1 {print $var}' temp.txt); awk
-vmaxx=$max -F' ' '{printf "%-7.7f %s\n", $1=0.5+($1/(maxx*2)), $2}' > freq.$i.txt; done && rm temp.txt

* 2\. Process the files freq.1-5.txt and produce tfidf.1-5.txt containing a list of words (out of 500 most frequent in respective lists), ordered by weight (specificity for each text):

> for j in {1..5}; do rm freq.$j.txt.temp; lines=$(wc -l freq.$j.txt) && for i
in {1..500}; do word=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=2 -F" " 'NR

line {print
$field}' freq.$j.txt); tf=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=1 -F" " 'NR

line {print
$field}' freq.$j.txt); count=$(egrep -lw $word freq.?.txt | wc -l); idf=$(echo
"1+l(5/$count)" | bc -l); tfidf=$(echo $tf*$idf | bc); echo $word $tfidf >>
freq.$j.txt.temp; done; sort -k 2nr < freq.$j.txt.temp > tfidf.$j.txt; done

* 3\. Process the files tfidf.1-5.txt and their source text, text.txt, and produce occ.txt with concordance of top 3 words from each of them:

> rm occ.txt && for j in {1..5}; do echo "$j" >> occ.txt; ptx -f -w 150
text.txt.$j > occ.$j.txt; for i in {1..3}; do word=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=1
-F" " 'NR

line {print $field}' tfidf.$j.txt); egrep -i
"[alpha:](/index.php?title=Alpha:&action=edit&redlink=1 "Alpha: \(page does
not exist\)") $word" occ.$j.txt >> occ.txt; done; done

Dušan Barok

_Written 23 October - 1 November 2014 in Bratislava and Stuttgart._

Barok
Techniques of Publishing
2014


Techniques of Publishing

Draft translation of a talk given at the seminar Informace mezi komoditou a komunitou [The Information Between Commodity and Community] held at Tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic, on May 6, 2014

My contribution has three parts. I will begin by sketching the current environment of publishing in general, move on to some of the specificities of publishing
in the humanities and art, and end with a brief introduction to the Monoskop
initiative I was asked to include in my talk.
I would like to thank Milos Vojtechovsky, Matej Strnad and CAS/FAMU for
the invitation, and Tranzitdisplay for hosting this seminar. It offers itself as an
opportunity for reflection for which there is a decent distance from a previous
presentation of Monoskop in Prague eight years ago when I took part in a new
media education workshop prepared by Miloš and Denisa Kera. Many things
changed since then, not only in new media, but in the humanities in general,
and I will try to articulate some of these changes from today’s perspective and
primarily from the perspective of publishing.

I. The Environment of Publishing
One change, perhaps the most serious, and which indeed relates to the humanities
publishing as well, is that from a subject that was just a year ago treated as a paranoia of a bunch of so called technological enthusiasts, is today a fact with which
the global public is well acquainted: we are all being surveilled. Virtually every
utterance on the internet, or rather made by means of the equipment connected
to it through standard protocols, is recorded, in encrypted or unencrypted form,
on servers of information agencies, besides copies of a striking share of these data
on servers of private companies. We are only at the beginning of civil mobilization towards reversal of the situation and the future is open, yet nothing suggests
so far that there is any real alternative other than “to demand the impossible.”
There are at least two certaintes today: surveillance is a feature of every communication technology controlled by third parties, from post, telegraphy, telephony
to internet; and at the same time it is also a feature of the ruling power in all its
variants humankind has come to know. In this regard, democracy can be also understood as the involvement of its participants in deciding on the scale and use of
information collected in this way.
I mention this because it suggests that also all publishing initiatives, from libraries,
through archives, publishing houses to schools have their online activities, back1

ends, shared documents and email communication recorded by public institutions–
which intelligence agencies are, or at least ought to be.
In regard to publishing houses it is notable that books and other publications today are printed from digital files, and are delivered to print over email, thus it is
not surprising to claim that a significant amount of electronically prepared publications is stored on servers in the public service. This means that besides being
required to send a number of printed copies to their national libraries, in fact,
publishers send their electronic versions to information agencies as well. Obviously, agencies couldn’t care less about them, but it doesn’t change anything on
the likely fact that, whatever it means, the world’s largest electronic repository of
publications today are the server farms of the NSA.
Information agencies archive publications without approval, perhaps without awareness, and indeed despite disapproval of their authors and publishers, as an
“incidental” effect of their surveillance techniques. This situation is obviously
radically different from a totalitarianism we got to know. Even though secret
agencies in the Eastern Bloc were blackmailing people to produce miserable literature as their agents, samizdat publications could at least theoretically escape their
attention.
This is not the only difference. While captured samizdats were read by agents of
flesh and blood, publications collected through the internet surveillance are “read”
by software agents. Both of them scan texts for “signals”, ie. terms and phrases
whose occurrences trigger interpretative mechanisms that control operative components of their organizations.
Today, publishing is similarly political and from the point of view of power a potentially subversive activity like it was in the communist Czechoslovakia. The
difference is its scale, reach and technique.
One of the messages of the recent “revelations” is that while it is recommended
to encrypt private communication, the internet is for its users also a medium of
direct contact with power. SEO, or search engine optimization, is now as relevant technique for websites as for books and other publications since all of them
are read by similar algorithms, and authors can read this situation as a political
dimension of their work, as a challenge to transform and model these algorithms
by texts.

2

II. Techniques of research in the humanities literature
Compiling the bibliography
Through the circuitry we got to the audience, readers. Today, they also include
software and algorithms such as those used for “reading” by information agencies
and corporations, and others facilitating reading for the so called ordinary reader,
the reader searching information online, but also the “expert” reader, searching
primarily in library systems.
Libraries, as we said, are different from information agencies in that they are
funded by the public not to hide publications from it but to provide access to
them. A telling paradox of the age is that on the one hand information agencies
are storing almost all contemporary book production in its electronic version,
while generally they absolutely don’t care about them since the “signal” information lies elsewhere, and on the other in order to provide electronic access, paid or
direct, libraries have to costly scan also publications that were prepared for print
electronically.
A more remarkable difference is, of course, that libraries select and catalogize
publications.
Their methods of selection are determined in the first place by their public institutional function of the protector and projector of patriotic values, and it is reflected
in their preference of domestic literature, ie. literature written in official state languages. Methods of catalogization, on the other hand, are characterized by sorting
by bibliographic records, particularly by categories of disciplines ordered in the
tree structure of knowledge. This results in libraries shaping the research, including academic research, towards a discursivity that is national and disciplinary, or
focused on the oeuvre of particular author.
Digitizing catalogue records and allowing readers to search library indexes by their
structural items, ie. the author, publisher, place and year of publication, words in
title, and disciplines, does not at all revert this tendency, but rather extends it to
the web as well.
I do not intend to underestimate the value and benefits of library work, nor the
importance of discipline-centered writing or of the recognition of the oeuvre of
the author. But consider an author working on an article who in the early phase
of his research needs to prepare a bibliography on the activity of Fluxus in central Europe or on the use of documentary film in education. Such research cuts
through national boundaries and/or branches of disciplines and he is left to travel
not only to locate artefacts, protagonists and experts in the field but also to find
literature, which in turn makes even the mere process of compiling bibliography
relatively demanding and costly activity.
3

In this sense, the digitization of publications and archival material, providing their
free online access and enabling fulltext search, in other words “open access”, catalyzes research across political-geographical and disciplinary configurations. Because while the index of the printed book contains only selected terms and for
the purposes of searching the index across several books the researcher has to have
them all at hand, the software-enabled search in digitized texts (with a good OCR)
works with the index of every single term in all of them.
This kind of research also obviously benefits from online translation tools, multilingual case bibliographies online, as well as second hand bookstores and small
specialized libraries that provide a corrective role to public ones, and whose “open
access” potential has been explored to the very small extent until now, but which
I won’t discuss here further for the lack of time.
Writing
The disciplinarity and patriotism are “embedded” in texts themselves, while I repeat that I don’t say this in a pejorative way.
Bibliographic records in bodies of texts, notes, attributions of sources and appended references can be read as formatted addresses of other texts, making apparent a kind of intertextual structure, well known in hypertext documents. However, for the reader these references are still “virtual”. When following a reference
she is led back to a library, and if interested in more references, to more libraries.
Instead, authors assume certain general erudition of their readers, while following references to their very sources is perceived as an exception from the standard
self-limitation to reading only the body of the text. Techniques of writing with
virtual bibliography thus affirm national-disciplinary discourses and form readers
and authors proficient in the field of references set by collections of local libraries
and so called standard literature of fields they became familiar with during their
studies.
When in this regime of writing someone in the Czech Republic wants to refer to
the work of Gilbert Simondon or Alexander Bogdanov, to give an example, the
effect of his work will be minimal, since there was practically nothing from these
authors translated into Czech. His closely reading colleague is left to try ordering
books through a library and wait for 3-4 weeks, or to order them from an online
store, travel to find them or search for them online. This applies, in the case of
these authors, for readers in the vast majority of countries worldwide. And we can
tell with certainty that this is not only the case of Simondon and Bogdanov but
of the vast majority of authors. Libraries as nationally and pyramidally situated
institutions face real challenges in regard to the needs of free research.
This is surely merely one aspect of techniques of writing.
4

Reading
Reading texts with “live” references and bibliographies using electronic devices is
today possible not only to imagine but to realise as well. This way of reading
allows following references to other texts, visual material, other related texts of
an author, but also working with occurrences of words in the text, etc., bringing
reading closer to textual analysis and other interesting levels. Due to the time
limits I am going to sketch only one example.
Linear reading is specific by reading from the beginning of the text to its end,
as well as ‘tree-like’ reading through the content structure of the document, and
through occurrences of indexed words. Still, techniques of close reading extend
its other aspect – ‘moving’ through bibliographic references in the document to
particular pages or passages in another. They make the virtual reference plastic –
texts are separated one from another merely by a click or a tap.
We are well familiar with a similar movement through the content on the web
– surfing, browsing, and clicking through. This leads us to an interesting parallel: standards of structuring, composing, etc., of texts in the humanities has been
evolving for centuries, what is incomparably more to decades of the web. From
this stems also one of the historical challenges the humanities are facing today:
how to attune to the existence of the web and most importantly to epistemological consequences of its irreversible social penetration. To upload a PDF online is
only a taste of changes in how we gain and make knowledge and how we know.
This applies both ways – what is at stake is not only making production of the
humanities “available” online, it is not only about open access, but also about the
ways of how the humanities realise the electronic and technical reality of their
own production, in regard to the research, writing, reading, and publishing.
Publishing
The analogy between information agencies and national libraries also points to
the fact that large portion of publications, particularly those created in software,
is electronic. However the exceptions are significant. They include works made,
typeset, illustrated and copied manually, such as manuscripts written on paper
or other media, by hand or using a typewriter or other mechanic means, and
other pre-digital techniques such as lithography, offset, etc., or various forms of
writing such as clay tablets, rolls, codices, in other words the history of print and
publishing in its striking variety, all of which provide authors and publishers with
heterogenous means of expression. Although this “segment” is today generally
perceived as artists’ books interesting primarily for collectors, the current process
of massive digitization has triggered the revival, comebacks, transformations and
5

novel approaches to publishing. And it is these publications whose nature is closer
to the label ‘book’ rather than the automated electro-chemical version of the offset
lithography of digital files on acid-free paper.
Despite that it is remarkable to observe a view spreading among publishers that
books created in software are books with attributes we have known for ages. On
top of that there is a tendency to handle files such as PDFs, EPUBs, MOBIs and
others as if they are printed books, even subject to the rules of limited edition, a
consequence of what can be found in the rise of so called electronic libraries that
“borrow” PDF files and while someone reads one, other users are left to wait in
the line.
Whilst, from today’s point of view of the humanities research, mass-printed books
are in the first place archives of the cultural content preserved in this way for the
time we run out of electricity or have the internet ‘switched off’ in some other
way.

III. Monoskop
Finally, I am getting to Monoskop and to begin with I am going to try to formulate
its brief definition, in three versions.
From the point of view of the humanities, Monoskop is a research, or questioning, whose object’s nature renders no answer as definite, since the object includes
art and culture in their widest sense, from folk music, through visual poetry to
experimental film, and namely their history as well as theory and techniques. The
research is framed by the means of recording itself, what makes it a practise whose
record is an expression with aesthetic qualities, what in turn means that the process of the research is subject to creative decisions whose outcomes are perceived
esthetically as well.
In the language of cultural management Monoskop is an independent research
project whose aim is subject to change according to its continual findings; which
has no legal body and thus as organisation it does not apply for funding; its participants have no set roles; and notably, it operates with no deadlines. It has a reach
to the global public about which, respecting the privacy of internet users, there
are no statistics other than general statistics on its social networks channels and a
figure of numbers of people and bots who registered on its website and subscribed
to its newsletter.
At the same time, technically said, Monoskop is primarily an internet website
and in this regard it is no different from any other communication media whose
function is to complicate interpersonal communication, at least due to the fact
that it is a medium with its own specific language, materiality, duration and access.
6

Contemporary media
Monoskop has began ten years ago in the milieu of a group of people running
a cultural space where they had organised events, workshops, discussion, a festival,
etc. Their expertise, if to call that way the trace left after years spent in the higher
education, varied well, and it spanned from fine art, architecture, philosophy,
through art history and literary theory, to library studies, cognitive science and
information technology. Each of us was obviously interested in these and other
fields other than his and her own, but the praxis in naming the substance whose
centripetal effects brought us into collaboration were the terms new media, media
culture and media art.
Notably, it was not contemporary art, because a constituent part of the praxis was
also non-visual expression, information media, etc., so the research began with the
essentially naive question ‘of what are we contemporary?’. There had been not
much written about media culture and art as such, a fact I perceived as drawback
but also as challenge.
The reflection, discussion and critique need to be grounded in reality, in a wider
context of the field, thus the research has began in-field. From the beginning, the
website of Monoskop served to record the environment, including people, groups,
organizations, events we had been in touch with and who/which were more or
less explicitly affiliated with media culture. The result of this is primarily a social
geography of live media culture and art, structured on the wiki into cities, with
a focus on the two recent decades.
Cities and agents
The first aim was to compile an overview of agents of this geography in their
wide variety, from eg. small independent and short-lived initiatives to established
museums. The focus on the 1990s and 2000s is of course problematic. One of
its qualities is a parallel to the history of the World Wide Web which goes back
precisely to the early 1990s and which is on the one hand the primary recording
medium of the Monoskop research and on the other a relevant self-archiving and–
stemming from its properties–presentation medium, in other words a platform on
which agents are not only meeting together but potentially influence one another
as well.
http://monoskop.org/Prague
The records are of diverse length and quality, while the priorities for what they
consist of can be generally summed up in several points in the following order:

7

1. Inclusion of a person, organisation or event in the context of the structure.
So in case of a festival or conference held in Prague the most important is to
mention it in the events section on the page on Prague.
2. Links to their web presence from inside their wiki pages, while it usually
implies their (self-)presentation.
http://monoskop.org/The_Media_Are_With_Us
3. Basic information, including a name or title in an original language, dates
of birth, foundation, realization, relations to other agents, ideally through
links inside the wiki. These are presented in narrative and in English.
4. Literature or bibliography in as many languages as possible, with links to
versions of texts online if there are any.
5. Biographical and other information relevant for the object of the research,
while the preference is for those appearing online for the first time.
6. Audiovisual material, works, especially those that cannot be found on linked
websites.
Even though pages are structured in the quasi same way, input fields are not structured, so when you create a wiki account and decide to edit or add an entry, the
wiki editor offers you merely one input box for the continuous text. As is the case
on other wiki websites. Better way to describe their format is thus articles.
There are many related questions about representation, research methodology,
openness and participation, formalization, etc., but I am not going to discuss them
due to the time constraint.
The first research layer thus consists of live and active agents, relations among
them and with them.
Countries
Another layer is related to a question about what does the field of media culture
and art stem from; what and upon what does it consciously, but also not fully
consciously, builds, comments, relates, negates; in other words of what it may be
perceived a post, meta, anti, retro, quasi and neo legacy.
An approach of national histories of art of the 20th century proved itself to be
relevant here. These entries are structured in the same way like cities: people,
groups, events, literature, at the same time building upon historical art forms and
periods as they are reflected in a range of literature.
8

http://monoskop.org/Czech_Republic
The overviews are organised purposely without any attempts for making relations
to the present more explicit, in order to leave open a wide range of intepretations
and connotations and to encourage them at the same time.
The focus on art of the 20th century originally related to, while the researched
countries were mostly of central and eastern Europe, with foundations of modern
national states, formations preserving this field in archives, museums, collections
but also publications, etc. Obviously I am not saying that contemporary media
culture is necessarily archived on the web while art of the 20th century lies in
collections “offline”, it applies vice versa as well.
In this way there began to appear new articles about filmmakers, fine artists, theorists and other partakers in artistic life of the previous century.
Since then the focus has considerably expanded to more than a century of art and
new media on the whole continent. Still it portrays merely another layer of the
research, the one which is yet a collection of fragmentary data, without much
context. Soon we also hit the limit of what is about this field online. The next
question was how to work in the internet environment with printed sources.
Log
http://monoskop.org/log
When I was installing this blog five years ago I treated it as a side project, an offshoot, which by the fact of being online may not be only an archive of selected
source literature for the Monoskop research but also a resource for others, mainly
students in the humanities. A few months later I found Aaaarg, then oriented
mainly on critical theory and philosophy; there was also Gigapedia with publications without thematic orientation; and several other community library portals
on password. These were the first sources where I was finding relevant literature
in electronic version, later on there were others too, I began to scan books and catalogues myself and to receive a large number of scans by email and soon came to
realise that every new entry is an event of its own not only for myself. According
to the response, the website has a wide usership across all the continents.
At this point it is proper to mention the copyright. When deciding about whether
to include this or that publication, there are at least two moments always present.
One brings me back to my local library at the outskirts of Bratislava in the early
1990s and asks that if I would have found this book there and then, could it change
my life? Because books that did I was given only later and elsewhere; and here I
think of people sitting behind computers in Belarus, China or Kongo. And even
9

if not, the latter is a wonder on whether this text has a potential to open up some
serious questions about disciplinarity or national discursivity in the humanities,
while here I am reminded by a recent study which claims that more than half
of academic publications are not read by more than three people: their author,
reviewer and editor. What does not imply that it is necessary to promote them
to more people but rather to think of reasons why is it so. It seems that the
consequences of the combination of high selectivity with open access resonate
also with publishers and authors from whom the complaints are rather scarce and
even if sometimes I don’t understand reasons of those received, I respect them.
Media technology
Throughout the years I came to learn, from the ontological perspective, two main
findings about media and technology.
For a long time I had a tendency to treat technologies as objects, things, while now
it seems much more productive to see them as processes, techniques. As indeed
nor the biologist does speak about the dear as biology. In this sense technology is
the science of techniques, including cultural techniques which span from reading,
writing and counting to painting, programming and publishing.
Media in the humanities are a compound of two long unrelated histories. One of
them treats media as a means of communication, signals sent from point A to the
point B, lacking the context and meaning. Another speaks about media as artistic
means of expression, such as the painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music or
film. The term “media art” is emblematic for this amalgam while the historical
awareness of these two threads sheds new light on it.
Media technology in art and the humanities continues to be the primary object of
research of Monoskop.
I attempted to comment on political, esthetic and technical aspects of publishing.
Let me finish by saying that Monoskop is an initiative open to people and future
and you are more than welcome to take part in it.

Dušan Barok
Written May 1-7, 2014, in Bergen and Prague. Translated by the author on May 10-13,
2014. This version generated June 10, 2014.

Barok
Shadow Libraries
2018


_A talk given at the [Shadow Libraries](http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG2096/)
symposium held at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in
[Athens](/Athens "Athens"), 17 March 2018. Moderated by [Kenneth
Goldsmith](/Kenneth_Goldsmith "Kenneth Goldsmith") (UbuWeb) and bringing
together [Dusan Barok](/Dusan_Barok "Dusan Barok") (Monoskop), [Marcell
Mars](/Marcell_Mars "Marcell Mars") (Public Library), [Peter
Sunde](/Peter_Sunde "Peter Sunde") (The Pirate Bay), [Vicki
Bennett](/Vicki_Bennett "Vicki Bennett") (People Like Us), [Cornelia
Sollfrank](/Cornelia_Sollfrank "Cornelia Sollfrank") (Giving What You Don't
Have), and Prodromos Tsiavos, the event was part of the _[Shadow Libraries:
UbuWeb in Athens](http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG2018/) _programme organised by [Ilan
Manouach](/Ilan_Manouach "Ilan Manouach"), Kenneth Goldsmith and the Onassis
Foundation._

[![Shadow Libraries.jpg](/images/thumb/8/8e/Shadow_Libraries.jpg/500px-
Shadow_Libraries.jpg)](/File:Shadow_Libraries.jpg)

This is the first time that I was asked to talk about Monoskop as a _shadow
library_.

What are shadow libraries?
[Lawrence Liang](/Lawrence_Liang "Lawrence Liang") wrote a think piece for _e-
flux_ a couple of years ago,
in response to the closure of Library.nu, a digital library that had operated
from 2004, first as Ebooksclub, later as Gigapedia.
He wrote that:

[![Liang Lawrence 2012 Shadow
Libraries.jpg](/images/thumb/5/53/Liang_Lawrence_2012_Shadow_Libraries.jpg
/500px-
Liang_Lawrence_2012_Shadow_Libraries.jpg)](http://www.e-flux.com/journal/37/61228
/shadow-libraries/)

In the essay, he moves between identifying Library.nu as digital Alexandria
and as its shadow.
In this account, even large libraries exist in the shadows cast by their
monumental precedessors.
There’s a lineage, there’s a tradition.

Almost everyone and every institution has a library, small or large.
They’re not necessarily Alexandrias, but they strive to stay relevant.
Take the University of Amsterdam where I now work.
University libraries are large, but they’re hardly _large enough_.
The publishing market is so huge that you simply can’t keep up with all the
niche little disciplines.
So either you have to wait days or weeks for a missing book to be ordered
somewhere.
Or you have some EBSCO ebooks.
And most of the time if you’re searching for a book title in the catalogue,
all you get are its reviews in various journals the library subscribes to.

So my colleagues keep asking me.
Dušan, where do I find this or that book?
You need to scan through dozens of texts, check one page in that book, table
of contents of another book, read what that paper is about.

[![Arts humanities and social sciences digital libraries
2018.jpg](/images/thumb/8/81/Arts_humanities_and_social_sciences_digital_libraries_2018.jpg
/500px-
Arts_humanities_and_social_sciences_digital_libraries_2018.jpg)](/Digital_libraries#Libraries
"Digital libraries#Libraries")

Well, just look _online_.

So what do digital libraries do?

[![Hand writing.jpg](/images/thumb/a/a2/Hand_writing.jpg/500px-
Hand_writing.jpg)](/File:Hand_writing.jpg)

You write a manuscript, have it published,

[![Scanning hand.jpg](/images/thumb/4/48/Scanning_hand.jpg/500px-
Scanning_hand.jpg)](/File:Scanning_hand.jpg)

and someone scans it later.

[![Hands typing.jpg](/images/thumb/8/8a/Hands_typing.jpg/500px-
Hands_typing.jpg)](/File:Hands_typing.jpg)

Or scrapes it from somewhere, since most books today are born digital and live
their digital lives.
...
Digital libraries need to be creative.
They don’t just preserve and circulate books.

[![Hirsal Josef Groegerova Bohumila eds Slovo pismo akce hlas
frontmatter.jpg](/images/thumb/9/98/Hirsal_Josef_Groegerova_Bohumila_eds_Slovo_pismo_akce_hlas_frontmatter.jpg
/500px-
Hirsal_Josef_Groegerova_Bohumila_eds_Slovo_pismo_akce_hlas_frontmatter.jpg)](https://monoskop.org/log/?p=10262)

They engage in extending print runs, making new editions, readily
reproducible, unlimited editions.

[![Hirsal Josef Groegerova Bohumila eds Slovo pismo akce hlas
Reichardt.jpg](/images/thumb/e/ef/Hirsal_Josef_Groegerova_Bohumila_eds_Slovo_pismo_akce_hlas_Reichardt.jpg
/500px-
Hirsal_Josef_Groegerova_Bohumila_eds_Slovo_pismo_akce_hlas_Reichardt.jpg)](https://monoskop.org/images/d/de/Hirsal_Josef_Groegerova_Bohumila_eds_Slovo_pismo_akce_hlas.pdf#page=87)

This one comes with something extra. Isn’t this beautiful? You can read along
someone else.
In this case we know these annotations come from the Slovak avant-garde visual
poet and composer [Milan Adamciak](/Milan_Adamciak "Milan Adamciak").

[![Milan Adamciak John Cage in Bratislava 1992
.jpg](/images/thumb/7/70/Milan_Adamciak_John_Cage_in_Bratislava_1992_.jpg
/500px-Milan_Adamciak_John_Cage_in_Bratislava_1992_.jpg)](/Milan_Adamciak
"Milan Adamciak")

...standing in the middle.
A couple of pages later...

[![Hirsal Josef Groegerova Bohumila eds Slovo pismo akce hlas
pp232-233.jpg](/images/thumb/4/4b/Hirsal_Josef_Groegerova_Bohumila_eds_Slovo_pismo_akce_hlas_pp232-233.jpg
/500px-
Hirsal_Josef_Groegerova_Bohumila_eds_Slovo_pismo_akce_hlas_pp232-233.jpg)](https://monoskop.org/images/d/de/Hirsal_Josef_Groegerova_Bohumila_eds_Slovo_pismo_akce_hlas.pdf#page=117)

...you can clearly see how he found out about a book containing one million
random digits [see note 24 on the image]. The strangest book.

[![Million Random Digits with 100000 Normal Deviates
p400.jpg](/images/thumb/d/d5/Million_Random_Digits_with_100000_Normal_Deviates_p400.jpg
/500px-
Million_Random_Digits_with_100000_Normal_Deviates_p400.jpg)](https://monoskop.org/log/?p=5780)

He was still alive when we put it up on Monoskop, and could experience it.
...
Digital libraries may seem like virtual, grey places, nonplaces.
But these little chance encounters happen all the time there.
There are touches. There are traces. There are many hands involved, visible
hands.
They join writers’ hands and help creating new, unlimited editions.

[![Second-Hand Libraries.jpg](/images/thumb/d/d4/Second-Hand_Libraries.jpg
/500px-Second-Hand_Libraries.jpg)](/File:Second-Hand_Libraries.jpg)

They may be off Google, but for many, especially younger generation these are
the places to go to learn, to share.
Rather than in a shadow, they are out in the open, in plain sight.

[![Hawking 2017 on free access to
research.jpg](/images/thumb/e/ea/Hawking_2017_on_free_access_to_research.jpg
/500px-
Hawking_2017_on_free_access_to_research.jpg)](http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news
/step-inside-the-mind-of-the-young-stephen-hawking-as-his-phd-thesis-goes-
online-for-first-time)

This made rounds last year.
As scholars, as authors, we have reasons to have our works freely accessible
by everyone.
We do it for feedback, for invites to lecture, for citations.
Sounds great.
So when after long two, three, four, five years I have my manuscript ready,
where will I go?
Will I go to an established publisher or an open access press?
Will I send it to MIT Press or Open Humanities Press?
Traditional publishers have better distribution, and they often have a strong
brand.
It’s often about career moves and bios, plans A’s and plan B’s.
There are no easy answers, but one can always be a little inventive.
In the end, one should not feel guilty for publishing with MIT Press.
But at the same time, one should neither feel guilty for scanning and sharing
such a book with others.
...
You know, there’s fighting, there are court cases.
[Aaaaarg](/Aaaaarg "Aaaaarg"), a digital library run by our dear friend [Sean
Dockray](/Sean_Dockray "Sean Dockray"), is facing a Canadian publisher.
Open Library is now facing the Authors Guild for lending scanned books
deaccessioned from libraries.
They need our help, our support.

[![Cabinet 2012 Monoskop
takedown.jpg](/images/thumb/2/28/Cabinet_2012_Monoskop_takedown.jpg/500px-
Cabinet_2012_Monoskop_takedown.jpg)](https://monoskop.org/log/?p=373#comment-16498)

But collisions of interests can be productive.
This is what our beloved _Cabinet_ magazine did when they found their PDFs
online.
They converted all their articles into HTML and put them online.
The most beautiful takedown request we have ever received.

[![The Writings of Swartz Aaron
2015.jpg](/images/thumb/7/77/The_Writings_of_Swartz_Aaron_2015.jpg/500px-
The_Writings_of_Swartz_Aaron_2015.jpg)](https://monoskop.org/log/?p=16598)

So what is at stake? What are these digital books?
They are poor versions of print books.
They come with no binding, no paper, no weight.
They come as PDFs, EPUBs, JPEGs in online readers, they come as HTML.
By the way, HTML is great, you can search it, copy, save it, it’s lightweight,
it’s supported by all browsers, footnotes too, you can adapt its layout
easily.
That’s completely fine for a researcher.
As a researcher, you just need source code:
you need plain text, page numbers, images, working footnotes, relevant data
and code.
_Data and code_ as well:
this is where online companions to print books come in,
you want to publish your research material,
your interviews, spreadsheets, software you made.
...
Here we distinguish between researchers and readers.
As _readers_ we will always build our beautiful libraries at home, and
elsewhere,
filled with books and... and external harddrives.
...
There may be _no contradiction_ between the existence of a print book in
stores and the existence of its free digital version.

[![Unconditional Basic
Access.jpg](/images/thumb/f/f3/Unconditional_Basic_Access.jpg/500px-
Unconditional_Basic_Access.jpg)](/File:Unconditional_Basic_Access.jpg)

So what we’ve been asking for is access, basic access. The access to culture
and knowledge for research, educational, noncommercial purposes. A low budget,
poor bandwidth access. Access to badly OCR’d ebooks with grainy images. Access
to culture and knowledge _light_.

Thank you.

Dusan Barok

_Written on 16-17 March 2018 in Athens and Amsterdam. Published online on 21
March 2018._

Bodo
A Short History of the Russian Digital Shadow Libraries
2014


Draft Manuscript, 11/4/2014, DO NOT CITE!

A short history of the Russian digital shadow libraries
Balazs Bodo, Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam

“What I see as a consequence of the free educational book distribution: in decades generations of people
everywhere in the World will grow with the access to the best explained scientific texts of all times.
[…]The quality and accessibility of education to poors will drastically grow too. Frankly, I'm seeing this as
the only way to naturally improve mankind: by breeding people with all the information given to them at
any time.” – Anonymous admin of Aleph, explaining the reason d’étre of the site

Abstract
RuNet, the Russian segment of the internet is now the home of the most comprehensive scientific pirate
libraries on the net. These sites offer free access to hundreds of thousands of books and millions of
journal articles. In this contribution we try to understand the factors that led to the development of
these sites, and the sociocultural and legal conditions that enable them to operate under hostile legal
and political conditions. Through the reconstruction of the micro-histories of peer produced online text
collections that played a central role in the history of RuNet, we are able to link the formal and informal
support for these sites to the specific conditions developed under the Soviet and post Soviet times.

(pirate) libraries on the net
The digitization and collection of texts was one of the very first activities enabled by computers. Project
Gutenberg, the first in line of digital libraries was established as early as 1971. By the early nineties, a
number of online electronic text archives emerged, all hoping to finally realize the dream that was
chased by humans every since the first library: the collection of everything (Battles, 2004), the Memex
(Bush, 1945), the Mundaneum (Rieusset-Lemarié, 1997), the Library of Babel (Borges, 1998). It did not
take long to realize that the dream was still beyond reach: the information storage and retrieval
technology might have been ready, but copyright law, for the foreseeable future was not. Copyright
protection and enforcement slowly became one of the most crucial issues around digital technologies.

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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2616631

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And as that happened, the texts, which were archived without authorization were purged from the
budding digital collections. Those that survived complete deletion were moved into the dark, locked
down sections of digital libraries that sometimes still lurk behind the law-abiding public façades. Hopes
for a universal digital library can be built was lost in just a few short years as those who tried it (such as
Google or Hathitrust) got bogged down in endless court battles.
There are unauthorized texts collections circulating on channels less susceptible to enforcement, such as
DVDs, torrents, or IRC channels. But the technical conditions of these distribution channels do not enable
the development of a library. Two of the most essential attributes of any proper library: the catalogue
and the community are hard to provide on such channels. The catalog doesn’t just organize the
knowledge stored in the collection; it is not just a tool of searching and browsing. It is a critical
component in the organization of the community of “librarians” who preserve and nourish the
collection. The catalog is what distinguishes an unstructured heap of computer files from a wellmaintained library, but it is the same catalog, which makes shadow libraries, unauthorized texts
collections an easy target of law enforcement. Those few digital online libraries that dare to provide
unauthorized access to texts in an organized manner, such as textz.org, a*.org, monoskop or Gigapedia/
library.nu, all had their bad experiences with law enforcement and rights holder dismay.
Of these pirate libraries, Gigapedia—later called Library.nu—was the largest at the turn of the 2010’s. At
its peak, it was several orders of magnitudes bigger than its peers, offering access to nearly a million
English language documents. It was not just size that made Gigapedia unique. Unlike most sites, it
moved beyond its initial specialization in scientific texts to incorporate a wide range of academic
disciplines. Compared to its peers, it also had a highly developed central metadata database, which
contained bibliographic details on the collection and also, significantly, on gaps in the collection, which
underpinned a process of actively solicited contributions from users. With the ubiquitous
scanner/copiers, the production of book scans was as easy as copying them, thus the collection grew
rapidly.
Gigapedia’s massive catalog made the site popular, which in turn made it a target. In early 2012, a group
of 17 publishers was granted an injunction against the site (now called Library.nu; and against iFile.it—
the hosting site that stored most of Library.nu’s content). Unlike the record and movie companies,
which had collaborated on dozens of lawsuits over the past decade, the Library.nu injunction and lawsuit
were the first coordinated publisher actions against a major file-sharing site, and the first to involve
major university publishers in particular. Under the injunction, the Library.nu adminstrators closed the
site. The collection disappeared and the community around it dispersed. (Liang, 2012)
Gigapedia’s collection was integrated into Aleph’s predominantly Russian language collection before the
shutdown, making Aleph the natural successor of Gigapedia/library.nu.

Libraries in the RuNet

2
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2616631

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The search soon zeroed in on a number of sites with strong hints to their Russian origins. Sites like Aleph,
[sc], [fi], [os] are open, completely free to use, and each offers access to a catalog comparable to the late
Gigapedia’s.
The similarity of these seemingly distinct services is no coincidence. These sites constitute a tightly knit
network, in which Aleph occupies the central position. Aleph, as its name suggests, is the source library,
it aims to seed of all scientific digital libraries on the net. Its mission is simple and straightforward. It
collects free-floating scientific texts and other collections from the Internet and consolidates them (both
content and metadata) into a single, open database. Though ordinary users can search the catalog and
retrieve the texts, its main focus is the distribution of the catalog and the collection to anyone who
wants to build services upon them. Aleph has regularly updated links that point to its own, neatly packed
source code, its database dump, and to the terabytes worth of collection. It is a knowledge infrastructure
that can be freely accessed, used and built upon by anyone. This radical openness enables a number of
other pirate libraries to offer Aleph’s catalogue along with books coming from other sources. By
mirroring Aleph they take over tasks that the administrators of Aleph are unprepared or unwilling to do.
Handling much of the actual download traffic they relieve Aleph from the unavoidable investment in
servers and bandwidth, which, in turn puts less pressure on Aleph to engage in commercial activities to
finance its operation. While Aleph stays in the background, the network of mirrors compete for
attention, users and advertising revenue as their design, business model, technical sophistication is finetuned to the profile of their intended target audience.
This strategy of creating an open infrastructure serves Aleph well. It ensures the widespread distribution
of books while it minimizes (legal) exposure. By relinquishing control, Aleph also ensures its own longterm survival, as it is copied again and again. In fact, openness is the core element in the philosophy of
Aleph, which was summed up by one of its administrators as to:
“- collect valuable science/technology/math/medical/humanities academic literature. That is,
collect humanity's valuable knowledge in digital form. Avoid junky books. Ignore "bestsellers".
- build a community of people who share knowledge, improve quality of books, find good and
valuable books, and correct errors.
- share the files freely, spreading the knowledge altruistically, not trying to make money, not
charging money for knowledge. Here people paid money for many books that they considered
valuable and then shared here on [Aleph], for free. […]
This is the true spirit of the [Aleph] project.”

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Reading, publishing, censorship and libraries in Soviet-Russia
“[T]he library of the Big Lubyanka was unique. In all probability it had been assembled out of confiscated
private libraries. The bibliophiles who had collected those books had already rendered up their souls to
God. But the main thing was that while State Security had been busy censoring and emasculating all the
libraries of the nation for decades, it forgot to dig in its own bosom. Here, in its very den, one could read
Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Panteleimon Romanov, and any volume at all of the complete works of Merezhkovsky.
(Some people wisecracked that they allowed us to read forbidden books because they already regarded
us as dead. But I myself think that the Lubyanka librarians hadn't the faintest concept of what they were
giving us—they were simply lazy and ignorant.)”
(Solzhenitsyn, 1974)
In order to properly understand the factors that shaped Russian pirate librarians’ and their wider
environments’ attitudes towards bottom-up, collaborative, copyright infringing open source digital
librarianship, we need to go back nearly a century and take a close look at the specific social and political
conditions of the Soviet times that shaped the contemporary Russian intelligentsia’s attitudes towards
knowledge.

The communist ideal of a reading nation
Russian culture always had a reverence for the printed word, and the Soviet state, with its Leninist
program of mass education further stressed the idea of the educated, reading public. As Stelmach (1993)
put it:
Reading almost transplanted religion as a sacred activity: in the secularized socialist state, where the
churches were closed, the free press stifled and schools and universities politicized, literature became the
unique source of moral truth for the population. Writers were considered teachers and prophets.
The Soviet Union was a reading culture: in the last days of the USSR, a quarter of the adult population
were considered active readers, and almost everyone else categorized as an occasional reader. Book
prices were low, alternative forms of entertainment were scarce, and people were poor, making reading
one of the most attractive leisure activities.
The communist approach towards intellectual property protection reflected the idea of the reading
nation. The Soviet Union inherited a lax and isolationist copyright system from the tsarist Russia. Neither
the tsarist Russian state nor the Soviet state adhered to international copyright treaties, nor did they
enter into bilateral treaties. Tsarist Russia’s refusal to grant protection to foreign authors and
translations had primarily an economic rationale. The Soviet regime added a strong ideological claim:
granting exclusive ownership to authors was against the interests of the reading public, and “the cultural
development of the masses,” and only served the private interests of authors and heirs.
“If copyright had an economic function, that was only as a right of remuneration for his contribution to
the extension of the socialist art heritage. If copyright had a social role, this was not to protect the author

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from the economically stronger exploiter, but was one of the instruments to get the author involved in
the great communist educational project.” (Elst, 2005, p 658)
The Soviet copyright system, even in its post-revolutionary phase, maintained two persistent features
that served as important instruments of knowledge dissemination. First, the statutorily granted
“freedom of translation” meant that translation was treated as an exception to copyright, which did not
require rights holder authorization. This measure dismantled a significant barrier to access in a
multicultural and multilingual empire. By the same token, the denial of protection to foreign authors and
rights holders eased the imports of foreign texts (after, of course the appropriate censorship review).
Due to these instruments:
“[s]oon after its founding, the Soviet Union became as well the world's leading literary pirate, not only
publishing in translation the creations of its own citizens but also publishing large numbers of copies of
the works of Western authors both in translation and in the original language.” (Newcity, 1980, p 6.)
Looking simply at the aggregate numbers of published books, the USSR had an impressive publishing
industry on a scale appropriate to a reading nation. Between 1946 and 1970 more than 1 billion copies of
over 26 thousand different work were published, all by foreign authors (Newcity, 1978). In 1976 alone,
more than 1.7 billion copies of 84,304 books were printed. (Friedberg, Watanabe, & Nakamoto, 1984, fn
4.)
Of course these impressive numbers reflected neither a healthy public sphere, nor a well-functioning
print ecology. The book-based public sphere was both heavily censored and plagued by the peculiar
economic conditions of the Soviet, and later the post-Soviet era.

Censorship
The totalitarian Soviet state had many instruments to control the circulation of literary and scientific
works. 1 Some texts never entered official circulation in the first hand: “A particularly harsh
prepublication censorship [affected] foreign literature, primarily in the humanities and socioeconomic
disciplines. Books on politics, international relations, sociology, philosophy, cybernetics, semiotics,
linguistics, and so on were hardly ever published.” (Stelmakh, 2001, p 145.)
Many ‘problematic’ texts were only put into severely limited circulation. Books were released in small
print runs; as in-house publications, or they were only circulated among the trustworthy few. As the
resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of June 4, 1959, stated: “Writings by
bourgeois authors in the fields of philosophy, history, economics, diplomacy, and law […] are to be
published in limited quantities after the excision from them of passages of no scholarly or practical

1

We share Helen Freshwater’s (2003) approach that censorship is a more complex phenomenon than the state just
blocking the circulation of certain texts. Censorship manifested itself in more than one ways and its dominant
modus operandi, institutions, extent, focus, reach, effectiveness showed extreme variations over time. This short
chapter however cannot go into the intricate details of the incredibly rich history of censorship in the Soviet Union.
Instead, through much simplification we try to demonstrate that censorship did not only affect literary works, but
extended deep into scholarly publishing, including natural science disciplines.

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Draft Manuscript, 11/4/2014, DO NOT CITE!
interest. They are to be supplied with extensive introductions and detailed annotations." (quoted in
Friedberg et al., 1984)
Truncation and mutilation of texts was also frequent. Literary works and texts from humanities and
social sciences were obvious subjects of censorship, but natural sciences and technical fields did not
escape:
“In our film studios we received an American technical journal, something like Cinema, Radio and
Television. I saw it on the chief engineer's desk and noticed that it had been reprinted in Moscow.
Everything undesirable, including advertisements, had been removed, and only those technical articles
with which the engineer could be trusted were retained. Everything else, even whole pages, was missing.
This was done by a photo copying process, but the finished product appeared to be printed.” (Dewhirst &
Farrell, 1973, p. 127)
Mass cultural genres were also subject to censorship and control. Women's fiction, melodrama, comics,
detective stories, and science fiction were completely missing or heavily underrepresented in the mass
market. Instead, “a small group of officially approved authors […] were published in massive editions
every year, [and] blocked readers' access to other literature. […]Soviet literature did not fit the formula
of mass culture and was simply bad literature, but it was issued in huge print-runs.” (Stelmakh, 2001, p.
150)
Libraries were also important instruments of censorship. When not destroyed altogether, censored
works ended up in the spetskhrans, limited access special collections established in libraries to contain
censored works. Besides obvious candidates such as anti-Soviet works and western ‘bourgeois’
publications, many scientific works from the fields of biology, nuclear physics, psychology, sociology,
cybernetics, and genetics ended up in these closed collections (Ryzhak, 2005). Access to the spetskhrans
was limited to those with special permits issued by their employers. “Only university educated readers
were enrolled and only those holding positions of at least junior scientific workers were allowed to read
the publications kept by the spetskhran” (Ryzhak, 2005). In the last years of the USSR, the spetskhran of
the Russian State Library—the largest of them with more than 1 million items in the collection—had 43
seats for its roughly 4500 authorized readers. Yearly circulation was around 200,000 items, a figure that
included “the history and literature of other countries, international relations, science of law, technical
sciences and others.” (Ryzhak, 2005)
Librarians thus played a central role in the censorship machinery. They did more than guard the contents
of limited-access collections and purge the freely accessible stocks according to the latest Party
directives. As the intermediaries between the readers and the closed stacks, their task was to carefully
guide readers’ interests:
“In the 1970s, among the staff members of the service department of the Lenin State Library of the
U.S.S.R., there were specially appointed persons-"politcontrollers"-who, apart from their regular
professional functions, had to perform additional control over the literature lent from the general stocks
(not from the restricted access collections), thus exercising censorship over the percolation of avant-garde

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aesthetics to the reader, the aesthetics that introduced new ways of thinking and a new outlook on life
and social behavior.” (Stelmakh, 2001)
Librarians also used library cards and lending histories to collect and report information on readers and
suspicious reading habits.
Soviet economic dysfunction also severely limited access to printed works. Acute and chronic shortages
of even censor-approved texts were common, both on the market and in libraries. When the USSR
joined its first first international copyright treaty in its history in 1973 (the UNESCO-backed Universal
Copyright Convention), which granted protection to foreign authors and denied “freedom of
translation,” the access problems only got worse. Soviet concern that granting protection to foreign
authors would result in significant royalty payments to western rightsholders proved valid. By 1976, the
yearly USSR trade deficit in publishing reached a million rubles (~5.5 million current USD) (Levin, 1983, p.
157). This imbalance not only affected the number of publications that were imported into the cashpoor country, but also raised the price of translated works to the double that of Russian-authored books
(Levin, 1983, p. 158).

The literary and scientific underground in Soviet times
Various practices and informal institutions evolved to address the problems of access. Book black
markets flourished: “In the 1970s and 1980s the black market was an active part of society. Buying books
directly from other people was how 35 percent of Soviet adults acquired books for their own homes, and
68 percent of families living in major cities bought books only on the black market.” (Stelmakh, 2001, p
146). Book copying and hoarding was practiced to supplement the shortages:
“People hoarded books: complete works of Pushkin, Tolstoy or Chekhov. You could not buy such things.
So you had the idea that it is very important to hoard books. High-quality literary fiction, high quality
science textbooks and monographs, even biographies of famous people (writers, scientists, composers,
etc.) were difficult to buy. You could not, as far as I remember, just go to a bookstore and buy complete
works of Chekhov. It was published once and sold out and that's it. Dostoyevsky used to be prohibited in
the USSR, so that was even rarer. Lots of writers were prohibited, like Nabokov. Eventually Dostoyevsky
was printed in the USSR, but in very small numbers.
And also there were scientists who wanted scientific books and also could not get them. Mathematics
books, physics - only very few books were published every year, you can't compare this with the market in
the U.S. Russian translations of classical monographs in mathematics were difficult to find.
So, in the USSR, everyone who had a good education shared the idea that hoarding books is very, very
important, and did just that. If someone had free access to a Xerox machine, they were Xeroxing
everything in sight. A friend of mine had entire room full of Xeroxed books.”2
From the 1960s onwards, the ever-growing Samizdat networks tried to counterbalance the effects of
censorship and provide access to both censored classics and information on the current state of Soviet

2

Anonymous source #1

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society. Reaching a readership of around 200,000, these networks operated in a networked, bottom-up
manner. Each node in the chain of distribution copied the texts it received, and distributed the copies.
The nodes also carried information backwards, towards the authors of the samizdat publications.
In the immediate post-Soviet political turmoil and economic calamity, access to print culture did not get
any easier. Censorship officially ended, but so too did much of the funding for the state-funded
publishing sector. Mass unemployment, falling wages, and the resulting loss of discretionary income did
not facilitate the shift toward market-based publishing models. The funding of libraries also dwindled,
limiting new acquisitions (Elst, 2005, p. 299-300). Economic constraints took the place of political ones.
But in the absence of political repression, self-organizing efforts to address these constraints acquired
greater scope of action. Slowly, the informal sphere began to deliver alternative modes of access to
otherwise hard-to-get literary and scientific works.
Russian pirate libraries emerged from these enmeshed contexts: communist ideologies of the reading
nation and mass education; the censorship of texts; the abused library system; economic hardships and
dysfunctional markets, and, most importantly, the informal practices that ensured the survival of
scholarship and literary traditions under hostile political and economic conditions. The prominent place
of Russian pirate libraries in the larger informal media economy—and of Russian piracy of music, film,
and other copyrighted work more generally—cannot be understood outside this history.

The emergence of DIY digital libraries in RuNet
The copying of censored and uncensored works (by hand, by typewriters, by photocopying or by
computers), the hoarding of copied texts, the buying and selling of books on the black market, and the
informal, peer-to-peer distribution of samizdat material were integral parts of the everyday experience
of much of educated Soviet and post-Soviet readers. The building and maintenance of individual
collections and the participation in the informal networks of exchange offered a sense of political,
economic and cultural agency—especially as the public institutions that supported the core professions
of the intelligentsia fell into sustained economic crisis.
Digital technologies were embraced by these practices as soon as they appeared:
"From late 1970s, when first computers became used in the USSR and printers became available,
people started to print forbidden books, or just books that were difficult to find, not necessarily
forbidden. I have seen myself a print-out on a mainframe computer of a science fiction novel,
printed in all caps! Samizdat was printed on typewriters, xeroxed, printed abroad and xeroxed, or
printed on computers. Only paper circulated, files could not circulate until people started to have
PCs at home. As late as 1992 most people did not have a PC at home. So the only reason to type
a big text into a computer was to print it on paper many times.”3
People who worked in academic and research institutions were well positioned in this process: they had
access to computers, and many had access to the materials locked up in the spetskhrans. Many also had
3

Anonymous source #1

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the time and professional motivations to collect and share otherwise inaccessible texts. The core of
current digital collections was created in this late-Soviet/early post-Soviet period by such professionals.
Their home academic and scientific institutions continued to play an important role in the development
of digital text collections well into the era of home computing and the internet.
Digitized texts first circulated in printouts and later on optical/magnetic storage media. With the
emergence of digital networking these texts quickly found their way to the early Internet as well. The
first platform for digital text sharing was the Russian Fidonet, a network of BBS systems similar to
Usenet, which enabled the mass distribution of plain text files. The BBS boards, such as the Holy Spirit
BBS’ “SU.SF & F.FANDOM” group whose main focus was Soviet-Russian science fiction and fantasy
literature, connected fans around emerging collections of shared texts. As an anyonmous interviewee
described his experience in the early 1990s…
“Fidonet collected a large number of plaintext files in literature / fiction, mostly in Russian, of course.
Fidonet was almost all typed in by hand. […] Maybe several thousand of the most important books,
novels that "everyone must read" and such stuff. People typed in poetry, smaller prose pieces. I have
myself read a sci-fi novel printed on a mainframe, which was obviously typed in. This novel was by
Strugatski brothers. It was not prohibited or dissident, but just impossible to buy in the stores. These
were culturally important, cult novels, so people typed them in. […] At this point it became clear that
there was a lot of value in having a plaintext file with some novels, and the most popular novels were first
digitized in this way.”
The next stage in the text digitization started around 1994. By that time growing numbers of people had
computers, scanning peripherals, OCR software. Russian internet and PC penetration while extremely
low overall in the 1990s (0.1% of the population having internet access in 1994, growing to 8.3% by
2003), began to make inroads in educational and scientific institutions and among Moscow and
St.Petersburg elites, who were often the critical players in these networks. As access to technologies
increased a much wider array of people began to digitize their favorite texts, and these collections began
to circulate, first via CD-ROMs, later via the internet.
One of such collection belonged to Maxim Moshkov, who published his library under the name lib.ru in
1994. Moshkov was a graduate of the Moscow State University Department of Mechanics and
Mathematics, which played a large role in the digitization of scientific works. After graduation, he started
to work for the Scientific Research Institute of System Development, a computer science institute
associated with the Russian Academy of Sciences. He describes the early days of his collection as follows:
“ I began to collect electronic texts in 1990, on a desktop computer. When I got on the Internet in 1994, I
found lots of sites with texts. It was like a dream came true: there they were, all the desired books. But
these collections were in a dreadful state! Incompatible formats, different encodings, missing content. I
had to spend hours scouring the different sites and directories to find something.
As a result, I decided to convert all the different file-formats into a single one, index the titles of the books
and put them in thematic directories. I organized the files on my work computer. I was the main user of
my collection. I perfected its structure, made a simple, fast and convenient search interface and

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developed many other useful functions and put it all on the Internet. Soon, people got into the habit of
visiting the site. […]
For about 2 years I have scoured the internet: I sought out and pulled texts from the network, which were
lying there freely accessible. Slowly the library grew, and the audience increased with it. People started
to send books to me, because they were easier to read in my collection. And the time came when I
stopped surfing the internet for books: regular readers are now sending me the books. Day after day I get
about 100 emails, and 10-30 of them contain books. So many books were sent in, that I did not have time
to process them. Authors, translators and publishers also started to send texts. They all needed the
library.”(Мошков, 1999)

In the second half of the 1990’s, the Russian Internet—RuNet—was awash in book digitization projects.
With the advent of scanners, OCR technology, and the Internet, the work of digitization eased
considerably. Texts migrated from print to digital and sometimes back to print again. They circulated
through different collections, which, in turn, merged, fell apart, and re-formed. Digital libraries with the
mission to collect and consolidate these free-floating texts sprung up by the dozens.
Such digital librarianship was the antithesis of official Soviet book culture: it was free, bottom-up,
democratic, and uncensored. It also offered a partial remedy to problems created by the post-Soviet
collapse of the economy: the impoverishment of libraries, readers, and publishers. In this context, book
digitization and collecting also offered a sense of political, economic and cultural agency, with parallels
to the copying and distribution of texts in Soviet times. The capacity to scale up these practices coincided
with the moment when anti-totalitarian social sentiments were the strongest, and economic needs the
direst.
The unprecedented bloom of digital librarianship is the result of the superimposition of multiple waves
of distinct transformations: technological, political, economical and social. “Maksim Moshkov's Library”
was ground zero for this convergence and soon became a central point of exchange for the community
engaged in text digitization and collection:
[At the outset] there were just a couple of people who started scanning books in large quantities. Literally
hundreds of books. Others started proofreading, etc. There was a huge hole in the market for books.
Science fiction, adventure, crime fiction, all of this was hugely in demand by the public. So lib.ru was to a
large part the response, and was filled by those books that people most desired and most valued.
For years, lib.ru integrated as much as it could of the different digital libraries flourishing in the RuNet. By
doing so, it preserved the collections of the many short-lived libraries.
This process of collection slowed in the early 2000’s. By that time, lib.ru had all of the classics, resulting
in a decrease in the flow of new digitized material. By the same token, the Russian book market was
finally starting to offer works aimed at the popular mainstream, and was flooded by cheap romances,
astrology, crime fiction, and other genres. Such texts started to appear in, and would soon flood lib.ru.
Many contributors, including Moshkov, were concerned that such ephemera would dilute the original
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library. And so they began to disaggregate the collection. Self-published literature, “user generated
content,” and fan fiction was separated into the aptly named samizdat.lib.ru, which housed original texts
submitted by readers. Popular fiction--“low-brow literature”—was copied from the relevant subsections
of lib.ru and split off. Sites specializing in those genres quickly formed their own ecosystem. [L], the first
of its kind, now charges a monthly fee to provide access to the collection. The [f] community split off
from [L] the same way that [L] split off from lib.ru, to provide free and unrestricted access to a
fundamentally similar collection. Finally, some in the community felt the need to focus their efforts on a
separate collection of scientific works. This became Kolhoz collection.

The genesis of a million book scientific library
A Kolhoz (Russian: колхо́ з) was one of the types of collective farm that emerged in the early Soviet
period. In the early days, it was a self-governing, community-owned collaborative enterprise, with many
of the features of a commons. For the Russian digital librarians, these historical resonances were
intentional.
The kolhoz group was initially a community that scanned and processed scientific materials: books and,
occasionally, articles. The ethos was free sharing. Academic institutes in Russia were in dire need of
scientific texts; they xeroxed and scanned whatever they could. Usually, the files were then stored on the
institute's ftp site and could be downloaded freely. There were at least three major research institutes
that did this, back in early 2000s, unconnected to each other in any way, located in various faraway parts
of Russia. Most of these scans were appropriated by the kolhoz group and processed into DJVU4.
The sources of files for kolhoz were, initially, several collections from academic institutes (downloaded
whenever the ftp servers were open for anonymous access; in one case, from one of the institutes of the
Chinese academy of sciences, but mostly from Russian academic institutes). At that time (around 2002),
there were also several commercialized collections of scanned books on sale in Russia (mostly, these were
college-level textbooks on math and physics); these files were also all copied to kolhoz and processed into
DJVU. The focus was on collecting the most important science textbooks and monographs of all time, in
all fields of natural science.
There was never any commercial support. The kolhoz group never had a web site with a database, like
most projects today. They had an ftp server with files, and the access to ftp was given by PM in a forum.
This ftp server was privately supported by one of the members (who was an academic researcher, like
most kolhoz members). The files were distributed directly by burning files on writable DVDs and giving the

4

DJVU is a file format that revolutionized online book distribution the way mp3 revolutionized the online music
distribution. For books that contain graphs, images and mathematical formulae scanning is the only digitization
option. However, the large number of resulting image files is difficult to handle. The DJVU file format allows for the
images of scanned book pages to be stored in the smallest possible file size, which makes it the perfect medium for
the distribution of scanned e-books.

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DVDs away. Later, the ftp access was closed to the public, and only a temporary file-swapping ftp server
remained. Today the kolhoz DVD releases are mostly spread via torrents.” 5
Kolhoz amassed around fifty thousand documents, the mexmat collection of the Moscow State
University Department of Mechanics and Mathematics (Moshkov’s alma mater) was around the same
size, the “world of books” collection (mirknig) had around thirty thousand files, and there were around a
dozen other smaller archives, each with approximately 10 thousand files in their respective collections.
The Kolhoz group dominated the science-minded ebook community in Russia well into the late 2000’s.
Kolhoz, however, suffered from the same problems as the early Fidonet-based text collections. Since it
was distributed in DVDs, via ftp servers and on torrents, it was hard to search, it lacked a proper catalog
and it was prone to fragmentation. Parallel solutions soon emerged: around 2006-7, an existing book site
called Gigapedia copied the English books from Kolhoz, set up a catalog, and soon became the most
influential pirate library in the English speaking internet.
Similar cataloguing efforts soon emerged elsewhere. In 2007, someone on rutracker.ru, a Russian BBS
focusing on file sharing, posted torrent links to 91 DVDs containing science and technology titles
aggregated from various other Russian sources, including Kolhoz. This massive collection had no
categorization or particular order. But it soon attracted an archivist: a user of the forum started the
laborious task of organizing the texts into a usable, searchable format—first filtering duplicates and
organizing existing metadata first into an excel spreadsheet, and later moving to a more open, webbased database operating under the name Aleph.
Aleph inherited more than just books from Kolhoz and Moshkov’s lib.ru. It inherited their elitism with
regard to canonical texts, and their understanding of librarianship as a community effort. Like the earlier
sites, Aleph’s collections are complemented by a stream of user submissions. Like the other sites, the
number of submissions grew rapidly as the site’s visibility, reputation and trustworthiness was
established, and like the others it later fell, as more and more of what was perceived as canonical
literature was uploaded:
“The number of mankind’s useful books is about what we already have. So growth is defined by newly
scanned or issued books. Also, the quality of the collection is represented not by the number of books but
by the amount of knowledge it contains. [ALEPH] does not need to grow more and I am not the only one
among us who thinks so. […]
We have absolutely no idea who sends books in. It is practically impossible to know, because there are a
million books. We gather huge collections which eliminate any traces of the original uploaders.
My expectation is that new arrivals will dry up. Not completely, as I described above, some books will
always be scanned or rescanned (it nowadays happens quite surprisingly often) and the overall process of
digitization cannot and should not be stopped. It is also hard to say when the slowdown will occur: I
expected it about a year ago, but then library.nu got shut down and things changed dramatically in many
respects. Now we are "in charge" (we had been the largest anyways, just now everyone thinks we are in
5

Anonymous source #1

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charge) and there has been a temporary rise in the book inflow. At the moment, relatively small or
previously unseen collections are being integrated into [ALEPH]. Perhaps in a year it will saturate.
However, intuition is not a good guide. There are dynamic processes responsible for eBook availability. If
publishers massively digitize old books, they'll obviously be harvested and that will change the whole
picture.” 6
Aleph’s ambitions to create a universal library are limited , at least in terms of scope. It does not want to
have everything, or anything. What it wants is what is thought to be relevant by the community,
measured by the act of actively digitizing and sharing books. But it has created a very interesting strategy
to establish a library which is universal in terms of its reach. The administrators of Aleph understand that
Gigapedia’s downfall was due to its visibility and they wish to avoid that trap:
“Well, our policy, which I control as strictly as I can, is to avoid fame. Gigapedia's policy was to gain as
much fame as possible. Books should be available to you, if you need them. But let the rest of the world
stay in its equilibrium. We are taking great care to hide ourselves and it pays off.”7
They have solved the dilemma of providing access without jeopardizing their mission by open sourcing
the collection and thus allowing others to create widely publicized services that interface with the
public.They let others run the risk of getting famous.

Mirrors and communities
Aleph serves as a source archive for around a half-dozen freely accessible pirate libraries on the net. The
catalog database is downloadable, the content is downloadable, even the server code is downloadable.
No passwords are required to download and there are no gatekeepers. There are no obstacle to setting
up a similar library with a wider catalog, with improved user interface and better services, with a
different audience or, in fact, a different business model.
This arrangement creates a two-layered community. The core group of the Aleph admins maintains the
current service, while a loose and ever changing network of ‘mirror sites’ build on the Aleph
infrastructure.
“The unspoken agreement is that the mirrors support our ideas. Otherwise we simply do not interact with
them. If the mirrors do support this, they appear in the discussions, on the Web etc. in a positive context.
This is again about building a reputation: if they are reliable, we help with what we can, otherwise they
should prove the World they are good on their own. We do not request anything from them. They are free
to do anything they like. But if they do what we do not agree with, it'll be taken into account in future
relations. If you think for a while, there is no other democratic way of regulation: everyone expresses his
own views and if they conform with ours, we support them. If the ideology does not match, it breaks
down.”8

6

Anonymous source #1
Anonymous source #2
8
Anonymous source #1
7

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The core Aleph team claims to exclusively control only two critical resources: the BBS that is the home of
the community, and the book-uploading interface. That claim is, however, not entirely accurate. For the
time being, the academic minded e-book community indeed gathers on the BBS managed by Aleph, and
though there is little incentive to move on, technically nothing stands in the way of alternatives to spring
up. As for the centralization of the book collection: many of the mirrors have their own upload pages
where one can contribute to a mirror’s collection, and it is not clear how or whether books that land at
one of the mirrors find their way back to the central database. Aleph also offers a desktop library
management tool, which enables dedicated librarians to see the latest Aleph database on their desktop
and integrate their local collections with the central database via this application. Nevertheless, it seems
that nothing really stands in the way of the fragmentation of the collection, apart from the willingness of
uploaders to contribute directly to Aleph rather than to one of its mirrors (or other sites).
Funding for Aleph comes from the administrators’ personal resources as well as occasional donations
when there is a need to buy or rent equipment or services:
“[W]e've been asking and getting support for this purpose for years. […] All our mirrors are supported
primarily from private pockets and inefficient donation schemes: they bring nothing unless a whole
campaign is arranged. I asked the community for donations 3 or 4 times, for a specific purpose only and
with all the budget spoken for. And after getting the requested amount of money we shut down the
donations.”9
Mirrors, however, do not need to be non-commercial to enjoy the support of the core Aleph community,
they just have to provide free access. Ad-supported business models that do not charge for individual
access are still acceptable to the community, but there has been serious fallout with another site, which
used the Aleph stock to seed its own library, but decided to follow a “collaborative piracy” business
approach.
“To make it utmost clear: we collaborate with anyone who shares the ideology of free knowledge
distribution. No conditions. [But] we can't suddenly start supporting projects that earn money. […]
Moreover, we've been tricked by commercial projects in the past when they used the support of our
community for their own benefit.”10
The site in question, [e], is based on a simple idea: If a user cannot find a book in its collection, the
administrators offer to purchase a digital or print copy, rip it, and sell it to the user for a fraction of the
original price—typically under $1. Payments are to be made in Amazon gift cards which make the
purchases easy but the de-anonymization of users difficult. [e] recoups its investment, in principle,
through resale. While clearly illegal, the logic is not that different from that of private subscription
libraries, which purchase a resource and distribute the costs and benefits among club members.

9

BBS comment posted on Jan 15, 2013
BBS comment posted on Jan 15, 2013

10

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Although from the rights holders’ perspective there is little difference between the two approaches,
many participants in the free access community draw a sharp line between the two, viewing the sales
model as a violation of community norms.
“[e] is a scam. They were banned in our forum. Yes, most of the books in [e] came from [ALEPH], because
[ALEPH] is open, but we have nothing to do with them... If you wish to buy a book, do it from legal
sources. Otherwise it must be free.[…]
What [e] wants:
- make money on ebook downloads, no matter what kind of ebooks.
- get books from all the easy sources - spend as little effort as possible on books - maximize profit.
- no need to build a community, no need to improve quality, no need to correct any errors - just put all
files in a big pile - maximize profit.
- files are kept in secret, never given away, there is no listing of files, there is no information about what
books are really there or what is being done.
There are very few similarities in common between [e]and [ALEPH], and these similarities are too
superficial to serve as a common ground for communication. […]
They run an illegal business, making a profit.”11
Aleph administrators describe a set of values that differentiates possible site models. They prioritize the
curatorial mission and the provision of long term free access to the collection with all the costs such a
position implies, such as open sourcing the collection, ignoring takedown requests, keeping a low profile,
refraining from commercial activities, and as a result, operating on a reduced budget . [e] prioritizes the
expansion of its catalogue on demand but that implies a commercial operation, a larger budget and the
associated high legal risk. Sites carrying Aleph’s catalogue prioritize public visibility, carry ads to cover
costs but respond to takedown requests to avoid as much trouble as they can. From the perspective of
expanding access, these are not easy or straightforward tradeoffs. In Aleph’s case, the strong
commitment to the mission of providing free access comes with significant sacrifices, the most important
of which is relinquishing control over its most valuable asset: its collection of 1.2 million scientific books.
But they believe that these costs are justified by the promise, that this way the fate of free access is not
tied to the fate of Aleph.
The fact that piratical file sharing communities are willing to make substantial sacrifices (in terms of selfrestraint) to ensure their long term survival has been documented in a number of different cases. (Bodó,
2013) Aleph is unique, however in its radical open source approach. No other piratical community has
given up all the control over itself entirely. This approach is rooted in the way how it regards the legal
status of its subject matter, i.e. scholarly publications in the first place. While norms of openness in the
field of scientific knowledge production were first formed in the Enlightenment period, Aleph’s
11

BBS comments posted on Jul 02, 2013, and Aug 25, 2013

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copynorms are as much shaped by the specificities of post-Soviet era as by the age old realization that in
science we can see further if we are allowed “standing on the shoulders of giants”.

Copyright and copynorms around Russian pirate libraries
The struggle to re-establish rightsholders’ control over digitized copyrighted works has defined the
copyright policy arena since Napster emerged in 1999. Russia brought a unique history to this conflict. In
Russia, digital libraries and their emerged in a period a double transformation: the post-Soviet copyright
system had to adopt global norms, while the global norms struggled to adapt to the emergence of digital
copying.
The first post-Soviet decade produced new copyright laws that conformed with some of the international
norms advocated by Western rightsholders, but little legal clarity or enforceability (Sezneva & Karaganis,
2011). Under such conditions, informally negotiated copynorms set in to fill the void of non-existent,
unreasonable, or unenforceable laws. The pirate libraries in the RuNet are as much regulated by such
norms as by the actual laws themselves.
During most of the 1990’s user-driven digitization and archiving was legal, or to be more exact, wasn’t
illegal. The first Russian copyright law, enacted in 1993, did not cover “internet rights” until a 2006
amendment (Budylin & Osipova, 2007; Elst, 2005, p. 425). As a result, many argued (including the
Moscow prosecutor’s office), that the distribution of copyrighted works via the internet was not
copyright infringement. Authors and publishers, who saw their works appear in digital form, and
circulated via CD-ROMs and the internet, had to rely on informal norms, still in development, to establish
control over their texts vis-à-vis enthusiastic collectors and for-profit entrepreneurs.
The HARRYFAN CD was one of the early examples of a digital text collection in circulation before internet
access was widespread. The CD contained around ten thousand texts, mostly Russian science fiction. It
was compiled in 1997 by Igor Zagumenov, a book enthusiast, from the texts that circulated on the Holy
Spirit BBS. The CD was a non-profit project, planned to be printed and sold in around 1000 copies.
Zagumenov did get in touch with some of the authors and publishers, and got permission to release
some of their texts, but the CD also included many other works that were uploaded to the BBS without
authorization. The CD included the following copyright notice, alongside the name and contact of
Zagumenov and those who granted permission:
Texts on this CD are distributed in electronic format with the consent of the copyright holders or their
literary agent. The disk is aimed at authors, editors, translators and fans SF & F as a compact reference
and information library. Copying or reproduction of this disc is not allowed. For the commercial use of
texts please refer directly to the copyright owners at the following addresses.
The authors whose texts and unpublished manuscripts appeared in the collection without authorization
started to complain to those whose contact details were in the copyright notice. Some complained
about the material damage the collection may have caused to them, but most complaints focused on
moral rights: unauthorized publication of a manuscript, the mutilation of published works, lack of
attribution, or the removal of original copyright and contact notices. Some authors had no problem
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appearing in non-commercially distributed collections but objected to the fact that the CDs were sold
(and later overproduced in spite of Zagumenov’s intentions).
The debate, which took place in the book-related fora of Fidonet, had some important points.
Participants again drew a significant distinction between free access provided first by Fidonet (and later
by lib.ru, which integrated some parts of the collection) and what was perceived as Zagumenov’s forprofit enterprise—despite the fact that the price of the CD only covered printing costs. The debate also
drew authors’ and publishers’ attention to the digital book communities’ actions, which many saw as
beneficial as long as it respected the wishes of the authors. Some authors did not want to appear online
at all, others wanted only their published works to be circulated.
Lib.ru of course integrated the parts of the HARRYFAN CD into its collection. Moshkov’s policy towards
authors’ rights was to ask for permission, if he could contact the author or publisher. He also honored
takedown requests sent to him. In 1999 he wrote on copyright issues as follows:
The author’s interests must be protected on the Internet: the opportunity to find the original copy, the
right of attribution, protection from distorting the work. Anyone who wants to protect his/her rights,
should be ready to address these problems, ranging from the ability to identify the offending party, to the
possibility of proving infringement.[…]
Meanwhile, it has become a stressing question how to protect authors-netizens' rights regarding their
work published on the Internet. It is known that there are a number of periodicals that reprint material
from the Internet without the permission of the author, without payment of a fee, without prior
arrangement. Such offenders need to be shamed via public outreach. The "Wall of shame" website is one
of the positive examples of effective instruments established by the networked public to protect their
rights. It manages to do the job without bringing legal action - polite warnings, an indication of potential
trouble and shaming of the infringer.
Do we need any laws for digital libraries? Probably we do, but until then we have to do without. Yes, of
course, it would be nice to have their status established as “cultural objects” and have the same rights as
a "real library" to collect information, but that might be in the distant future. It would also be nice to
have the e-library "legal deposits" of publications in electronic form, but when even Leninka [the Russian
State Library] cannot always afford that, what we really need are enthusiastic networkers. […]
The policy of the library is to take everything they give, otherwise they cease to send books. It is also to
listen to the authors and strictly comply with their requirements. And it is to grow and prosper. […] I
simply want the books to find their readers because I am afraid to live in a world where no one reads
books. This is already the case in America, and it is speeding up with us. I don’t just want to derail this
process, I would like to turn it around.”

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Moshkov played a crucial role in consolidating copynorms in the Russian digital publishing domain. His
reputation and place in the Russian literary domain is marked by a number of prizes12, and the library’s
continued existence. This place was secured by a number of closely intertwined factors:







Framing and anchoring the digitization and distribution practice in the library tradition.
The non-profit status of the enterprise.
Respecting the wishes of the rights holders even if he was not legally obliged to do so.
Maintaining active communication with the different stakeholders in the community,
including authors and readers.
Responding to a clear gap in affordable, legal access.
Conservatism with regard to the book, anchored in the argument that digital texts are not
substitutes for printed matter.

Many other digital libraries tried to follow Moshkov’s formula, but the times were changing. Internet and
computer access left the sub-cultural niches and became mainstream; commercialization became a
viable option and thus an issue for both the community and rightsholders; and the legal environment
was about to change.

Formalization of the IP regime in the 2000s
As soon as the 1993 copyright law passed, the US resumed pressure on the Russian government for
further reform. Throughout the period—and indeed to the present day—US Trade Representative
Special 301 reports cited inadequate protections and lack of enforcement of copyright. Russia’s plans to
join the WTO, over which the US had effective veto power, also became leverage to bring the Russian
copyright regime into compliance with US norms.
Book piracy was regularly mentioned in Special 301 reports in the 2000s, but the details, alleged losses,
and analysis changed little from year to year. The estimated $40M USD losses per year throughout this
period were dwarfed by claims from the studios and software vendors, and clearly were not among the
top priorities of the USTR. For most of the decade, the electronic availability of bestsellers and academic
textbooks was seen in the context of print substitution, rather than damage to the non-existent
electronic market. And though there is little direct indication, the Special 301 reports name sites which
(unlike lib.ru) were serving audiences beyond the RuNet, indicating that the focus of enforcement was
not to protect US interests in the Russian market, but to prevent sites based in Russia to cater for
demand in the high value Western-European and US markets.
A 1998 amendment to the 1993 copyright law extended the legal framework to encompass digital rights,
though in a fashion that continued to produce controversy. After 1998, digital services had to license
content from collecting societies, but those societies needed no permission from rightsholders provided
they paid royalites. The result was a proliferation of collective management organizations, competing to
license the material to digital services (Sezneva and Karaganis, 2011), which under this arrangement
12

ROTOR, the International Union of Internet Professionals in Russia voted lib.ru as the “literary site of the year” in
1999,2001 and 2003, “electronic library of the year” in 2004,2006,2008,2009, and 2010, “programmer of the year”
in 1999, and “man of the year” in 2004 and 2005.

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were compliant with Russian law, but were regarded as illegal by Western rights holders who claimed
that the Russian collecting societies were not representing them.
The best known of dispute from this time was the one around the legality of Allofmp3.com, a site that
sold music from western record labels at prices far below those iTunes or other officially licensed
vendors. AllofMP3.com claimed that it was licensed by ROMS, the Russian Society for Multimedia and
Internet (Российское общество по мультимедиа и цифровым сетям (НП РОМС)), but despite of that
became the focal point of US (and behind them, major label) pressure, leading to an unsuccessful
criminal prosecution of the site owner and eventual closure of the site in 2007. Although Lib.ru had
some direct agreements with authors, it also licensed much of its collection from ROMS, and thus was in
the same legal situation as AllofMP3.com. .
Lib.ru avoided the attention of foreign rightholders and Russian state pressure and even benefited from
state support during the period, the receiving a $30,000 grant from the Federal Agency for Press and
Mass Communications to digitize the most important works from the 1930’s. But the chaotic licensing
environment that governed their legal status also came back to haunt them. In 2005, a lawsuit was
brought against Moshkov by KM Online (KMO), an online vendor that sold digital texts for a small fee.
Although the KMO collection—like every other collection—had been assembled from a wide range of
sources on the Internet, KMO claimed to pay a 20% royalty on its income to authors. In 2004 KMO
requested that lib.ru take down works by several authors with whom (or with whose heirs) KMO claimed
to be in exclusive contract to distribute their texts online. KMO’s claims turned out to be only partly true.
KMO had arranged contracts with a number of the heirs to classics of the Soviet period, who hoped to
benefit from an obscure provision in the 1993 Russian copyright law that granted copyrights to the heirs
of politically prosecuted and later rehabilitated Soviet-era authors. Moshkov, in turn, claimed that he
had written or oral agreements with many of the same authors and heirs, in addition to his agreement
with ROMS.
The lawsuit was a true public event. It generated thousands of news items both online and in the
mainstream press. Authors, members of the publishing industry, legal professionals, librarians, internet
professionals publicly supported Moshkov, while KMO was seen as a rogue operator that would lie to
make easy money on freely-available digital resources.
Eventually, the court ruled that KMO indeed had one exclusive contract with Eduard Gevorgyan, and that
the publication of his texts by Moshkov infringed the moral (but not the economic) rights of the author.
Moshkov was ordered to pay 3000 Rubles (approximately $100) in compensation.
The lawsuit was a sign of a slow but significant transformation in the Russian print ecosystem. The idea
of a viable market for electronic books began to find a foothold. Electronic versions of texts began to be
regarded as potential substitutes for the printed versions, not advertisements for them or supplements
to them. More and more commercial services emerged, which regard the well-entrenched free digital
libraries as competitors. As Russia continued to bring its laws into closer conformance with WTO
requirements, ahead of Russia’s admission in 2012, western rightsholders gained enough power to
demand enforcement against RuNet pirate sites. The kinds of selective enforcement for political or

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business purposes, which had marked the Russian IP regime throughout the decade (Sezneva &
Karaganis, 2011), slowly gave way to more uniform enforcement.

Closure of the Legal Regime
The legal, economic, and cultural conditions under which Aleph and its mirrors operate today are very
different from those of two decades earlier. The major legal loopholes are now closed, though Russian
authorities have shown little inclination to pursue Aleph so far:
I can't say whether it's the Russian copyright enforcement or the Western one that's most dangerous for
Aleph; I'd say that Russian enforcement is still likely to tolerate most of the things that Western
publishers won't allow. For example, lib.ru and [L] and other unofficial Russian e-libraries are tolerated
even though far from compliant with the law. These kinds of e-libraries could not survive at all in western
countries.13
Western publishers have been slow to join record, film, and software companies in their aggressive
online enforcement campaigns, and academic publishers even more so. But such efforts are slowly
increasing, as the market for digital texts grows and as publishers benefit from the enforcement
precedents set or won by the more aggressive rightsholder groups. The domain name of [os], one of the
sites mirroring the Aleph collection was seized, apparently due to the legal action taken by a US
rightholder, and it also started to respond to DMCA notices, removing links to books reported to be
infringing. Aleph responds to this with a number of tactical moves:
We want books to be available, but only for those who need them. We do not want [ALEPH] to be visible.
If one knows where to get books, there are here for him or her. In this way we stay relatively invisible (in
search engines, e.g.), but all the relevant communities in the academy know about us. Actually, if you
question people at universities, the percentage of them is quite low. But what's important is that the
news about [ALEPH] is spread mostly by face-to-face communication, where most of the unnecessary
people do not know about it. (Unnecessary are those who aim profit)14
The policy of invisibility is radically different from Moshkov’s policy of maximum visibility. Aleph hopes
that it can recede into the shadows where it will be protected by the omerta of academics sharing the
sharing ethos:
In Russian academia, [Aleph] is tacitly or actively supported. There are people that do not want to be
included, but it is hard to say who they are in most cases. Since there are DMCA complaints, of course
there are people who do not want stuff to appear here. But in our experience the complainers are only
from the non-scientific fellows. […] I haven't seen a single complaint from the authors who should
constitute our major problem: professors etc. No, they don't complain. Who complains are either of such
type I have mentioned or the ever-hungry publishers.15

13

Anonymous source #1
Anonymous source #1
15
Anonymous source #1
14

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The protection the academic community has to offer may not be enough to fend off the publishers’
enforcement actions. The option to recede further into the darknets and hide behind the veil of privacy
technologies is one option the Aleph site has: the first mirror on I2P, an anonymizing network designed
to hide the whereabouts and identity of web services is already operational. But
[i]f people are physically served court invitations, they will have to close the site. The idea is, however,
that the entire collection is copied throughout the world many times over, the database is open, the code
for the site is open, so other people can continue.16

On methodology
We tried to reconstruct the story behind Aleph by conducting interviews and browsing through the BBS
of the community. Access to the site and community members was given under a strict condition of
anonymity. We thus removed any reference to the names and URLs of the services in question.
At one point we shared an early draft of this paper with interested members and asked for their
feedback. Beyond access and feedback, community members were helping the writing of this article by
providing translations of some Russian originals, as well as reviewing the translations made by the
author. In return, we provided financial contributions to the community, in the value of 100 USD.
We reproduced forum entries without any edits to the language, we, however, edited interviews
conducted via IM services to reflect basic writing standards.

16

Anonymous source #1

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24

Bodo
Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era
2015


Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era
Balazs Bodo

Abstract
In the digital era where, thanks to the ubiquity of electronic copies, the book is no longer a scarce
resource, libraries find themselves in an extremely competitive environment. Several different actors are
now in a position to provide low cost access to knowledge. One of these competitors are shadow libraries
- piratical text collections which have now amassed electronic copies of millions of copyrighted works
and provide access to them usually free of charge to anyone around the globe. While such shadow
libraries are far from being universal, they are able to offer certain services better, to more people and
under more favorable terms than most public or research libraries. This contribution offers insights into
the development and the inner workings of one of the biggest scientific shadow libraries on the internet in
order to understand what kind of library people create for themselves if they have the means and if they
don’t have to abide by the legal, bureaucratic and economic constraints that libraries usually face. I argue
that one of the many possible futures of the library is hidden in the shadows, and those who think of the
future of libraries can learn a lot from book pirates of the 21 st century about how users and readers expect
texts in electronic form to be stored, organized and circulated.
“The library is society’s last non-commercial meeting place which the majority of the population uses.”
(Committee on the Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society, 2010)
“With books ready to be shared, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a librarian. When everyone is
librarian, library is everywhere.” – Marcell Mars, www.memoryoftheworld.org
I have spent the last few months in various libraries visiting - a library. I spent countless hours in the
modest or grandiose buildings of the Harvard Libraries, the Boston and Cambridge Public Library
systems, various branches of the Openbare Bibliotheek in Amsterdam, the libraries of the University of
Amsterdam, with a computer in front of me, on which another library was running, a library which is
perfectly virtual, which has no monumental buildings, no multi-million euro budget, no miles of stacks,
no hundreds of staff, but which has, despite lacking all what apparently makes a library, millions of
literary works and millions of scientific books, all digitized, all available at the click of the mouse for
everyone on the earth without any charge, library or university membership. As I was sitting in these

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physical spaces where the past seemed to define the present, I was wondering where I should look to find
the library of the future: down to my screen or up around me.
The library on my screen was Aleph, one of the biggest of the countless piratical text collections on the
internet. It has more than a million scientific works and another million literary works to offer, all free to
download, without any charge or fee, for anyone on the net. I’ve spent months among its virtual stacks,
combing through the catalogue, talking to the librarians who maintain the collection, and watching the
library patrons as they used the collection. I kept going back to Aleph both as a user and as a researcher.
As a user, Aleph offered me books that the local libraries around me didn’t, in formats that were more
convenient than print. As a researcher, I was interested in the origins of Aleph, its modus operandi, its
future, and I was curious where the journey to which it has taken the book-readers, authors, publishers
and libraries would end.
In this short essay I will introduce some of the findings of a two year research project conducted on
Aleph. In the project I looked at several things. I reconstructed the pirate library’s genesis in order to
understand the forces that called it to life and shaped its development. I looked at its catalogue to
understand what it has to offer and how that piratical supply of books is related to the legal supply of
books through libraries and online distributors. I also acquired data on its usage, so was able to
reconstruct some aspects of piratical demand. After a short introduction, in the first part of this essay I
will outline some of the main findings, and in the second part will situate the findings in the wider context
of the future of libraries.

Book pirates and shadow librarians
Book piracy has a fascinating history, tightly woven into the history of the printing press (Judge, 1934),
into the history of censorship (Wittmann, 2004), into the history of copyright (Bently, Davis, & Ginsburg,
2010; Bodó, 2011a) and into the history of European civilization (Johns, 2010). Book piracy, in the 21st or
in the mid-17th century is an activity that has deep cultural significance, because ultimately it is a story
about how knowledge is circulated beyond and often against the structures of political and economic
power (Bodó, 2011b), and thus it is a story about the changes this unofficial circulation of knowledge
brings.
There are many different types of book pirates. Some just aim for easy money, others pursue highly
ideological goals, but they are invariably powerful harbingers of change. The emergence of black markets
whether they be of culture, of drugs or of arms is always a symptom, a warning sign of a friction between

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supply and demand. Increased activity in the grey and black zones of legality marks the emergence of a
demand which legal suppliers are unwilling or unable to serve (Bodó, 2011a). That friction, more often
than not, leads to change. Earlier waves of book piracy foretold fundamental economic, political, societal
or technological shifts (Bodó, 2011b): changes in how the book publishing trade was organized (Judge,
1934; Pollard, 1916, 1920); the emergence of the new, bourgeois reading class (Patterson, 1968; Solly,
1885); the decline of pre-publication censorship (Rose, 1993); the advent of the Reformation and of the
Enlightenment (Darnton, 1982, 2003), or the rapid modernization of more than one nation (Khan &
Sokoloff, 2001; Khan, 2004; Yu, 2000).
The latest wave of piracy has coincided with the digital revolution which, in itself, profoundly upset the
economics of cultural production and distribution (Landes & Posner, 2003). However technology is not
the primary cause of the emergence of cultural black markets like Aleph. The proliferation of computers
and the internet has just revealed a more fundamental issue which all has to do with the uneven
distribution of the access to knowledge around the globe.
Sometimes book pirates do more than just forecast and react to changes that are independent of them.
Under certain conditions, they themselves can be powerful agents of change (Bodó, 2011b). Their agency
rests on their ability to challenge the status quo and resist cooptation or subjugation. In that effect, digital
pirates seem to be quite resilient (Giblin, 2011; Patry, 2009). They have the technological upper hand and
so far they have been able to outsmart any copyright enforcement effort (Bodó, forthcoming). As long as
it is not completely possible to eradicate file sharing technologies, and as long as there is a substantial
difference between what is legally available and what is in demand, cultural black markets will be here to
compete with and outcompete the established and recognized cultural intermediaries. Under this constant
existential threat, business models and institutions are forced to adapt, evolve or die.
After the music and audiovisual industries, now the book industry has to address the issue of piracy.
Piratical book distribution services are now in direct competition with the bookstore on the corner, the
used book stall on the sidewalk, they compete with the Amazons of the world and, like it or not, they
compete with libraries. There is, however, a significant difference between the book and the music
industries. The reluctance of music rights holders to listen to the demands of their customers caused little
damage beyond the markets of recorded music. Music rights holders controlled their own fates and those
who wanted to experiment with alternative forms of distribution had the chance to do so. But while the
rapid proliferation of book black markets may signal that the book industry suffers from similar problems
as the music industry suffered a decade ago, the actions of book publishers, the policies they pursue have
impact beyond the market of books and directly affect the domain of libraries.

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The fate of libraries is tied to the fate of book markets in more than one way. One connection is structural:
libraries emerged to remedy the scarcity in books. This is true both for the pre-print era as well as in the
Gutenberg galaxy. In the era of widespread literacy and highly developed book markets, libraries offer
access to books under terms publishers and booksellers cannot or would not. Libraries, to a large extent,
are defined to complement the structure of the book trade. The other connection is legal. The core
activities of the library (namely lending, copying) are governed by the same copyright laws that govern
authors and publishers. Libraries are one of the users in the copyright system, and their existence depends
on the limitations of and exceptions to the exclusive rights of the rights holders. The space that has been
carved out of copyright to enable the existence of libraries has been intensely contested in the era of
postmodern copyright (Samuelson, 2002) and digital technologies. This heavy legal and structural
interdependence with the market means that libraries have only a limited control over their own fate in the
digital domain.
Book pirates compete with some of the core services of libraries. And as is usually the case with
innovation that has no economic or legal constraints, pirate libraries offer, at least for the moment,
significantly better services than most of the libraries. Pirate libraries offer far more electronic books,
with much less restrictions and constraints, to far more people, far cheaper than anyone else in the library
domain. Libraries are thus directly affected by pirate libraries, and because of their structural
interdependence with book markets, they also have to adjust to how the commercial intermediaries react
to book piracy. Under such conditions libraries cannot simply count on their survival through their legacy.
Book piracy must be taken seriously, not just as a threat, but also as an opportunity to learn how shadow
libraries operate and interact with their users. Pirate libraries are the products of readers (and sometimes
authors), academics and laypeople, all sharing a deep passion for the book, operating in a zone where
there is little to no obstacle to the development of the “ideal” library. As such, pirate libraries can teach
important lessons on what is expected of a library, how book consumption habits evolve, and how
knowledge flows around the globe.

Pirate libraries in the digital age
The collection of texts in digital formats was one of the first activities that computers enabled: the text file
is the native medium of the computer, it is small, thus it is easy to store and copy. It is also very easy to
create, and as so many projects have since proved, there are more than enough volunteers who are willing
to type whole books into the machine. No wonder that electronic libraries and digital text repositories
were among the first “mainstream” application of computers. Combing through large stacks of matrix-

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printer printouts of sci-fi classics downloaded from gopher servers is a shared experience of anyone who
had access to computers and the internet before it was known as the World Wide Web.
Computers thus added fresh momentum to the efforts of realizing the age-old dream of the universal
library (Battles, 2004). Digital technologies offered a breakthrough in many of the issues that previously
posed serious obstacles to text collection: storage, search, preservation, access have all become cheaper
and easier than ever before. On the other hand, a number of key issues remained unresolved: digitization
was a slow and cumbersome process, while the screen proved to be too inconvenient, and the printer too
costly an interface between the text file and the reader. In any case, ultimately it wasn’t these issues that
put a break to the proliferation of digital libraries. Rather, it was the realization, that there are legal limits
to the digitization, storage, distribution of copyrighted works on the digital networks. That realization
soon rendered many text collections in the emerging digital library scene inaccessible.
Legal considerations did not destroy this chaotic, emergent digital librarianship and the collections the adhoc, accidental and professional librarians put together. The text collections were far too valuable to
simply delete them from the servers. Instead, what happened to most of these collections was that they
retreated from the public view, back into the access-controlled shadows of darknets. Yesterday’s gophers
and anonymous ftp servers turned into closed, membership only ftp servers, local shared libraries residing
on the intranets of various academic, business institutions and private archives stored on local hard drives.
The early digital libraries turned into book piracy sites and into the kernels of today’s shadow libraries.
Libraries and other major actors, who decided to start large scale digitization programs soon needed to
find out that if they wanted to avoid costly lawsuits, then they had to limit their activities to work in the
public domain. While the public domain is riddled with mind-bogglingly complex and unresolved legal
issues, but at least it is still significantly less complicated to deal with than copyrighted and orphan works.
Legally more innovative, (or as some would say, adventurous) companies, such as Google and Microsoft,
who thought they had sufficient resources to sort out the legal issues soon had to abandon their programs
or put them on hold until the legal issues were sorted out.
There were, however, a large group of disenfranchised readers, library patrons, authors and users who
decided to ignore the legal problems and set out to build the best library that could possibly be built using
the digital technologies. Despite the increased awareness of rights holders to the issue of digital book
piracy, more and more communities around text collections started defy the legal constraints and to
operate and use more or less public piratical shadow libraries.

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Aleph1
Aleph2 is a meta-library, and currently one of the biggest online piratical text collections on the internet.
The project started on a Russian bulletin board devoted to piracy in around 2008 as an effort to integrate
various free-floating text collections that circulated online, on optical media, on various public and private
ftp servers and on hard-drives. Its aim was to consolidate these separate text collections, many of which
were created in various Russian academic institutions, into a single, unified catalog, standardize the
technical aspects, add and correct missing or incorrect metadata, and offer the resulting catalogue,
computer code and the collection of files as an open infrastructure.

From Russia with love
It is by no means a mistake that Aleph was born in Russia. In post-Soviet Russia the unique constellation
of several different factors created the necessary conditions for the digital librarianship movement that
ultimately led to the development of Aleph. A rich literary legacy, the Soviet heritage, the pace with
which various copying technologies penetrated the market, the shortcomings of the legal environment and
the informal norms that stood in for the non-existent digital copyrights all contributed to the emergence of
the biggest piratical library in the history of mankind.
Russia cherishes a rich literary tradition, which suffered and endured extreme economic hardships and
political censorship during the Soviet period (Ermolaev, 1997; Friedberg, Watanabe, & Nakamoto, 1984;
Stelmakh, 2001). The political transformation in the early 1990’s liberated authors, publishers, librarians
and readers from much of the political oppression, but it did not solve the economic issues that stood in
the way of a healthy literary market. Disposable income was low, state subsidies were limited, the dire
economic situation created uncertainty in the book market. The previous decades, however, have taught
authors and readers how to overcome political and economic obstacles to access to books. During the
Soviet times authors, editors and readers operated clandestine samizdat distribution networks, while
informal book black markets, operating in semi-private spheres, made uncensored but hard to come by
books accessible (Stelmakh, 2001). This survivalist attitude and the skills that came with it became handy
in the post-Soviet turmoil, and were directly transferable to the then emerging digital technologies.

1

I have conducted extensive research on the origins of Aleph, on its catalogue and its users. The detailed findings, at
the time of writing this contribution are being prepared for publication. The following section is brief summary of
those findings and is based upon two forthcoming book chapters on Aleph in a report, edited by Joe Karaganis, on
the role of shadow libraries in the higher education systems of multiple countries.
2
Aleph is a pseudonym chosen to protect the identity of the shadow library in question.

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Russia is not the only country with a significant informal media economy of books, but in most other
places it was the photocopy machine that emerged to serve such book grey/black markets. In pre-1990
Russia and in other Eastern European countries the access to this technology was limited, and when
photocopiers finally became available, computers were close behind them in terms of accessibility. The
result of the parallel introduction of the photocopier and the computer was that the photocopy technology
did not have time to lock in the informal market of texts. In many countries where the photocopy machine
preceded the computer by decades, copy shops still capture the bulk of the informal production and
distribution of textbooks and other learning material. In the Soviet-bloc PCs instantly offered a less costly
and more adaptive technology to copy and distribute texts.
Russian academic and research institutions were the first to have access to computers. They also had to
somehow deal with the frustrating lack of access to up-to-date and affordable western works to be used in
education and research (Abramitzky & Sin, 2014). This may explain why the first batch of shadow
libraries started in a number of academic/research institutions such as the Department of Mechanics and
Mathematics (MexMat) at Moscow State University. The first digital librarians in Russia were
mathematicians, computer scientists and physicists, working in those institutions.
As PCs and internet access slowly penetrated Russian society, an extremely lively digital librarianship
movement emerged, mostly fuelled by enthusiastic readers, book fans and often authors, who spared no
effort to make their favorite books available on FIDOnet, a popular BBS system in Russia. One of the
central figures in these tumultuous years, when typed-in books appeared online by the thousands, was
Maxim Moshkov, a computer scientist, alumnus of the MexMat, and an avid collector of literary works.
His digital library, lib.ru was at first mostly a private collection of literary texts, but soon evolved into the
number one text repository which everyone used to depose the latest digital copy on a newly digitized
book (Мошков, 1999). Eventually the library grew so big that it had to be broken up. Today it only hosts
the Russian literary classics. User generated texts, fan fiction and amateur production was spin off into the
aptly named samizdat.lib.ru collection, low brow popular fiction, astrology and cheap romance found its
way into separate collections, and so did the collection of academic/scientific books, which started an
independent life under the name of Kolkhoz. Kolkhoz, which borrowed its name from the commons
based agricultural cooperative of the early Soviet era, was both a collection of scientific texts, and a
community of amateur librarians, who curated, managed and expanded the collection.
Moshkov and his library introduced several important norms into the bottom-up, decentralized, often
anarchic digital library movement that swept through the Russian internet in the late 1990’s, early 2000’s.
First, lib.ru provided the technological blueprint for any future digital library. But more importantly,

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Moshkov’s way of handling the texts, his way of responding to the claims, requests, questions, complaints
of authors and publishers paved the way to the development of copynorms (Schultz, 2007) that continue
to define the Russian digital library scene until today. Moshkov was instrumental in the creation of an
enabling environment for the digital librarianship while respecting the claims of authors, during times
when the formal copyright framework and the enforcement environment was both unable and unwilling to
protect works of authorship (Elst, 2005; Sezneva, 2012).

Guerilla Open Access
Around the time of the late 2000’s when Aleph started to merge the Kolkhoz collection with other, freefloating texts collections, two other notable events took place. It was in 2008 when Aaron Swartz penned
his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (Swartz, 2008), in which he called for the liberation and sharing of
scientific knowledge. Swartz forcefully argued that scientific knowledge, the production of which is
mostly funded by the public and by the voluntary labor of academics, cannot be locked up behind
corporate paywalls set up by publishers. He framed the unauthorized copying and transfer of scientific
works from closed access text repositories to public archives as a moral act, and by doing so, he created
an ideological framework which was more radical and promised to be more effective than either the
creative commons (Lessig, 2004) or the open access (Suber, 2013) movements that tried to address the
access to knowledge issues in a more copyright friendly manner. During interviews, the administrators of
Aleph used the very same arguments to justify the raison d'être of their piratical library. While it seems
that Aleph is the practical realization of Swartz’s ideas, it is hard to tell which served as an inspiration for
the other.
It was also in around the same time when another piratical library, gigapedia/library.nu started its
operation, focusing mostly on making freely available English language scientific works (Liang, 2012).
Until its legal troubles and subsequent shutdown in 2012, gigapedia/library.nu was the biggest English
language piratical scientific library on the internet amassing several hundred thousand books, including
high-quality proofs ready to print and low resolution scans possibly prepared by a student or a lecturer.
During 2012 the mostly Russian-language and natural sciences focused Alephs absorbed the English
language, social sciences rich gigapedia/library.nu, and with the subsequent shutdown of
gigapedia/library.nu Aleph became the center of the scientific shadow library ecosystem and community.

Aleph by numbers

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By adding pre-existing text collections to its catalogue Aleph was able to grow at an astonishing rate.
Aleph added, on average 17.500 books to its collection each month since 2009, and as a result, by April
2014 is has more than 1.15 million documents. Nearly two thirds of the collection is in English, one fifth
of the documents is in Russian, while German works amount to the third largest group with 8.5% of the
collection. The rest of the major European languages, like French or Spanish have less than 15000 works
each in the collection.
More than 50 thousand publishers have works in the library, but most of the collection is published by
mainstream western academic publishers. Springer published more than 12% of the works in the
collection, followed by the Cambridge University Press, Wiley, Routledge and Oxford University Press,
each having more than 9000 works in the collection.
Most of the collection is relatively recent, more than 70% of the collection being published in 1990 or
after. Despite the recentness of the collection, the electronic availability of the titles in the collection is
limited. While around 80% of the books that had an ISBN number registered in the catalogue3 was
available in print either as a new copy or a second hand one, only about one third of the titles were
available in e-book formats. The mean price of the titles still in print was 62 USD according to the data
gathered from Amazon.com.
The number of works accessed through of Aleph is as impressive as its catalogue. In the three months
between March and June, 2012, on average 24.000 documents were downloaded every day from one of
its half-a-dozen mirrors.4 This means that the number of documents downloaded daily from Aleph is
probably in the 50 to 100.000 range. The library users come from more than 150 different countries. The
biggest users in terms of volume were the Russian Federation, Indonesia, USA, India, Iran, Egypt, China,
Germany and the UK. Meanwhile, many of the highest per-capita users are Central and Eastern European
countries.

What Aleph is and what it is not
Aleph is an example of the library in the post scarcity age. It is founded on the idea that books should no
longer be a scarce resource. Aleph set out to remove both sources of scarcity: the natural source of
3

Market availability data is only available for that 40% of books in the Aleph catalogue that had an ISBN number
on file. The titles without a valid ISBN number tend to be older, Russian language titles, in general with low
expected print and e-book availability.
4
Download data is based on the logs provided by one of the shadow library services which offers the books in
Aleph’s catalogue as well as other works also free and without any restraints or limitations.

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in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate

scarcity in physical copies is overcome through distributed digitization; the artificial source of scarcity
created by copyright protection is overcome through infringement. The liberation from both constraints is
necessary to create a truly scarcity free environment and to release the potential of the library in the postscarcity age.
Aleph is also an ongoing demonstration of the fact that under the condition of non-scarcity, the library can
be a decentralized, distributed, commons-based institution created and maintained through peer
production (Benkler, 2006). The message of Aleph is clear: users left to their own devices, can produce a
library by themselves for themselves. In fact, users are the library. And when everyone has the means to
digitize, collect, catalogue and share his/her own library, then the library suddenly is everywhere. Small
individual and institutional collections are aggregated into Aleph, which, in turn is constantly fragmented
into smaller, local, individual collections as users download works from the collection. The library is
breathing (Battles, 2004) books in and out, but for the first time, this circulation of books is not a zero
sum game, but a cumulative one: with every cycle the collection grows.
On the other hand Aleph may have lots of books on offer, but it is clear that it is neither universal in its
scope, nor does it fulfill all the critical functions of a library. Most importantly Aleph is disembedded
from the local contexts and communities that usually define the focus of the library. While it relies on the
availability of local digital collections for its growth, it has no means to play an active role in its own
development. The guardians of Aleph can prevent books from entering the collection, but they cannot
pay, ask or force anyone to provide a title if it is missing. Aleph is reliant on the weak copy-protection
technologies of official e-text repositories and the goodwill of individual document submitters when it
comes to the expansion of the collection. This means that the Aleph collection is both fragmented and
biased, and it lacks the necessary safeguards to ensure that it stays either current or relevant.
Aleph, with all its strengths and weaknesses carries an important lesson for the discussions on the future
of libraries. In the next section I’ll try situate these lessons in the wider context of the library in the post
scarcity age.

The future of the library
There is hardly a week without a blog post, a conference, a workshop or an academic paper discussing the
future of libraries. While existing libraries are buzzing with activity, librarians are well aware that they
need to re-define themselves and their institutions, as the book collections around which libraries were
organized slowly go the way the catalogue has gone: into the digital realm. It would be impossible to give

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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate

a faithful summary of all the discussions on the future of libraries is such a short contribution. There are,
however, a few threads, to which the story of Aleph may contribute.

Competition
It is very rare to find the two words: libraries and competition in the same sentence. No wonder: libraries
enjoyed a near perfect monopoly in their field of activity. Though there may have been many different
local initiatives that provided free access to books, as a specialized institution to do so, the library was
unmatched and unchallenged. This monopoly position has been lost in a remarkably short period of time
due to the internet and the rapid innovations in the legal e-book distribution markets. Textbooks can be
rented, e-books can be lent, a number of new startups and major sellers offer flat rate access to huge
collections. Expertise that helps navigate the domains of knowledge is abundant, there are multiple
authoritative sources of information and meta-information online. The search box of the library catalog is
only one, and not even the most usable of all the different search boxes one can type a query in5.
Meanwhile there are plenty of physical spaces which offer good coffee, an AC plug, comfortable chairs
and low levels of noise to meet, read and study from local cafes via hacker- and maker spaces, to coworking offices. Many library competitors have access to resources (human, financial, technological and
legal) way beyond the possibilities of even the richest libraries. In addition, publishers control the
copyrights in digital copies which, absent of well fortified statutory limitations and exceptions, prevent
libraries keeping up with the changes in user habits and with the competing commercial services.
Libraries definitely feel the pressure. “Libraries’ offers of materials […] compete with many other offers
that aim to attract the attention of the public. […] It is no longer enough just to make a good collection
available to the public.” (Committee on the Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society, 2010) As a
response, libraries have developed different strategies to cope with this challenge. The common thread in
the various strategy documents is that they try to redefine the library as a node in the vast network of
institutions that provide knowledge, enable learning, facilitate cooperation and initiate dialogues. Some of
the strategic plans redefine the library space as an “independent medium to be developed” (Committee on
the Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society, 2010), and advise libraries to transform themselves into
culture and community centers which establish partnerships with citizens, communities and with other
public and private institutions. Some librarians propose even more radical ways of keeping the library

5

ArXiv, SSRN, RePEc, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon, Mendeley, Citavi,
ResearchGate, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Khan Academy, specialized twitter and other
social media accounts are just a few of the available discovery services.

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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate

relevant by, for example, advocating more opening hours without staff and hosting more user-governed
activities.
In the research library sphere, the Commission on the Future of the Library, a task force set up by the
University of California Berkeley defined the values the university research library will add in the digital
age as “1) Human expertise; 2) Enabling infrastructure; and 3) Preservation and dissemination of
knowledge for future generations.” (Commission on the Future of the Library, 2013). This approach is
from among the more conservative ones, still relying on the hope that libraries can offer something
unique that no one else is able to provide. Others, working at the Association of Research Libraries are
more like their public library counterparts, defining the future role of the research libraries as a “convener
of ‘conversations’ for knowledge construction, an inspiring host; a boundless symposium; an incubator;
a 3rd space both physically and virtually; a scaffold for independence of mind; and a sanctuary for
freedom of expression, a global entrepreneurial engine” (Pendleton-Jullian, Lougee, Wilkin, & Hilton,
2014), in other words, as another important, but in no way unique node in the wider network of
institutions that creates and distributes knowledge.
Despite the differences in priorities, all these recommendations carry the same basic message. The unique
position of libraries in the center of a book-based knowledge economy, on the top of the paper-bound
knowledge hierarchy is about to be lost. As libraries are losing their monopoly of giving low cost, low
restrictions access to books which are scarce by nature, and they are losing their privileged and powerful
position as the guardians of and guides to the knowledge stored in the stacks. If they want to survive, they
need to find their role and position in a network of institutions, where everyone else is engaged in
activities that overlap with the historic functions of the library. Just like the books themselves, the power
that came from the privileged access to books is in part dispersed among the countless nodes in the
knowledge and learning networks, and in part is being captured by those who control the digital rights to
digitize and distribute books in the digital era.
One of the main reasons why libraries are trying to redefine themselves as providers of ancillary services
is because the lack of digital lending rights prevents them from competing on their own traditional home
turf - in giving free access to knowledge. The traditional legal limitations and exceptions to copyright that
enabled libraries to fulfill their role in the analogue world do not apply in the digital realm. In the
European Union, the Infosoc Directive (“Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of
copyright and related rights in the information society,” 2001) allows for libraries to create digital copies
for preservation, indexing and similar purposes and allows for the display of digital copies on their
premises for research and personal study (Triaille et al., 2013). While in theory these rights provide for

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in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate

the core library services in the digital domain, their practical usefulness is rather limited, as off-premises
e-lending of copyrighted works is in most cases6 only possible through individual license agreements with
publishers.
Under such circumstances libraries complain that they cannot fulfill their public interest mission in the
digital era. What libraries are allowed to do under their own under current limitations and exceptions, is
seen as inadequate for what is expected of them. But to do more requires the appropriate e-lending
licenses from rights holders. In many cases, however, libraries simply cannot license digitally for e-lending. In those cases when licensing is possible, they see transaction costs as prohibitively high; they
feel that their bargaining positions vis-à-vis rightholders is unbalanced; they do not see that the license
terms are adapted to libraries’ policies, and they fear that the licenses provide publishers excessive and
undue influence over libraries (Report on the responses to the Public Consultation on the Review of the
EU Copyright Rules, 2013).
What is more, libraries face substantial legal uncertainties even where there are more-or-less well defined
digital library exceptions. In the EU, questions such as whether the analogue lending rights of libraries
extend to e-books, whether an exhaustion of the distribution right is necessary to enjoy the lending
exception, and whether licensing an e-book would exhaust the distribution right are under consideration
by the Court of Justice of the European Union in a Dutch case (Rosati, 2014b). And while in another case
(Case C-117/13 Technische Universität Darmstadt v Eugen Ulmer KG) the CJEU reaffirmed the rights of
European libraries to digitize books in their collection if that is necessary to give access to them in digital
formats on their premises, it also created new uncertainties by stating that libraries may not digitize their
entire collections (Rosati, 2014a).
US libraries face a similar situation, both in terms of the narrowly defined exceptions in which libraries
can operate, and the huge uncertainty regarding the limits of fair use in the digital library context. US
rights holders challenged both Google’s (Authors Guild v Google) and the libraries (Authors Guild v
HathiTrust) rights to digitize copyrighted works. While there seems to be a consensus of courts that the
mass digitization conducted by these institutions was fair use (Diaz, 2013; Rosati, 2014c; Samuelson,
2014), the accessibility of the scanned works is still heavily limited, subject to licenses from publishers,
the existence of print copies at the library and the institutional membership held by prospective readers.
While in the highly competitive US e-book market many commercial intermediaries offer e-lending
6

The notable exception being orphan works which are presumed to be still copyrighted, but without an identifiable
rights owner. In the EU, the Directive 2012/28/EU on certain permitted uses of orphan works in theory eases access
to such works, but in practice its practical impact is limited by the many constraints among its provisions. Lacking
any orphan works legislation and the Google Book Settlement still in limbo, the US is even farther from making
orphan works generally accessible to the public.

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in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate

licenses to e-book catalogues of various sizes, these arrangements also carry the danger of a commercial
lock-in of the access to digital works, and render libraries dependent upon the services of commercial
providers who may or may not be the best defenders of public interest (OECD, 2012).
Shadow libraries like Aleph are called into existence by the vacuum that was left behind by the collapse
of libraries in the digital sphere and by the inability of the commercial arrangements to provide adequate
substitute services. Shadow libraries are pooling distributed resources and expertise over the internet, and
use the lack of legal or technological barriers to innovation in the informal sphere to fill in the void left
behind by libraries.

What can Aleph teach us about the future of libraries?
The story of Aleph offers two, closely interrelated considerations for the debate on the future of libraries:
a legal and an organizational one. Aleph operates beyond the limits of legality, as almost all of its
activities are copyright infringing, including the unauthorized digitization of books, the unauthorized
mass downloads from e-text repositories, the unauthorized acts of uploading books to the archive, the
unauthorized distribution of books, and, in most countries, the unauthorized act of users’ downloading
books from the archive. In the debates around copyright infringement, illegality is usually interpreted as a
necessary condition to access works for free. While this is undoubtedly true, the fact that Aleph provides
no-cost access to books seems to be less important than the fact that it provides an access to them in the
first place.
Aleph is a clear indicator of the volume of the demand for current books in digital formats in developed
and in developing countries. The legal digital availability, or rather, unavailability of its catalogue also
demonstrates the limits of the current commercial and library based arrangements that aim to provide low
cost access to books over the internet. As mentioned earlier, Aleph’s catalogue is mostly of recent books,
meaning that 80% of the titles with a valid ISBN number are still in print and available as a new or used
print copy through commercial retailers. What is also clear, that around 66% of these books are yet to be
made available in electronic format. While publishers in theory have a strong incentive to make their most
recent titles available as e-books, they lag behind in doing so.
This might explain why one third of all the e-book downloads in Aleph are from highly developed
Western countries, and two third of these downloads are of books without a kindle version. Having access
to print copies either through libraries or through commercial retailers is simply not enough anymore.
Developing countries are a slightly different case. There, compared to developed countries, twice as many

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in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate

of the downloads (17% compared to 8% in developed countries) are of titles that aren’t available in print
at all. Not having access to books in print seems to be a more pressing problem for developing countries
than not having access to electronic copies. Aleph thus fulfills at least two distinct types of demand: in
developed countries it provides access to missing electronic versions, in developing countries it provides
access to missing print copies.
The ability to fulfill an otherwise unfulfilled demand is not the only function of illegality. Copyright
infringement in the case of Aleph has a much more important role: it enables the peer production of the
library. Aleph is an open source library. This means that every resource it uses and every resource it
creates is freely accessible to anyone for use without any further restrictions. This includes the server
code, the database, the catalogue and the collection. The open source nature of Aleph rests on the
ideological claim that the scientific knowledge produced by humanity, mostly through public funds
should be open for anyone to access without any restrictions. Everything else in and around Aleph stems
from this claim, as they replicate the open access logic in all the other aspects of Aleph’s operation. Aleph
uses the peer produced Open Library to fetch book metadata, it uses the bittorrent and ed2k P2P networks
to store and make books accessible, it uses Linux and MySQL to run its code, and it allows its users to
upload books and edit book metadata. As a consequence of its open source nature, anyone can contribute
to the project, and everyone can enjoy its benefits.
It is hard to quantify the impact of this piratical open access library on education, science and research in
various local contexts where Aleph is the prime source of otherwise inaccessible books. But it is
relatively easy to measure the consequences of openness at the level of the Aleph, the library. The
collection of Aleph was created mostly by those individuals and communities who decided to digitize
books by themselves for their own use. While any single individual is only capable of digitizing a few
books at the maximum, the small contributions quickly add up. To digitize the 1.15 million documents in
the Aleph collection would require an investment of several hundred million Euros, and a substantial
subsequent investment in storage, collection management and access provision (Poole, 2010). Compared
to these figures the costs associated with running Aleph is infinitesimal, as it survives on the volunteer
labor of a few individuals, and annual donations in the total value of a few thousand dollars. The hundreds
of thousands who use Aleph on a more or less regular basis have an immense amount of resources, and by
disregarding the copyright laws Aleph is able to tap into those resources and use them for the
development of the library. The value of these resources and of the peer produced library is the difference
between the actual costs associated with Aleph, and the investment that would be required to create
something remotely similar.

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Bodó B. (2015): Libraries in the post-scarcity era.
in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate

The decentralized, collaborative mass digitization and making available of current, thus most relevant
scientific works is only possible at the moment through massive copyright infringement. It is debatable
whether the copyrighted corpus of scientific works should be completely open, and whether the blatant
disregard of copyrights through which Aleph achieved this openness is the right path towards a more
openly accessible body of scientific knowledge. It is also yet to be measured what effects shadow libraries
may have on the commercial intermediaries and on the health of scientific publishing and science in
general. But Aleph, in any case, is a case study in the potential benefits of open sourcing the library.

Conclusion
If we can take Aleph as an expression of what users around the globe want from a library, then the answer
is that there is a strong need for a universally accessible collection of current, relevant (scientific) books
in restrictions-free electronic formats. Can we expect any single library to provide anything even remotely
similar to that in the foreseeable future? Does such a service have a place in the future of libraries? It is as
hard to imagine the future library with such a service as without.
While the legal and financial obstacles to the creation of a scientific library with as universal reach as
Aleph may be difficult the overcome, other aspects of it may be more easily replicable. The way Aleph
operates demonstrates the amount of material and immaterial resources users are willing to contribute to
build a library that responds to their needs and expectations. If libraries plan to only ‘host’ user-governed
activities, it means that the library is still imagined to be a separate entity from its users. Aleph teaches us
that this separation can be overcome and users can constitute a library. But for that they need
opportunities to participate in the production of the library: they need the right to digitize books and copy
digital books to and from the library, they need the opportunity to participate in the cataloging and
collection building process, they need the opportunity to curate and program the collection. In other
words users need the chance to be librarians in the library if they wish to do so, and so libraries need to be
able to provide access not just to the collection but to their core functions as well. The walls that separate
librarians from library patrons, private and public collections, insiders and outsiders can all prevent the
peer production of the library, and through that, prevent the future that is the closest to what library users
think of as ideal.

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in: Porsdam (ed): Copyrighting Creativity: Creative values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property, Ashgate

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Bodo
In the Name of Humanity
2016


# In the Name of Humanity

By [Balazs Bodo](https://limn.it/researchers/bodo/)

![In the Name of Humanity](https://limn.it/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/Gamelin1_t02-745x1024.jpg)

Jacques Gamelin

![](http://limn.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/02
/Fahrenheit_451_1966_Francois_Truffaut-800x435.png)

Fahrenheit 451 (1966).

As I write this in August 2015, we are in the middle of one of the worst
refugee crises in modern Western history. The European response to the carnage
beyond its borders is as diverse as the continent itself: as an ironic
contrast to the newly built barbed-wire fences protecting the borders of
Fortress Europe from Middle Eastern refugees, the British Museum (and probably
other museums) are launching projects to “protect antiquities taken from
conflict zones” (BBC News 2015). We don’t quite know how the conflict
artifacts end up in the custody of the participating museums. It may be that
asylum seekers carry such antiquities on their bodies, and place them on the
steps of the British Museum as soon as they emerge alive on the British side
of the Eurotunnel. But it is more likely that Western heritage institutions,
if not playing Indiana Jones in North Africa, Iraq, and Syria, are probably
smuggling objects out of war zones and buying looted artifacts from the
international gray/black antiquities market to save at least some of them from
disappearing in the fortified vaults of wealthy private buyers (Shabi 2015).
Apparently, there seems to be some consensus that artifacts, thought to be
part of the common cultural heritage of humanity, cannot be left in the hands
of those collectives who own/control them, especially if they try to destroy
them or sell them off to the highest bidder.

The exact limits of expropriating valuables in the name of humanity are
heavily contested. Take, for example, another group of self-appointed
protectors of culture, also collecting and safeguarding, in the name of
humanity, valuable items circulating in the cultural gray/black markets. For
the last decade Russian scientists, amateur librarians, and volunteers have
been collecting millions of copyrighted scientific monographs and hundreds of
millions of scientific articles in piratical shadow libraries and making them
freely available to anyone and everyone, without any charge or limitation
whatsoever (Bodó 2014b; Cabanac 2015; Liang 2012). These pirate archivists
think that despite being copyrighted and locked behind paywalls, scholarly
texts belong to humanity as a whole, and seek to ensure that every single one
of us has unlimited and unrestricted access to them.

The support for a freely accessible scholarly knowledge commons takes many
different forms. A growing number of academics publish in open access
journals, and offer their own scholarship via self-archiving. But as the data
suggest (Bodó 2014a), there are also hundreds of thousands of people who use
pirate libraries on a regular basis. There are many who participate in
courtesy-based academic self-help networks that provide ad hoc access to
paywalled scholarly papers (Cabanac 2015).[1] But a few people believe that
scholarly knowledge could and should be liberated from proprietary databases,
even by force, if that is what it takes. There are probably no more than a few
thousand individuals who occasionally donate a few bucks to cover the
operating costs of piratical services or share their private digital
collections with the world. And the number of pirate librarians, who devote
most of their time and energy to operate highly risky illicit services, is
probably no more than a few dozen. Many of them are Russian, and many of the
biggest pirate libraries were born and/or operate from the Russian segment of
the Internet.

The development of a stable pirate library, with an infrastructure that
enables the systematic growth and development of a permanent collection,
requires an environment where the stakes of access are sufficiently high, and
the risks of action are sufficiently low. Russia certainly qualifies in both
of these domains. However, these are not the only reasons why so many pirate
librarians are Russian. The Russian scholars behind the pirate libraries are
familiar with the crippling consequences of not having access to fundamental
texts in science, either for political or for purely economic reasons. The
Soviet intelligentsia had decades of experience in bypassing censors, creating
samizdat content distribution networks to deal with the lack of access to
legal distribution channels, and running gray and black markets to survive in
a shortage economy (Bodó 2014b). Their skills and attitudes found their way to
the next generation, who now runs some of the most influential pirate
libraries. In a culture, where the know-how of how to resist information
monopolies is part of the collective memory, the Internet becomes the latest
in a long series of tools that clandestine information networks use to build
alternative publics through the illegal sharing of outlawed texts.

In that sense, the pirate library is a utopian project and something more.
Pirate librarians regard their libraries as a legitimate form of resistance
against the commercialization of public resources, the (second) enclosure
(Boyle 2003) of the public domain. Those handful who decide to publicly defend
their actions, speak in the same voice, and tell very similar stories. Aaron
Swartz was an American hacker willing to break both laws and locks in his
quest for free access. In his 2008 “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” (Swartz
2008), he forcefully argued for the unilateral liberation of scholarly
knowledge from behind paywalls to provide universal access to a common human
heritage. A few years later he tried to put his ideas into action by
downloading millions of journal articles from the JSTOR database without
authorization. Alexandra Elbakyan is a 27-year-old neurotechnology researcher
from Kazakhstan and the founder of Sci-hub, a piratical collection of tens of
millions of journal articles that provides unauthorized access to paywalled
articles to anyone without an institutional subscription. In a letter to the
judge presiding over a court case against her and her pirate library, she
explained her motives, pointing out the lack of access to journal articles.[2]
Elbakyan also believes that the inherent injustices encoded in current system
of scholarly publishing, which denies access to everyone who is not
willing/able to pay, and simultaneously denies payment to most of the authors
(Mars and Medak 2015), are enough reason to disregard the fundamental IP
framework that enables those injustices in the first place. Other shadow
librarians expand the basic access/injustice arguments into a wider critique
of the neoliberal political-economic system that aims to commodify and
appropriate everything that is perceived to have value (Fuller 2011; Interview
with Dusan Barok 2013; Sollfrank 2013).

Whatever prompts them to act, pirate librarians firmly believe that the fruits
of human thought and scientific research belong to the whole of humanity.
Pirates have the opportunity, the motivation, the tools, the know-how, and the
courage to create radical techno-social alternatives. So they resist the
status quo by collecting and “guarding” scholarly knowledge in libraries that
are freely accessible to all.


Water-damaged books drying, 1985.

Both the curators of the British Museum and the pirate librarians claim to
save the common heritage of humanity, but any similarities end there. Pirate
libraries have no buildings or addresses, they have no formal boards or
employees, they have no budgets to speak of, and the resources at their
disposal are infinitesimal. Unlike the British Museum or libraries from the
previous eras, pirate libraries were born out of lack and despair. Their
fugitive status prevents them from taking the traditional paths of
institutionalization. They are nomadic and distributed by design; they are _ad
hoc_ and tactical, pseudonymous and conspiratory, relying on resources reduced
to the absolute minimum so they can survive under extremely hostile
circumstances.

Traditional collections of knowledge and artifacts, in their repurposed or
purpose-built palaces, are both the products and the embodiments of the wealth
and power that created them. Pirate libraries don’t have all the symbols of
transubstantiated might, the buildings, or all the marble, but as
institutions, they are as powerful as their more established counterparts.
Unlike the latter, whose claim to power was the fact of ownership and the
control over access and interpretation, pirates’ power is rooted in the
opposite: in their ability to make ownership irrelevant, access universal, and
interpretation democratic.

This is the paradox of the total piratical archive: they collect enormous
wealth, but they do not own or control any of it. As an insurance policy
against copyright enforcement, they have already given everything away: they
release their source code, their databases, and their catalogs; they put up
the metadata and the digitalized files on file-sharing networks. They realize
that exclusive ownership/control over any aspects of the library could be a
point of failure, so in the best traditions of archiving, they make sure
everything is duplicated and redundant, and that many of the copies are under
completely independent control. If we disregard for a moment the blatantly
illegal nature of these collections, this systematic detachment from the
concept of ownership and control is the most radical development in the way we
think about building and maintaining collections (Bodó 2015).

Because pirate libraries don’t own anything, they have nothing to lose. Pirate
librarians, on the other hand, are putting everything they have on the line.
Speaking truth to power has a potentially devastating price. Swartz was caught
when he broke into an MIT storeroom to download the articles in the JSTOR
database.[3] Facing a 35-year prison sentence and $1 million in fines, he
committed suicide.[4] By explaining her motives in a recent court filing,[5]
Elbakyan admitted responsibility and probably sealed her own legal and
financial fate. But her library is probably safe. In the wake of this lawsuit,
pirate libraries are busy securing themselves: pirates are shutting down
servers whose domain names were confiscated and archiving databases, again and
again, spreading the illicit collections through the underground networks
while setting up new servers. It may be easy to destroy individual
collections, but nothing in history has been able to destroy the idea of the
universal library, open for all.

For the better part of that history, the idea was simply impossible. Today it
is simply illegal. But in an era when books are everywhere, the total archive
is already here. Distributed among millions of hard drives, it already is a
_de facto_ common heritage. We are as gods, and might as well get good at
it.[6]



## About the author

**Bodo Balazs,**  PhD, is an economist and piracy researcher at the Institute
for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. [More
»](https://limn.it/researchers/bodo/)

## Footnotes

[1] On such fora, one can ask for and receive otherwise out-of-reach
publications through various reddit groups such as
[r/Scholar](https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar) and using certain Twitter
hashtags like #icanhazpdf or #pdftribute.

[2] Elsevier Inc. et al v. Sci-Hub et al, New York Southern District Court,
Case No. 1:15-cv-04282-RWS

[3] While we do not know what his aim was with the article dump, the
prosecution thought his Manifesto contained the motives for his act.

[4] See _United States of America v. Aaron Swartz_ , United States District
Court for the District of Massachusetts, Case No. 1:11-cr-10260

[5] Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 50 Filed 09/15/15, available at
[link](https://www.unitedstatescourts.org/federal/nysd/442951/).

[6] I of course stole this line from Stewart Brand (1968), the editor of the
Whole Earth catalog, who, in return, claims to have been stolen it from the
British anthropologist Edmund Leach. See
[here](http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods) for
the details.

## Bibliography

BBC News. “British Museum ‘Guarding’ Object Looted from Syria. _BBC News,_
June 5. Available at [link](http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-
arts-33020199).

Bodó, B. 2015. “Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era.” In _Copyrighting
Creativity_ , edited by H. Porsdam (pp. 75–92). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

———. 2014a. “In the Shadow of the Gigapedia: The Analysis of Supply and Demand
for the Biggest Pirate Library on Earth.” In _Shadow Libraries_ , edited by J.
Karaganis (forthcoming). New York: American Assembly. Available at
[link](http://ssrn.com/abstract=2616633).

———. 2014b. “A Short History of the Russian Digital Shadow Libraries.” In
Shadow Libraries, edited by J. Karaganis (forthcoming). New York: American
Assembly. Available at [link](http://ssrn.com/abstract=2616631).

Boyle, J. 2003. “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the
Public Domain.” _Law and Contemporary Problems_ 66:33–42. Available at
[link](http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.470983).

Brand, S. 1968. _Whole Earth Catalog,_ Menlo Park, California: Portola
Institute.

Cabanac, G. 2015. “Bibliogifts in LibGen? A Study of a Text‐Sharing Platform
Driven by Biblioleaks and Crowdsourcing.” _Journal of the Association for
Information Science and Technology,_ Online First, 27 March 2015 _._

Fuller, M. 2011. “In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean
Dockray.” _Metamute._ Available at
[link](http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/paradise-too-many-books-
interview-sean-dockray).

Interview with Dusan Barok. 2013. _Neural_ 10–11.

Liang, L. 2012. “Shadow Libraries.” _e-flux._  Available at
[link](http://www.e-flux.com/journal/shadow-libraries/).

Mars, M., and Medak, T. 2015. “The System of a Takedown: Control and De-
commodification in the Circuits of Academic Publishing.” Unpublished
manuscript.

Shabi, R. 2015. “Looted in Syria–and Sold in London: The British Antiques
Shops Dealing in Artefacts Smuggled by ISIS.” _The Guardian,_ July 3.
Available at [link](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/antiquities-
looted-by-isis-end-up-in-london-shops).

Sollfrank, C. 2013. “Giving What You Don’t Have: Interviews with Sean Dockray
and Dmytri Kleiner.” _Culture Machine_ 14:1–3.

Swartz, A. 2008. “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” Available at
[link](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt).

Constant
Tracks in Electronic fields
2009


figure 3 Dmytri Kleiner: Web 2.0
is a business model, it capitalises
on community created values.

figure 1 E-traces: In the reductive
world of Web 2.0 there are no
insignificant actors because once
added up, everybody counts.

figure 4 Christophe Lazaro:
Sociologists and anthropologists
are trying to stick the notion of
‘social network' to the specificities
of digital networks, that is to say
to their horizontal character

figure 2

1

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2

figure 5 The Robot Syndicat:
Destined to survive collectively
through multi-agent systems
and colonies of social robots

figure 6

figure 11

figure 7
figure 9

figure 8

figure 10

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3

figure 12
Destination port:
Every single passing
of a visitor triggers
the projection of
a simultaneous
registration

figure 15

figure 18

figure 16

figure 13

figure 17

figure 19
Doppelgänger: The
electronic double
(duplicate, twin) in
a society of control
and surveillance

figure 14

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4

figure 20 CookieSensus: Cookies
found on washingtonpost.com

figure 22 Image Tracer: Images
and data accumulate into layers as
the query is repeated over time

figure 21 ... and
cookies sent by tacodo.net
figure 23 Shmoogle: In one click,
Google hierarchy crumbles down

4

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figure 24 Jussa
Parrikka: We move
onto a baroque world,
a mode of folding
and enveloping new
ways of perception
and movement

figure 25

figure 26 Extended Speakers: A
netting of thin metal wires suspends
from the ceiling of the haunted
house in the La Bellone courtyard

figure 28

figure 27

figure 29

figure 30

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figure 31

figure 32

figure 33

figure 34

figure 35

figure 38

figure 41

figure 44

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figure 39

figure 42

figure 45

figure 48

figure 37

figure 40

figure 43

figure 46

figure 49

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figure 50

figure 55

figure 60

figure 65

figure 70

figure 75

figure 51

figure 56

figure 61

figure 66

figure 71

figure 76

figure 52

figure 57

figure 62

figure 67

figure 72

figure 77

figure 53

figure 58

figure 63

figure 68

figure 73

figure 78

figure 54

figure 59

figure 64

figure 69

figure 74

figure 79

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figure 80 Elgaland-Vargaland:
Since November 2007, the Embassy
permanently resides in La Bellone

figure 81 Ambassadors Yves
Poliart and Wendy Van Wynsberghe

figure 85

figure 82
figure 84

figure 86
figure 83

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figure 87 It could be the
result of psychic echoes from
the past, psychokinesis, or the
thoughts of aliens or nature spirits

figure 89 Manu
Luksch: Our
digital selves are
many dimensional,
alert, unforgetting

figure 88

figure 91

figure 93

figure 92

figure 94

figure 90

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figure 95

figure 97

figure 96

figure 99

figure 98

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figure 100

figure 101

figure 103
Audio-geographic
dérive: Listening to
the electro-magnetic
spectrum of Brussels

figure 106

figure 107

figure 102

figure 104

figure 108

figure 110

figure 105

figure 112

figure 111

figure 109

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figure 113 Michael Murtaugh:
Rather than talking about
leaning forward or backward,
a more useful split might be
between reading and writing

figure 114

figure 117
figure 115 Adrian
Mackenzie: This
opacity reflects the
sheer number of
operations that have
to be compressed
into code ...

figure 116 ... in
order for digital signal
processing to work

figure 118

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figure 119 Sabine Prokhoris and
Simon Hecquet: What happens
precisely when one decides to
consider these margins, these
‘supplementen', as fullgrown
creations – slave, nor attachment?

figure 120 Praticable:
Making the body as a locus of
knowledge production tangible

figure 121

figure 123

figure 122

figure 124

figure 125

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figure 126 Mutual
Motions Video Library:
A physical exchange
between existing
imagery, real-time
interpretation,
experiences
and context

figure 129

figure 130

figure 127 Modern
Times: His gestures
are burlesque responses
to the adversity
in his life, or just
plain ‘exuberant'

figure 131 Michael
Terry: We really
want to have lots of
people looking at it,
and considering it,
and thinking about
the implications

figure 128

figure 132

figure 133 Görkem
Çetin: There's a lack of
usability bug reporting
tool which can be
used to submit, store,
modify and maintain
user submitted videos,
audio files and pictures

figure 134 Simon
Yuill: It is here
where contingency
and notation meet,
but it is here also
that error enters

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figure 135

figure 141
figure 138

figure 136

figure 139

figure 137

figure 140

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figure 144 Séverine Dusollier:
I think amongst many of the
movements that are made, most are
not ‘a work', they are subconscious
movements, movements that
are translations of gestures that
are simply banal or necessary

figure 142

figure 145

figure 143

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figure 146 Sadie Plant: It is
this kind of deep collectivity,
this profound sense of
micro-collaboration, which
has often been tapped into

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Verbindingen/Jonctions 10
EN
NL
FR

Tracks in electr(on)ic fields

19

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20

Introduction
E-Traces

25

EN, NL, FR

35

EN, NL, FR

Nicolas Malevé, Michel Cleempoel
E-traces en contexte NL, FR

38

Dmytri Kleiner, Brian Wyrick
InfoEnclosure 2.0 NL

47

Christophe Lazaro

58

Marc Wathieu

65

Michel Cleempoel
Destination port
Métamorphoz
Doppelgänger
Andrea fiore
Cookiesensus

FR

70

EN, NL, FR

71

FR, NL, EN

73

EN

Tsila Hassine
Shmoogle and Tracer

EN

Jussi Parikka
Insects, Affects and Imagining New
Sensoriums EN

75
77

81

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21

Pierre Berthet
Concert with various extended objects

EN, NL, FR

93

Leiff Elgren, CM von Hausswolff
Elgaland-Vargaland EN, NL, FR

95

CM von Hausswolff, Guy-Marc Hinant
Ghost Machinery EN, NL

98

Read Feel Feed Real

101

EN, NL, FR

Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel
Faceless: Chasing the Data Shadow

EN

104

Julien Ottavi
Electromagnetic spectrum Research code
0608 FR

119

Michael Murtaugh
Active Archives or: What's wrong with the
YouTube documentary? EN

131


EN, NL, FR

Femke Snelting

NL

139
143

Adrian Mackenzie
Centres of envelopment and intensive
movement in digital signal processing EN

155

Elpueblodechina
El Curanto EN

174

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Alice Chauchat, Frédéric Gies

181

Dance (notation)

184

EN

Sabine Prokhoris, Simon Hecquet
Mutual Motions Video Library

188
198

EN, NL, FR

Inès Rabadan
Does the repetition of a gesture irrevocably
lead to madness?

215

Michael Terry (interview)
Data analysis as a discourse

217

EN

233

254

Sadie Plant
A Situated Report

275

Biographies

EN

287

EN, NL, FR

License register

311

Vocabulary

313

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23

The Making-of

323

EN

Colophon

331

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25

EN

Introduction

25

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29

EN

Traces in electr(on)ic fields documents the 10 th edition
of Verbindingen/Jonctions with the same name, a bi-annual multidisciplinary festival organised by Constant, association for arts and media. It is a meeting point for a
diverse public that from an artistic, activist and / or theoretical perspective is interested in experimental reflections
on technological culture.
Not for the first time, but during this edition more explicit than ever, we put the question of the interaction
between body and technology on the table. How to think
about the actual effects of surveillance, the ubiquitous presence of cameras and public safety procedures that can only
regard individuals as an amalgamate of analysable data?
What is the status of ‘identity' when it appears both elusive and unchangeable? How are we conditioned by the
technology we use? What is the relationship between commitment and reward? flexibility of work and healthy life?
Which traces does technology leave in our thinking, behavior, our routine movements? And what residue do we
leave behind ourselves on electr(on)ic fields through our
presence in forums, social platforms, databases, log files?
The dual nature of the term ‘notation' formed an important source of inspiration. Systems that choreographers,
composers and computer programmers use to record ideas
and observations, can then be interpreted as instruction,
as a command which puts an actor, software, performing artist or machine in to motion. From punch card to
musical scale, from programming language to Laban notation, we were interested in the standards and protocols
needed to make such documents work. It was the reason
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to organise the festival inside the documentation, library
and workshop for theater and dance, ‘maison du spectacle'
La Bellone. Located in the heart of Brussels, La Bellone
offered hospitality to a diverse group of thinkers, dancers,
artists, programmers, interface designers and others and
its meticulously renovated 17th century façade formed the
perfect backdrop for this intense program.
Throughout the festival we worked with a number of
themes, not meant to isolate areas of thinking, but rather
as ‘spider threads' interlinking various projects:
E-traces (p. 35) subjected the current reality of Web 2.0
to a number of critical considerations. How do we regain
control of the abundant data correlation that mega-companies such as Google and Yahoo produce, in exchange for
our usage of their services? How do we understand ‘service' when we are confronted with their corporate Janus
face: one a friendly interface, the other Machiavellian
user licenses?
Around us, magnetic fields resonate unseen waves (p.
77) took the ghostly presence of technology as a starting
point and Read Feel Feed Real (p. 101) listened to unheard
sounds and looked behind the curtains in Do-It-Yourself,
walks and urban interventions. Through the analysis of radio waves and their use in artistic installations, by making
electro-magnetic fields heard, we made unexplained phenomena tangible.
As machines learn about bodies, bodies learn about machines and the movements that emerge as a result, are
not readily reduced to cause and effect. Mutual movements (p. 139) started in the kitchen, the perfect place to
30

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31

reconsider human-machine configurations, without having
to separate these from everyday life and the patterns that
are ingrained in it. Would a different idea of ‘user' also
change our approach to ‘use'?
At the end of the adventure Sadie Plant remarked in
her ‘situated report' on Tracks in electr(on)ic fields (p.
275): “It is ultimately very difficult to distinguish between
the user and the developer, or the expert and the amateur. The experiment, the research, the development is
always happening in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on the
bus, using your mobile or using your computer. (...) this
sense of repetitive activity, which is done in many trades
and many lines, and that really is the deep unconscious
history of human activity. And arguably that's where the
most interesting developments happen, albeit in a very unsung, unseen, often almost hidden way. It is this kind of
deep collectivity, this profound sense of micro-collaboration, which has often been tapped into.”
Constant, October 2009

34

34

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35

EN

E-Traces

35

35

35

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36

How does the information we seize in search engines
circulate, what happens to our data entered in social networking sites, health records, news sites, forums and chat
services we use? Who is interested? How does the ‘market' of the electronic profile function? These questions
constitute the framework of the E-traces project.
For this, we started to work on Yoogle!, an online game.
This game, still in an early phase of development, will allow users to play with the parameters of the Web 2.0 economy and to exchange roles between the different actors
of this economy. We presented a first demo of this game,
accompanied by a public discussion with lawyers, artists
and developers. The discussion and lecture were meant
to analyse more deeply the mechanism of the economy
behind its friendly interface, the speculation on profiling,
the exploitation of free labor, but also to develop further
the scenario of the game.

EN

NL

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47

DMYTRI KLEINER, BRIAN WYRICK
License: Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick, 2007. Anti-Copyright. Use as desired in whole or in part. Independent or collective commercial use encouraged. Attribution optional.
Text first published in English in Mute: http://www.metamute.org/InfoEnclosure-2.0. For translations in
Polish and Portuguese, see http://www.telekommunisten.net

figure 3
Dmytri
Kleiner


MICHEL CLEEMPOEL
License: Free Art License
figure 12
Every single
passing of
a visitor
triggered the
projection
of a
simultaneous
registration

figure 14

EN

Destination port
During the Jonctions festival, Destination port registered the flux
of visitors in the entrance hall of La Bellone. Every single passing
of a visitor triggered the projection of a simultaneous registration
in the hall, and this in superposition with formerly captured images
of visitors, thus creating temporary and unlikely encounters between
persons.

Doppelgänger
Born in September 2001, represented here by Valérie Cordy et
Natalia De Mello, the MéTAmorphoZ collective is a multidisciplinary
association that create installations, spectacles and transdisciplinary
performances that mix artistic experiments and digital practices.
With the project Doppelganger, the collective MéTAmorphoZ focuses on the thematic of the electronic double(duplicate, twin) in a
society of control and surveillance.
“Our electronic identity, symbol of this new society of control,
duplicates our organic and social identity. But this legal obligation
to be assigned a unique, stable and unforgeable identity isn't, in the
end, a danger for our fundamental freedom to claim identitites which
are irreducibly multiple for each of us?”
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ANDREA fiORE
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
EN

Cookiecensus
Although still largely perceived as a private activity, web surfing
leaves persistent trails. While users browse and interact through the
web, sites watch them read, write, chat and buy. Even on the basis
of a few basic web publishing experiences one can conclude that most
web servers record ‘by default' their entire clickstream in persistent
‘log' files.
‘Web cookies' are sort of digital labels sent by websites to web
browsers in order to assign them a unique identity and automatically
recognize their users over several visits. Today, this technology, which
was introduced with the first version of the Netscape browser in 1994,
constitutes the de facto standard upon which a wide range of interactive functionalities are built that were not conceived by the early web
protocol design. Think, for example, of user accounts and authentications, personalized content and layouts, e-commerce and shopping
charts.
While it has undeniably contributed to the development and the
social spread of the new medium, web cookie technology is still to
be considered as problematic. Especially the so-called ‘third party
cookies' issue – a technological loophole enabling marketeers and advertisement firms to invisibly track users over large networks of syndicated websites – has been the object of a serious controversy, involving
a varied set of actors and stakeholders.
Cookiecensus is a software prototype. A wannabe info tool for
studying electronic surveillance in one of its natively digital environments. Its core functionality consists of mapping and analyzing third
party's cookies distribution patterns within a given web, in order to
identify its trackers and its network of syndicated sites. A further
feature of the tool is the possibility to inspect the content of a web
page in relation to its third party cookie sources.

figure 20
Cookies
found on
Washingtonpost.com

figure 21
Cookies
sent by
Tacodo.net

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It is an attempt to deconstruct the perceived unity and consistency
of web pages by making their underlying content assemblage and their
related attention flows visible.

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TSILA HASSINE
License: Free Art License
EN

Shmoogle and Tracer
What is Shmoogle? Shmoogle is a Google randomizer. In one
click, Google hierarchy crumbles down. Results that were usually exiled to pages beyond user attention get their ‘15 seconds of PageRank
fame'. While also being a useful tool for internet research, Shmoogle
is a comment, a constant reminder that the Google order is not necessarily ‘the good order', and that sometimes chaos is more revealing
than order. While Google serves the users with information ready for
immediate consumption, Shmoogle forces its users to scroll down and
make their own choices. If Google is a search engine, then Shmoogle
is a research engine.

figure 22
Images
and data
accumulate
into layers
as the query
is repeated
over time

figure 23 In
one click,
Google
hierarchy
crumbles
down

In Image Tracer, order is important. Image Tracer is a collaboration between artist group De Geuzen and myself. Tracer was born
out of our mutual interest in the traces images leave behind them on
their networked paths. In Tracer images and data accumulate into
layers as the query is repeated over time. Boundaries between image
and data are blurred further as the image is deliberately reduced to
thumbnail size, and emphasis is placed on the image's context, the
neighbouring images, and the metadata related to that image. Image Tracer builds up an archive of juxtaposed snapshots of the web.
As these layers accumulate, patterns and processes reveal themselves,
and trace a historiography in the making.

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EN

NL

FR

Around us, magnetic fields resonate
unseen waves
Om ons heen resoneren ongeziene
golven
Autour de nous, les champs
magnétiques font résonner des ondes
invisibles

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In computer terminology many words refer to chimerical images such as bots, demons and ghosts. Dr. Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian psychologist, and Swedish film
producer Friedrich Jurgenson went a step further and explored the territory of the Electric Voice phenomena. Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are speech or speech-like
sounds that can be heard on electronic devices that were
not present at the time the recording was made. Some
believe these could be of paranormal origin.
For this part of the V/J10 programme, we chose a
metaphorical approach, working with bodiless entities and
hidden processes, finding inspiration in The Embassy of
Elgaland-Vargaland, semi-fictional kingdoms, consisting
of all Border Territories (Geographical, Mental & Digital). These kingdoms were founded by Leiff Elgren and
CM Von Hausswolff. Elgren stated that: “All dead people
are inhabitants of the country Elgaland-Vargaland, unless
they stated that they did not want to be an inhabitant”.


JUSSI PARIKKA
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
EN

Insects, Affects and Imagining New Sensoriums

figure 24
Jussa
Parrikka
at V/J10

A Media Archaeological Rewiring
from Geniuses to Animals
An insect media artist or a media archaeologist imagining a potential weird medium might end up with something that sounds quite
mundane to us humans. For the insect probe head, the question of
what it feels like to perceive with two eyes and ears and move with two
legs would be a novel one, instead of the multiple legs and compound
eyes that it has to use to manoeuvre through space. The uncanny
formations often used in science fiction to describe something radically inhuman (like the killing machine insects of Alien movies) differ
from the human being in their anatomy, behaviour and morals. The
human brain might be a much more effcient problem solver and the
human hands are quite handy tool making metatools, and the human
body could be seen as an original form of any model of technics, as
Ernst Kapp already suggested by the end of the 19 th century. But
still, such realisations do not take away the fascination that emerges
from the question of what would it be like to move, perceive and think
differently; what does a becoming-animal entail.
I am of course taking my cue here from the philosopher Manuel DeLanda who in his 1991 book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines,
asked what would the history of warfare look like from the viewpoint
of a future robot historian? An exercise perhaps in creative imagination, DeLanda's question also served other ends relating to physics of
self-organization. My point is not to discuss DeLanda, or the history
of war machines, but I want to pick an idea from this kind of an
approach, an idea that could be integrated into media archaeological considerations, concerning actual or imaginary media. As already
said, imagining alternative worlds is not the endpoint of this exercise
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in ‘insect media', but a way to dip into an alternative understanding
of media and technology, where such general categories as ‘humans'
and ‘machines' are merely the endpoints of intensive flows, capacities, tendencies and functions. Such a stance takes much of its force
from Gilles Deleuze's philosophical ontology of abstract materialism,
which focuses primarily on a Spinozian ontology of intensities, capacities and functions. In this sense, the human being is not a distinct
being in the world with secondary qualities, but a “capacity to signify, exchange, and communicate”, as Claire Colebrook has pointed
out in her article ‘The Sense of Space' (Postmodern Culture). This
opens up a new agenda not focused on ‘beings' and their tools, but
on capacities and tendencies that construct and create beings in a
move which emphasizes Deleuze's interest in pre-Kantian worlds of
baroque. In addition, this move includes a multiplication of subjectivities and objects of the world, a certain autonomy of the material
world beyond the privileged observer. Like everybody who has done
gardening knows: there is a world teeming with life outside the human
sphere, with every bush and tree being a whole society in itself.
To put it shortly, still following Colebrook's recent writing on the
concept of affect, what Deleuze found in the baroque worlds of windowless monads was a capacity of perception that does not stem from
a universalising idea of perception in general. Man or any general
condition of perception is not the primary privileged position of perception but perceptions and creations of space and temporality are
multiplied in the numerous monadic worlds, a distributed perception
of a kind that according to Deleuze later found resonance in the philosophy of A.N.Whitehead. For Whitehead, the perceiving subject is
more akin to a ‘superject', a second order construction from the sum
of its perceptions. It is the world perceived that makes up superjects
and based on the variations of perceptions also alternative worlds.
Baroque worlds, argues Deleuze in his book Le Pli from 1988, are
characterised by the primacy of variation and perspectivism which is
a much more radical notion than a relativist idea of different subjects
having different perspectives on the world. Instead, “the subject will
be what comes to the point of view”, and where “the point of view is
not what varies with the subject, at least in the first instance; it is, to
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the contrary, the condition in which an eventual subject apprehends
a variation (metamorphosis). . . ”.
Now why this focus on philosophy, this short excursion that merely
sketches some themes around variation and imagination? What I am
after is an idea of how to smuggle certain ideas of variation, modulation and perception into considerations of media culture, media
archaeology and potentially also imaginary media, where imaginary
media become less a matter of a Lacanian mirror phase looking for
utopian communication offering unity, but a deterritorialising way
of understanding the distributed ontology of the world and media
technologies. Variation and imagination become something else than
the imaginations of a point of view – quite the contrary, the imagination and variation give rise to points of view, which opens up a
whole new agenda of a past paradoxically not determined, and even
further, future as open to variation. This would mean taking into
account perceptions unheard of, unfelt, unthought-of, but still real in
their intensive potentiality, a becoming-other of the sensorium so to
speak. Hence, imagination becomes not a human characteristic but
an epistemological tool that interfaces analytics of media theory and
history with the world of animals and novel affects.
Imaginary media and variations at the heart of media cultural
modes of seeing and hearing have been discussed in various recent
books. The most obvious one is The Book of Imaginary Media, edited
by Eric Kluitenberg. According to the introduction, all media consist
of a real and an imagined part, a functional coupling of material characteristics and discursive dreams which fabricate the crucial features
of modern communication tied intimately with utopian ideals. Imaginary media – or actual media imagined beyond its real capacities
– have been dreamed to compensate insuffcient communication, a
realisation that Kluitenberg elaborates with the argument that “central to the archaeology of imaginary media in the end are not the
machines, but the human aspirations that more often than not are
left unresolved by the machines. . . ”. Powers of imagination are then
based in the human beings doing the imagining, in the human powers
able to transcend the actual and factual ways of perception and to

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grasp the unseen, unheard and unthought of media creations. Variation remains connected to the principle of the central point where
variation is perceived.
Talking of the primacy of variation, we are easily reminded of
Siegfried Zielinski's application of the idea of ‘variantology' as an
‘anarchaeology of media', a task dedicated to the primacy of variation resisting the homogeneous drive of commercialised media spheres.
Excavating dreams of past geniuses, from Empedocles to Athanius
Kircher's cosmic machines and communication networks to Ernst florens Friedrich Chladni's visualisation of sound, Zielinski has been underlining the creative potential in an exercise of imagining media. In
this context, he defines in threefold the term ‘imaginary media' in his
chapter in the Book of Imaginary Media:
• Untimely media/apparatus/machines: “Media devised and designed
either much too late or much too early. . . ”
• Conceptual media/apparatus/machines: “Artefacts that were only
ever sketched as models. . . but never actually built.”
• Impossible media/apparatus/machines: “Imaginary media in the
true sense, by which I mean hermetic and hermeneutic machines. . .
they cannot actually be built, and whose implied meanings nonetheless have an impact on the factual world of media.”
A bit reminiscent of the baroque idea, variation is primary, claims
Zielinski. Whereas the capitalist orientated consumer media culture
is working towards a psychopathia medialis of homogenized media
technological environments, variantology is committed to promoting
heterogeneity, finding dynamic moments of media archaeological past,
and excavating radical experiments that push the limits of what can
be seen, heard and thought. Variantology is then implicitly suggested
as a mode of ontogenesis, of bringing forth, of modulation and change
– an active mode of creation instead of distanced contemplation.
Indeed, the aim of promoting diversity is a much welcomed one,
but I would like to propose a slight adjustment to this task, something that I engage under the banner of ‘insect media'. Whereas
Zielinski and much of the existing media archaeological research still
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starts off from the human world of male inventor-geniuses, I propose
a slightly more distributed look at the media archaeology of affects,
capacities, modes of perception and movement, which are primarily
not attached to a specific substance (animal, technology), but since
the 19 th century at least, refer to a certain passage, vector from animals to technology and vice versa. Here, a mode of baroque thought,
a thought tuned in terms of variations becomes unravelled with the
help of animality that is not to be seen as a metaphor, but as a metamorphosis, as ‘teachings' in weird perceptions, novel ways of moving,
new ways of sensing, opening up to the world of sensations and contracting them. Instead of looking for variations through inventions of
people, we can turn to the ‘storehouses of invention' of for example
insects that from the 19 th century on were introduced as an alien
form of media in themselves. Next I will elaborate how we can use
these tiny animals as philosophical and media archaeological tools to
address media and technology as intensities that signal weird sensory
experiences.
Novel Sensoriums

During the latter half of the 19 th century, insects were seen as
uncanny but powerful forms of media in themselves, capable of weird
sensory and kinaesthetic experiences. Examples range from popular newspaper discourse to scientific measurements and such early
best-sellers as An Introduction to Entomology; or, Elements of the
Natural History of Insects: Comprising an Account of Noxious and
Useful Insects, of Their Metamorphoses, Hybernation, Instinct (1815—
1826) by William Kirby and William Spence.
Since the 19 th century, insects and animal affects are not only
found in biology but also in art, technology and popular culture. In
this sense, the 19 th century interest in insects produces a valuable
perspective on the intertwining of biology (entomology), technology
and art, where the basics of perception are radically detached from
human-centred models towards the animal kingdom. In addition, this
science-technology-art trio presents a challenge to rethink the forces
which form what we habitually refer to as ‘media' as modes of perception. By expanding our notions of ‘media' from the technological
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apparatuses to the more comprehensive assemblages that connect biological, technological, social and aesthetic issues, we are also able to
bring forth novel contexts for contemporary analysis and design of media systems. In a way, then, the concept of the ‘insect' functions here
as a displacing and a deterritorialising force that seeks a questioning
of where and in what kind of conditions we approach media technologies. This is perhaps an approach that moves beyond a focus on
technology per se, but still does not remain blind to the material forces
of the world. It presents an alternative to the ‘substance-approaches'
that start from a stability or a ground like ‘technology' or ‘humans'.
It is my claim that Deleuzian biophilosophy, that has taken elements
from Spinozian ontology, von Uexküll's ethology, Whitehead's ideas
as well as Simondon's notions on individuation, is able to approach
the world as media in itself: a contracting of forces and analysing
them in terms of their affects, movements, speeds and slownesses.
These affects are primary defining capacities of an entity, instead of
a substance or a class it belongs to, as Deleuze explains in his short
book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. From this perspective we can
adopt a novel media archaeological rewiring that looks at media history not as one of inventors, geniuses and solid technologies, but as a
field of affects, interactions and modes of sensation and perception.
Examples from the 19 th century popular discourse are illustrative.
In 1897, New York Times addressed spiders as ‘builders, engineers
and weavers', and also as ‘the original inventors of a system of telegraphy'. Spiders' webs offer themselves as ingenious communication
systems which do not merely signal according to a binary setting
(something has hit the web/has not hit the web) but transmits information regarding the “general character and weight of any object
touching it (. . . )” Or take for example the book Beautés et merveilles
de la nature et des arts by Eliçagaray from the 18 th century which
lists both technological and animal wonders, for example bees and
ants, electricity and architectural constructions as marvels of artifice
and nature.
Similar accounts abound since the mid 19 th century. Insects sense,
move, build, communicate and even create art in various ways that
raised wonder and awe for example in U.S. popular culture. Apt
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example of the 19 th century insect mania is the New York Times
story (May 29, 1880) about the ‘cricket mania' of a certain young
lady who collected and trained crickets as musical instruments:
200 crickets in a wirework-house, filled with ferns and shells,
which she called a ‘fernery'. The constant rubbing of the wings
of these insects, producing the sounds so familiar to thousands
everywhere seemed to be the finest music to her ears. She
admitted at once that she had a mania for capturing crickets.
Besides entertainment, and in a much earlier framework, the classic
of modern entomology, the aforementioned An Introduction to Entomology by Kirby and Spence already implicitly presented throughout
its four volume best seller the idea of a primitive technics of nature –
insect technics that were immanent to their surroundings.
Kirby and Spence's take probably attracted the attention it did
because of the catchy language but also what could be called its
ethological touch. Insects were approached as living and interacting
entities that are intimately coupled with their environment. Insects
intertwine with human lives (“Direct and indirect injuries caused by
insects, injuries to our living vegetable property but also direct and
indirect benefits derived from insects”), but also engage in ingenious
building projects, stratagems, sexual behaviour and other expressive
modes of motion, perception and sensation. Instead of pertaining to a
taxonomic account of the interrelations between insect species, their
forms, growth or for example structural anatomy, An Introduction to
Entomology (vol. 1) is traversed by a curiosity cabinet kind of touch
on the ethnographics of insects. Here, insects are for example war
machines, like the horse-fly (Tabanus L.): “Wonderful and various
are the weapons that enable them to enforce their demand. What
would you think of any large animal that should come to attack you
with a tremendous apparatus of knives and lancets issuing from its
mouth?”.
From Kirby and Spence to later entomologists and other writers,
insects' powers of building continuously attracted the early entomological gaze. Buildings of nature were described as more fabulous than
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the pyramids of Egypt or the aqueducts of Rome. Suddenly, in this
weird parallel world, such minuscule and admittedly small-brained
entities like termites were pictured as alike to the ancient monarchies
and empires of Western civilization. The Victorian appreciation of
ancient civilization could also incorporate animal kingdoms and their
buildings of monarchic measurements. Perhaps the parallel was not
to be taken literally, but in any case it expressed a curious interest
towards microcosmical worlds. A recurring trope was that of ‘insect
geometrics' which seemed with accuracy, paralleled only in mathematics, to follow and fold nature's resources into micro versions of
emerging urban culture. To quote Kirby and Spence's An Introduction to Entomology, vol. 2:
No thinking man ever witnesses the complexness and yet regularity and effciency of a great establishment, such as the Bank
of England or the Post Offce without marvelling that even human reason can put together, with so little friction and such
slight deviations from correctness, machines whose wheels are
composed not of wood and iron, but of fickle mortals of a thousand different inclinations, powers, and capacities. But if such
establishments be surprising even with reason for their prime
mover, how much more so is a hive of bees whose proceedings
are guided by their instincts alone!
Whereas the imperialist powers of Europe headed for overseas conquests, the mentality of exposition and mapping new terrains turned
also towards other fields than the geographical. The Seeing Eye – a
key figure of hierarchical modern power – could also be a non-human
eye, as with the fly which according to Steven Connor can be seen as
the recurring mode of “radically alien mode of entomological vision”
with its huge eyes consisting of 4000 sensors. Hence, it is fitting how
in 1898 the idea of “photographing through a fly's eye” was suggested
as a mode of experimental vision – able also to catch queen Victoria
with “the most infinitesimal lens known to science”, that of a dragon
fly.

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Jean-Jacques Lecercle explains how the Victorian enthusiasm for
entomology and insect worlds is related to a general discourse of natural history that as a genre labelled the century. Through the themes
of ‘exploration' and ‘taxonomy' Lecercle claims how Alice in Wonderland can be read as a key novel of the era in its evaluation and
classification of various life worlds beyond the human. Like Alice in
the 1865 novel, new landscapes and exotic species are offered as an
armchair exploration of worlds not merely extensive but also opened
up by intensive gaze into microcosms. Uncanny phenomenal worlds
are what tie together the entomological quest, Darwinian inspired biological accounts of curious species and Alice's adventures into imaginative worlds of twisting logic. In taxonomic terms, the entomologist
is surrounded by a new cult of private and public archiving. New
modes of visualizing and representing insect life produce a new phase
of taxonomy becoming a public craze instead of merely a scientific
tool. Again the wonder worlds of Alice or Edward Lear, the Victorian nonsense poet, are the ideal point of reference for 19 th century
natural historian and entomologist, as Lecercle writes:
And it is part of a craze for discovering and classifying new
species. Its advantage over natural history is that it can invent those species (like the Snap-dragon-fly) in the imaginative
sense, whereas natural history can invent them only in the
archaeological sense, that is discover what already exists. Nonsense is the entomologist's dream come true, or the Linnaean
classification gone mad, because gone creative (. . . )
For Alice, the feeling of not being herself and “being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing”, which of course is something
incomprehensible to the Caterpillar she encounters. It is not queer for
the Caterpillar whose mode of being is defined by the metamorphosis
and the various perception/action-modulations it brings about. It
is only the suddenness of the becoming-insect of Alice that dizzies
her. A couple of years later, in The Population of an Old-Pear Tree,
or Stories of insect life (1870) an everyday meadow is disclosed as
a vivacious microcosm in itself. The harmonious scene, “like a great
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amphitheatre”, is filled with life that easily escapes the (human) eye.
Like Alice, the protagonist wandering in the meadow is “lulled and
benumbed by dreamy sensations” which however transport him suddenly into new perceptions and bodily affects. What is revealed to
our boy hero in this educational novel fashioned in the style of travel
literature (connecting it thus to the colonialist contexts of its age)
is a world teeming with sounds, movements, sensations and insect
beings (huge spiders, cruel mole-crickets, energetic bees) that are beyond the human form (despite the constant tension of such narratives
as educational and moralising tales that anthropomorphize affective
qualities into human characteristics). True to entomological classification, a big part is reserved for the structural-anatomical differences
of the insect life but also the affect-life of how insects relate to their
surroundings is under scrutiny.
As precursors of ethology, such natural historical quests (whether
archaeological, entomological or imaginative) were expressing an appreciation of phenomenal worlds differing from that of the human
with its two hands, two eyes and two feet. In a way, this entailed a
kind of an extended Kantianism interested not only in the conditions
of possibility of experiences, but the emergence of alternative potentials on the immanent level of life that functions through a technics of
nature. Curiously the inspiration with new phenomenal worlds was
connected to the emergence of new technologies of movements, sensation and communication (all challenging the Kantian apperception of
Man as the historically constant basis of knowledge and perception).
Nature was gradually becoming the “new storehouse of invention”
(New York Times, August 4, 1901) that was to entice inventors into
perfecting their developments. What I argue is that this theme can
also be read as an expression of a shift in understanding technology
– a shift that marked the rise of modern discourse concerning media
technologies since the end of the 19 th century and that has usually
been attributed to an anthropological and ethnological turn in understanding technology. I also address this theme in another text of
mine, ‘Insect Technics'. For several writers such as Ernst Kapp who
became one of the predecessors of later theories of media as ‘extensions of man', it was the human body that served as a storage house
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of potential media. However, at the same time, another undercurrent
proposed to think of technologies, inventions and solutions to problems posed by life as stemming from a much more different class of
bodies, namely insects.
So beyond Kant, we move onto a baroque world, not as a period of
art, but as a mode of folding and enveloping new ways of perception
and movement. The early years and decades of technical media were
characterized by the new imaginary of communication, from work
by inventors such as Nikola Tesla to various modes of e.g. spiritualism analyzed recently in her art works by Zoe Beloff. However, one
can radicalize the viewpoint even further and take an animal turn and
not look for alien but for animal and insect ways of sensing the world.
Naturally, this is exactly what is being proposed in a variety of media
art pieces and exhibitions. Insects have made their appearance for
example in Toshio Iwai's Music Insects (1990), Sarah Peebles' electroacoustic Insect Grooves as an example of imaginary soundscapes,
David Dunn's acoustic ecology pieces with insect sounds, the Sci-Art:
Bio-Robotic Choreography project (2001, with Stelarc as one of the
participators), and Laura Beloff's Spinne (2002), a networked spider installation that works according to the web spider/ant/crawler
technology.
Here we are dealing not just with representing the insect, but engaging with the animal affects, indistinguishable from those of the
technological, as in Stelarc's work where the experimentation with
new bodily realities is a form of becoming-insect of the technological
human body. Imagining by doing is a way to engage directly with
affects of becoming-animal of media where the work of sound and
body artists doubles the media archaeological analysis of historical
strata. In other words, one should not reside on the level of intriguing representations of imagined ways of communication, or imagined
apparatuses that never existed, but realize the overabundance of real
sensations, perceptions to contract, to fold, the neomaterialist view
towards imagined media.

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Literature
Ernest van Bruyssel, The population of an old pear-tree; or, Stories
of insect life. (New York: Macmillan and co., 1870).
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking Glass. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Roger
Lancelyn Green. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Claire Colebrook, ‘The Sense of Space. On the Specificity of Affect
in Deleuze and Guattari.' In: Postmodern Culture, vol. 15, issue 1,
2004.
Steven Connor, fly. (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. (New
York: Zone Books, 1991).
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Transl. Robert
Hurley. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988).
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Transl. Tom Conley. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Kultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten. (Braunschweig:
Druck und Verlag von George Westermann, 1877).
William Kirby & William Spence, An Introduction to Entomology,
or Elements of the Natural History of Insects. Volumes 1 and 2.
Unabridged Faximile of the 1843 edition. (London: Elibron, 2005).
Eric Kluitenberg (ed.), Book of Imaginary Media. Excavating the
Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium. (Rotterdam: NAi
publishers, 2006).
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of
Victorian Nonsense Literature. (London: Routledge, 1994).
Jussi Parikka, ‘Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies.' In:
(Un)Easy Alliance - Thinking the Environment with Deleuze/Guattari, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Press, Forthcoming 2008).
Siegfried Zielinski, ‘Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola. A Case
Study on Athanius Kircher's World of Apparatus between the Imaginary and the Real.' In: Book of Imaginary Media, edited by Kluitenberg. (Rotterdam: NAi, 2006).

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PIERRE BERTHET
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
EN

Extended speakers
& Concert with various extended objects
We invited Belgian artist Pierre Berthet to create an installation
for V/J10 that explores the resonance of EVP voices. He made a
netting of thin metal wires which he suspended from the ceiling of
the haunted house in the La Bellone courtyard.
Through these metal wires, loudspeakers without membranes were
connected to a network of resonating cans. Sinus tones and radio
recordings were transmitted through the speakers, making the metal
wires vibrate which, in their turn, caused the cans to resonate.

figure 26
A netting
of thin
metal wires
suspended
from the
ceiling of
the haunted
house in the
La Bellone
courtyard

figure 27


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Concert with various extended objects

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LEIff ELGREN, CM VON Hausswolff
License: Fully Restricted Copyright
EN

Elgaland-Vargaland
The Embassy of the The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland
(KREV)
The Kingdoms were proclaimed in 1992 and consist of all ‘Border
Territories': geographical, mental and digital. Elgaland-Vargaland is
the largest – and most populous – realm on Earth, incorporating all
boundaries between other nations as well as ‘Digital Territory' and
other states of existence. Every time you travel somewhere, and every
time you enter another form of being, such as the dream state, you
visit Elgaland-Vargaland, the kingdom founded by Leiff Elgren and
CM von Hausswolff.
During the Venice Biennale, Elgren stated that all dead people
are inhabitants of the country Elgaland-Vargaland unless they had
declared that they did not want to be an inhabitant.
Since V/J10, the Elgaland-Vargaland Embassy permanently resides in La Bellone.

figure 80
Since V/J10,
the Elgaland-Vargaland
Embassy permanently
resides in
La Bellone

figure 82

figure 81
Ambassadors
Yves
Poliart and
Wendy Van
Wynsberghe

figure 83

figure 85

figure 86

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NL

Elgaland-Vargaland
figure 84
Every time
you travel
somewhere,
and every
time you
enter another form of
being, you
visit Elgaland-Vargaland.


CM VON Hausswolff, GUY-MARC HINANT
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
figure 88
Drawings by
Dominique
Goblet,
EVP sounds
by Carl
Michael von
Hausswolff,
images by
Guy-Marc
Hinant

figure 87
EVP could
be the result
of psychic
echoes from
the past,
psychokinesis, or the
thoughts
of aliens
or nature
spirits.

For more information on EVP, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomenon##_note
-fontana1
EN

Ghost Machinery
During V/J10 we showed an audiovisual installation entitled Ghost
Machinery, with drawings by Dominique Goblet, EVP sounds by Carl
Michael von Hausswolff, and images by Guy-Marc Hinant, based on
Dr. Stempnicks Electronic Voice Phenomena recordings.
EVP has been studied primarily by paranormal researchers since
the 1950s, who have concluded that the most likely explanation for
the phenomena is that they are produced by the spirits of the deceased. In 1959, Attila Von Szalay first claimed to have recorded the
‘voices of the dead', which led to the experiments of Friedrich Jürgenson. The 1970s brought increased interest and research including
the work of Konstantine Raudive. In 1980, William O'Neill backed by
industrialist George Meek built a ‘Spiricom' device, which was said to
facilitate very clear communication between this world and the spirit
world.
Investigation of EVP continues today through the work of many
experimenters, including Sarah Estep and Alexander McRae. In addition to spirits, paranormal researchers have claimed that EVP could
be due to psychic echoes from the past, psychokinesis unconsciously
produced by living people, or the thoughts of aliens or nature spirits.
Paranormal investigators have used EVP in various ways, including
as a tool in an attempt to contact the souls of dead loved ones and in
ghost hunting. Organizations dedicated to EVP include the American
Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena, the International Ghost
Hunters Society, as well as the skeptical Rorschach Audio project.

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Read Feel Feed Real

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Electro Magnetic fields of ordinary objects acted as EN
source material for an audio performance, surveillance
camera's and legislation are ingredients for a science fiction film, live annotation of videostreaming with the help
of IRC chats. . .
A mobile video laboratory was set up during the festival, to test out how to bring together scripting, annotation, data readings and recordings in digital archives.
Operating somewhere between surveillance and observation, the Open Source video team mixed hands-on Icecast
streaming workshops with experiments looking at the way
movements are regulated through motion control and vice
versa.

MANU LUKSCH, MUKUL PATEL
License: Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike license
figure 94
CCTV
sculpture
in a park
in London

EN

Faceless: Chasing the Data Shadow
Stranger than fiction
Remote-controlled UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) scan the city
for anti-social behaviour. Talking cameras scold people for littering
the streets (in children's voices). Biometric data is extracted from
CCTV images to identify pedestrians by their face or gait. A housing project's surveillance cameras stream images onto the local cable
channel, enabling the community to monitor itself.

figure 95
Poster in
London

These are not projections of the science fiction film that this text
discusses, but techniques that are used today in Merseyside 1. The
Guardian has reported the MoD rents out an RAF-staffed spy plane
for public surveillance, carrying reconnaissance equipment able to
monitor telephone conversations on the ground. It can also be used
for automatic number plate recognition: “Cheshire police recently revealed they were using the Islander [aircraft] to identify people speeding, driving when using mobile phones, overtaking on double white
lines, or driving erratically.”, Middlesborough 2, Newham and Shoreditch 3 in the UK. In terms of both density and sophistication, the UK
1

“Police spy in the sky fuels ‘Big Brother fears'”, Philip Johnston, Telegraph, 23/05/2007
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/22/ndrone22.xml
‘Talking' CCTV scolds offenders', BBC News, 4 April 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2
/hi/uk_news/england/6524495.stm
3
“If the face fits, you're nicked”, Independent, Nick Huber, Monday, 1 April 2002 http:/
/www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/if-the-face-fits-youre-nicked
-656092.html
“In 2001 the Newham system was linked to a central control room operated by the
London Metropolitan Police Force. In April 2001 the existing CCTV system in Birmingham city centre was upgraded to smart CCTV. People are routinely scanned by both
systems and have their faces checked against the police databases.”
Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility http://www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk
/resources/general/ethicol/Ecv12no1.html
2

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leads the world in the deployment of surveillance technologies. With
an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in place, its inhabitants are
the most watched in the world. 4 Many London buses have five or more
cameras inside, plus several outside, including one recording cars that
drive in bus lanes.
But CCTV images of our bodies are only one of many traces of
data that we leave in our wake, voluntarily and involuntarily. Vehicles are tracked using Automated Number Plate Recognition systems, our movements revealed via location-aware devices (such as
cell phones), the trails of our online activities recorded by Internet
Service Providers, our conversations overheard by the international
communications surveillance system Echelon, shopping habits monitored through store loyalty cards, individual purchases located using
RfiD (Radio-frequency identification) tags, and our meal preferences
collected as part of PNR (flight passenger) data. 5 Our digital selves
are many dimensional, alert, unforgetting.

4
5

A Report on the Surveillance Society. For the Information Commissioner by the Surveillance Studies Network, September 2006, p.19. Available from http://www.ico.gov.uk
‘e-Borders' is a £ 1.2bn passenger-screening programme to be introduced in 2009 and
to be complete by 2014. The single border agency, combining immigration, customs
and visa checks, includes a £ 650m contract with consortia Trusted Borders for a passenger-screening IT system: anyone entering or leaving Britain are to give 53 pieces
of information in advance of travel. This information, taken when a travel ticket is
bought, will be shared among police, customs, immigration and the security services
for at least 24 hours before a journey is due to take place. Trusted Borders consists
of US military contractor Raytheon Systems who will work with Accenture, Detica,
Serco, QinetiQ, Steria, Capgemini, and Daon. Ministers are also said to be considering
the creation of a list of ‘disruptive' passengers. It is expected to cost travel companies
£ 20million a year compiling the information. These costs will be passed on to customers via ticket prices, and the Government is considering introducing its own charge
on travellers to recoup costs. A pilot of the e-borders technology, known as Project
Semaphore, has already screened 29 million passengers.
Similarly, the arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the biggest defence contractor in
the U.S., that undertakes intelligence work as well as contributing to the Trident programme in the UK, is bidding to run the UK 2011 Census. New questions in the 2011
Census will include information about income and place of birth, as well as existing
questions about languages spoken in the household and many other personal details.
The Canadian Federal Government granted Lockheed Martin a $43.3 million deal to
conduct its 2006 Census. Public outcry against it resulted in only civil servants handling the actual data, and a new government task force being set up to monitor privacy
during the Census.
http://censusalert.org.uk/
http://www.vivelecanada.ca/staticpages/index.php/20060423184107361

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Increasingly, these data traces are arrayed and administered in
networked structures of global reach. It is not necessary to posit a
totalitarian conspiracy behind this accumulation – data mining is an
exigency of both market effciency and bureaucratic rationality. Much
has been written on the surveillance society and the society of control,
and it is not the object here to construct a general critique of data
collection, retention and analysis. However, it should be recognised
that, in the name of effciency and rationality – and, of course, security – an ever-increasing amount of data is being shared (also sold,
lost and leaked 6) between the keepers of such seemingly unconnected
records as medical histories, shopping habits, and border crossings.
6

Sales: “Personal details of all 44 million adults living in Britain could be sold to
private companies as part of government attempts to arrest spiralling costs for the new
national identity card scheme, set to get the go-ahead this week. [...] ministers have
opened talks with private firms to pass on personal details of UK citizens for an initial
cost of £ 750 each.”
“Ministers plan to sell your ID card details to raise cash”, Francis Elliott, Andy McSmith and Sophie Goodchild, Independent, Sunday 26 June 2005
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ministers-plan-to-sell-your-id-card-details
-to-raise-cash-496602.html
Losses: In January 2008, hundreds of documents with passport photocopies, bank
statements and benefit claims details from the Department of Work and Pensions were
found on a road near Exeter airport, following their loss from a TNT courier vehicle.
There were also documents relating to home loans and mortgage interest, and details
of national insurance numbers, addresses and dates of birth.
In November 2007, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) posted, unrecorded and unregistered via TNT, computer discs containing personal information on 25 million people
from families claiming child benefit, including the bank details of parents and the dates
of birth and national insurance numbers of children. The discs were then lost.
Also in November, HMRC admitted a CD containing the personal details of thousands
of Standard Life pension holders has gone missing, leaving them at heightened risk
of identity theft. The CD, which contained data relating to 15,000 Standard Life
pensions customers including their names, National Insurance numbers and pension
plan reference numbers was lost in transit from the Revenue offce in Newcastle to the
company's headquarters in Edinburgh by ‘an external courier'.
Thefts: In November 2007, MoD acknowledged the theft of a laptop computer containing the personal details of 600,000 Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and RAF recruits
and of people who had expressed interest in joining, which contained, among other
information, passport, and national insurance numbers and bank details.
In October 2007, a laptop holding sensitive information was stolen from the boot of
an HMRC car. A staff member had been using the PC for a routine audit of tax
information from several investment firms. HMRC refused to comment on how many
individuals may be at risk, or how many financial institutions have had their data
stolen as well. BBC suggest the computer held data on around 400 customers with
high value individual savings accounts (ISAs), at each of five different companies –
including Standard Life and Liontrust. (In May, Standard Life sent around 300 policy
documents to the wrong people.)

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Legal frameworks intended to safeguard a conception of privacy by
limiting data transfers to appropriate parties exist. Such laws, and in
particular the UK Data Protection Act (DPA, 1998) 7, are the subject
of investigation of the film Faceless.
From Act to Manifesto
“I wish to apply, under the Data Protection Act,
for any and all CCTV images of my person held
within your system. I was present at [place] from
approximately [time] onwards on [date].” 8
For several years, ambientTV.NET conducted a series of exercises
to visualise the data traces that we leave behind, to render them
into experience and to dramatise them, to watch those who watch
us. These experiments, scrutinising the boundary between public
and private in post-9/11 daily life, were run under the title ‘the Spy
School'. In 2002, the Spy School carried out an exercise to test the
reach of the UK Data Protection Act as it applies to CCTV image
data.
The Data Protection Act 1998 seeks to strike a balance between
the rights of individuals and the sometimes competing interests
of those with legitimate reasons for using personal information.
The DPA gives individuals certain rights regarding information
held about them. It places obligations on those who process information (data controllers) while giving rights to those who are
the subject of that data (data subjects). Personal information
covers both facts and opinions about the individual. 9

7
9

The full text of the DPA (1998) is at http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts1998
/19980029.htm
Data Protection Act Fact Sheet available from the UK Information Commissioners
Offce, http://www.ico.gov.uk

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The original DPA (1984) was devised to ‘permit and regulate'
access to computerised personal data such as health and financial
records. A later EU directive broadened the scope of data protection
and the remit of the DPA (1998) extended to cover, amongst other
data, CCTV recordings. In addition to the DPA, CCTV operators
‘must' comply with other laws related to human rights, privacy, and
procedures for criminal investigations, as specified in the CCTV Code
of Practice (http://www.ico.gov.uk).
As the first subject access request letters were successful in delivering CCTV recordings for the Spy School, it then became pertinent
to investigate how robust the legal framework was. The Manifesto for
CCTV filmmakers was drawn up, permitting the use only of recordings obtained under the DPA. Art would be used to probe the law.

figure 92
Still from
Faceless,
2007

figure 94
Multiple,
conflicting
timecode
stamps

A legal readymade
Vague spectres of menace caught on time-coded surveillance
cameras justify an entire network of peeping vulture lenses. A
web of indifferent watching devices, sweeping every street, every
building, to eliminate the possibility of a past tense, the freedom
to forget. There can be no highlights, no special moments: a
discreet tyranny of now has been established. Real time in its
most pedantic form. 10
Faceless is a CCTV science fiction fairy tale set in London, the city
with the greatest density of surveillance cameras on earth. The film
is made under the constraints of the Manifesto – images are obtained
from existing CCTV systems by the director/protagonist exercising
her/his rights as a surveilled person under the DPA. Obviously the
protagonist has to be present in every frame. To comply with privacy
legislation, CCTV operators are obliged to render other people in
the recordings unidentifiable – typically by erasing their faces, hence
the faceless world depicted in the film. The scenario of Faceless thus
derives from the legal properties of CCTV images.
10

(Ian Sinclair: Lights out for the territory, Granta, London, 1998, p. 91)

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“RealTime orients the life of every citizen. Eating, resting, going
to work, getting married – every act is tied to RealTime. And every
act leaves a trace of data – a footprint in the snow of noise...” 11
The film plays in an eerily familiar city, where the reformed RealTime calendar has dispensed with the past and the future, freeing
citizens from guilt and regret, anxiety and fear. Without memory or
anticipation, faces have become vestigial – the population is literally
faceless. Unimaginable happiness abounds – until a woman recovers
her face...
There was no traditional shooting script: the plot evolved during
the four-year long process of obtaining images. Scenes were planned
in particular locations, but the CCTV recordings were not always
obtainable, so the story had to be continually rewritten.
Faceless treats the CCTV image as an example of a legal readymade (‘objet trouvé'). The medium, in the sense of raw materials
that are transformed into artwork, is not adequately described as
simply video or even captured light. More accurately, the medium
comprises images that exist contingent on particular social and legal
circumstances – essentially, images with a legal superstructure. Faceless interrogates the laws that govern the video surveillance of society
and the codes of communication that articulate their operation, and
in both its mode of coming into being and its plot, develops a specific
critique.
Reclaiming the data body
Through putting the DPA into practice and observing the consequences over a long exposure, close-up, subtle developments of the
law were made visible and its strengths and lacunae revealed.
“I can confirm there are no such recordings of
yourself from that date, our recording system was
not working at that time.” (11/2003)

11

Faceless, 2007

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Many data requests had negative outcomes because either the surveillance camera, or the recorder, or the entire CCTV system in question
was not operational. Such a situation constitutes an illegal use of
CCTV: the law demands that operators: “comply with the DPA by
making sure [...] equipment works properly.” 12
In some instances, the non-functionality of the system was only
revealed to its operators when a subject access request was made. In
the case below, the CCTV system had been installed two years prior
to the request.
“Upon receipt of your letter [...] enclosing the
required 10£ fee, I have been sourcing a company
who would edit these tapes to preserve the privacy of other individuals who had not consented
to disclosure. [...] I was informed [...] that all
tapes on site were blank. [.. W]hen the engineer
was called he confirmed that the machine had not
been working since its installation.
Unfortunately there is nothing further that can be
done regarding the tapes, and I can only apologise
for all the inconvenience you have been caused.”
(11/2003)
Technical failures on this scale were common. Gross human errors
were also readily admitted to:

12

CCTV Systems and the Data Protection Act 1998, available from http://www.ico.gov
.uk

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“As I had advised you in my previous letter, a request was made to remove the tape and for it not
to be destroyed. Unhappily this request was not
carried out and the tape was wiped according with
the standard tape retention policy employed by
[deleted]. Please accept my apologies for this and
assurance that steps have been taken to ensure a
similar mistake does not happen again.” (10/2003)

figure 98
The Rotain
Test, devised
by the
UK Home
Offce Police
Scientific
Development
Branch,
measures
surveillance
camera
performance.

Some responses, such as the following, were just mysterious (data
request made after spending an hour below several cameras installed
in a train carriage).
“We have carried out a careful review of all relevant tapes and we confirm that we have no images of
you in our control.” (06/2005)
Could such a denial simply be an excuse not to comply with the costly
demands of the DPA?
“Many older cameras deliver image quality so poor
that faces are unrecognisable. In such cases the
operator fails in the obligation to run CCTV for
the declared purposes.
You will note that yourself and a colleague's faces
look quite indistinct in the tape, but the picture you sent to us shows you wearing a similar
fur coat, and our main identification had been made
through this and your description of the location.”
(07/2002)

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To release data on the basis of such weak identification compounds
the failure.
Much confusion is caused by the obligation to protect the privacy
of third parties in the images. Several data controllers claimed that
this relieved them of their duty to release images:
“[... W]e are not able to supply you with the images you requested because to do so would involve
disclosure of information and images relating to
other persons who can be identified from the tape
and we are not in a position to obtain their consent to disclosure of the images. Further, it is
simply not possible for us to eradicate the other
images. I would refer you to section 7 of the Data
Protection Act 1998 and in particular Section 7
(4).” (11/2003)
Even though the section referred to states that it is:
“not to be construed as excusing a data controller
from communicating so much of the information
sought by the request as can be communicated without disclosing the identity of the other individual concerned, whether by the omission of names or
other identifying particulars or otherwise.”
Where video is concerned, anonymisation of third parties is an expensive, labour-intensive procedure – one common technique is to occlude
each head with a black oval. Data controllers may only charge the
statutory maximum of 10 £ per request, though not all seemed to be
aware of this:

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“It was our understanding that a charge for production of the tape should be borne by the person
making the enquiry, of course we will now be checking into that for clarification. Meanwhile please
accept the enclosed video tape with compliments of
[deleted], with no charge to yourself.” (07/2002)

figure 90
Off with
their heads!

Visually provocative and symbolically charged as the occluded heads
are, they do not necessarily guarantee anonymity. The erasure of a
face may be insuffcient if the third party is known to the person requesting images. Only one data controller undeniably (and elegantly)
met the demands of third party privacy, by masking everything but
the data subject, who was framed in a keyhole. (This was an uncommented second offering; the first tape sent was unprocessed.) One
CCTV operator discovered a useful loophole in the DPA:
“I should point out that we reserve the right, in
accordance with Section 8(2) of the Data Protection
Act, not to provide you with copies of the information requested if to do so would take disproportionate effort.” (12/2004)
What counts as ‘disproportionate effort'? The gold standard was set
by an institution whose approach was almost baroque – they delivered
hard copies of each of the several hundred relevant frames from the
time-lapse camera, with third parties heads cut out, apparently with
nail scissors.
Two documents had (accidentally?) slipped in between the printouts – one a letter from a junior employee tendering her resignation
(was it connected with the beheading job?), and the other an ironic
memo:

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“And the good news -- I enclose the 10 £ fee to be
passed to the branch sundry income account.” (Head
of Security, internal communication 09/2003)
From 2004, the process of obtaining images became much more difficult.
“It is clear from your letter that you are aware
of the provisions of the Data Protection Act and
that being the case I am sure you are aware of
the principles in the recent Court of Appeal decision in the case of Durant vs. financial Services Authority. It is my view that the footage you
have requested is not personal data and therefore
[deleted] will not be releasing to you the footage
which you have requested.” (12/2004)
Under Common Law, judgements set precedents. The decision in
the case Durant vs. financial Service Authority (2003) redefined
‘personal data'; since then, simply featuring in raw video data does
not give a data subject the right to obtain copies of the recording.
Only if something of a biographical nature is revealed does the subject
retain the right.

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“Having considered the matter carefully, we do not
believe that the information we hold has the necessary relevance or proximity to you. Accordingly
we do not believe that we are obligated to provide
you with a copy pursuant to the Data Protection Act
1988. In particular, we would remark that the video
is not biographical of you in any significant way.”
(11/2004)
Further, with the introduction of cameras that pan and zoom, being
filmed as part of a crowd by a static camera is no longer grounds for
a data request.
“[T]he Information Commissioners office has indicated that this would not constitute your personal
data as the system has been set up to monitor the
area and not one individual.” (09/2005)
As awareness of the importance of data rights grows, so the actual
provision of those rights diminishes:

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figure 89
Still from
Faceless,
2007

"I draw your attention to CCTV systems and the Data
Protection Act 1998 (DPA) Guidance Note on when the
Act applies. Under the guidance notes our CCTV system is no longer covered by the DPA [because] we:
• only have a couple of cameras
• cannot move them remotely
• just record on video whatever the cameras pick
up
• only give the recorded images to the police to
investigate an incident on our premises"
(05/2004)
Data retention periods (which data controllers define themselves)
also constitute a hazard to the CCTV filmmaker:
“Thank you for your letter dated 9 November addressed to our Newcastle store, who have passed
it to me for reply. Unfortunately, your letter was
delayed in the post to me and only received this
week. [...] There was nothing on the tapes that you
requested that caused the store to retain the tape
beyond the normal retention period and therefore
CCTV footage from 28 October and 2 November is no
longer available.” (12/2004)
Amidst this sorry litany of malfunctioning equipment, erased tapes,
lost letters and sheer evasiveness, one CCTV operator did produce
reasonable justification for not being able to deliver images:

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“We are not in a position to advise whether or not
we collected any images of you at [deleted]. The
tapes for the requested period at [deleted] had
been passed to the police before your request was
received in order to assist their investigations
into various activities at [deleted] during the
carnival.” (10/2003)

figure 91
Still from
Faceless,
2007

In the shadow of the shadow
There is debate about the effcacy, value for money, quality of
implementation, political legitimacy, and cultural impact of CCTV
systems in the UK. While CCTV has been presented as being vital in solving some high profile cases (e.g. the 1999 London nail
bomber, or the 1993 murder of James Bulger), at other times it has
been strangely, publicly, impotent (e.g. the 2005 police killing of Jean
Charles de Menezes). The prime promulgators of CCTV may have
lost some faith: during the 1990s the UK Home Offce spent 78% of
its crime prevention budget on installing CCTV, but in 2005, an evaluation report by the same offce concluded that, “the CCTV schemes
that have been assessed had little overall effect on crime levels.” 13
An earlier, 1992, evaluation reported CCTV's broadly positive
public reception due to its assumed effectiveness in crime control,
acknowledging “public acceptance is based on limited and partly inaccurate knowledge of the functions and capabilities of CCTV systems
in public places.” 14
By the 2005 assessment, support for CCTV still “remained high in
the majority of cases” but public support was seen to decrease after
implementation by as much as 20%. This “was found not to be the
reflection of increased concern about privacy and civil liberties, as
this remained at a low rate following the installation of the cameras,”
13

Gill, M. and Spriggs, A., Assessing the impact of CCTV. London: Home Offce
Research, Development and Statistics Directorate 2005, pp.60-61.
www.homeoffce.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors292.pdf
14
http://www.homeoffce.gov.uk/rds/prgpdfs/fcpu35.pdf

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but “that support for CCTV was reduced because the public became
more realistic about its capabilities” to lower crime.
Concerns, however, have begun to be voiced about function creep
and the rising costs of such systems, prompted, for example, by the
disclosure that the cameras policing London's Congestion Charge remain switched on outside charging hours and that the Met are to
have live access to them, having been exempted from parts of the
Data Protection Act to do so. 15 As such realities of CCTV's daily
operation become more widely known, existing acceptance may be
somewhat tempered.
Physical bodies leave data traces: shadows of presence, conversation, movement. Networked databases incorporate these traces into
data bodies, whose behaviour and risk are priorities for analysis and
commodification, by business and by government. The securing of
a data body is supposedly necessary to secure the human body, either preventatively or as a forensic tool. But if the former cannot
be assured, as is the case, what grounds are there for trust in the
hollow promise of the latter? The all-seeing eye of the panopticon is
not complete, yet. Regardless, could its one-way gaze ever assure an
enabling conception of security?

15

Surveillance State Function Creep – London Congestion Charge “real-time bulk data”
to be automatically handed over to the Metropolitan Police etc. http://p10.hostingprod
.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/2007/07/surveillance_state_function_creep_london_congestion
_charge_realtime_bulk_data.html

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MICHAEL MURTAUGH

figure 113
Start
broadcasting
yourself!

License: Free Art License
EN

Active Archives
or: What's wrong with the YouTube documentary?
As someone who has shot video and programmed web-based interfaces to video over the past decade, it has been exciting to see how
distributing video via the Internet has become increasingly popularized, thanks in large part to video sharing sites like YouTube. At the
same time, I continue to design and write software in search of new
forms of collaborative and ‘evolving' documentaries; and for myself,
and others around me, I feel disinterest, even aversion, to posting
videos on YouTube. This essay has two threads: (1) I revisit an
earlier essay describing the ‘Evolving Documentary' model to get at
the roots of my enthusiasm for working with video online, and (2) I
examine why I find YouTube problematic, and more a reflection of
television than the possibilities that the web offers.
In 1996, I co-authored an essay with Glorianna Davenport, then
my teacher and director of the Interactive Cinema group at the MIT
Media Lab, called Automatist storyteller systems and the shifting
sands of story. 1 In it, we described a model for supporting ‘Evolving
Documentaries', or an “approach to documentary storytelling that
celebrates electronic narrative as a process in which the author(s), a
networked presentation system, and the audience actively collaborate
in the co-construction of meaning.” In this paper, Glorianna included
a section entitled ‘What's wrong with the Television Documentary?'
The main points of this argument were as follows:

1

figure 114
Join the
largest
worldwide
video-sharing
community!

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/363/davenport.html

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1.
[... T]elevision consumes the viewer. Sitting passively in front
of a TV screen, you may appreciate an hour-long documentary;
you may even find the story of interest; however, your ability to
learn from the program is less than what it might be if you were
actively engaged with it, able to control its shape and probe its
contents.
Here, it is crucial to understand what is meant by the word ‘active'
. In a naive comparison between the activities of watching television
and surfing the web, one might say that the latter is inherently more
active in the sense that the process is ‘driven' by the choices of the
user; in the early days of the web it became popular to refer to this
split as ‘lean back vs. lean forward' media. Of course, if one means
to talk about cognitive activity, this is clearly misleading as aimlessly surfing the net can be achieved at near comatose levels of brain
function (as any late night surfer can attest to) and watching a particularly sharp television program can be incredibly engaging, even
life changing. Glorianna would often describe her frustration with
traditional documentary by observing the vast difference between her
own sense of engagement with a story gained through the process of
shooting and editing, versus the experience of an audience member
from simply viewing the end result. Thus ‘active' here relates to the
act of authoring and the construction of meaning. Rather than talking about leaning forward or backward, a more useful split might be
between reading and writing. Rather than being a question of bad
versus good access, the issue becomes about two interconnected cognitive processes, both hopefully ‘active' and involving thought. An
ideal platform for online documentary would be one that facilitates a
fluid movement between moments of reflection (reading) and of construction (writing).

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2.
Television severely limits the ways in which an author can
‘grow' a story. A story must be composed into a fixed, unchanging form before the audience can see and react to it: there is no
obvious way to connect viewers to the process of story construction. Similarly, the medium offers no intrinsic, immediately
available way to interconnect the larger community of viewers
who wish to engage in debate about a particular story.
Part of the promise of crossing video with computation is the potential to combine the computers' ability to construct models and
run simulations with the random access possibilities of digitized media. Instead of editing a story down into a fixed form or ‘final cut',
one can program a ‘storytelling system' that can act as an ‘editor in
software'. Thus the system can maintain a dynamic representation
of the context of a particular telling, on which to base (or support a
viewer in making) editing decisions ‘on the fly'. The ‘Evolving Documentary' was intended to support complex stories that would develop
over time, and which could best be told from a variety of points of
view.
3.
Like published books and movies, television is designed for
unidirectional, one-to-many transmission to a mass audience,
without variation or personalization of presentation. The remote-control unit and the VCR (videocassette recorder) - currently the only devices that allow the viewer any degree of independent control over the play-out of television - are considered
anathema by commercial broadcasters. Grazing, time-shifting,
and ‘commercial zapping' run contrary to the desire of the industry for a demographically correct audience that passively
absorbs the programming - and the intrusive commercial messages - that the broadcasters offer.
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Adding a decentralized means of distribution and feedback such
as the Internet provides the final piece of the puzzle in creating a
compelling new medium for the evolving documentary. No longer
would footage have to be excluded for reasons of reaching a ‘broad'
or average audience. An ideal storytelling system would be one that
could connect an individual viewer to whatever material was most
personally relevant. The Internet is a unique ‘mass media' in its
potential support for enabling access to non-mainstream, individually
relevant and personal subject matter.
What's wrong with the YouTube documentary?
YouTube has massively popularized the sharing and consumption
of video online. That said, most of the core concerns made in the
arguments related to television, are still relevant to YouTube when
considered as a platform for online collaborative documentary.
Clips are primarily ‘view-only'
Already in it's name, ‘YouTube' consciously invokes the television
set, thus inviting visitors to ‘lean back' and watch. The YouTube
interface functions primarily as a showcase of static monolithic elements. Clips are presented as fixed and finished, to be commented
upon, rated, and possibly bookmarked, but no more. The clip is
‘atomic' in the sense that it's not possible to make selections within a
clip, to export images or sound, or even to link to a particular starting
point. Without special plugins, the site doesn't even allow downloading of the clip. While users are encouraged ‘to embed' YouTube content in other websites (by cutting and pasting special HTML codes
that refer back to the YouTube site), the resulting video plays using
the YouTube player, complete with ‘related' links back into the service. It is in fact a violation of the YouTube terms of use to attempt
to display videos from the service in any other way.

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The format of the clip is fixed and uniform for all kinds
of content
Technically, YouTube places some rather arbitrary limits on the
format of clips: all clips must contain an image and a sound track
and may not be longer than 10 minutes in length. Furthermore all
clips are treated equally, there is no notion of a ‘lecture', versus a
‘slideshow', versus a ‘music video', together with a sense that these
different kinds of material might need to be handled differently. Each
clip is compressed in a uniform way, meaning at the moment into a
flash format video file of fixed data rate and screen size.
Clips have no history
Despite these limitations, users of YouTube have found workarounds
to, for instance, download clips to then rework them into derived clips.
Although the derived works are often placed back again on YouTube,
the system itself has no means representing this kind of relationship.
(There is a mechanism for posting video responses to other clips, but
this kind of general purpose solution seems not to be understood or
used to track this kind of ‘derived' relationship.) The system is unable to model or otherwise make available the ‘history' of a particular
piece of media. Contrast this with a system like Wikipedia, where the
full history of an article, with a record of what was changed, by whom,
when, and even ‘meta-level' discussions about the changes (including
possible disagreement) is explicitly facilitated.
Weak or ‘flat' narrative structure
YouTube's primary model for narrative is a broad (and somewhat
obscure) sense of ‘relatedness' (based on user-defined tags) modulated
by popularity. As with many ‘social networking' and media sharing
sites, YouTube relies on ‘positive feedback' popularity mechanisms,
such as view counts, ‘star' ratings and favorites, to create ranked lists
of clips. Entry points like ‘Videos being watched right now', ‘Most
Viewed', ‘Top Favorites', only close the loop of featuring what's already popular to begin with. In addition, YouTube's commercial

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model of enabling special paid levels of membership leads to ambiguous selection criteria, complicated by language as in the ‘Promoted
Videos' and ‘Featured Videos' of YouTube's front page (promoting
what?, featured by whom?).
The ‘editing logic' threading the user through the various clips is
flat, in that a clip is shown the same way regardless of what has been
viewed before it. Thus YouTube makes no visible use of a particular viewing history (though the fact that this information is stored
has been brought to the attention of the public via the ongoing Viacom lawsuit, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7506948.stm).
In this way it's difficult to get a sense of being in a particular ‘story
arc' or thread when moving from clip to clip in YouTube as in a sense
each click and each clip restarts the narrative experience.
No licenses for sharing / reuse
The lack of a download feature in YouTube could be said to protect the interests of those who wish to assert a claim of copyright.
However, YouTube ignores and thus obscures the question of license
altogether. One can find for instance the early films of Hitchcock,
now part of the public domain, in 10 minute chunks on YouTube;
despite this status (not indicated on the site), these clips are, like all
YouTube clips, unavailable for any kind of manipulation. This approach, and the limitations it places on the use of YouTube material,
highlights the fact that YouTube is primarily focused on getting users
to consume YouTube material, framed in YouTube's media player, on
YouTube's terms.
Traditional models for (software) authorship
While YouTube is built using open source software (Python and
ffmpeg for instance), the source code of the system itself is closed,
leaving little room for negotiation about how the software of the
site itself operates. This is a pity on a variety of levels. Free and
open source software is inextricably bound to the web not only in
terms of providing many of the underlying software (like the Apache
web server), but also in the reverse, as the possibilities for collaborative development that the web provides has catalyzed the process of
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open source development. Software designed to support collaborative
work on code, like Subversion and other CVS's (concurrent versioning systems), and platforms for tracking and discussing software (like
TRAC), provide much richer models of use and relationship to work
than those which YouTube offer for video production.
Broadcasting over coherence
From it's slogan (‘Broadcast yourself'), to the language the service
uses around joining and uploading videos (see images), YouTube falls
very much into a traditional model of commercial broadcast television. In this model sharing means getting others to watch your clips,
with the more eyeballs the better.
The desire for broadness and the building of a ‘worldwide' community united only by a desire to ‘broadcast one's self' means creating
coherence is not a top priority. YouTube comments, for instance,
seem to suffer from this lack of coherence and context. Given no
particular focus, comments seem doomed to be similarly ungrounded
and broad. Indeed, comments in YouTube often seem to take on
more the character of public toilets than of public broadcasting, replete with the kind of sexism, racism, and homophobia that more or
less anonymous ‘blank wall' access seems to encourage.
A problematic space for ‘sharing'
The combination of all these aspects make YouTube for many a
problematic space for ‘sharing' - particularly when the material is of
a personal or particular nature. While on the one hand appearing
to pose an alternative platform to television, YouTube unfortunately
transposes many of that form's limitations and conventions onto the
web.
Looking to the future, what still remains challenging, is figuring
out how to fuse all those aspects that make the Internet so compelling
as a medium and enable them in the realm of online video: the net's
decentralized nature, the possibilities for participatory/collaboration
production, the ability to draw on diverse sources of knowledge (from
‘amateur' and home-based, to ‘expert'). How can the successful examples of collaborative text-based projects like Wikipedia inspire new
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forms of collaborative video online; and in a way that escapes the
‘heaviness' and inertia of traditional forms of film/video. This fusion
can and needs to take place on a variety of levels, from the concept
of what a documentary is and can be, to the production tools and
content management systems media makers use, to a legal status of
media that reflects an understanding that culture is something which
is shared, down to the technical details of the formats and codecs
carrying the media in a way that facilitates sharing, instead of complicating it.

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EN
NL
FR

Mutual Motions

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Whether we operate a computer with the help of a command line interface, or by using buttons, switches and
clicks. . . the exact location of interaction often serves as
conduit for mutual knowledge - machines learn about bodies and bodies learn about machines. Dialogues happen
at different levels and in various forms: code, hardware,
interface, language, gestures, circuits.
Those conversations are sometimes gentle in tone - ubiquitous requests almost go unnoticed - and other times
they take us by surprise because of their authoritative
and demanding nature: “Put That There”. How can we
think about such feed back loops in productive ways?
How are interactions translated into software, and how
does software result in interaction? Could the practice of
using and producing free software help us find a middle
ground between technophobia and technofetishism? Can
we imagine ourselves and our realities differently, when we
try to re-design interfaces in a collaborative environment?
Would a different idea about ‘user' change our approach
to ‘use' as well?


7

“Classic puff pastry begins with a basic dough called a détrempe (pronounced day-trahmp) that is rolled out and
wrapped around a slab of butter. The
dough is then repeatedly rolled, folded,
and turned.”, Molly Stevens, A Shortcut
to flaky Puff Pastry. http://www.taunton
.com/finecooking/articles/how-to/rough-puff
-pastry.aspx 2008

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figure XI

figure XIII

ADRIAN MACKENZIE
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
EN

Centres of envelopment and intensive movement
in digital signal processing

figure 115
Adrian
Mackenzie
at V/J10

Abstract
The paper broadly concerns algorithmic processes commonly found
in wireless networks, video and audio compression. The problem it
addresses is how to account for the convoluted nature of the digital
signal processing (DSP). Why is signal processing so complex and relatively inaccessible? The paper argues that we can only understand
what is at stake in these labyrinthine calculations by switching focus away from abstract understandings of calculation to the dynamic
re-configuration of space and movement occurring in signal processing. The paper works through one example in detail of this reconfigured
movement in order to illustrate how digital signal processing enables
different experiences of proximity, intimacy, co-location and distance.
It explores how wireless signal processing algorithms envelope heterogeneous spaces in the form of hidden states, and logistical networks.
Importantly, it suggests that the ongoing dynamism of signal processing could be understood in terms of intensive movement produced by
a centre of envelopment. Centres of envelopment generate extensive
changes, but they also change the nature of change itself.
From sets to signals: digital signal processing
In new media art, in new media theory and in various forms of
media activism, there has been so much work that seizes on the possibilities of using digital technologies to design interactions, sound,
image, text, and movement that challenge dominant forms of experience, habit and selfhood. In various ways, the processes of branding,
commodification, consumption, control and surveillance associated
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with contemporary media have been critically interrogated and challenged.
However, there are some domains of contemporary technological
and media culture that are really hard to work with. They may
be incredibly important, they may be an intimate part of everyday
life, yet remain relatively intractable. They resist contestation, and
engagement with may even seem pointless. This is because they may
contain intractable materials, or be organised in such complicated
ways that they are hard to change.
This paper concerns one such domain, digital signal processing
(DSP). I am not saying that new media has not engaged with DSP. Of
course it has, especially in video art and sound art, but there is little
work that helps us make sense of how the sensations, textures, and
movements associated with DSP come to be taken for granted, come
to appear as normal, and everyday, or how they could be contested.
A promotional video from Intel for the UltraMobilePC 1 promotes
change in relation to mobile media. Intel, because it makes semiconductors, is highly invested in digital signal processing in various forms.
In any case, video itself is a prime example of contemporary DSP at
work. Two aspects of this promotional video for the UMPC, the UltraMobile PC, relate to digital signal processing. There is much signal
processing here. It connects the individual's eyes, mouths and ears
to screens that display information services of various kinds. There
is also much signal processing in the wireless network infrastructures
that connect all these gadgets to each other and to various information services (maps, calendars, news feeds). In just this example,
sound, video, speech recognition, fibre, wireless and satellite, imaging
technologies in medicine all rely on DSP. We could say a good portion
of our experience is DSP-based.
This paper is an attempt to develop a theory of digital signal processing, a theory that could be used to talk about ways of contesting,
critiquing, or making alternatives. The theory under development
here relies a lot on two notions, ‘intensive movement' and ‘centre
of envelopment' that Deleuze proposed in Difference and Repetition.

figure 117
A promotional video
from Intel
for the UltraMobilePC

1

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GFS2TiK3AI

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However, I want to keep the philosophy in the background as much as
possible. I basically want to argue that we need to ask: why does so
much have to be enveloped or interiorised in wireless or audiovisual
DSP?
How does DSP differ from other algorithmic processes?
What can we say about DSP? firstly, influenced by recent software
studies-based approaches (Fuller, Chun, Galloway, Manovich), I think
it is worth comparing the kinds of algorithmic processes that take
place in DSP with those found in new media more generally. Although
it is an incredibly broad generalisation, I think it is safe to say that
DSP does not belong to the set-based algorithms and data-structures
that form the basis of much interest in new media interactivity or
design.
DSP differs from set-based code. If we think of social software such
as flickr, Google, or Amazon, if we think of basic information infrastructures such as relational databases or networks, if we think of
communication protocols or search engines, all of these systems rely
on listing, enumerating, and sorting data. The practices of listing,
indexing, addressing, enumerating and sorting, all concern sets. Understood in a fairly abstract way, this is what much software and code
does: it makes and changes sets. Even areas that might seem quite
remote from set-making, such as the 3D-projective geometry used in
computer game graphics are often reduced algorithmically to complicated set-theoretical operations on shapes (polygons). Even many
graphic forms are created and manipulated using set operations.
The elementary constructs of most programming languages reflect
this interest in set-making. For instance, networks or, in computer
science terms, graphs, are visually represented like using lines and
boxes. But in terms of code, they are presented as either edge or
‘adjacency lists', like this: 2
graph = {'A': ['B', 'C'],
'B': ['C', 'D'],
2

http://www.python.org/doc/essays/graphs/

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'C':
'D':
'E':
'F':

['D'],
['C'],
['F'],
['C']}

A graph or network can be seen as a list of lists. This kind of
representation in code of relations is very neat and nice. It means that
something like the structure of the internet, as a hybrid of physical
and logical relations, can be recorded, stored, sorted and re-ordered
in code. Importantly, it is highly open to modification and change.
Social software, or Web2.0, as exemplified in websites like Facebook or
YouTube also can be understood as massive deployments of set theory
in the form of code. Their sociality is very much dependent on set
making and set changing operations, both in the composition of the
user interfaces and in the underlying databases that make constantly
seek to attach new relations to data, to link identities and attributes.
In terms of activism, and artwork, relations that can be expressed in
the form of sets and operations on sets, are highly manipulable. They
can be learned relatively easily, and they are not too difficult to work
with. For instance, scripts that crawl or scrape websites have been
widely used in new media art and activism.
By contrast, DSP code is not based on set-making. It relies on
a different ordering of the world that lies closer to streams of signals that come from systems such as sensors, transducers, cameras,
and that propagate via radio or cable. Indeed, although it is very
widely used, DSP is not usually taught as part of the computer science or software engineering. The textbooks in these areas often do
not mention DSP. The distinction between DSP and other forms of
computation is clearly defined in a textbook of DSP:
Digital Signal Processing is distinguished from other areas in
computer science by the unique type of data it uses: signals.
In most cases, these signals originate as sensory data from the
real world: seismic vibrations, visual images, sound waves, etc.
DSP is the mathematics, the algorithms, and the techniques

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used to manipulate these signals after they have been converted
into a digital form. (Smith, 2004)
While it draws on some of the logical and set-based operations
found in code in general, DSP code deals with signals that usually involve some kind of sensory data – vibrations, waves, electromagnetic
radiation, etc. These signals often involve forms of rapid movement,
rhythms, patterns or fluctuations. Sometimes these movements are
embodied in physical senses, such as the movements of air involved in
hearing, or the flux of light involved in seeing. Because they are often
irregular movements, they cannot be easily captured in the forms of
movement idealised in classical mechanics – translation, rotation, etc.
Think for instance of a typical photograph of a city street. Although
there are some regular geometrical forms, the way in which light is
reflected, the way shadows form, is very difficult to describe geometrically. It is much easier, as we will see, to think of an image as a
signal that distributes light and colour in space. Once an image or
sound can be seen as a signal, it can undergo digital signal processing.
What distinguishes DSP from other algorithmic processes is its
reliance on transforms rather than functions. This is a key difference.
The ‘transform' deals with many values at once. This is important
because it means it can deal with things that are temporal or spatial,
such as sounds, images, or signals in short. This brings algorithms
much closer to sensation, and to what bodies feel. While there is
codification going on, since the signal has to be treated digitally as
discrete numerical values, it is less reducible to the sequence of steps or
operations that characterise set-theoretical coding. Here for instance
is an important section of the code used in MPEG video encoding in
the free software ffmpeg package:

figure 116
The simplest
mpeg encoder

**
* @file mpegvideo.c
* The simplest mpeg encoder (well, it was the simplest!).
*
...
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* for jpeg fast DCT */
#define CONST_BITS 14
static const uint16_t aanscales[64] = {
/* precomputed values scaled up by 14 bits */
16384, 22725, 21407, 19266, 16384, 12873, 8867, 4520,
22725, 31521, 29692, 26722, 22725, 17855, 12299, 6270,
21407, 29692, 27969, 25172, 21407, 16819, 11585, 5906,
19266, 26722, 25172, 22654, 19266, 15137, 10426, 5315,
16384, 22725, 21407, 19266, 16384, 12873, 8867, 4520,
12873, 17855, 16819, 15137, 12873, 10114, 6967, 3552,
8867, 12299, 11585, 10426, 8867, 6967, 4799, 2446,
4520, 6270, 5906, 5315, 4520, 3552, 2446, 1247
};
...
for(i=0;i<64;i++) {
const int j=
dsp{}->}idct_permutation[i];
qmat[qscale][i] = (int)((uint64_t_C(1)
<< (QMAT_SHIFT + 14))
(aanscales[i]
* qscale * quant_matrix[j]));
I don't think we need to understand this code in detail. There is
only one thing I want to point out in this code: the list of ‘precomputed' numerical values is used for ‘jpeg fast DCT'. This is a typical
piece of DSP type code. It refers to the way in which video frames are
encoding using Fast Fourier Transforms. The key point here is that
these values have been carefully worked out in advance to scale different colour and luminosity components of the image differently. The
transform, DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform), is applied to chunks of
sensation – video frames – to make them into something that can be
manipulated, stored, changed in size or shape, and circulated. Notice
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that the code here is quite opaque in comparison to the graph data
structures discussed previously. This opacity reflects the sheer number of operations that have to be compressed into code in order for
digital signal processing to work.
Working with DSP: architecture and geography
So we can perhaps see from the two code examples above that there
is something different about DSP in comparison to the set-based
processing. DSP seems highly numerical and quantified, while the
set-based code is symbolic and logical. What is at stake in this difference? I would argue that it is something coming into the code from
outside, something that is difficult to read in the code itself because
it is so opaque and convoluted. Why is DSP code hard to understand
and also hard to write?
You will remember that I said at the outset that there are some
facets of technological cultures that resist appropriation or intervention. I think the mathematics of DSP is one of those facets. If I just
started explaining some of the mathematical models that have been
built into the contemporary world, I think it would be shoring up
or reinforcing a certain resistance to change associated with DSP, at
least in its main mathematical formalisations. I do think the mathematical models are worth engaging with, partly because they look
so different from the set-based operations found in much code today.
The mathematical models can tell us why DSP is difficult to intervene
in at a low level.
However, I don't think it is the mathematics as such that makes
digital signal processing hard to grapple with. The mathematics is an
architectural response to a geographical problem, a problem of where
code can go and be in the world. I would argue that it is the relation
between the architecture and geography of digital signal processing
itself that we should grapple with. It is something to do about the
immersion in everyday life, the proximity to sensation, the shifting
multi-sensory patterning of sociality, the movements of bodies across
variable distances, and the effervescent sense of impending change
that animates the convoluted architecture of DSP.

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We could think of the situations in which DSP is commonly found.
For instance, in the background of the scenes in the daily lives of
businessmen shown in Intel's UPMC video, lie wireless infrastructures
and networks. Audiovisual media and wireless networks both use
signal processing, but for different reasons. Although they seem quite
disparate from each other in terms of how we embody them, they
actually sometimes use the same DSP algorithms. (In other work, I
have discussed video codecs. 3
3

The case of video codecs
In the foreground of the UMPC vision, stand images, video images in particular, and
to a lesser extent, sounds. They form a congested mass, created by media and information networks. People in electronic media cultures constantly encounter images in
circulation. Millions of images flash across TV, cinema and computer screens. DVD's
shower down on us. The internet is loaded down with video at the moment (Google
Video, YouTube.com, Yahoo video, etc.). A powerful media-technological imagining of
video moving everywhere, every which way, has taken root.
The growth of video material culture is associated with a key dynamic: the proliferation
of software and hardware codecs. Codecs generate linear transforms of images and
sound. Transformed images move through communication networks much more quickly
than uncompressed audiovisual materials. Without codecs, an hour of raw digital video
would need 165 CD-ROMs or take roughly 24 hours to move across a standard computer
network (10Mbit/sec ethernet). Instead of 165 CDs, we take a single DVD on which a
film has been encoded by a codec. We play it on a DVD player that also has a codec,
usually implemented in hardware. Instead of 32Mbyte/sec, between 1-10 MByte/sec
streams from the DVD into the player and then onto the television screen.
The economic and technical value of codecs can hardly be overstated. DVD, the transmission formats for satellite and cable digital television (DVB and ATSC), HDTV
as well as many internet streaming formats such as RealMedia and Windows Media,
third generation mobile phones and voice-over-ip (VoIP), all depend on video and audio codecs. They form a primary technical component of contemporary audiovisual
culture.
Physically, codecs take many forms, in software and hardware. Today, codecs nestle in
set-top boxes, mobile phones, video cameras and webcams, personal computers, media
players and other gizmos. Codecs perform encoding and decoding on a digital data
stream or signal, mainly in the interest of finding what is different in a signal and what
is mere repetition. They scale, reorder, decompose and reconstitute perceptible images
and sounds. They only move the differences that matter through information networks
and electronic media. This performance of difference and repetition of video comes at
a cost. Enormous complication must be compressed in the codec itself.
Much is at stake in this logistics from the perspective of cultural studies of technology
and media. On the one hand, codecs analyse, compress and transmit images that
fascinate, bore, fixate, horrify and entertain billions of spectators. Many of these
videos are repetitive or cliched. There are many re-runs of old television series or
Hollywood classics. YouTube.com, a video upload site, offers 13,500 wedding videos.
Yet the spatio-temporal dynamics of these images matters deeply. They open new
patterns of circulation. To understand that circulation matters deeply, we could think
of something we don't want to see, for instance, the execution of many hostages (Daniel
Perl, Nick Berg, and others) in Jihadist videos since 2002. Islamist and ‘shock-site' web

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While images are visible, wireless signals are relatively hard to
sense. So they are a ‘hard case' to analyse. We know they surround
us, but we hardly have any sensation of them. A tightly packed
labyrinth of digital signal processing lies between antenna and what
reaches the business travellers' eyes and ears. Much of what they
look at and listen has passed through wireless chipsets. The chipsets,
produced by Broadcom, Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Airgo or
Pico, are tiny (1 cm) fragments that support highly convoluted and
concatenated paths on nanometre scales. In wireless networks such
as Wi-fi, Bluetooth, and 3G mobile phones with their billions of
miniaturised chipsets, we encounter a vast proliferation of relations.
What is at stake in these convoluted, compressed packages of relationality, these densely patterned architectures dedicated to wireless
communication?
Take for instance the picoChip, a latest-generation wireless digital
signal processing chip, designed by a ‘fabless' semiconductor company,
picoChip Designs Ltd, in Bath, UK. The product brief describes the
chip as:
[t]he architecture of choice for next-generation wireless. Expressly designed to address the new air-interfaces, picoChip's
multi-core DSP is the most powerful baseband processor on
the market. Ideally suited to WiMAX, HSPA, UMTS-LTE,
802.16m, 802.20 and others, the picoArray delivers ten-times
better MIPS/$ than legacy approaches. Crucially, the picoArray is easy to program, with a robust development environment
and fast learning curve. (PicoChip, 2007)
Written for electronics engineers, the key points here are that the
chip is designed for wireless communication or ‘air-interface', that
servers streamed these videos across the internet using the low-bitrate Windows Media
Video codec, a proprietary variant of the industry-standard MPEG-4. The shock of
such events – the sight of a beheading, the sight of a journalist pleading for her life –
depends on its circulation through online and broadcast media. A video beheading lies
at the outer limit of the ordinary visual pleasures and excitations attached to video
cultures. Would that beheading, a corporeal event that takes video material culture to
its limits, occur without codecs and networked media?

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its purpose is to receive and transmit information wirelessly, and
that it accommodates a variety of wireless communication standards
(WiMAX, HSPA, 802.16m, etc). In this context, much of the terminology of performance and low cost is familiar. The chip combines computing performance and value for money (“ten times better
MIPS/$ – Million Instructions Per Second/$”) as a ‘baseband processor'. That means that it could find its way into many different version of hardware being produced for applications that range between
large-scale wireless information infrastructures and small consumer
electronics applications. Only the last point is slightly surprisingly
emphatic: “[c]rucially, the picoArray is easy to program, with a robust development environment and fast learning curve.” Why should
ease of programming be important?
And why should so many processors be needed for wireless
signal processing?
The architecture of the picoChip stands on shifting ground. We
are witnessing, as Nigel Thrift writes, “a major change in the geography of calculation. Whereas ‘computing' used to consist of centres
of calculation located at definite sites, now, through the medium of
wireless, it is changing its shape” (Thrift, 2004, 182). The picoChip's
architecture is a respond to the changing geographies of calculation.
Calculation is not carried out at definite sites, but at almost any
site. We can see the picoChip as an architectural response to the
changing geography of computing. The architecture of the picoChip
is typical in the ways that it seeks to make a constant re-shaping
of computation possible, normal, affordable, accessible and programmable. This is particularly evident in the parallel character of its
architecture. Digital signal processing requires massive parallellisation: more chips everywhere, and chips that do more in parallel. The
advanced architecture of the picoChip is typical of the shape of things
more generally:
[t]he picoArray™ is a tiled processor architecture in which hundreds of processors are connected together using a deterministic
interconnect. The level of parallelism is relatively fine grained
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with each processor having a small amount of local memory.
... Multiple picoArrayTM devices may be connected together to
form systems containing thousands of processors using on-chip
peripherals which effectively extend the on-chip bus structure.
(Panesar, et al., 2006, 324)
The array of processors shown then, is a partial representation, an
armature for a much more extensive diffusion of processors in wireless
digital signal processing: in wireless base stations, 3G phones, mobile
computing, local area networks, municipal, community and domestic
Wi-fi network, in femtocells, picocells, in backhaul, last-mile or first
mile infrastructures.

figure 118
Typical contemporary
wireless infrastructure
DSP chip architecture
PicoChip202

Architectures and intensive movement
It is as if the picoChip is a miniaturised version of the urban geography that contains the many gadgets, devices, and wireless and wired
infrastructures. However, this proliferation of processors is more than
a diffusion of the same. The interconnection between these arrays of
processors is not just extensive, as if space were blanketed by an ever
finer and wider grid of points occupied by processors at work shaping
signals. As we will see, the interconnection between processors in DSP
seeks to potentialise an intensive movement. It tries to accommodate
a change in the nature of movement. Since all movement is change,
intensive movement is a change in change. When intensive movement
occurs, there is always a change in kind, a qualitative change.
Intensive movements always respond to a relational problem. The
crux of the relational problem of wirelessness is this: how can many
things (signals, messages, flows of information) occupy the same space
at the same time, yet all be individualised and separate? The flow of
information and messages promises something highly individualised
(we saw this in the UMPC video from Intel). In terms of this individualising change, the movement of images, messages and data, and the
movement of people, have become linked in very specific ways today.
The greater the degree of individualization, the more dense becomes
the mobility of people and the signals they transmit and receive. And
as people mobilise, they drag personalised flows of communication on
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the move with them. Hence flows of information multiply massively,
and networks must proliferate around those flows. The networks need
to become more dense, and imbricate lived spaces more closely in response to individual mobility.
This poses many problems for the architecture of communication infrastructure. The infrastructural problems of putting networks everywhere are increasingly, albeit only partially, solved by packing radio-frequency waves with more and more intricately modulated signal
patterns. This is the core response of DSP to the changing geography
of calculation, and to the changing media embodiments associated
with it. To be clear on this: were it not for digital signal processing,
the problems of interference, of unrelated communications mixing together, would be potentially insoluble. The very possibility of mobile
devices and mobility depends on ways of increasing the sheer density
of wireless transmissions. Radio spectrum becomes an increasingly
valuable, tightly controlled resource. For any one individual communication, not much space or time can be available. And even when
there is space, it may be noisy and packed with other people and
things trying to communicate. different kinds of wireless signals are
constantly added to the mix. Signals may have to work their way
through crowds of other signals to reach a desired receiver. Communication does not take place in open, uncluttered space. It takes
place in messy configurations of buildings, things and people, which
obstruct waves and bounce signals around. The same signal may
be received many times through different echoes (‘multipath echo'
). Because of the presence of crowds of other signals, and the limited spectrum available for any one transmission, wirelessness needs
to be very careful in its selection of paths if experience is to stream
rather than just buzz. The problem for wireless communication is to
micro-differentiate many paths and to allow them to interweave and
entwine with each other without coming into relation.
So the changing architectures of code and computation associated
with DSP in wireless networks does more, I would argue, than fit in
with changing geography of computing. It belongs to a more intensive, enveloped, and enveloping set of movements. To begin addressing this dynamic, we might say that wireless DSP is the armature
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of a centre of envelopment. This is a concept that Gilles Deleuze
proposes late in Difference and Repetition. ‘Centres of envelopment'
are a way of understanding how extensive movements arise from intensive movement. Such centres crop up in ‘complex systems' when
differences come into relation:
to the extent that every phenomenon finds its reason in a difference of intensity which frames it, as though this constituted
the boundaries between which it flashes, we claim that complex
systems increasingly tend to interiorise their constitutive differences: the centres of envelopment carry out this interiorisation
of the individuating factors. (Deleuze, 2001, 256)
Much of what I have been describing as the intensive movement
that folds spaces and times inside DSP can be understood in terms
of an interiorisation of constitutive differences. An intensive movement always entails a change in the nature of change. In this case,
a difference in intensity arises when many signals need to co-habit
that same place and moment. The problem is: how can many signals
move simultaneously without colliding, without interfering with each
other? How can many signals pass by each other without needing
more space? These problems induce the compression and folding of
spaces inside wireless processing, the folding that we might understand as a ‘centre of envelopment' in action.
The Fast Fourier Transform: transformations between time
and space
I have been arguing that the complications of the mathematics
and the convoluted nature of the code or hardware used in DSP,
stems from an intensive movement or constitutive difference that is
interiorised. We can trace this interiorisation in the DSP used in
wireless networks. I do not have time to show how this happens
in detail, but hopefully one example of DSP that occurs but in the
video codecs and wireless networks will illustrate how this happens
in practice.
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Late in the encoding process, and much earlier in the decoding
process in contemporary wireless networks, a fairly generic computational algorithm comes into action: the Fast Fourier Transform
(ffT). In some ways, it is not surprising to find the ffT in wireless networks or in digital video. Dating from the mid-1960s, ffTs
have long been used to analyse electrical signals in many scientific
and engineering settings. It provides the component frequencies of
a time-varying signal or waveform. Hence, in ‘spectral analysis', the
ffT can show the spectrum of frequencies present in a signal.
The notion of the Fourier transform is mathematical and has been
known since the early 19th century: it is an operation that takes
an arbitrary waveform and turns it into a set of periodic waves (sinusoids) of different frequencies and amplitudes. Some of these sinusoids
make more important contributions to overall shape of the waveform
than others. Added together again, these sine or cosine waves should
exactly re-constitute the original signal. Crucially, a Fourier transform can turn something that varies over time (a signal) into a set of
simple components (sine or cosine waves) that do not vary over time.
Put more technically, it switches between ‘time' and ‘frequency' domains. Something that changes in time, a signal, becomes a set of
distinct components that can be handled separately. 4
In a way, this analysis of a complex signal into simple static component signals means that DSP does use the set-based approaches I
described earlier. Once a complex signal, such as an image, has been
analysed into a set of static components, we can imagine code that

4

Humanities and social science work on the Fast Fourier Transform is hard to find, even
though the ffT is the common mathematical basis of contemporary digital image,
video and sound compression, and hence of many digital multimedia (in JPEG, MPEG
files, in DVDs). In the early 1990s, Friedrich Kittler wrote an article that discussed
it {Kittler, 1993 #753}. His key point was largely to show that there is no realtime
in digital signal processing. The ffT works by defining a sliding window of time for
a signal. It treats a complicated signal as a set of blocks that it lifts out of the time
domain and transforms into the frequency domain. The ffT effectively plots an event
in time as a graph in space. The experience of realtime is epiphenomenal. In terms of
the ffT, a signal is always partly in the future or the past. Although Kittler was not
referring to the use of ffT in wireless networks, the same point applies – there is no
realtime communication. However, while this point about the impossibility of realtime
calculation was important to make during the 1990s, it seems well-established now.

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would select the most important or relevant components. This is precisely what happens in video and sound codecs such as MPEG and
MP3.
The ffT treats sounds and images as complicated superimpositions of waveforms. The envelope of a signal becomes something that
contains many simple signals. It is interesting that wireless networks
tend to use this process in reverse. It deliberately takes a well-separated and discrete set of signals – a digital datastream – and turns it
into a single complex signal. In contrast to the normal uses of ffT in
separating important from insignificant parts of a signal, in wireless
networks, and in many other communications setting, ffT is used to
put signals together in such a way as to contain them in a single envelope. The ffT is found in many wireless computation algorithms
because it allows many different digital signals to be put together on
a single wave and then extracted from it again.
Why would this superimposition of many signals onto a single complex waveform be desirable? Would it not increase the possibilities of
confusion or interference between signals? In some ways the ffT is
used to slow everything down rather than speed it up. Rather than
simply spatialising a duration, the ffT as used in wireless networks
defines a different way of inhabiting the crowded, noise space of electromagnetic radiation. Wireless transmitters are better at inhabiting
crowded signal spectrum when they don't try to separate themselves
off from each other, but actually take the presence of other transmitters into account. How does the ffT allow many transmitters to
inhabit the same spectrum, and even use the same frequencies?
The name of this technique is OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). OFDM spreads a single data stream coming
from a single device across a large number of sub-carriers signals (52
in IEEE 802.11a/g). It splits the data stream into dozens of separate signals of slightly different frequency that together evenly use
the whole available radio spectrum. This is done in such a way that
many different transmitters can be transmitting at the same time,
on the same frequency, without interfering with each other. The advantage of spreading a single high speed data stream across many
signals (wideband) is that each individual signal can carry data at a
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much slower rate. Because the data is split into 52 different signals,
each signal can be much slower (1/50). That means each bit of data
can be spaced apart more in time. This has great advances in urban
environments where there are many obstacles to signals, and signals
can reflect and echo often. In this context, the slower the data is
transmitted, the better.
At the transmitter, a reverse ffT (IffT) is used to re-combine
the 50 signals onto 1 signal. That is, it takes the 50 or so different
sub-carriers produced by OFDM, each of which has a single slightly
different, but carefully chosen frequency, and combines them into one
complex signal that has a wide spectrum. That is, it fills the available
spectrum quite evenly because it contains many different frequency
components. The waveform that results from the IffT looks like
'white noise': it has no remarkable or outstanding tendency whatsoever, except to a receiver synchronised to exactly the right carrier
frequency. At the receiver, this complex signal is transformed, using ffT, back into a set of 50 separate data streams, that are then
reconstituted into a single high speed stream.
Even if we cannot come to grips with the techniques of transformation using in DSP in any great detail, I hope that one point stands
out. The transformation involves ‘c'hanges in kind. Data does not
simply move through space. It changes in kind in order to move
through space, a space whose geography is understood as too full of
potential relations.
Conclusion
A couple of points in conclusion:
a. The spectrum of different wireless-audiovisual devices competing
to do more or less the same thing, are all a reproduction of the
same. Extensive movement associated with wireless networks and
digital video occur in various forms. firstly in the constant enveloping of spaces by wireless signals, and secondly in the dense

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population of wireless spectrum by competing, overlapping signals, vying for market share in highly visible, well-advertised campaigns to dominate spectrum while at the same time allowing for
the presence of many others.
b. Actually, in various ways, wirelessness puts the very primacy of
extension as space-making in question. Signals seem to be able to
occupy the same space at the same time, something that should
not happen in space as usually understood. We can understand
this by re-conceptualising movement as intensive. Intensive movement occurs in multiple ways. Here I have emphasised the constant folding inwards or interiorisation of heterogeneous movements via algorithms used in digital signal processing. Intensive
movement ensues occurs when a centre of envelopment begins to
interiorise differences. While these interiorised spaces are computationally intensive (as exemplified by the picoChip's massive
processing power), the spaces they generate are not perceived as
calculated, precise or rigid. Wirelessness is a relatively invisible,
messy, amorphous, shifting sets of depths and distances that lacks
the visible form and organisation of other entities produced by
centres of calculation (for instance, the shape of a CAD-designed
building or car). However, similar processes occur around sound
and images through DSP. In fact, different layers of DSP are increasingly coupled in wireless media devices.
c. Where does this leave the centre of envelopment? The cost of
this freeing up of movement, of mobility, seems to me to be an
interiorisation of constitutive differences, not just in DSP code
but in the perceptual fields and embodiment of the mobile user.
The irony of the DSP is that it uses code to quantify sensations
or physical movements that lie at the fringes of representation
or awareness. We can't see DSP as such, but it supports our
seeing and moving. It brings code quite close to the body. It
can work with audio and images in ways that bring them much
closer to us. The proliferation of mobile devices such as mp3 and
digital cameras is one consequence of that. Yet the price DSP
pays for this proximity to sensation, to sounds, movement, and
others, is the envelopment I have been describing. DSP acts as
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a centre of envelopment, as something that tends to interiorise
intensive movements, the changing nature of change, the intensive
movements that give rise to it.
d. This brings us back to the UMPC video: it shows two individuals.
Their relation can never, it seems, get very far. The provision
of images, sound and wireless connectivity has come so far, that
they hardly need encounter each other at all. There is something
intensely monadological here: DSP is heavily engaged in furnishing the interior walls of the monad, and with orienting the monad
in relation to other monads, but making sure that nothing much
need pass between them. So much has already been pre-processed
between, that nothing much need happen between. They already
have a complete perception of their relation to the other.
e. On a final constructive note, it seems that there is room for contestation here. The question is how to introduce the set-based
code processes that have proven productive in other areas into
the domain of DSP. What would that look like? How would it be
sensed? What could it do to our sensations of video or wireless
media?

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References
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul
Patton, Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers. (London; New
York: Continuum, 2001).
Panesar, Gajinder, Daniel Towner, Andrew Duller, Alan Gray, and
Will Robbins. ‘D'eterministic Parallel Processing, International Journal of Parallel Programming 34, no. 4 (2006): 323-41.
PicoChip. 'Advanced Wireless Technologies', (2007). http://www
.picochip.com/solutions/advanced_wireless_technologies
PicoChip. 'Pc202 Integrated Baseband Processor Product Brief',
(2007). http://www.picochip.com/downloads/03989ce88cdbebf5165e2f095a1cb1c8
/PC202_product_brief.pdf
Smith, Steven W. The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital
Signal Processing: California Technical Publishing, 2004).
Thrift, Nigel. ‘R'emembering the Technological Unconscious by
Foregrounding Knowledges of Position, Environment & Planning D:
Society & Space 22, no. 1 (2004): 175-91.

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ELPUEBLODECHINA A.K.A.
ALEJANDRA MARIA PEREZ NUNEZ
License: ??
EN

El Curanto
Curanto is a traditional method of cooking in the ground by the
people of Chiloe, in the south of Chile. This technique is practiced
throughout the world under different names. What follows is a summary of the ELEMENTS and steps enunciated and executed during el
curanto, which was performed in the centre of Brussels during V/J10.

Recipe

?

For making a curanto you need
to take the following steps and
arrange the following ELEMENTS:

This image is repeated in many
different cultures. Might be an
ancient way of cooking. What
does this underground cooking
imply? Most of all, it takes a lot
of TIME.

Free Libre Open Source
Curanto in the center
of Bruxelles

OVEN, a hole in the ground
filled with fire resistant STONES.

? find a way to get a good deal
at the market to get fresh
MUSSELS for x people.
It
helps to have a CHARISMATIC
WOMAN do it for you.

figure A

a slow cooking

OVEN

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onomies of immaterial labour.
?

A BRIGHT WOMAN FRIEND to
find out about BELGIAN PORPHYRY and tell you about the
mining carrière in Quenast
(Hainaut).

? A CAMERA WOMAN to hand
you a MARBLE STONE to put
inside the OVEN.

figure B a TERRAIN VAGUE in
the centre of Brussels and a
NEIGHBOUR willing to let you in.

?

or some other MULwho is
extremely PATIENT and HUMOURISTIC and who helps
you to focus and takes pictures.
WENDY

TITASKING WOMAN

?

or some
that
TRUSTS the carrier of the
performance, will tell their
STORY about TRAVELING MUSSELS.
FEMKE

and

PETER

EXCENTRIC COUPLE

figure C A HOLE in the
ground 1.5 m deep, 1 m
diameter. (It makes me
think of a hole in my head).

A hole in the ground reminds me
of the unknown. FOOD cooked
inside the ground relates to ideas,
creativity and GIFT. It helps to
have GUILLAUME or a strong and
positive MAN to help you dig the
hole. A second PERSON would be
of great help, especially if, while
digging, he would talk about tax-

Mussels eaten in the centre of
Brussels are grown in Ireland and
immersed in Dutch seawater and
are then offcially called Dutch.
After 2 days in Dutch water, they
are ready to be exported to Brussels and become Belgian mussels
that are in fact Dutch-Irish.

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figure D Original curanto
STONES are round fire
resistant stones. I couldn't
find them in Brussels.

figure E A good BUCKET
to scoop the rain out
of your newly dug HOLE

The only round and granite stones
were very expensive design ones.
In Chile you just dig a hole anywhere and find them. The only
fire resistant rock in Brussels was
the STREET itself.
? Square shaped rocks collected
randomly throughout the city
by means of appropriation.
Streets are made of a type of
granite rock, might be Belgian
porphyry. Note that there is a
message on one of the stones we
picked up in the centre. It reads
'watch your head'.

figure F A tent to protect
your fiRE from random RAIN

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figure G LAIA or some
psychonaut, hierophant friend.

Should be someone who is able to
transmit confidence to the execution of el curanto and who will
keep you company while you are
appropriating stones in Brussels.
? A good BOUILLON made of
cheap white wine and concentrated bio vegetables and
spices is one of the secrets.

figure I GIRL that will
randomly come to the place
with her MOTHER and
speak in Spanish to the
carrier of the performance.

She will play the flute, give
the OVEN some orders to cook
well and sing improvised SONGS.
She and some other children will
play around by digging holes and
making their own CURANTO.

figure J A big fiRE to heat up
the wet cold ground of Brussels
figure H You need to find
or some Palestinian fellow
to help you keep the fire burning

MOAM

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figure K

figure M A SACK CLOTH
to cover the food and to
retain STEAM for cooking.

RED HOT COAL

figure L Using some
cabbage leaves to cover
the RED HOT COAL to
place the FOOD on top of

figure N

or some
who is
happy to SHARE his expert
knowledge and willing to
join in the performance.
DIDIER

PANIC COOK MAN

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?

?

HOLE

?

MUSSELS

?
figure O ONIONS,
and SPECULATIONS.

GESTURES

?

While reading VALIS, the carrier
of the performance will become
reverend TIMOTHY ARCHER and
read about TIME (something that
has mainly been forgotten is
Palestine).

figure P el curanto is
to be made together with
PEOPLE and for EVERYONE.

WOOD found in a dismantled
house. It helps to find a ride
to transport it.

SPICES,

leaf.

rosemary and bay

MICHAEL or some DEDICATED
friend that will assist with the
execution of the performance
and keep the pictures of it afterwards for months.

figure Q You can eat from
the shell by using your hands
or a little WOODEN SPOON.

If you want to eat later, take the
mussels out of their shell, add
OLIVE OIL, make a spread and
keep it cold in a jar. find QUEER
couples to savour it with BREAD
while talking about SEX.
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?

fiRE

?

RED HOT COAL

?

FOOD

?

from the cooking MUSIt helps to use 'hot'
PIEZZO MICROPHONES.
NOISE

SELS.

Here TIME turns into space.
“Time can be overcome”, Mircea
Eliade wrote. That's what it's all
about.
The great mystery of Eleusis, of
the Orphics, of the early Christians, of Sarapis, of the Greco

1

-Roman mystery religions, of
Hermes Trismegistos, of the Renaissance Hermetic alchemists,
of the Rose Cross Brotherhood,
of Apollonius of Tyana, of Simon
Magus, of Asklepios, of Paracelsus, of Bruno, consists of the abolition of time. The techniques are
there. Dante discusses them in
the Comedy. It has to do with
the loss of amnesia; when forgetfulness is lost, true memory
spreads out backward and forward, into the past and into the
future, and also, oddly, into alternate universes; it is orthogonal as well as linear. 1

Philip K. Dick Valis (1972)

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ALICE CHAUCHAT, FRÉDÉRIC GIES
License: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Work
EN

Praticable
Praticable is a collaborative research project between several artists
(currently: Alice Chauchat, Frédéric de Carlo, Frédéric Gies, Isabelle
Schad and Odile Seitz).
Praticable proposes itself as a horizontal work structure, which
brings research, creation, transmission and production structure into
relation with each other. This structure is the basis for the creation
of a variety of performances by either one or several of the project's
participants. In one way or another, these performances start from
the exploration of body practices, leading to a questioning of its representation. More concretely, Praticable takes the form of collective
periods of research and shared physical practices, both of which are
the basis for various creations. These periods of research can either
be independent of the different creation projects or integrated within
them.
During Jonctions/Verbindingen 10, Alice Chauchat and Frédéric
Gies gave a workshop for participants dealing with different ‘body
practices'. On the basis of Body-Mind Centering (BMC) techniques,
the body as a locus of knowledge production was made tangible. The
notation of the Dance performance with which Frédéric Gies concluded the day is reproduced in this book and published under an
open license.

figure 120
Workshop for
participants
with different
body
practices
at V/J10

figure 121
The body as
a locus of
knowledge
production
was made
tangible

figure 122

figure 123

184

Dance (Notation)
20 sec.
31. INTERCELLULAR flUID
Initiate movement in your intercellular fluid. Start slowly and
then put more and more energy
and speed in your movement, using intercellular fluid as a pump
to make you jump.

20 sec.
32. VENOUS BLOOD
Initiate movement in your venous
blood, rising and falling and following its waves.

20 sec.
33. VENOUS BLOOD
Initiate movement in your venous blood, slowing down progressively.

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Less than 5 sec.
34. TRANSITION
Make visible in your movement a
transition from venous blood to
cerebrospinal fluid. finish in the
same posture you chose to start
PART 3.

1 min.
35. EACH flUID
Go through each fluid quality you
have moved with since the beginning of PART 3. The 1st one has
to be cerebrospinal fluid. After
this one, the order is free.

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61. ALL GLANDS
Stand up slowly, building your
vertical axis from coccygeal body
to pineal gland. Use this time to
bound with earth through your
feet, as if you were growing roots.

INSTRUMENTAL (during the voice echo)
Down, down, down in your heart
find, find, find the secret
62. LOWER GLANDS OF THE
PELVIS
Dance as if you were dancing
in a club. Focus on your lower
glands, in your pelvis, to initiate your dance. Your arms, torso,
neck and head are also involved
in your dance.
SMALL PERIMETER
Turn, turn, turn your head around
63. MAMILLARY BODIES
Turn and turn your head around,
initiating this movement in
mamillary bodies. Let your head
drive the rest of your body into
turns.

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Baby we can do it
We can do it alright
64. LOWER GLANDS OF THE
PELVIS
Dance as if you were dancing
in a club. Focus on your lower
glands, in your pelvis, to initiate your dance. Your arms, torso,
neck and head are also involved
in your dance.
Do you believe in love at first sight
It's an illusion, I don't care
Do you believe I can make you feel better
Too much confusion, come on over here
65. HEART BODY
Keep on dancing as if you were
dancing in a club and initiate
movements in your heart body,
connecting with your forearms
and hands.

License: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Work

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Mutual Motions Video Library
To be browsed, a vision to be displaced

figure 126

figure 125

Wearing the video library, performer Isabelle Bats presents a selection of films related to the themes of V/J10. As a living memory, the
discs and media players in the video library are embedded in a dress
designed by artists collective De Geuzen. Isabelle embodies an accessible interface between you (the viewer), and the videos. This human
interface allows for a mutual relationship: viewing the films influences
the experience of other parts of the program, and the situation and
context in which you watch the films play a role in experiencing and
interpreting the videos. A physical exchange between existing imagery, real-time interpretation, experiences and context, emerges as
a result.
The V/J10 video library collects excerpts of performance and dance
video art, and (documentary) film, which reflect upon our complex
body–technique relations. Searching for the indicating, probing, disturbing or subverting gesture(s) in the endless feedback loop between
technology, tools, data and bodies, we collected historical as well as
contemporary material for this temporary archive.

Modern Times or the Assembly Line
Reflects the body in work environments, which are structured by
technology, ranging from the pre-industrial manual work with analogue
tools, to the assembly line, to postmodern surveillance configurations.
24 Portraits
Excerpt from a series of documentary portraits by Alain Cavalier, FR,
1988-1991.

umentaries paying tribute to women's
manual work. The intriguing and sensitive portraits of 24 women working
in different trades reveal the intimacy
of bodies and their working tools.

24 Portraits is a series of short doc-

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Humain, trop humain
Quotes from a documentary by Louis
Malle, FR, 1972.
A documentary filmed at the Citroen
car factory in Rennes and at the 1972
Paris auto show, documenting the monotonous daily routines of working the
assembly lines, the close interaction
between bodies and machines.

Performing the Border
Video essay by Ursula Biemann, CH,
1999, 45 min.
“Performing the Border is a video
essay set in the Mexican-U.S. border town Ciudad Juarez, where the
U.S. industries assemble their electronic and digital equipment, located
right across El Paso, Texas.
The
video discusses the sexualization of
the border region through labour division, prostitution, the expression of
female desires in the entertainment industry, and sexual violence in the public sphere. The border is presented
as a metaphor for marginalization and
the artificial maintenance of subjective boundaries at a moment when
the distinctions between body and machine, between reproduction and production, between female and male,
have become more fluid than ever.”
(Ursula Biemann)
http://www.geobodies.org

Maquilapolis (city of factories)
A film by Vicky Funari and Sergio
De La Torre, Mexico/U.S.A., 2006, 68
min.

Carmen works the graveyard shift in
one of Tijuana's maquiladoras, the
multinationally-owned factories that
came to Mexico for its cheap labour.
After making television components
all night, Carmen comes home to a
shack she built out of recycled garage
doors, in a neighbourhood with no
sewage lines or electricity. She suffers
from kidney damage and lead poisoning from her years of exposure to toxic
chemicals. She earns six dollars a day.
But Carmen is not a victim. She is a
dynamic young woman, busy making
a life for herself and her children.
As Carmen and a million other
maquiladora workers produce televisions, electrical cables, toys, clothes,
batteries and IV tubes, they weave
the very fabric of life for consumer nations. They also confront labour violations, environmental devastation and
urban chaos – life on the frontier of
the global economy. In Maquilapolis Carmen and her colleague Lourdes reach beyond the daily struggle for
survival to organize for change: Carmen takes a major television manufacturer to task for violating her labour
rights, Lourdes pressures the government to clean up a toxic waste dump
left behind by a departing factory.
As they work for change, the world
changes too: a global economic crisis
and the availability of cheaper labour
in China begin to pull the factories
away from Tijuana, leaving Carmen,
Lourdes and their colleagues with an
uncertain future.
A co-production of the Independent
Television Service (ITVS), project of
Creative Capital.
http://www.maquilapolis.com

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Practices of everyday life
Everyday life as the place of a performative encounter between bodies
and tools, from the U.S.A. of the 70s to contemporary South Africa.

Saute ma ville
Chantal Akerman, B, 1968, 13 min.

states that, “When the woman speaks,
she names her own oppression.”

A girl returns home happily. She locks
herself up in her kitchen and messes up
the domestic world. In her first film,
Chantal Akerman explores a scattered
form of being, where the relationship
with the controlled human world literally explodes. Abolition of oneself,
explosion of oneself.

“I was concerned with something like
the notion of ‘language speaking the
subject', and with the transformation
of the woman herself into a sign in
a system of signs that represent a
system of food production, a system
of harnessed subjectivity.” (Martha
Rosler)

Semiotics of the Kitchen

Choreography

Video by Martha Rosler, U.S.A., 1975,
05:30 min.
Semiotics of the Kitchen adopts the
form of a parodic cooking demonstration in which, Rosler states, “An
anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated ‘meaning' of tools with a lexicon
of rage and frustration.” In this performance-based work, a static camera is
focused on a woman in a kitchen. On
a counter before her are a variety of
utensils, each of which she picks up,
names and proceeds to demonstrate,
but with gestures that depart from the
normal uses of the tool. In an ironic
grammatology of sound and gesture,
the woman and her implements enter
and transgress the familiar system of
everyday kitchen meanings – the securely understood signs of domestic
industry and food production erupt
into anger and violence. In this alphabet of kitchen implements, Rosler

Video installation preview by Anke
Schäfer, NL/South Africa, 13:07 min
(loop), 2007.
Choreography reflects on the notion
‘Armed Response' as an inner state
of mind. The split screen projection
shows the movements of two women
commuting to their work. On the one
side, the German-South African Edda
Holl, who lives in the rich Northern
suburbs of Johannesburg. Her search
for a safe journey is characterized
by electronic security systems, remote
controls, panic buttons, her constant
cautiousness, the reassuring glances
in the tinted car windows. On the
other side, you see the African-South
African Gloria Fumba, who lives in
Soweto and whose security techniques
are very basic: clutching her handbag to her body, the way she cues for
the bus, avoiding to go home alone
when it's dark. A classical continuity

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editing, as seen fiction film, suggests
at first a narrative storyline, but is
soon interrupted by moments of pause.
These pauses represent the desires of
both women to break with the safety
mechanism that motivates their daily
movements.

Television
Ximena Cuevas, Mexico, 1999, 2 min.
“The vacuum cleaner becomes the device of the feminist ‘liberation', or the
monster that devours us.” (Insite 2000
program, San Diego Museum of Art)

http://www.livemovie.org

Perform the script, write the score
Considers dance and performance as knowledge systems where movement and data interact. With excerpts of performance documents,
interviews and (dance) films. But also the script, the code, as system
of perversion, as an explorative space for the circulation of bodies.
William Forsythe's works
Choreography can be understood as
writing moving bodies into space, a
complex act of inscription, which is
situated on the borderline between
creating and remembering, future and
past. Movement is prescribed and is
passing at the same time. It can be
inscribed into the visceral body memory through constant repetition, but
it is also always undone:
As Laurie Anderson says:
“You're walking. And you don't always realize it, but you're always
falling. With each step you fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over,
you're falling.
And then catching
your self from falling.” (Quoted after
Gabriele Brandstetter, ReMembering
the Body)
William Forsythe, for instance, considers classical ballet as a historical
form of a knowledge system loaded

with ideologies about society, the self,
the body, rather than a fixed set
of rules, which simply can be implemented. An arabesque is a platonic ideal for him, a prescription,
but it can't be danced: “There is
no arabesque, there is only everyone's arabesque.” His choreography
is concerned with remembering and
forgetting: referencing classical ballet, creating a geometrical alphabet,
which expands the classical form, and
searching for the moment of forgetfulness, where new movement can arise.
Over the years, he and his company
developed an understanding of dance
as a complex system of processing information with some analogies to computer programming.

Chance favours
pared mind

the

pre-

Educational dance film, produced by
Vlaams Theaterinstituut, Ministerie
van Onderwijs dienst Media and Informatie, dir. Anne Quirynen, 1990,

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Rehearsal Last Supper

25 min.
Chance favours the prepared mind
features discussions and demonstrations by William Forsythe and four
Frankfurt Ballet Dancers about their
understanding of movement and their
working methods: “Dance is like writing or drawing, some sort of inscription.” (William Forsythe)

The way of the weed
Experimental dance film featuring
William Forsythe, Thomas McManus
and dancers of the Frankfurt Ballet,
An-Marie Lambrechts, Peter Missotten and Anne Quirynen, soundtrack:
Peter Vermeersch, 1997, 83 min.
In this experimental dance film, investigator Thomas is dropped in a desert
in 7079, not only to investigate the
growth movements of the plant life
there, but also the life's work of the
obscure scientist William F. (William
Forsythe), who has achieved numerous insights and discoveries on the
growth and movement of plants. This
knowledge is stored in the enormous
data bank of an underground laboratory. It is Thomas's task to hack into
his computer and check the professor's secret discoveries. His research
leads him into the catacombs of a
complex building, where he finds people stored in cupboards in a comatose
state. They are loaded with professor F.'s knowledge of vegetation. He
puts the ‘people-plants' into a large
transparent pool of water and notices
that in the water the ‘samples' come
to life again. . . A complex reflection
on (body) memory, (digital) archives
and movement as repetition and interference.

Video installation preview by Anke
Schäfer, NL/South Africa, 16:40 min.
(loop), 2007.
The work Rehearsal Last Supper combines a kind of ‘Three Stooges' physical, slapstick-style comedy, but with
far more serious subject matters such
as abuse, gender violence, and the
general breakdown of family relationships. It's a South African and mixed
couple re-enactment of a similar scene
that Bruce Nauman realized in the 70s
with a white, middle-aged man and
woman.
The experience, the ‘Gestalt' of the
experienced violence, the frustration
and the unwillingly or even forced internalization are felt to the core of the
voice and the body. Humour can help
to express the suppressed and to use
your pain as power.
Actors: Nat Ramabulana, Tarryn Lee,
Megan Reeks, Raymond Ngomane
(from Wits University Drama department), Kekeletso Matlabe, Lebogang
Inno, Thabang Kwebu, Paul Noko
(from Market Theatre Laboratory).
http://www.livemovie.org

Nest Of Tens
Miranda July, U.S.A., 1999, 27 min.
Nest Of Tens is comprised of four alternating stories, which reveal mundane yet personal methods of control.
These systems are derived from intuitive sources. Children and a retarded
adult operate control panels made out
of paper, lists, monsters, and their
own bodies.
“A young boy, home alone, performing

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a bizarre ritual with a baby; an uneasy, aborted sexual flirtation between
a teenage babysitter and an older man;
an airport lounge encounter between a
businesswoman (played by July) and a
young girl. Linked by a lecturer enumerating phobias in a quasi-academic
seminar, these three perverse, unnerving scenarios involving children and
adults provide authentic glimpses into
the queasy strangeness that lies behind the everyday.” (New York Video
Festival, 2000)

In the field of players
Jeanne Van Heeswijk & Marten Winters, 2004, NL
Duration: 25.01.2004 – 31.01.2004
Location: TENT.Rotterdam
Participants: 106 through casting, 260
visitors of TENT.
Together with artist Marten Winters,
Van Heeswijk developed a ‘game:set'.
In cooperation with graphic designer
Roger Teeuwen, they marked out a
set of lines and fields on the ground.
Just like in a sporting venue, these
lines had no meaning until used by the
players. The relationship between the
players was revealed by the rules of the
game.
Designer Arienne Boelens created special game cards that were handed out
during the festival by the performance
artists Bliss. Both Bliss and the cards
turned up all over the festival, showing
up at every hot spot or special event.
Through these game cards people were

invited to fulfil the various roles of
the game – like ‘Round Miss' (the
girl who walks around the ring holding up a numbered card at the start
of each round at boxing matches),
‘40-plus male in (high) cultural position', ‘Teen girl with star ambitions',
‘Vital 65-plus'. But even ‘Whisperer',
and ‘Audience' were specific roles.

Writing Desire
Video essay by Ursula Biemann, CH,
2000, 25 min.

Writing Desire is a video essay on
the new dream screen of the Internet, and its impact on the global circulation of women's bodies from the
‘Third World' to the ‘first World'
. Although underage Philippine ‘pen
pals' and post-Soviet mail-order brides
have been part of the transnational
exchange of sex in the post-colonial
and post-Cold War marketplace of desire before the digital age, the Internet has accelerated these transactions.
The video provides the viewers with
a thoughtful meditation on the obvious political, economic and gender inequalities of these exchanges by simulating the gaze of the Internet shopper
looking for the imagined docile, traditional, pre-feminist, but Web-savvy
mate.
http://www.geobodies.org

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INÈS RABADAN
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
EN

Does the repetition of a gesture irrevocably
lead to madness?

figure 127
Screening
Modern
Times at
V/J10

A personal introduction to Modern Times
(Charles Chaplin, 1936)
figure 128

One of the most memorable moments of Modern Times, is the one
where the tramp goes mad after having spent the whole day screwing
bolts on the assembly line. He is free: neither husband, nor worker,
nor follower of some kind of movement, nor even politically engaged.
His gestures are burlesque responses to the adversity in his life, or
just plain ‘exuberant'. But through the interaction with the machine,
however, he completely goes off the rails and ends up in prison.
Inès Rabadan made two short films in which a female protagonist
is confined by the fast-paced work of the assembly line. Tragically
and mercilessly, the machine changes the woman and reduces her to
a mechanical gesture – a gesture in which she sometimes takes pride,
precisely in order not to lose her sanity. Or else, she really goes mad,
ruined by the machine, eventually managing to free herself.

figure 129

figure 130


MICHAEL TERRY
License: Free Art License
EN

Data analysis as a discourse

figure 131
Michael
Terry in
between
LGM sessions

An interview with Michael Terry
Michael Terry is a computer scientist working at the Human Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Waterloo, Canada. His
main research focus is on improving usability in open source software, and ingimp is the first result of that work.
In a Skype conversation that was live broadcast in La Bellone during Verbindingen/Jonctions 10, we spoke about ingimp, a clone of the
popular image manipulation programme Gimp, but with an important difference. Ingimp allows users to record data about their usage
in to a central database, and subsequently makes this data available
to anyone.
At the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Wroclaw, just before Michael
Terry presents ingimp to an audience of Gimp developers and users,
Ivan Monroy Lopez and Femke Snelting meet up with Michael Terry
again to talk more about the project and about the way he thinks
data analysis could be done as a form of discourse.

figure 132
Interview
at Wroclaw

Femke Snelting (FS) Maybe we could start this face-to-face conversation with a description of the ingimp project you are developing
and – what I am particularly interested in –, why you chose to work
on usability for Gimp?
Michael Terry (MT) So the project is ‘ingimp', which is an instrumented version of Gimp, it collects information about how the
software is used in practice. The idea is you download it, you install
it, and then with the exception of an additional start up screen, you
use it just like regular Gimp. So, our goal is to be as unobtrusive as
possible to make it really easy to get going with it, and then to just
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forget about it. We want to get it into the hands of as many people
as possible, so that we can understand how the software is actually
used in practice. There are plenty of forums where people can express
their opinions about how Gimp should be designed, or what's wrong
with it, there are plenty of bug reports that have been filed, there
are plenty of usability issues that have been identified, but what we
really lack is some information about how people actually apply this
tool on a day to day basis. What we want to do is elevate discussion
above just anecdote and gut feelings, and to say, well, there is this
group of people who appear to be using it in this way, these are the
characteristics of their environment, these are the sets of tools they
work with, these are the types of images they work with and so on,
so that we have some real data to ground discussions about how the
software is actually used by people.
You asked me now why Gimp? I actually used Gimp extensively
for my PhD work. I had these little cousins come down and hang
out with me in my apartment after school, and I would set them up
with Gimp, and quite often they would start off with one picture,
they would create a sphere, a blue sphere, and then they played with
filters until they got something really different. I would turn to them
looking at what they had been doing for the past twenty minutes,
and would be completely amazed at the results they were getting
just by fooling around with it. And so I thought, this application
has lots and lots of power; I'd like to use that power to prototype
new types of interface mechanisms. So I created JGimp, which is
a Java based extension for the 1.0 Gimp series that I can use as a
back-end for prototyping novel user interfaces. I think that it is a
great application, there is a lot of power to it, and I had already an
investment in its code base, so it made sense to use that as a platform
for testing out ideas of open instrumentation.
FS: What is special about ingimp, is the fact that the data you
collect, is equally free to use, run, study and distribute, as the software
you are studying. Could you describe how that works?

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MT: Every bit of data we collect, we make available: you can go to
the website, you can download every log file that we have collected.
The intent really is for us to build tools and infrastructure so that the
community itself can sustain this analysis, can sustain this form of
usability. We don't want to create a situation where we are creating
new dependencies on people, or where we are imposing new tasks on
existing project members. We want to create tools that follow the
same ethos as open source development, where anyone can look at
the source code, where anyone can make contributions, from filing
a bug to doing something as simple as writing a patch, where they
don't even have to have access to the source code repository, to make
valuable contributions. So importantly, we want to have a really low
barrier to participation. At the same time, we want to increase the
signal-to-noise ratio. Yesterday I talked with Peter Sikking, an information architect working for Gimp, and he and I both had this
experience where we work with user interfaces, and since everybody
uses an interface, everybody feels they are an expert, so there can be
a lot of noise. So, not only did we want to create an open environment for collecting this data, and analysing it, but we also wanted to
increase the chance that we are making valuable contributions, and
that the community itself can make valuable contributions. Like I
said, there is enough opinion out there. What we really need to do
is to better understand how the software is being used. So, we have
made a point from the start to try to be as open as possible with
everything, so that anyone can really contribute to the project.
FS: Ingimp has been running for a year now. What are you finding?
MT: I have started analysing the data, and I think one of the things
that we realised early on is that it is a very rich data set; we have lots
and lots of data. So, after a year we've had over 800 installations, and
we've collected about 5000 log files, representing over half a million
commands, representing thousands of hours of the application being
used. And one of the things you have to realise is that when you have
a data set of that size, there are so many different ways to look at it
that my particular perspective might not be enough. Even if you sit
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someone down, and you have him or her use the software for twenty
minutes, and you videotape it, then you can spend hours analysing
just those twenty minutes of videotape. And so, I think that one of
the things we realised is that we have to open up the process so that
anyone could easily participate. We have the log files available, but
they really didn't have an infrastructure for analysing them. So, we
created this new piece of software called ‘Stats Jam', an extension
to MediaWiki, which allows anyone to go to the website and embed
SQL-queries against the ingimp data set and then visualise those
results within the Wiki text. So, I'll be announcing that today and
demonstrating that, but I have been using that tool now for a week
to complement the existing data analysis we have done.
One of the first things that we realized is that we have over 800
installations, but then you have to ask, how many of those are really serious users? A lot of people probably just were curious, they
downloaded it and installed it, found that it didn't really do much
for them and so maybe they don't use it anymore. So, the first thing
we had to do is figure out which data points should we really pay
attention to. We decided that a person should have used ingimp on
two different occasions, preferably at least a day apart, where they'd
saved an image on both of the instances. We used that as an indication of what a serious user is. So with that filter in place, the ‘800
installations' drops down to about 200 people. So we had about 200
people using ingimp; and looking at the data, this represents about
800 hours of use, about 4000 log files, and again still about half a
million commands. So, it's still a very significant group of people.
200 people are still a lot, and that's a lot of data, representing about
11000 images they have been working on – there's just a lot.
From that group, what we found is that use of ingimp is really
short and versatile. So, most sessions are about fifteen minutes or
less, on average. There are outliers, there are some people who use it
for longer periods of time, but really it boils down to them using it for
about fifteen minutes, and they are applying fewer than a hundred
operations when they are working on the image. I should probably
be looking at my data analysis as I say this, but they are very quick,
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short, versatile sessions, and when they use it, they use less than 10
different tools, or they apply less than 10 different commands.
What else did we find? We found that the two most popular monitor resolutions are 1280 by 1024, and 1024 by 768. So, those represent
collectively 60 % of the resolutions, and really 1280 by 1024 represents
pretty much the maximum for most people, although you have some
higher resolutions. So one of the things that's always contentious
about Gimp, is its window management scheme and the fact that it
has multiple windows, right? And some people say, well you know,
this works fine if you have two monitors, because you can throw out
the tools on one monitor and then your images are on another monitor. Well, about 10 to 15 % of ingimp users have two monitors, so
that design decision is not working out for most of the people, if that
is the best way to work. These are things I think that people have
been aware of, it's just now we have some actual concrete numbers
where you can turn to and say: now this is how people are using it.
There is a wide range of tasks that people are performing with the
tool, but they are really short, quick tasks.
FS: Every time you start up ingimp, a screen comes up asking
you to describe what you are planning to do and I am interested in
the kind of language users invent to describe this, even when they
sometimes don't know exactly what it is they are going to do. So
inventing language for possible actions with the software has in a
way become a creative process that is now shared between interface
designer, developer and user. If you look at the ‘activity tags' you
are collecting, do you find a new vocabulary developing?
MT: I think there are 300 to 600 different activity tags that people
register within that group of ‘significant users'. I didn't have time to
look at all of them, but it is interesting to see how people are using
that as a medium for communicating to us. Some people will say,
“Just testing out, ignore this!” Or, people are trying to do things like
insert HTML code, to do like a cross-site scripting attack, because,
you have all the data on the website, so they will try to play with
that. Some people are very sparse and they say ‘image manipulation'
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or ‘graphic design' or something like that, but then some people are
much more verbose, and they give more of a plan, “This is what I
expect to be doing.” So, I think it has been interesting to see how
people have adopted that and what's nice about it, is that it adds a
really nice human element to all this empirical data.
Ivan Monroy Lopez (IM): I wanted to ask you about the data;
without getting too technical, could you explain how these data are
structured, what do the log files look like?
MT: So the log files are all in XML, and generally we compress
them, because they can get rather large. And the reason that they
are rather large is that we are very verbose in our logging. We want
to be completely transparent with respect to everything, so that if
you have some doubts or if you have some questions about what kind
of data has been collected, you should be able to look at the log file,
and figure out a lot about what that data is. That's how we designed
the XML log files, and it was really driven by privacy concerns and
by the desire to be transparent and open. On the server side we take
that log file and we parse it out, and then we throw it into a database,
so that we can query the data set.
FS: Now we are talking about privacy. . . I was impressed by the
work you have done on this; the project is unusually clear about why
certain things are logged, and other things not; mainly to prevent
the possibility of ‘playing back' actions so that one could identify
individual users from the data set. So, while I understand there are
privacy issues at stake I was wondering... what if you could look at the
collected data as a kind of scripting for use, as writing a choreography
that might be replayed later?
MT: Yes, we have been fairly conservative with the type of information that we collect, because this really is the first instance where
anyone has captured such rich data about how people are using software on a day to day basis, and then made it all that data publicly
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available. When a company does this, they will keep the data internally, so you don't have this risk of someone outside figuring something out about a user that wasn't intended to be discovered. We
have to deal with that risk, because we are trying to go about this
in a very open and transparent way, which means that people may
be able to subject our data to analysis or data mining techniques
that we haven't thought of, and extract information that we didn't
intent to be recording in our file, but which is still there. So there are
fairly sophisticated techniques where you can do things like look at
audio recordings of typing and the timings between keystrokes, and
then work backwards with the sounds made to figure out the keys
that people are likely pressing. So, just with keyboard audio and
keystroke timings alone, you can often give enough information to be
able to reconstruct what people are actually typing. So we are always
sort of weary about how much information is in there.
While it might be nice to be able to do something like record people's actions and then share that script, I don't think that that is
really a good use of ingimp. That said, I think it is interesting to
ask: could we characterize people's use enough, so that we can start
clustering groups of people together and then providing a forum for
these people to meet and learn from one another? That's something
we haven't worked out. I think we have enough work cut out for us
right now just to characterize how the community is using it.
FS: It was not meant as a feature request, but as a way to imagine
how usability research could flip around and also become productive
work.
MT: Yes, totally. I think one of the things that we found when
bringing people into the basic usability of the ingimp software and
ingimp website, is that people like looking at what commands other
people are using, what the most frequently used commands are; and
part of the reason that they like that, is because of what it teaches
them about the application. So they might see a command they were
unaware of. So we have toyed with the idea of then providing not
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only the command name, but then a link from that command name
to the documentation – but I didn't have time to implement it, but
certainly there are possibilities like that, you can imagine.
FS: Maybe another group can figure something out like that? That's
the beauty of opening up your software plus data set of course.
Well, just a bit more on what is logged and what not... Maybe you
could explain where and why you put the limit, and what kind of use
you might miss out on as a result?
MT: I think it is important to keep in mind that whatever instrument you use to study people, you are going to have some kind of
bias, you are going to get some information at the cost of other information. So if you do a video taped observation of a user and you
just set up a camera, then you are not going to find details about
the monitor maybe, or maybe you are not really seeing what their
hands are doing. No matter what instrument you use, you are always
getting a particular slice.
I think you have to work backwards and ask what kind of things
do you want to learn. And so the data that we collect right now, was
really driven by what people have done in the past in the area of instrumentation, but also by us bringing people into the lab, observing
them as they are using the application, and noticing particular behaviours and saying, hey, that seems to be interesting, so what kind of
data could we collect to help us identify those kind of phenomena, or
that kind of performance, or that kind of activity? So again, the data
that we were collecting was driven by watching people, and figuring
out what information will help us to identify these types of activities.
As I've said, this is really the first project that is doing this, and
we really need to make sure we don't poison the well. So if it happens that we collect some bit of information, that then someone can
later say, “Oh my gosh, here is the person's file system, here are the
names they are using for the files” or whatever, then it's going to
make the normal user population weary of downloading this type of
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instrumented application. The thing that concerns me most about
open source developers jumping into this domain, is that they might
not be thinking about how you could potentially impact privacy.
IM: I don't know, I don't want to get paranoid. But if you are
doing it, then there is a possibility someone else will do it in a less
considerate way.
MT: I think it is only a matter of time before people start doing
this, because there are a lot of grumblings about, “We should be
doing instrumentation, someone just needs to sit down and do it.”
Now there is an extension out for firefox that will collect this kind
of data as well, so you know. . .
IM: Maybe users could talk with each other, and if they are aware
that this type of monitoring could happen, then that would add a
different social dimension. . .
MT: It could. I think it is a matter of awareness, really. We have a
lengthy concern agreement that details the type of information we are
collecting and the ways your privacy could be impacted, but people
don't read it.
FS: So concretely... what information are you recording, and what
information are you not recording?
MT: We record every command name that is applied to a document,
to an image. Where your privacy is at risk with that, is that if you
write a custom script, then that custom script's name is going to be
inserted into a log file. And so if you are working for example for Lucas
or DreamWorks or something like that, or ILM, in some Hollywood
movie studio and you are using ingimp and you are writing scripts,
then you could have a script like ‘fixing Shrek's beard', and then that
is getting put into the log file and then people are going to know that
the studio uses ingimp.
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We collect command names, we collect things like what windows
are on the screen, their positions, their sizes, and we take hashes of
layer names and file names. We take a string and then we create a
hash code for it, and we also collect information about how long is
this string, how many alphabetical characters, numbers; things like
that, to get a sense of whether people are using the same files, the
same layer names time and time again, and so on. But this is an
instance where our first pass at this, actually left open the possibility
of people taking those hashes and then reconstructing the original
strings from that. Because we have the hash code, we have the length
of the string – all you have to do is generate all possible strings of
that length, take the hash codes and figure out which hashes match.
And so we had to go back and create a new scheme for recording this
type of information where we create a hash and we create a random
number, we pair those up on the client machine but we only log the
random number. So, from log to log then, we can track if people
use the same image names, but we have no idea of what the original
string was.
There are these little ‘gotchas' like that, that I don't think most
people are aware of, and this is why I get really concerned about
instrumentation efforts right now, because there isn't this body of
experience of what kind of data should we collect, and what shouldn't
we collect.
FS: As we are talking about this, I am already more aware of what
data I would allow being collected. Do you think by opening up this
data set and the transparent process of collecting and not collecting,
this will help educate users about these kinds of risks?
MT: It might, but honestly I think probably the thing that will
educate people the most is if there was a really large privacy error
and that it got a lot of news, because then people would become more
aware of it because right now – and this is not to say that we want
that to happen with ingimp – but when we bring people in and we ask
them about privacy, “Are you concerned about privacy?” and they
say “No”, and we say “Why?” Well, they inherently trust us, but the
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fact is that open source also lends a certain amount of trust to it,
because they expect that since it is open source, the community will
in some sense police it and identify potential flaws with it.
FS: Is that happening? Are you in dialogue with the open source
community about this?
MT: No, I think probably five to ten people have looked at the
ingimp code – realistically speaking I don't think a lot of people looked
at it. Some of the Gimp developers took a gander at it to see “How
could we put this upstream?” But I don't want it upstream, because
I want it to always be an opt-in, so that it can't be turned on by
mistake.
FS: You mean you have to download ingimp and use it as a separate
program? It functions in the same way as Gimp, but it makes the
fact that it is a different tool very clear.
MT: Right. You are more aware, because you are making that
choice to download that, compared to the regular version. There is
this awareness about that.
We have this lengthy text based consent agreement that talks about
the data we collect, but less than two percent of the population reads
license agreements. And, most of our users are actually non-native
English speakers, so there are all these things that are working against
us. So, for the past year we have really been focussing on privacy, not
only in terms of how we collect the data, but how we make people
aware of what the software does.
We have been developing wordless diagrams to illustrate how the
software functions, so that we don't have to worry about localisation
errors as much. And so we have these illustrations that show someone
downloading ingimp, starting it up, a graph appears, there is a little
icon of a mouse and a keyboard on the graph, and they type and you
see the keyboard bar go up, and then at the end when they close the
application, you see the data being sent to a web server. And then
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we show snapshots of them doing different things in the software, and
then show a corresponding graph change. So, we developed these by
bringing in both native and non-native speakers, having them look at
the diagrams and then tell us what they meant. We had to go through
about fifteen people and continual redesign until most people could
understand and tell us what they meant, without giving them any
help or prompts. So, this is an ongoing research effort, to come up
with techniques that not only work for ingimp, but also for other
instrumentation efforts, so that people can become more aware of the
implications.
FS: Can you say something about how this type of research relates
to classic usability research and in particular to the usability work
that is happening in Gimp?
MT: Instrumentation is not new, commercial software companies
and researchers have been doing instrumentation for at least ten years,
probably ten to twenty years. So, the idea is not new, but what is
new – in terms of the research aspects of this –, is how do we do this
in a way where we can make all the data open? The fact that you
make the data open, really impacts your decision about the type of
data you collect and how you are representing it. And you need to
really inform people about what the software does.
But I think your question is... how does it impact the Gimp's
usability process? Not at all, right now. But that is because we have
intentionally been laying off to the side, until we got to the point
where we had an infrastructure, where the entire community could
really participate with the data analysis. We really want to have
this to be a self-sustaining infrastructure, we don't want to create a
system where you have to rely on just one other person for this to
work.
IM: What approach did you take in order to make this project
self-sustainable?
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MT: Collecting data is not hard. The challenge is to understand
the data, and I don't want to create a situation where the community
is relying on only one person to do that kind of analysis, because this
is dangerous for a number of reasons. first of all, you are creating
a dependency on an external party, and that party might have other
obligations and commitments, and might have to leave at some point.
If that is the case, then you need to be able to pass the baton to
someone else, even if that could take a considerate amount of time
and so on.
You also don't want to have this external dependency, because of
the richness in the data, you really need to have multiple people
looking at it, and trying to understand and analyse it. So how are
we addressing this? It is through this Stats Jam extension to the
MediaWiki that I will introduce today. Our hope is that this type
of tool will lower the barrier for the entire community to participate
in the data analysis process, whether they are simply commenting on
the analysis we made or taking the existing analysis, tweaking it to
their own needs, or doing something brand new.
In talking with members of the Gimp project here at the Libre
Graphics Meeting, they started asking questions like, “So how many
people are doing this, how many people are doing this and how many
this?” They'll ask me while we are sitting in a café, and I will be able
to pop the database open and say, “A certain number of people have
done this.” or, “No one has actually used this tool at all.”
The danger is that this data is very rich and nuanced, and you
can't really reduce these kinds of questions to an answer of “N people
do this”, you have to understand the larger context. You have to
understand why they are doing it, why they are not doing it. So, the
data helps to answer some questions, but it generates new questions.
They give you some understanding of how the people are using it,
but then it generates new questions of, “Why is this the case?” Is this
because these are just the people using ingimp, or is this some more
widespread phenomenon?
They asked me yesterday how many people are using this colour
picker tool – I can't remember the exact name – so I looked and there
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was no record of it being used at all in my data set. So I asked them
when did this come out, and they said, “Well it has been there at
least since 2.4.” And then you look at my data set, and you notice
that most of my users are in the 2.2 series, so that could be part of
the reasons. Another reason could be, that they just don't know that
it is there, they don't know how to use it and so on. So, I can answer
the question, but then you have to sort of dig a bit deeper.
FS: You mean you can't say that because it is not used, it doesn't
deserve any attention?
MT: Yes, you just can't jump to conclusions like that, which is
again why we want to have this community website, which shows the
reasoning behind the analysis: here are the steps we had to go through
to get this result, so you can understand what that means, what the
context means – because if you don't have that context, then it's sort
of meaningless. It's like asking, “What are the most frequently used
commands?” This is something that people like to ask about. Well
really, how do you interpret that? Is it the numbers of times it has
been used across all log files? Is it the number of people that have
used it? Is it the number of log files where it has been used at least
once? There are lots and lots of ways in which you can interpret
this question. So, you really need to approach this data analysis as
a discourse, where you are saying: here are my assumptions, here is
how I am getting to this conclusion, and this is what it means for
this particular group of people. So again, I think it is dangerous if
one person does that and you become to rely on that one person. We
really want to have lots of people looking at it, and considering it,
and thinking about the implications.
FS: Do you expect that this will impact the kind of interfaces that
can be done for Gimp?
MT: I don't necessarily think it is going to impact interface design,
I see it really as a sort of reality check: this is how communities are
using the software and now you can take that information and ask,
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do we want to better support these people or do we. . . For example
on my data set, most people are working on relatively small images
for short periods of time, the images typically have one or two layers,
so they are not really complex images. So regarding your question,
one of the things you can ask is, should we be creating a simple tool
to meet these people's needs? All the people are just doing cropping
and resizing, fairly common operations, so should we create a tool
that strips away the rest of the stuff? Or, should we figure out why
people are not using any other functionality, and then try to improve
the usability of that?
There are so many ways to use data – I don't really know how
it is going to be used, but I know it doesn't drive design. Design
happens from a really good understanding of the users, the types of
tasks they perform, the range of possible interface designs that are
out there, lots of prototyping, evaluating those prototypes and so on.
Our data set really is a small potential part of that process. You can
say, well, according to this data set, it doesn't look like many people
are using this feature, let's not too much focus on that, let's focus on
these other features or conversely, let's figure out why they are not
using them. . . Or you might even look at things like how big their
monitor resolutions are, and say, well, given the size of the monitor
resolution, maybe this particular design idea is not feasible. But I
think it is going to complement the existing practices, in the best
case.
FS: And do you see a difference in how interface design is done in
free software projects, and in proprietary software?
MT: Well, I have been mostly involved in the research community,
so I don't have a lot of exposure to design projects. I mean, in my
community we are always trying to look at generating new knowledge,
and not necessarily at how to get a product out the door. So, the
goals or objectives are certainly different.

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I think one of the dangers in your question is that you sort of
lump a lot of different projects and project styles into one category
of ‘open source'. ‘Open source' ranges from volunteer driven projects
to corporate projects, where they are actually trying to make money
out of it. There is a huge diversity of projects that are out there;
there is a wide diversity of styles, there is as much diversity in the
open source world as there is in the proprietary world.
One thing you can probably say, is that for some projects that are
completely volunteer driven like Gimp, they are resource strapped.
There is more work than they can possibly tackle with the number of
resources they have. That makes it very challenging to do interface
design; I mean, when you look at interface code, it costs you 50 or 75
% of a code base. That is not insignificant, it is very difficult to hack,
and you need to have lots of time and manpower to be able to do
significant things. And that's probably one of the biggest differences
you see for the volunteer driven projects: it is really a labour of
love for these people and so very often the new things interest them,
whereas with a commercial software company developers are going to
have to do things sometimes they don't like, because that is what is
going to sell the product.

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SADIE PLANT
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Interwoven with her own thoughts and experiences, Sadie Plant gave a situated report on the Mutual
Motions track, and responded to the issues discussed during the week-end.

figure 146
Sadie Plant
reports
at V/J10

EN

A Situated Report
I have to begin with many thanks to Femke and Laurence, because
it really has been a great pleasure for me to have been here this weekend. It's nearly five years since I came to an event like this, believe
it or not, and I really cannot say enough how much I have enjoyed it,
and how stimulating I have found it. So yes, a big thank you to both
for getting me here. And as you say, it's ten years since I wrote Zeros
+ Ones, and you are marking ten years of this festival too, so it's an
interesting moment to think about a lot of the issues that have come
up over the weekend. This is a more or less spontaneous report, very
much an ‘open performance', to use Simon Yuill's words, and not to
be taken as any kind of definitive account of what has happened this
weekend. But still I hope it can bring a few of the many and varied strands of this event together, not to form a true conclusion, but
perhaps to provide some kind of digestif after a wonderful meal.
I thought I should begin as Femke very wisely began, with the
theme of cooking. Femke gave us a recipe at the beginning of the
weekend, really a kind of recipe for the whole event, with cooking as
an example of the fact that there are many models, many activities,
many things that we do in our everyday lives, which might inform
and expand our ideas about technology and how we work with them.
So, I too will begin with this idea of cooking, which is as Femke
said a very magical, transformative experience. Femke's clip from
the Cathérine Deneuve film was a really lovely instance of the kind
of deep elemental, magical chemistry which goes on in cooking. It is
this that makes it such an instructive and interesting candidate, for a
model to illuminate the work of programming, which itself obviously
has this same kind of potential to bring something into effect in a very
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direct and immediate sense. And cooking is also the work behind the
scene, the often forgotten work, again a little bit like programming,
that results in something which – again like a lot of technology – can
operate on many different scales. Cooking is in one sense the most
basic kind of activity, a simple matter of survival, but it can also
work on a gourmet level too, where it becomes the most refined – and
well paid – kind of work. It can be the most detailed, fiddly, sort of
decorative work; it can be the most backbreaking, heavy industrial
work – bread making for example as well. So it really covers the whole
panoply of these extremes.
If we think about a recipe, and ask ourselves about the machine that
the recipe requires, it's obviously running on an incredibly complex
assemblage: you have the kitchen, you have all the ingredients, you
have machines for cooling things, machines for heating things, you
have the person doing the cooking, the tools in question. We really
are talking here about a complex process, and not just an end result.
The process is also, again, a very ‘open' activity. Simon Yuill defined
an `open performance' as a partial composition completed in the
performance.
Cooking is always about experimentation and the kitchen really is
a kind of lab. The instructions may be exact, the conditions may be
more or less precise but the results are never the same twice. There
are just too many variables, too many contingencies involved. Of
course like any experimental work, it can go completely wrong, it
often does go wrong: sometimes it really is all about process, and
not about eating at all! But as Simon again said today, quoting Sun
Ra: there are no real mistakes, there are no truly wrong things. This
was certainly the case with the fantastic cooking process that we
had throughout the whole day yesterday, which ended with us eating
these fantastic mussels, which I am sure elpueblodechina thought in
fact were not as they should have been. But only she knew what
she was aiming at: for the people who ate them they were delicious,
their flavour enhanced by the whole experience of their production.
elpueblodechina's meal made us ask: what does it mean for something
to go wrong? She was using a cooking technique which has come out
of generations and generations of errors, mistakes, probings, fallings
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backs, not just simply a continuous kind of story of progress, success,
and forward movement. So the mistakes are clearly always a very big
part of how things work in life, in any context in life, but especially
of course in the context of programming and working with software
and working with technologies, which we often still tend to assume
are incredibly reliable, logical systems, but in fact are full of glitches
and errors. As thinkers and activists resistant to and critical of mainstream methods and cultures, this is something that we need to keep
encouraging.
I have for a long time been interested in textiles, and I can't resist mentioning the fact that the word ‘recipe' was the old word for
knitting patterns: people didn't talk about knitting patterns, but
‘recipes' for knitting. This brings us to another interesting junction
with another set of very basic, repetitive kinds of domestic and often
overlooked activities, which are nevertheless absolutely basic to human existence. Just as we all eat food, so we all wear clothes. As with
cooking, the production of textiles again has this same kind of sense
of being very basic to our survival, very elemental in that sense, but
it can also function at a high level of detailed, refined activity as well.
With a piece of knitting it is difficult to see the ways in which a single
thread becomes looped into a continuous textile. But if you look at a
woven pattern, the program that has led to the pattern is right there
in front of you, as you see the textile itself. This makes weaving a
very nice, basic and early example of how this kind of immediacy can
be brought into operation. What you look at in a piece of woven cloth
is not just a representation of something that can happen somewhere
else, but the actual instructions for producing and reproducing that
piece of woven cloth as well. So that's the kind of deep intuitive connection that it has with computer programming, as well as the more
linear historical connections of which I have often spoken.
There are some other nice connections between textiles, cooking
and programming as well. Several times yesterday there was a lot
of talk about both experts and amateurs, and developers and users.
These are divisions which constantly, and often perhaps with good
reason, reassert themselves, and often carry gendered connotations
too. In the realm of cooking, you have the chef on the one hand,
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who is often male and enjoys the high status of the inventive, creative expert, and the cook on the other, who is more likely to be
female and works under quite a different rubric. In reality, it might
be said that the distinction is far from precise: the very practise of
using computers, of cooking, of knitting, is almost inevitably one of
constantly contributing to their development, because they are all relatively open systems and they all evolve through people's constant,
repetitive use of them. So it is ultimately very difficult to distinguish
between the user and the developer, or the expert and the amateur.
The experiment, the research, the development is always happening
in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on the bus, using your mobile or
using your computer. Fernand Braudel speaks about this kind of ‘micro-histories', this sense of repetitive activity, which is done in many
trades and many lines, and that really is the deep unconscious history
of human activity. And arguably that's where the most interesting
developments happen, albeit in a very unsung, unseen, often almost
hidden way. It is this kind of deep collectivity, this profound sense of
micro-collaboration, which has often been tapped into this weekend.
Still, of course, the social and conceptual divisions persist, and
still, just as we have our celebrity chefs, so we have our celebrity
programmers and dominant corporate software developers. And just
as we have our forgotten and overlooked cooks, so we have people who
are dismissed, or even dismiss themselves, as ‘just computer users'.
The technological realities are such that people are often forced into
this role, with programmes that really are so fixed and closed that
almost nothing remains for the user to contribute. The structural
and social divisions remain, and are reproduced on gendered lines as
well.
In the 1940s, computer programming was considered to be extremely menial, and not at all a glamorous or powerful activity.
Then of course, the business of dealing with the software was strictly
women's work, and it was with the hardware of the system that the
most powerful activity lay. That was where the real solid development was done, and that was where the men were working, with what
were then the real nuts and bolts of the machines. Now of course, it
has all turned around. It is women who are building the chips and
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putting the hardware – such as it is these days – together, while the
male expertise has shifted to the writing of software. In only half a
century, the evolution of the technology has shifted the whole notion
of where the power lies. No doubt – and not least through weekends
like this – the story will keep moving on.
But as the world of computing does move more and more into
software and leave the hardware behind, it is accompanied by the
perceived danger that the technology and, by extension, the cultures
around it, tend to become more and more disembodied and intangible.
This has long been seen as a danger because it tends to reinforce what
have historically, in the Western world at least, been some of the more
oppressive tendencies to affect women and all the other bodies that
haven't quite fitted the philosophical ideal. Both the Platonic and
Christian traditions have tended to dismissing or repress the body,
and with it all the kind of messy, gritty, tangible stuff of culture,
as transient, difficult, and flawed. And what has been elevated is of
course the much more formal, idealist, disembodied kind of activities
and processes. This is a site of continual struggle, and I guess part of
the purpose of a weekend like this is to keep working away, re-injecting
some sense of materiality, of physicality, of the body, of geography,
into what are always in danger of becoming much more formal and
disembodied worlds. What Femke and Laurence have striven to remind us this weekend is that however elevated and removed our work
appears to be from the matter of bodies and physical techniques,
we remain bodies, complex material processes, working in a complex
material work.
Once again, there still tends to be something of a gendered divide.
The dance workshop organised this morning by Alice Chauchat and
Frédéric Gies was an inspiring but also difficult experience for many
of us, unused as we are to using our bodies in such literally physical
and public ways. It was not until we came out of the workshop into
a space which was suddenly mixed in terms of gender, that I realised
that the participants in the workshop had been almost exclusively
female. It was only the women who had gone to this kind of more
physical, embodied, and indeed personally challenging part of the
weekend. But we all need to continually re-engage with this sense
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of the body, all this messiness and grittiness, which it is in many
vested interests to constantly cleanse from the world. We have to
make ourselves deal with all the embarrassment, the awkwardness,
and the problematic side of this more tangible and physical world.
For that reason it has been fantastic that we have had such strong
input from people involved in dance and physical movement, people
working with bodies and the real sense of space. Sabine Prokhoris
and Simon Hecquet made us think about what it means to transcribe
the movements of the body; Séverine Dusollier and Valérie Laure
Benabou got us to question the legal status of such movements too.
And what we have gained from all of this is this sense that we are all
always working with our bodies, we are always using our bodies, with
more or less awareness and talent, of course, whether we are dancing
or baking or knitting or slumped over our keyboards. In some ways we
shouldn't even need to say it, but the fact that we do need to remind
ourselves of our embodiment shows just how easy it is for us to forget
our physicality. This morning's dance workshop really showed some
of the virtues of being able to turn off one's self-consciousness, to
dismiss the constantly controlling part of one's self and to function
on a different, slightly more automatic level. Or perhaps one might
say just to prioritise a level of bodily activity, of bodily awareness,
of a sense of spatiality that is so easy to forget in our very cerebral
society.
What Frédéric and Alice showed us was not simply about using the
body, but rather how to overcome the old dualism of thinking of the
body as a kind of servant of the mind. Perhaps this is how we should
think about our relationships to our technologies as well, not just to
see them as our servants, and ourselves as the authors or subjects of
the activity, but rather to perceive the interactivity, the sense of an
interplay, not between two dualistic things, the body and the mind, or
the agent and the tool, the producer and the user, but to try and see
much more of a continuum of different levels and different kinds and
different speeds of material activity, some very big and clunky, others at extremely complex micro-levels. During the dance workshop,
Frédéric talked about all the synaptic connections that are happening as one moves one's body, in order to instil in us this awareness
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of ourselves as physical, material, thinking machines, assemblages of
many different kinds of activity. And again, I think this idea of bringing together dance, food, software, and brainpower, to see ourselves
operating at all these different levels, has been extremely rewarding.
Femke asked a question of Sabine and Simon yesterday, which perhaps never quite got answered, but expressed something about how
as people living in this especially wireless world, we are now carrying more and more technical devices, just as I am now holding this
microphone, and how these additional machines might be changing
our awarenesses of ourselves. Again it came up this morning in the
workshop when we were asked to imagine that we might have different parts of our bodies, another head, or our feet may have mirrors
in them, or in one brilliant example that we might have magnets,
so that we were forced to have parts of our bodies drawn together
in unlikely combinations, just to imagine a different kind of sense of
self that you get from that experience, or a different way of moving
through space. But in many ways, because of our technologies now,
we don't need to imagine such shifts: we are most of us now carrying
some kind of telecommunicating device, for example, and while we
are not physically attached to our machines – not yet anyway –, we
are at least emotionally attached to them. Often they are very much
with us and part of us: the mobile phone in your pocket is to hand,
it is almost a part of us. And I too am very interested in how that
has changed not only our more intellectual conceptions of ourselves,
but also our physical selves. The fact that I am holding this thing
[the microphone] obviously does change my body, its capacities, and
its awareness of itself. We are all aware of this to some extent: everyone knows that if you put on very formal clothes, for example, you
behave in different ways, your body and your whole experience of its
movement and spatiality changes. Living in a very conservative part
of Pakistan a few years ago, where I had to really be completely covered up and just show my eyes, gave me an acute sense of this kind
of change: I had to sit, stand, walk and turn to look at things in an
entirely new set of ways. In a less dramatic but equally affective way,
wirelessness obviously introduces a new sense of our bodies, of what
we can do with our bodies, of what we carry with us on our bodies,
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and consequently of who we are and how we interact with our environment. And in this sense wirelessness has also brought the body
back into play, rescuing us from what only ten years ago seemed to
be the very real dangers of a more formal and disembodied sense of a
virtual world, which was then imagined as some kind of ‘other place'
, a notion of cyberspace, up there somehow, in an almost heavenly
conception. Wirelessness has made it possible for computer devices to
operate in an actual, geographical environment: they can now come
with us. We can almost start to talk more realistically about a much
more interesting notion of the cyborg, rather than some big clunky
thing trailing wires. It really can start to function as a more interesting idea, and I am very interested in the political and philosophical
implications of this development as well, and in that it does reintroduce the body to as I say what was in danger of becoming a very
kind of abstract and formal kind of cyberspace. It brings us back into
touch with ourselves and our geographies.
The interaction between actual space and virtual space, has been
another theme of this weekend; this ability to translate, to move between different kinds of spaces, to move from the analogue to the
digital, to negotiate the interface between bodies and machines. Yesterday we heard from Adrian Mackenzie about digital signal processing, the possibility of moving between that real sort of analogue world
of human experience and the coding necessary to computing. Sabine
and Simon talked about the possibilities of translating movement into
dance, and this also has come up several times today, and also with
Simon's work in relation to music and notation. Simon and Sabine
made the point that with the transcription and reading of a dance,
one is offered – rather as with a recipe – the same ingredients, the
same list of instructions, but once again as with cooking, you will
never get the same dance, or you will never get the same food as a
consequence. They were interested in the idea of notation, not to
preserve or to conserve, but rather to be able to send food or dance
off into the future, to make it possible in the future. And Simon
referred to these fantastic diagrams from The Scratch Orchestra, as
an entirely different way of conceiving and perceiving music, not as
a score, a notation in this prescriptive, conserving sense of the word,
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but as the opportunity to take something forward into the future.
And to do so not by writing down the sounds, or trying to capture
the sounds, but rather as a way of describing the actions necessary
to produce those sounds, is almost to conceive the production of music as a kind of dance, and again to emphasise its embodiment and
physicality.
This sense of performance brings into play the idea of ‘play' itself,
whether ‘playing' a musical instrument, ‘playing' a musical score, or
‘playing' the body in an effort to dance. I think in some dance traditions one speaks about ‘playing the body'; in Tai Chi it is certainly
said that one plays the body, as though it was an instrument. And
when I think about what I have been doing for the last five years,
it's involved having children, it's involved learning languages, it's involved doing lots of cooking, and lots of playing, funny enough. And
what has been lovely for me about this weekend is that all of these
things have been discussed, but they haven't been just discussed, they
have actually been done as well. So we have not only thought about
cooking, but cooking has happened, not only with the mussels, but
also with the fantastic food that has been provided all weekend. We
haven't just thought about dancing, but dancing has actually been
done. We haven't just thought about translating, but with great
thanks to the translators – who I think have often had a very difficult job – translating has also happened as well. And in all of these
cases we have seen what might so easily have been a simply theoretical discussion, has itself been translated into real bodily activity:
they have all been, literally, brought into play. And this term ‘play'
, which spans a kind of mathematical play of numbers, in relation to
software and programming, and also the world of music and dance,
has enormous potential for us all: Simon talked about ‘playing free'
as an alternative term to ‘improvisation', and this notion of ‘playing
free' might well prove very useful in relation to all these questions of
making music, using the body, and even playing the system in terms
of subverting or hacking into the mainstream cultural and technical
programs with which we presented.

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This weekend was inspired by several desires and impulses to which
I feel very sympathetic, and which remain very urgent in all our debates about technology. As we have seen, one of the most important
of those desires is to reinsert the body into what is always in danger of becoming a disembodied realm of computing and technology.
And to reinsert that body not as a kind of Chaplinesque cog in the
wheel that we saw when Inès Rabadán introduced Modern Times last
night, but as something more problematic, something more complex
and more interesting. And also not to do so nostalgically, with some
idea of some kind of lost natural activity that we need to regain, or to
reassert, or to reintroduce. There is no true body, there is no natural
body, that we can recapture from some mythical past and bring back
into play. At the same time we need to find a way of moving forward,
and inserting our senses of bodies and physicality into the future, to
insist that there is something lively and responsive and messy and
awkward always at work in what could have the tendency otherwise
to be a world of closed systems and dead loops.
One of the ways of doing this is to constantly problematise both
individualised conceptions of the body and orthodox notions of communities and groups. Michael Terry's presentation about ingimp, developed in order to imagine the community of people who are using
his image manipulation software, raised some very problematic issues
about the notion of community, which were also brought up again by
Simon today, with this ideas about collaboration and collectivity, and
what exactly it means to come together and try to escape an individualised notion of one's own work. Femke's point to Michael exemplified
the ways in which the notion of community has some real dangers:
Michael or his team had done the representations of the community
themselves – so if people told them they were graphic artists, they
had found their own kind of symbols for what a graphic artist would
look like –, and when Femke suggested that people – especially if
they were graphic artists – might be capable of producing their own
representations and giving their own way of imagining themselves,
Michael's response was to the effect that people might then come up
with what he and his team would consider to be ‘undesirable images'
of themselves. And this of course is the age old problem with the idea
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of a community: an open, democratic grouping is great when you're
in it and you all agree what's desirable, but what happens to all the
people that don't quite fit the picture? How open can one afford to
be? We need some broader, different senses of how to come together
which, as Alice and Frédéric were discussed, are ways of collaborating
without becoming a new fixed totality. If we go back to the practices
of cooking, weaving, knitting, and dancing, these long histories of
very everyday activities that people have performed for generation
after generation, in every culture in the world – it is at this level that
we can see a kind of collective activity, which is way beyond anything
one might call a ‘community' in the self-conscious sense of the term.
And it's also way beyond any simple notion of a distributed collection of individuals: it is perhaps somewhere at the junction of these
modes, an in-between way of working which has come together in its
own unconscious ways over long periods of time.
This weekend has provided a rich menu of questions and themes to
feed in and out of the writing and use of software, as well as all our
other ways of dealing with our machines, ourselves, and each other.
To keep the body and all its flows and complexities in play, in a lively
and productive sense; to keep all the interruptive possibilities alive;
to stop things closing down; to keep or to foster the sense of collectivity in a highly individualised and totalising world; to find new
ways – constantly find new ways – of collaborating and distributing
information: these are all crucial and ongoing struggles in which we
must all remain continually engaged. And I notice even now that I
used this term ‘to keep', as though there was something to conserve
and preserve, as though the point of making the recipes and writing
the programs is to preserve something. But the ‘keeping' in question
here is much more a matter of ‘keeping on', of constantly inventing
and producing without, as Simon said earlier, leaving ourselves too
vulnerable to all the new kinds of exploitation, the new kinds of territorialisation, which are always waiting around the corner to capture
even the most fluid and radical moves we make. This whole weekend
has been an energising reminder, a stimulating and inspiriting call to

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keep problematising things, to keep inventing and to keep reinventing, to keep on keeping on. And I thank you very much for giving me
the chance to be here and share it all. Thank you.
A quick postscript. After this ‘spontaneous report' was made,
the audience moved upstairs to watch a performance by the dancer
Frédéric Gies, who had co-hosted the morning's workshop. I found
the energy, the vulnerability, and the emotion with which he danced
quite overwhelming. The Madonna track - Hung Up (Time Goes by
so Slowly) – to which he danced ran through my head for the whole
train journey back to Birmingham, and when I got home and checked
out the Madonna video on YouTube I was even more moved to see
what a beautiful commentary and continuation of her choreography
Frédéric had achieved. This really was an example not only of playing
the body, the music, and the culture, but also of effecting the kind of
‘free play' and ‘open performance', which had resonated through the
whole weekend and inspired us all to keep our work and ourselves in
motion. So here's an extra thank you to Frédéric Gies. Madonna will
never sound the same to me.

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Biographies
Valérie Laure Benabou
http://www.juriscom.net/minicv/vlb
EN

Valérie Laure Benabou is associate
Professor at the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin and teaches at
the Ecole des Mines. She is a member of the Centre d'Etude et de
Recherche en Droit de l'Immatériel
(CERDI), and of the Editorial Board
of Propriétés Intellectuelles. She also
teaches civil law at the University
of Barcelona and taught international
commercial law at the Law University
in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She was a
member of the Commission de réflexion du Conseil d'Etat sur Internet et
les réseaux numériques, co-ordinated
by Ms Falque-Pierrotin, which produced the Rapport du Conseil d'Etat,
(La Documentation française, 1998).
She is the author of a number of works
and articles, including ‘La directive
droit d'auteur, droits voisins et société
de l'information: valse à trois temps
avec l'acquis communautaire', in Europe, No. 8-9, September 2001, p.
3, and in Communication Commerce
Electronique, October 2001, p. 8., and
‘Vie privée sur Internet: le traçage', in
Les libertés individuelles à l'épreuve
des NTIC, PUL, 2001, p. 89.

Pierre Berthet
http://pierre.berthet.be/
EN

Studied percussion with André Van

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Belle and Georges-Elie Octors, improvisation with Garrett List, composition with Frederic Rzewski, and music theory with Henri Pousseur. Designs and builds sound objects and installations (composed of steel, plastic,
water, magnetic fields etc.). Presents
them in exhibitions and solo or duo
performances with Brigida Romano
(CD Continuum asorbus on the Sub
Rosa label) or Frédéric Le Junter (CD
Berthet Le Junter on the Vandœuvres
label). Collaborated with 13th tribe
(CD Ping pong anthropology). Played
percussion in Arnold Dreyblatt's Orchestra of excited strings (CD Animal magnetism, label Tzadik; CD The
sound of one string, label Table of the
elements).

avec Garrett List, la composition avec
Frederic Rzewski, et la théorie de
la musique avec Henri Pousseur. Il
conçoit et construit des objets et installations sonores (en acier, plastique, eau, champs magnétiques etc.),
et les a présentés lors d'expositions et
de performances en solo ou en duo
avec Brigida Romano (CD Continuum asorbus sur le label Sub Rosa)
or Frédéric Le Junter (CD Berthet Le
Junter sur le label Vandœuvres). A
collaboré avec 13th tribe (CD Ping
pong anthropology). A joué de la
percussion chez Orchestra of excited
strings d'Arnold Dreyblatt (CD Animal magnetism, label Tzadik; CD The
sound of one string, sur le label Table
of the elements).

NL

Alice Chauchat
Geluidskunstenaar.
Studeerde percussie met André Van Belle en Georges-Eliehttp://www.theselection.net/dance/
Octors, improvisatie met Garrett List,
EN
compositie met Frederic Rzewski, en
muziektheorie met Henri Pousseur.
Member of the Praticable collective.
Hij ontwerpt en bouwt sonore voorAlice Chauchat was born in 1977 in
werpen en installaties (in staal, plasSaint-Etienne (France) and lives in
tiek, water, magnetische velden etc.).
Paris. She studied at the ConservaDeze toont hij tijdens tentoonstellintoire National Supérieur de Lyon and
gen en performances, solo of samen
P.A.R.T.S in Brussels. She is a foundmet Brigida Romano (cd Continuum
ing member of the collective B.D.C.
asorbus bij het label Sub Rosa) en
With other members such as Tom PlisFrédéric Le Junter (cd Berthet Le
chke, Martin Nachbar and Hendrik
Junter bij het label Vandœuvres).
Laevens she created Events for TeleBerthet werkte samen met 13th tribe
vision, Affects and(Re)sort, between
(cd Ping pong anthropology). Hij ver1999 and 2001. In 2001 she presented
zorgde de percussie voor Arnold Dreyher first solo Quotation marks me.
blatts Orchestra of excited strings (cd
In 2003 she collaborated with Vera
Animal magnetism, label Tzadik; cd
Knolle (A Number of Classics in the
The sound of one string, bij het label
Age of Performance). In 2004 she
Table of the elements).
made J'aime, together with Anne JuFR

Plasticien sonore. A étudié la percussion avec André Van Belle et
Georges-Elie Octors, l'improvisation

ren, and CRYSTALLL, a collaboration with Alix Eynaudi. She also takes
part in other people's projects, such as
Projet, initiated by Xavier Le Roy, or

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Michel Cleempoel
http://www.michelcleempoel.be/
EN

Graduated from the National Superior Art School La Cambre in Brussels.
Author of numerous digital art works
and exhibitions. Worked in collaboration with Nicolas Malevé:
http://www.deshabillez-vous.be

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http://www.geuzen.org/

EN

EN

Femke Snelting, Renée Turner and
Riek Sijbring form the art and design
collective De Geuzen (a foundation for
multi-visual research). De Geuzen develop various strategies on and off line,
to explore their interests in the female
identity, critical resistance, representation and narrative archives.

Séverine Dusollier

Doctor in Law, Professor at the University of Namur (Belgium), Head of
the Department of Intellectual Property Rights at the Research Center for
Computer and Law of the University
of Namur, and Project Leader Creative Commons Belgium, Namur.
NL

EN

Leif Elggren (born 1950, Linköping,
Sweden) is a Swedish artist who lives
and works in Stockholm.
Active since the late 1970s, Leif
Elggren has become one of the most
constantly surprising conceptual artists
to work in the combined worlds of
audio and visual. A writer, visual
artist, stage performer and composer,
he has many albums to his credits, solo and with the Sons of God,
on labels such as Ash International,

http://www.fundp.ac.be/universite/personnes
/page_view/01003580/

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Touch, Radium and his own firework Edition. His music, often conceived as the soundtrack to a visual
installation or experimental stage performance, usually presents carefully
selected sound sources over a long
stretch of time and can range from
mesmerising quiet electronics to harsh
noise. His wide-ranging and prolific
body of art often involves dreams and
subtle absurdities, social hierarchies
turned upside-down, hidden actions
and events taking on the quality of
icons.
Together with artist Carl Michael
von Hausswolff, he is a founder of
the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland
(KREV), where he enjoys the title of
King.

EN

elpueblodechina a.k.a.
Alejandra
Perez Nuñez is a sound artist and
performer working with open source

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tools, electronic wiring and essay writing. In collaborative projects with
Barcelona based group Redactiva, she
works on psychogeography and social science fiction projects, developing narratives related to the mapping of collective imagination. She received an MA in Media Design at the
Piet Zwart Institute in 2005, and has
worked with the organization V2_ in
Rotterdam. She is currently based in
Valparaíso, Chile, where she is developing a practice related to appropriation, civil society and self-mediation
through electronic media.



EN

Born in Bari (Italy) in 1980, and graduated in May 2005 in Communication
Sciences at the University of Rome
La Sapienza, with a dissertation thesis on software as cultural and social
artefact. His educational background
is mostly theoretical: Humanities and
Media Studies. More recently, he has
been focussing on programming and
the development of web based applications, mostly using open source technologies. In 2007 he received an M.A.
in Media Design at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
His areas of interest are:
social
software, actor network theory, digital archives, knowledge management,
machine readability, semantic web,
data mining, information visualization, profiling, privacy, ubiquitous
computing, locative media.

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ware, de compilatie van data en de
exploratie van numerieke archieven en
privacy. In 2007 behaalde hij een M.A.
in Media Design aan het Piet Zwart
Instituut in Rotterdam.

amazons (1st version in Tanzfabrik,
2nd in Ausland, Berlin) and The
bitch is back under pressure (reloaded) (Basso, Berlin). As a memeber of the Praticable collective, he
created Dance and The breast piece,
in collaboration with Alice Chauchat.
He also collaborated on Still Lives
(Good Work: Anderson/ Gies/ Pelmus/ Pocheron/ Schad).

EN
After studying ballet and contemfaut (CND, Parijs), Le principal déporary dance, Frédéric Gies worked
faut-solo (Tipi de Beaubourg, Parijs),
with various choreographers such as
En corps (CND, Parijs), Post porn
Daniel Larrieu, Bernard Glandier,
traffc (Macba, Barcelona), In bed
Jean-François Duroure, Olivia Grandville with Rebecca (Vooruit, Gent), (don't)
and Christophe Haleb. In 1995, he
Show it! (Scène nationale, Dieppe),
created a duet in collaboration with
Second hand vintage collector (someOdile Seitz (Because I love). In 1998
times we like to mix it up!) (Ausland,
he started working with Frédéric De
Berlijn).
Carlo. Together they have created
In 2004 danst hij in The better you
various performances such as Le prinlook, the more you see


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Dominique Goblet
http://www.dominique-goblet.be/
EN

Visual artist. She shows her work in
galleries and publishes her stories in
magazines and books. In all cases,
what she tries to pursue is an art of
the multi-faceted narrative. Her exhibitions of paintings – from frame to
frame and in the whole space of the
gallery – could be ‘read' as fragmented
stories. Her comic books question the
deep or thin relations between human
beings. As an author, she has taken
part in almost all the Frigobox series
published by Fréon (Brussels) and to
several Lapin magazines, published by
L'Association (Paris). A silent comic
book was published in the gigantic
Comix 2000 (L'Association). In the
beginning of 2002, a second book is
published by the same editor: Souvenir d'une journée parfaite - Memories of a perfect day - a complex story
that combines autobiographical facts
and fictions.

Tsila Hassine
http://www.missdata.org/

EN

Tsila Hassine is a media artist / designer.
Her interests lie with the
hidden potentialities withheld in the
electronic data mines. In her practice she endeavours to extrude undercurrents of information and traces of
processes that are not easily discerned
through regular consumption of mass
networked media. This she accomplishes through repetitive misuse of
available platforms.
She completed a BScs in Mathematics and Computer Science and spent
2003 at the New Media department
of the HGK Zürich.
In 2004 she
joined the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where she pursued an MA
in Media Design, until graduating in
June 2006 with Google randomizer
Shmoogle.
She is currently a researcher at the Design department of
the Jan van Eyck Academie.

Simon Hecquet
EN

Dancer and choreographer. Educated
in classical and contemporary dance,
Hecquet has worked with many different dance companies, specialised
in contemporary as well as baroque
dance.
During this time, he also
studied different notation systems to
describe movement, after which he
wrote scores for several dance pieces
from the contemporary choreographic
repertory. He also contributed, among
others, with the Quatuor Knust,
to projects that restaged important
dance pieces of the 20th century. Together with Sabine Prokhoris he made
a movie, Ceci n'est pas une danse
chorale (2004), and a book, Fabriques
de la Danse (PUF, 2007). He teaches

transcription systems for movement,
among others, at the department of
Dance at the Université de Paris VIII.


Guy Marc Hinant
EN

Guy Marc Hinant is a filmmaker of
films like The Garden is full of Metal
(1996), Éléments d'un Merzbau oublié (1999), The Pleasure of Regrets
– a Portrait of Léo Kupper (2003),
Luc Ferrari face to his Tautology
(2006) and I never promised you a
rose garden – a portrait of David
Toop through his records collection
(2008), all developed together with
Dominique Lohlé. He is the curator
of An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music CD Series, and manages
the Sub Rosa label. He writes fragmented fictions and notes on aesthetics (some of his texts have been published by Editions de l'Heure, Luna
Park, Leonardo Music Journal etc.).

Dmytri Kleiner
http://www.telekommunisten.net/
EN

Dmytri Kleiner is a USSR-born, Canadian software developer and cultural
producer. In his work, he investigates the intersections of art, technology and political economy. He is a
founder of Telekommunisten, an anarchist technology collective, and lives
in Berlin with his wife Franziska and
his daughter Henriette.


Bettina Knaup
EN

Cultural producer and curator with a
background in theatre and film studies, political science and gender studies. She is interested in the interface
of live arts, politics and knowledge
production, and has curated and/or
produced transnational projects such
as the public arts and science program ‘open space' of the International Women's University (Hannover,
1998-2000), and the transdisciplinary
performing arts laboratory, IN TRANSIT (Berlin, House of World Cultures
2002-2003). Between 2001 and 2004,
she has co-curated and co-directed
the international festival of contemporary arts, CITY OF WOMEN (Ljubljana). After directing the new European platform for cultural exchange
LabforCulture during its launch phase
(Amsterdam, 2004-06), Knaup works
again as an independent curator with
a base in Berlin.


EN

Christophe Lazaro is a scientific collaborator at the Law department
of the Facultés Notre-Dame de la
Paix, Namur, and researcher at the
Research Centre for Computer and
Law. His interest in legal matters is
complemented by socio-anthropological research on virtual communities
(free software community), the human/artefact relationship (prothesis,
implants, RfiD chips), transhumanism and posthumanism.

Manu Luksch, founder of ambientTV.NET,
is a filmmaker who works outside the
frame. The ‘moving image', and in
particular the evolution of film in the
digital or networked age, has been
a core theme of her works. Characteristic is the blurring of boundaries between linear and hypertextual
narrative, directed work and multiple
authorship, and post-produced and
self-generative pieces. Expanding the
idea of the viewing environment is also
of importance; recent works have been
NL
shown on electronic billboards in pub



Nicolas Malevé

He has recently been working on sigSince 1998 multimedia artist Nicolas
nal processing, looking at how artists,
Malevé has been an active member of
activists, development projects, and
the organization of Constant. As such,
community groups are making alterhe has taken part in organizing varinate or competing communication inous activities connected with alternafrastructures.
tives to copyrights, such as ‘Copy.cult



Michael Murtaugh
http://automatist.org/

EN

Born in September 2001, represented
here by Valérie Cordy and Natalia
De Mello, the MéTAmorphoZ collective is a multidisciplinary association that create installations, spectacles and transdisciplinary performances that mix artistic experiments
and digital practices.

EN

Freelance developer of (tools for) online documentaries and other forms of
digital archives. He works and lives in
the Netherlands and online at automatist.org. He teaches at the MA Media
Design program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.

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Julien Ottavi
http://www.noiser.org/

Ottavi is the founder, artistic programmer, audio computer researcher
(networks and audio research) and
sound artist of the experimental music
organization Apo33. Founded in 1997,
Apo33 is a collective of artists, musicians, sound artists, philosophers and
computer scientists, who aim to promote new types of music and sound
practices that do not receive large media coverage. The purpose of Apo33
is to create the conditions for the development of all of the kinds of music
and sound practices that contribute
to the advancement of sound creation,
including electronic music, concrete
music, contemporary written music,
sound poetry, sound art and other
practices which as yet have no name.
Apo33 refers to all of these practices
as ‘Audio Art'.

EN

Jussi Parikka teaches and writes on
the cultural theory and history of new
media. He has a PhD in Cultural
History from the University of Turku,
finland, and is Senior Lecturer in
Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. Parikka has
published a book on ‘cultural theory
in the age of digital machines' (Koneoppi, in finnish) and his Digital
Contagions: A Media Archaeology of
Computer Viruses has been published
by Peter Lang, New York, Digital Formations-series (2007). Parikka is currently working on a book on ‘Insect
Media', which focuses on the media
theoretical and historical interconnections of biology and technology.


Sadie Plant

Sadie Plant is the author of The Most
Radical Gesture, Zeros and Ones,
and Writing on Drugs.
She has
taught in the Department of Cultural
Studies, University of Birmingham,
and the Department of Philosophy,
University of Warwick. For the last
ten years she has been working independently and living in Birmingham,
where she is involved with the Ikon
Gallery, Stan's Cafe Theatre Company, and the Birmingham Institute
of Art and Design.




EN

Praticable proposes itself as a horizontal work structure, which brings into
relation research, creation, transmission and production structure. This
structure is the basis for the creation
of many performances that will be
signed by one or more participants in
the project. These performances are
grounded, in one way or another, in
the exploration of body practices to
approach representation. Concretely,
the form of Praticable is periods of
common research of /on physical practices which will be the soil for the various creations. The creation periods
will be part of the research periods.
Thus, each specific project implies the
involvement of all participants in the
practice, the research and the elaboration of the practice from which the
piece will ensue.

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Sabine Prokhoris

EN

EN

Psychoanalyst and author of, among
others, Witch's Kitchen:
Freud,
Faust, and the Transference (Cornell
University Press, 1995), and co-author
with Simon Hecquet of Fabriques de la
Danse (PUF, 2007). She is also active
in contemporary dance, as a critic and
a choreographer. In 2004 she made the
film Ceci n'est pas une danse chorale
together with Simon Hecquet.



After obtaining a master's degree in
Philosophy and Letters, Inès Rabadan
studied film at the IAD. Her short
films (Vacance, Surveiller les Tortues,
Maintenant, Si j'avais dix doigts,
Le jour du soleil), were shown at
about sixty festivals. Surveiller les
tortues and Maintenant were awarded
at the festivals of Clermont, Vendôme,
Chicago, Aix, Grenoble, Brest and
Namur. Occasionally she supervises
scenario workshops.
Her first feature film, Belhorizon, was selected
for the festivals of Montréal, Namur, Créteil, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Santo Domingo and
Mannheim-Heidelberg.
At the end
of 2006, it was released in Belgium,
France and Switzerland.

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EN

Antoinette Rouvroy is researcher at
the Law department of the Facultés
Notre-Dame de la Paix in Namur,
and at the Research Centre for Computer and Law. Her domains of expertise range from rights and ethics
of biotechnologies, philosophy of Law
and ‘critical legal studies' to interdisciplinary questions related to privacy
and non-discrimination, science and
technology studies, law and language.
NL

Antoinette Rouvroy is onderzoekster
aan het departement Rechten van de
Facultés Notre-Dame de la Paix in Namen, en aan het Centre de Recherche
Informatique et Droit van de Universiteit van Namen. Zij is gespecialiseerd in het recht en de ethiek

Femke Snelting is a member of the
art and design collective De Geuzen
and of the experimental design agency
OSP.
NL


Michael Terry
http://www.ingimp.org/

Computer Scientist, University of Waterloo, Canada.

Carl Michael von Hausswolff

Von Hausswolff was born in 1956 in
Linkšping, Sweden.
He lives and
works in Stockholm. Since the end
of the 70s, von Hausswolff has been
working as a composer using the tape
recorder as his main instrument and
as a conceptual visual artist working with performance art, light- and
sound installations and photography.
His audio compositions from 1979 to
1992, constructed almost exclusively
from basic material taken from earlier audiovisual installations and performance works, essentially consist of
complex macromal drones with a surface of aesthetic elegance and beauty.
In later works, von Hausswolff retained the aesthetic elegance and the
drone, and added a purely isolationistic sonic condition to composing.


Marc Wathieu
http://www.erg.be/sdr/blog/

Marc Wathieu teaches at Erg (digital arts) and HEAJ (visual communication). He is a digital artist (he
works with the Brussels based collective LAB[au]) and sound designer.
He is also an offcial representative of
the Robots Trade Union with the human institutions. During V/J10 he
presented the Robots Trade Union's
Chart and ambitions.


Peter Westenberg

Brian Wyrick

FR

Peter Westenberg is an artist and film
and video maker, and member of Constant. His projects evolve from an
interest in social cartography, urban
anomalies and the relationships between locative identity and cultural

Brian Wyrick is an artist, filmmaker
and web developer working in Berlin
and Chicago. He is also co-founder
of Group 312 films, a Chicago-based
film group.


Simon Yuill
http://www.spring-alpha.org/
EN

Artist and programmer based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a developer in
the spring_alpha and Social Versioning System (SVS) projects. He has
helped to set up and run a number
of hacklabs and free media labs in
Scotland including the Chateau Institute of Technology (ChIT) and Electron Club, as well as the Glasgow
branch of OpenLab. He has written
on aspects of Free Software and cultural praxis, and has contributed to
publications such as Software Studies
(MIT Press, 2008), the flOSS Manuals and Digital Artists Handbook project (GOTO10 and Folly).


License Register
??

65, 174

a
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Work

181, 188

c
Copyright Presses Universitaires de France, 2007 188
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 58, 71,
73, 81, 93, 98, 155, 215, 254, 275
Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike license
104
d
Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick, 2007. Anti-Copyright. Use as desired in whole or in part. Independent or collective commercial use
encouraged. Attribution optional.
47
f
Free Art License 38, 70, 75, 131, 143, 217
Fully Restricted Copyright 95
g
GNUFDL 119

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t
The text is under a GPL. The images are a little trickier as none of
them belong to me. The images from ap and David Griffths can
be GPL as well, the Scratch Orchestra images (the graphic music
scores) were always published ‘without copyright' so I guess are
public domain. The photograph of the Scratch Orchestra performance can be GPL or public domain and should be credited to
Stefan Szczelkun. The other images, Sun Ra, Black Arts Group
and Lester Bowie would need to mention ‘contact the photographers'. Sorry the images are complicated but they largely come
from a time before copyleft was widespread.
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This publication was produced with a set of digital tools that are
rarely used outside the world of scientific publishing: TEX, LATEX and
ConTEXt. As early as the summer of 2008, when most contributions
and translations to Tracks in electronic fields were reaching their final
stage, we started discussing at OSP 1 how we could design and produce
a book in a way that responded to the theme of the festival itself. OSP
is a design collective working with Free Software, and our relation to
the software we design with, is particular on purpose. At the core
of our design practice is the ongoing investigation of the intimate
connection between form, content and technology. What follows, is a
report of an experiment that stretched out over a little more than a
year.
For the production of previous books, OSP used Scribus, an Open
Source Desktop Publishing tool which resembles its proprietary variants PageMaker, InDesign or QuarkXpress. In this type of software,
each single page is virtually present as a ‘canvas' that has the same
proportions as a physical page and each of these ‘pages' can be individually altered through adding or manipulating the virtual objects
on it. Templates or ‘master pages' allow the automatic placement
of repeated elements such as page numbers and text blocks, but like
in a paper-based design workflow, each single page can be treated as
an autonomous unit that can be moved, duplicated and when necessary removed. Scribus would have certainly been fit for this job,
though the rapidly developing project is currently in a stage that the
production of books with more than 40 pages can become tedious.
Users are advised to split up such documents into multiple sections
which means that in able to keep continuity between pages, design
decisions are best made beforehand. As a result, the design workflow
is rendered less flexible than you would expect from state-of-the-art

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Open Source Publishing http://ospublish.constantvzw.org

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creative software. In previous projects, Scribus' rigid workflow challenged us to relocate our creative energy to another territory: that
of computation. We experimented with its powerful Python scripting
API to create 500 unique books. In another project, we transformed
a text block over a sequence of pages with the help of a fairy-tale
script. But for Tracks in electronic fields we dreamed of something
else.
Pierre Huyghebaert takes on the responsibility for the design of
the book. He had been using various generations of lay-out software
since the early 90's, and gathered an extensive body of knowledge
about their potential and limitations. More than once he brought up
the desire to try out a legendary typesetting system called TEX a
sublime typographic engine that allegedly implemented the work of
grandmaster Jan Tshichold 2 with mathematical precision.
TEX is a computer language designed by Donald Knuth in the
1970's, specifically for typesetting mathematical and other scientific
material. Powerful algorithms automatize widow and orphan control and can handle intelligent image placement. It is renowned for
being extremely stable, for running on many different kinds of computers and for being virtually bug free. In the academic tradition
of free knowledge exchange, Knuth decided to make TEX available
‘for no monetary fee' and modifications of or experimentations with
the source code are encouraged. In typical self referential style, the
near perfection of its software design is expressed in a version number
which is converging to π 3.
For OSP, TEX represents the potential of doing design differently.
Through shifting our software habits, we try to change our way of
working too. But Scribus, like the kinds of proprietary softwares it is
modeled on, has a ‘productionalist' view of design built into it 4, which

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In Die neue Typographie (1928), Jan Tschichold formulated the classic canon of modernist bookdesign.

3

The value of Π (3.141592653589793...) is the ratio of any circle's circumference to its
diameter and it's decimal representation never repeats. The current version number of
TEX is 3.141592

4

“A DTP program is the equivalent of a final assembly in an industrial process”
Christoph Schäfer, Gregory Pittman et al. The Offcial Scribus Manual.fles Books,
2009

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is undeniably seeping through in the way we use it. An exotic Free
Software tool like TEX, rooted firmly in an academic context rather
than in commercial design, might help us to re-imagine the familiar
skill of putting type on a page. By making this kind of ‘domain
shift' 5 we hope to discover another experience of making, and find a
more constructive relation between software, content and form. So
when Pierre suggests that this V/J10 publication is possibly the right
occasion to try, we respond with enthusiasm.
By the end of 2008, Pierre starts carving out a path in the dense
forest of manuals, advice, tips-and-tricks with the help of Ivan Monroy Lopez. Ivan is trained as mathematician and more or less familiar with the exotic culture of TEX. They decide to use the popular
macro-package LATEX 6 to interface with TEX and find out about the
tong-in-cheek concept of ‘badness' (depending on the tension put on
hyphenated paragraphs, compiling a .tex document produces ‘badness' for each block on a scale from 0 to 10.000), and encounter a
long history of wonderful but often incoherent layers of development
that envelope the mysterious lasagna beauty of TEX's typographic
algorithms.
Laying-out a publication in LATEX is an entirely different experience than working with a canvas-based software. first of all, design decisions are executed through the application of markup which
vaguely reminds of working with CSS or HTML. The actual design is
only complete after ‘compiling' the document, and this is where TEX
magic happens. The software passes several times over a marked up
.tex file, incrementally deciding where to hyphenate a word, place a
paragraph or image. In principle, the concept of a page only applies
after compilation is complete. Design work therefore radically shifts
from the act of absolute placement to co-managing a flow. All elements remain relatively placed until the last tour has passed, and
while error messages, warnings and hyphenation decisions scroll by on
the command line, the sensation of elasticity is almost tangible. And

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See: Richard Sennett. The Craftsman. Allen Lane (Penguin Press), 2008

6 L
ATEX

is a high-level markup language that was first developed by Leslie Lamport in
1985. Lamport is a computer scientist also known for his work on distributed systems
and multi-treading algorithms.

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indeed, when within the acceptable ‘stretch' of the program placement of a paragraph is exceeded, words literally break out of the grid
(see page 34 example).
When I join Pierre to continue the work in January 2009, the
book is still far from finished. By now, we can produce those typical
academic-style documents with ease, but we still have not managed to
use our own fonts 7. flipping back and forth in the many manuals and
handbooks that exist, we enjoy discovering a new culture. Though
we occasionally cringe at the paternalist humour that seems to have
infected every corner of the TEX community and which is clearly
inspired by witticisms of the founding father, Donald Knuth himself,
we experience how the lightweight, flexible document structure of
TEX allows for a less hierarchical and non-linear workflow, making
it easier to collaborate on a project. It is an exhilarating experience
to produce a lay-out in dialogue with a tool and the design process
takes on an almost rhythmical quality, iterative and incremental. It
also starts to dawn on us, that souplesse comes with a price.
“Users only need to learn a few easy-to-understand commands that
specify the logical structure of a document” promises The Not So
Short Introduction to LATEX. “They almost never need to tinker with
the actual layout of the document”. It explains why using LATEX
stops being easy-to-understand once you attempt to expand its strict
model of ‘book', ‘article' or ‘thesis': the ‘users' that LATEX addresses
are not designers and editors like us. At this point, we doubt whether
to give up or push through, and decide to set ourselves a limit of a
week in which we should be able to to tick off a minimal amount of
items from a list of essential design elements. Custom page size and
headers, working with URL's... they each require a separate ‘package'
that may or may not be compatible with another one. At the end of
the week, just when we start to regain confidence in the usability of
LATEX for our purpose, our document breaks beyond repair when we
try to use custom paper size with custom headers at the same time.

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“Installing fonts in LATEX has the name of being a very hard task to accomplish. But
it is nothing more than following instructions. However, the problem is that, first, the
proper instructions have to be found and, second, the instructions then have to be read
and understood”. http://www.ntg.nl/maps/29/13.pdf

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In February, more than 6 months into the process, we briefly consider switching to OpenOffce instead (which we had never tried for
such a large publication) or go back to Scribus (which means for
Pierre, learning a new tool). Then we remember ConTEXt, a relatively young ‘macro package' that uses the TEX engine as well. “While
LATEX insulates the writer from typographical details, ConTEXt takes
a complementary approach by providing structured interfaces for handling typography, including extensive support for colors, backgrounds,
hyperlinks, presentations, figure-text integration, and conditional compilation” 8. This is what we have been looking for.
ConTEXt was developed in the 1990's by a Dutch company specialised in ‘Advanced Document Engineering'. They needed to produce complex educational materials and workplace manuals and came
up with their own interface to TEX. “The development was purely
driven by demand and configurability, and this meant that we could
optimize most workflows that involved text editing”. 9
However frustrating it is to re-learn yet another type of markup
(even if both are based on the same TEX language, most of the LATEX
commands do not work in ConTEXt and vice versa), many of the
things that we could only achieve by means of ‘hack' in LATEX, are
built in and readily available in ConTEXt. With the help of the
very active ConTEXt mailinglist we find a way to finally use our own
fonts and while plenty of questions, bugs and dark areas remain, it
feels we are close to producing the kind of multilingual, multi-format,
multi-layered publication we imagine Tracks in Electr(on)ic fields to
be.
However, Pierre and I are working on different versions of Ubuntu,
respectively on a Mac and on a PC and we soon discover that our
installations of ConTEXt produce different results. We can't find
a solution in the nerve-wrackingly incomplete, fragmented though
extensive documentation of ConTEXt and by June 2009, we still have
not managed to print the book. As time passes, we find it increasingly

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Interview with Hans Hagen http://www.tug.org/interviews/interview-files/hans-hagen
.html

9

Interview with Hans Hagen http://www.tug.org/interviews/interview-files/hans-hagen
.html

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difficult to allocate concentrated time for learning and it is a humbling
experience that acquiring some sort of fluency seems to pull us in all
directions. The stretched out nature of the process also feeds our
insecurity: Maybe we should have tried this package also? Have we
read that manual correctly? Have we read the right manual? Did we
understand those instructions really? If we were computer scientists
ourselves, would we know what to do? Paradoxically, the more we
invest into this process, mentally and physically, the harder it is to
let go. Are we refusing to see the limits of this tool, or even scarier,
our own limitations? Can we accept that the experience we'd hoped
for, is a lot more banal than the sublime results we secretly expected?
A fellow Constant member suggests in desperation: “You can't just
make a book, can you?”
In July, Pierre decides to pay for a consult with the developers
of ConTEXt themselves, and once and for all solve some of the issues we continue to struggle with. We drive up expectantly to the
headquarters of Pragma in Hasselt (NL) and discuss our problems,
seated in the recently redecorated rooms of a former bank building.
Hans Hagen himself reinstalls markIV (the latest in ConTEXt) on the
machine of Pierre, while his colleague Ton Otten tours me through
samples of the colorful publications produced by Pragma. In the afternoon, Hans gathers up some code examples that could help us place
thumbnail images and before we know it we are on our way South
again. Our visit confirms the impression we had from the awkwardly
written manuals and peculiar syntax, that ConTEXt is in essence a
one man mission. It is hard to imagine that a tool written to solve
particular problems of a certain document engineer, will ever grow
into the kind of tool that we desire too as well.
In August, as I type up this report, the book is more or less ready
to go to print. Although it looks ‘handsome' according to some, due
to unexpected bugs and time restraints, we have had to let go of
some of the features we hoped to implement. Looking at it now, just
before going to print, it has certainly not turned out to be the kind of
eye-opening typographic experience we dreamt of and sadly, we will
never know whether that is due to our own limited understanding
of TEX, LATEX and ConTEXt, to the inherent limits of those tools

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themselves, or to the crude decision to finally force through a lay-out
in two weeks. Probably a mix of all of the above, it is first of all a
relief that the publication finally exists. Looking back at the process, I
am reminded of the wise words of Joseph Weizenbaum, who observed
that “Only rarely, if indeed ever, are a tool and an altogether original
job it is to do, invented together” 10.
While this book nearly crumbled under the weight of the projections it had to carry, I often thought that outside academic publishing, the power of TEX is much like a Fata Morgana. Mesmerizing
and always out of reach, TEX continues to represent a promise of an
alternative technological landscape that keeps our dream of changing
software habits alive.

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Femke Snelting (OSP), August 2009

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Joseph Weizenbaum. Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation.
MIT, 1976

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Colophon
Tracks in electr(on)ic fields is a publication of Constant, Association for Art
and Media, Brussels.
Translations: Steven Tallon, Anne Smolar, Yves Poliart, Emma Sidgwick
Copy editing: Emma Sidgwick, Femke Snelting, Wendy Van Wynsberghe
English editing and translations: Sophie Burm
Design: Pierre Huyghebaert, Femke Snelting (OSP)
Photos, unless otherwise noted: Constant (Peter Westenberg). figure 5-9: Marc
Wathieu, figure 31-96: Constant (Christina Clar, video stills), figure 102-104:
Leiff Elgren, CM von Hausswolff, figure 107-116: Manu Luksch, figure A-Q:
elpueblodechina, figure 151 + 152: Pierre Huyghebaert, figure 155: Cornelius
Cardew, figure 160-162: Scratch Orchestra, figure 153 + 154: Michael E. Emrick
(Courtesy of Ben Looker), figure 156-157 + 159: photographer unknown, figure
158: David Griffths, pages 19, 25, 35, 77 and 139: public domain or unknown.
This book was produced in ConTEXt, based on the TEX typesetting engine, and
other Free Softwares (OpenOffce, Gimp, Inkscape). For a written account of
the production process see The Making Of on page 323.
Printing: Drukkerij Geers Offset, Gent

EN

FR

NL

Copyright © 2009, Constant.
Copyleft: this book is free. You can distribute and modify it according to the
terms of the Free Art Licence. You can find an example of this licence on the
site ‘Copyleft Attitude' http://www.artlibre.org
Copyleft : cette oeuvre est libre, vous pouvez la redistribuer et/ou la modifier selon les termes de la Licence Art Libre. Vous trouverez un exemplaire de
cette Licence sur le site Copyleft Attitude http://www.artlibre.org ainsi que sur
d'autres sites.
Copyleft: dit boek is een vrij werk. Je kunt het verspreiden en/of veranderen
volgens de termen van de Free Art Licence. Je vindt de tekst van deze licentie
onder andere op de site ‘Copyleft Attitude' http://www.artlibre.org
This book can be downloaded from: http://www.constantvzw.org/verlag. Sources
are available from http://osp.constantvzw.org/sources/vj10

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figure 148 De Vlaamse Minister van Cultuur,
Jeugd, Sport en Brussel

figure 149 De Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie

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Constant
Conversations
2015


This book documents an ongoing dialogue between developers and designers involved in the wider ecosystem of Libre
Graphics. Its lengthy title, I think that conversations are the
best, biggest thing that Free Software has to offer its user, is taken
from an interview with Debian developer Asheesh Laroia, Just
ask and that will be that, included in this publication. His remark points at the difference that Free Software can make when
users are invited to consider, interrogate and discuss not only
the technical details of software, but its concepts and histories
as well.
Conversations documents discussions about tools and practices
for typography, layout and image processing that stretch out
over a period of more than eight years. The questions and answers were recorded in the margins of events such as the yearly
Libre Graphics Meeting, the Libre Graphics Research Unit,
a two-year collaboration between Medialab Prado in Madrid,
Worm in Rotterdam, Piksel in Bergen and Constant in Brussels,
or as part of documenting the work process of the Brussels’
design team OSP. Participants in these intersecting events and
organisations constitute the various instances of ‘we’ and ‘I’ that
you will discover throughout this book.
The transcriptions are loosely organised around three themes:
tools, communities and design. At the same time, I invite you
to read Conversations as a chronology of growing up in Libre
Graphics, a portrait of a community gradually grasping the interdependencies between Free Software and design practice.
Femke Snelting
Brussels, December 2014

Introduction

A user should not be able to shoot himself in the foot

I think the ideas behind it are beautiful in my mind

We will get to know the machine and we will understand
ConTeXt and the ballistics of design
Meaningful transformations

Tools for a Read Write World
Etat des Lieux

Distributed Version Control

Even when you are done, you are not done
Having the tools is just the beginning
Data analysis as a discourse

Why you should own the beer company you design for
Just Ask and That Will Be That
Tying the story to data
Unicodes

If the design thinking is correct, the tools should be irrelevant
You need to copy to understand
What’s the thinking here

The construction of a book (Aether9)
Performing Libre Graphics

The Making of Conversations

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Colophon

351

Keywords

353

Free Art License

359

Larisa Blazic:

Introduction

Computational concepts, their technological language and the hybridisation of creative practice have been successfully explored in Media Arts for a
few decades now. Digital was a narrative, a tool and a concept, an aesthetic
and political playground of sorts. These experiments created a notion of
the digital artisan and creative technologist on the one hand and enabled
a new view of intellectual property on the other. They widened a pathway
to participation, collaboration and co-creation in creative software development, looking critically at the software as cultural production as well as
technological advance.
This book documents conversations between artists, typographers, designers, developers and software engineers involved in Libre Graphics, an independent, self-organised, international community revolving around Free,
Libre, Open Source software (F/LOSS). Libre Graphics resembles the community of Media arts of the late twentieth Century, in so far that it is using
software as a departure point for creative exploration of design practice. In
some cases it adopts software development processes and applies them to
graphic design, using version control and platforms such as GitHub, but it
also banks on a paradigm shift that Free Software offers – an active engagement with software to bend it, fork it, reshape it – and in that it establishes
conversations with a developers community that haven’t taken place before.
This pathway was, however, at moments full of tension, created by diverging views on what the development process entails and what it might
mean. The conversations brought together in this book resulted from the
need to discuss those complex issues and to adress the differences and similarities between design, design production, Free Culture and software development. As in theatre, where it is said that conflict drives the plot forward,
so it does here. It makes us think harder about the ethics of our practices
while we develop tools and technologies for the benefit of all.
The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) was brought to my attention in
2012 as an interesting example of dialogue between creative types and developers. The event was running since 2006 and was originally conceived as an
annual gathering for discussions about Free and Open Source software used
in graphics. At the time I was teaching at the University of Westminster
for nearly ten years. The subject was computers, arts and design and it took
a variety of forms; sometimes focused on graphic design, sometimes on
contemporary media practice, interaction design, software design and mysterious hypermedia. F/LOSS was part of my artistic practice for many years,
7

Larisa Blazic:

Introduction

but its inclusion to the UK Higher Education was a real challenge. My
frustration with difficult computer departments grew exponentially year by
year and LGM looked like a place to visit and get much needed support.
Super fast-forward to Madrid in April 2013: I landed. Little did I know
that this journey would change everything. Firstly, the wonderfully diverse
group of people present: artists, designers, software developers, typographers, interface designers, more software developers! It was very exciting
listening to talks, overhearing conversations in breaks, observing group discussions and slowly engaging with the Libre Graphics community. Being
there to witness how far the F/LOSS community has come was so heartwarming and uplifting, that my enthusiasm was soaring.
The main reason for my attendance at the Madrid LGM was to join
the launch of a network of Free Culture aware educators in art, music and
design education. 1 Aymeric Mansoux and his colleagues from the Willem
De Kooning Academie and the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam convened
the first ever meeting of the network with the aim to map out a landscape
of current educational efforts as well as to share experiences. I was aware of
Aymeric’s efforts through his activities with GOTO10 and the FLOSS+Art
book 2 that they published a couple of years before we finally met. Free
Culture was deeply embedded in his artistic and educational practice, and it
was really good to have someone like him set the course of discussion.
Lo’ and behold the conversation started – we sat in a big circle in the
middle of Medialab Prado. The introduction round began, and I thought:
there are so many people using F/LOSS in their teaching! Short courses,
long courses, BA courses, MA courses, summer schools, all sorts! There
were so many solutions presented for overcoming institutional barricades,
Adobe marriages and Apple hostages. Individual efforts and group efforts,
long term and short, a whole world of conventional curriculums as well as
a variety of educational experimentations were presented. Just sitting there,
listening about shared troubles and achievements was enough to give me a
new surge of energy to explore new strategies for engaging BA level students
with F/LOS tools and communities.
Taking part in LGM 2013 was a useful experience that has informed
my art and educational practice since. It was clear from the gathering that
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2

http://eightycolumn.net/
Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. FLOSS+Art. OpenMute, 2008.
http://things.bleu255.com/floss-art

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Larisa Blazic:

Introduction

F/LOSS is not a ghetto for idealists and techno fetishists – it was ready for
an average user, it was ready for a specialist user, it was ready for all and
what is most important the communication lines were open. Given that
Linux distributions extend the life of a computer by at least ten years, in
combination with the likes of Libre Graphics, Open Video and a plethora
of other F/LOS software, the benefits are manyfold, important for all and
not to be ignored by any form of creative practice worldwide.

Libre Graphics seems to offer a very exciting transformation of graphic design practice through implementation of F/LOS software development and
production processes. A hybridisation across these often separated fields of
practice that take under consideration openness and freedom to create, copy,
manipulate and distribute, while contributing to the development of visual
communication itself. All this may lease a new life to an over-commercialised
graphic design practice, banalised by mainstream culture.
This book brings together reflections on collaboration and co-creation
in graphic design, typography and desktop publishing, but also on gender
issues and inclusion to the Libre Graphics community. It offers a paradigm
shift, supported by historical research into graphic and type design practice,
that creates strong arguments to re-engage with the tools of production.
The conversations conducted give an overview of a variety of practices and
experiences which show the need for more conversations and which can help
educate designers and developers alike. It gives detailed descriptions of the
design processes, productions and potential trade-offs when engaged in software design and development while producing designed artefacts. It points
to the importance of transparent software development, breaking stereotypes and establishing a new image of the designer-developer combo, a fresh
perspective of mutual respect between disciplines and a desire to engage in
exchange of knowledge that is beneficial beyond what any proprietary software could ever be.
Larisa Blazic is a media artist living and working in London. Her interests range from

creative collaborations to intersections between video art and architecture. As senior lecturer
at the Faculty of Media, Arts and Design of the University of Westminster, she is currently
developing a master’s program on F/LOSS art & design.

9

While in the background participants of the Libre Graphics
Meeting 2007 start saying goodbye to each other, Andreas
Vox makes time to sit down with us to talk about Scribus,
the Open Source application for professional page layout.
The software is significant not only to it’s users that do design with it, but also because Scribus helps us think about
links between software, Free Culture and design. Andreas
is a mathematician with an interest in system dynamics,
who lives and works in Lübeck, Germany. Together with
Franz Schmid, Petr Vanek (subik), Riku Leino (Tsoots),
Oleksandr Moskalenko (malex), Craig Bradney (MrB), Jean
Ghali and Peter Linnel (mrdocs) he forms the core Scribus
developer team. He has been working on Scribus since
2003 and is currently responsible for redesigning the internal workings of its text layout system.
This weekend Peter Linnel presented amongst many other new Scribus features 1 ,
‘The Color Wheel’, which at the click of a button visualises documents the way
they would be perceived by a colour blind person. Can you explain how such a
feature entered into Scribus? Did you for example speak to accessibility experts?

I don’t think we did. The code was implemented by subik 2 , a developer
from the Czech Republic. As far as I know, he saw a feature somewhere else
or he found an article about how to do this kind of stuff, and I don’t know
where he did it, but I would have to ask him. It was a logic extension of the
colour wheel functionality, because if you pick different colours, they look
different to all people. What looks like red and green to one person, might
look like grey and yellow to other persons. Later on we just extended the
code to apply to the whole canvas.
1

2

http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Version_1.3.4%2B-New_Features
Petr Vanek

13

It is quite special to offer such a precise preview of different perspectives in your
software. Do you think it it is particular to Scribus to pay attention to these kind
of things?

Yeah, sure. Well, the interesting thing is ... in Scribus we are not depending
on money and time like other proprietary packages. We can ask ourselves:
Is this useful? Would I have fun implementing it? Am I interested in seeing
how it works? So if there is something we would like to see, we implement
it and look at it. And because we have a good contact with our user base,
we can also pick up good ideas from them.
There clearly is a strong connection between Scribus and the world of prepress
and print. So, for us as users, it is an almost hallucinating experience that while
on one side the software is very well developed when it comes to .pdf export for
example, I would say even more developed than in other applications, but than
still it is not possible to undo a text edit. Could you maybe explain how such a
discrepancy can happen, to make us understand better?

One reason is, that there are more developers working on the project,
and even if there was only one developer, he or she would have her own
interests. Remember what George Williams said about FontForge ... 3 he is
not that interested in nice Graphical User Interfaces, he just makes his own
functionality ... that is what interests him. So unless someone else comes
up who compensates for this, he will stick to what he likes. I think that
is the case with all Open Source applications. Only if you have someone
interested and able to do just this certain thing, it will happen. And if it
is something boring or something else ... it will probably not happen. One
way to balance this, is to keep in touch with real users, and to listen to
the problems they have. At least for the Scribus team, if we see people
complaining a lot about a certain feature missing ... we will at some point
say: come on, let’s do something about it. We would implement a solution and
when we get thanks from them and make them happy, that is always nice.

Can you tell us a bit more about the reasons for putting all this work into
developing Scribus, because a layout application is quite a complex monster with
all the elements that need to work together ... Why is it important you find, to
develop Scribus?
3

I think the ideas behind it are beautiful in my mind

14

I use to joke about the special mental state you need to become a Scribus
developer ... and one part of it is probably megalomania! It is kind of mountain climbing. We just want to do it, to prove it can be done. That must
have been also true for Franz Schmid, our founder, because at that time,
when he started, it was very unlikely that he would succeed. And of course
once you have some feedback, you start to think: hey, I can do it ... it works.
People can use it, people can print with it, do things ... so why not make it even
better? Now we are following InDesign and QuarkXpress, and we are playing
the top league of page layout applications ... we’re kind of in a competition
with them. It is like climbing a mountain and than seeing the next, higher
mountain from the top.

In what way is it important to you that Scribus is Free Software?

Well ... it would not work with closed software. Open software allows you to
get other people that also are interested in working on the project involved,
so you can work together. With closed software you usually have to pay
people; I would only work because someone else wants me to do it and
we would not be as motivated. It is totally different. If it was closed, it
would not be fun. In Germany they studied what motivates Open Source
developers, and they usually list: ‘fun’; they want to do something more
challenging than at work, and some social stuff is mentioned as well. Of
course it is not money.
One of the reasons the Scribus project seems so important to us, is that it might
draw in other kinds of users, and open up the world of professional publishing to
people who can otherwise not afford proprietary packages. Do you think Scribus
will change the way publishing works? Does that motivate you, when you work
on it?

I think the success of Open Source projects will also change the way people
use software. But I do not think it is possible to foresee or plan, in what
way this will change. We see right now that Scribus is adopted by all kinds
of idealists, who think that is interesting, lets try how far we can go, and
do it like that. There are other users that really just do not have the money
to pay for a professional page layout application such as very small newspapers associations, sports groups, church groups. They use Scribus because
otherwise they would have used a pirated copy of some other software, or
15

another application which is not up to that task, such as a normal word processor. Or otherwise they would have used a deficient application like MS
Publisher to do it. I think what Scribus will change, is that more people
will be exposed to page layout, and that is a good thing, I think.

In another interview with the Scribus team 4 , Craig Bradney speaks about the
fact that the software is often compared with its proprietary competition. He
brings up the ‘Scribus way of doing things’. What do you think is ‘The Scribus
Way’?

I don’t think Craig meant it that way. Our goal is to produce good output,
and make that easy for users. If we are in doubt, we think for example:
InDesign does this in quite an OK way, so we try to do it in a similar way;
we do not have any problems with that. On the other hand ... I told you a
bit about climbing mountains ... We cannot go from the one top to the next
one just in one step. We have to move slowly, and have to find our ways and
move through valleys and that sometimes also limits us. I can say: I want it
this way but then it is not possible now, it might be on the roadmap, but we
might have to do other things first.

When we use Scribus, we actually thought we were experiencing ‘The Scribus
Way’ through how it differences from other layout packages. First of all, in
Scribus there is a lot more attention for everything that happens after the layout
is done, i.e. export, error checking etc. and second, working with the text editor
is clearly the preferred way of doing layout. For us it links the software to a more
classic ways of doing design: a strictly phased process where a designer starts with
writing typographic instructions which are carried out by a typesetter, after which
the designer pastes everything into the mock-up. In short: it seems easier to do a
magazine in Scribus, than a poster. Do you recognize that image?
That is an interesting thought, I have never seen it that way before. My
background is that I did do a newspaper, magazine for a student group, and
we were using PageMaker, and of course that influenced me. In a small
group that just wants to bring out a magazine, you distribute the task of
writing some articles, and usually you have only one or two persons who are
capable of using a page layout application. They pull in the stories and make
some corrections, and then do the layout. Of course that is a work flow I am
4

http://www.kde.me.uk/index.php?page=fosdem-interview-scribus

16

familiar with, and I don’t think we really have poster designers or graphic
artists in the team. On the other hand ... we do ask our users what they
think should be possible with Scribus and if a functionality is not there, we
ask them to put in a bug report so we do not forget it and some time later
we will pick it up and implement it. Especially the possibility to edit from
the canvas, this will approve in the upcoming versions.
Some things we just copied from other applications. I think Franz 5 had no
previous experience with PageMaker, so when I came to Scribus, and saw
how it handled text chains, I was totally dismayed and made some changes
right away because I really wanted it to work the way it works in PageMaker,
that is really nice. So, previous experience and copying from another applications was one part of the development. Another thing is just technical
problems. Scribus is at the moment internally not that well designed, so we
first have to rewrite a lot of code to be able to reach some elements. The
coding structure for drawing and layout was really cumbersome inside and
it was difficult to improve. We worked with 2.500 lines of code, and there
were no comments in between. So we broke it down in several elements,
put some comments in and also asked Franz: why did you did this or that, so
we could put some structure back into the code to understand how it works.
There is still a lot of work to be done, and we hope we can reach a state
where we can implement new stuff more easily.
It is interesting how the 2.500 lines of code are really tangible when you use
Scribus old-style, even without actually seeing them. When Peter Linnel was
explaining how to make the application comply to the conservative standards of
the printing business, he used this term ‘self-defensive code’ ...
At Scribus we have a value that a file should never break in a print shop.
Any bug report we receive in this area, is treated with first priority.

We can speak from experience, that this is really true! But this robustness shifts
out of sight when you use the inbuilt script function; then it is as if you come
in to the software through the backdoor. From self-defence to the heart of the
application?

It is not really self-defence ... programmers and software developers sometimes use the expression: ‘a user should not shoot himself in the foot’.
5

Schmid

17

Scribus will not protect you from ugly layout, if that would be possible at
all! Although I do sometimes take deliberate decisions to try and do it ...
for example that for as long as I am around, I will not make an option to
do ‘automatic letter spacing’, because I think it is just ugly. If you do it
manually, that is your responsibility; I just do not feel like making anything
like that work automatically. What we have no problems with, is to prevent
you from making invalid output. If Scribus thinks a certain font is not OK,
and it might break on one or two types of printers ... this is reason enough
for us to make sure this font is not used. The font is not even used partially,
it is gone. That is the kind of self-defence Peter Linnel was talking about.
It is also how we build .pdf files and PostScript. Some ways of building
PostScript take less storage, some of it would be easier to read for humans,
but we always take an approach that would be the least problematic in a
print shop. This meant for example, that you could not search in a .pdf. 6
I think you can do that now, but there are still limitations; it is on the
roadmap to improve over time, to even add an option to output a web oriented .pdf and a print oriented .pdf ... but it is an important value in Scribus
is to get the output right. To prevent people to really shoot themselves in
the foot.

Our last question is about the relation between the content that is layed out
in Scribus, and the fact that it is an Open Source project. Just as an example,
Microsoft Word will come out with an option to make it easy to save a document
with a Creative Commons License 7 . Would this, or not, be an interesting option
to add to Scribus? Would you be interested in making that connection, between
software and content?
It could well be we would copy that, if it is not already been patented by
Microsoft! To me it sounds a bit like a marketing trick ... because it is such
an easy function to do. But, if someone from Creative Commons would ask
for this function, I think someone would implement it for Scribus in a short
time, and I think we would actually like it. Maybe we would generalize it a
little, so that for example you could also add other licenses too. We already
have support for some meta data, and in the future we might put some more
function in to support license managing, for example also for fonts.
6
7

because the fonts get outlined and/or reencoded
http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/5947

18

About the relation between content and Open Source software in general
... there are some groups who are using Scribus I politically do not really
identify with. Or more or less not at all. If I meet those people on the IRC
chat, I try to be very neutral, but I of course have my own thoughts in the
back of my head.

Do you think using a tool like Scribus produces a certain kind of use?

No. Preferences for work tools and political preference are really orthogonal,
and we have both. For example when you have some right wing people they
could also enjoy using Scribus and socialist groups as well. It is probably the
best for Scribus to keep that stuff out of it. I am not even sure about the
political conviction of the other developers. Usually we get along very well,
but we don’t talk about those kinds of things very much. In that sense I
don’t think that using Scribus will influence what is happening with it.
As a tool, because it makes creating good page layouts much easier, it will
probably change the landscape because a lot of people get exposed to page
layout and they learn and teach other people; and I think that is growing,
and I hope it will be growing faster than if it is all left to big players like
InDesign and Quark ... I think this will improve and it will maybe also
change the demands that users will make for our application. If you do page
layout, you get into a new frame of mind ... you look in a different way at
publications. It is less content oriented, but more layout oriented. You will
pick something up and it will spread. People by now have understood that
it is not such a good idea to use twelve different fonts in one text ... and I
think that knowledge about better page layout will also spread.

19

When we came to the Libre Graphics Meeting
for the first time in 2007, we recorded this rare
conversation with George Williams, developer of
FontForge, the editing tool for fonts. We spoke
about Shakespeare, Unicode, the pleasure of making beautiful things, and pottery.
We‘re doing these interviews, as we’re working as designers on Open Source
OK.

With Open Source tools, as typographers, but often when we speak to
developers they say well, tell me what you want, or they see our interest in
what they are doing as a kind of feature request or bug report.

(laughs) Yes.

Of course it’s clear that that’s the way it often works, but for us it’s also
interesting to think about these tools as really tools, as ways of shaping
work, to try and understand how they are made or who is making them.
It can help us make other things. So this is actually what we want to talk
about. To try and understand a bit about how you’ve been working on
FontForge. Because that’s the project you’re working on.

OK.

And how that connects to other ideas of tools or tools’ shape that you
make. These kind of things. So maybe first it’s good to talk about what
it is that you make.

OK. Well ... FontForge is a font editor.
I started playing with fonts when I bought my first Macintosh, back in the
early eighties (actually it was the mid-eighties) and my father studied textual bibliography and looked at the ways the printing technology of the
Renaissance affected the publication of Shakespeare’s works. And what that
meant about the errors in the compositions we see in the copies we have
left from the Renaissance. So my father was very interested in Renaissance
printing (and has written books on this subject) and somehow that meant
23

that I was interested in fonts. I’m not quite sure how that connection happened, but it did. So I was interested in fonts. And there was this program
that came out in the eighties called Fontographer which allowed you to create PostScript 1 and later TrueType 2 fonts. And I loved it. And I made lots
of calligraphic fonts with it.

You were ... like 20?

I was 20~30. Lets see, I was born in 1959, so in the eighties I was in my
twenties mostly. And then Fontographer was bought up by Macromedia 3
who had no interest in it. They wanted FreeHand 4 which was done by
the same company. So they dropped Fon ... well they continued to sell
Fontographer but they didn’t update it. And then OpenType 5 came out and
Unicode 6 came out and Fontographer didn’t do this right and it didn’t do
that right ... And I started making my own fonts, and I used Fontographer
to provide the basis, and I started writing scripts that would add accents to
latin letters and so on. And figured out the Type1 7 format so that I could
decompose it — decompose the Fontographer output so that I could add
1
2
3
4
5

6
7

PostScript fonts are outline font specifications developed by Adobe Systems for professional
digital typesetting, which uses PostScript file format to encode font information.
Wikipedia. PostScript fonts — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple and Microsoft in the late 1980s as a
competitor to Adobe’s Type 1 fonts used in PostScript.
Wikipedia. TrueType — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

Macromedia was an American graphics, multimedia and web development software company
(1992–2005). Its rival, Adobe Systems, acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005.
Wikipedia. Macromedia — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

Adobe FreeHand (formerly Macromedia Freehand) is a computer application for creating
two-dimensional vector graphics. Adobe discontinued development and updates to the
program. Wikipedia. Adobe FreeHand — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType,
retaining TrueType’s basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing
typographic behavior. Wikipedia. Opentype — wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and
handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems.
Wikipedia. Unicode — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

Type 1 is a font format for single-byte digital fonts for use with Adobe Type Manager
software and with PostScript printers. It can support font hinting. It was originally a
proprietary specification, but Adobe released the specification to third-party font
manufacturers provided that all Type 1 fonts adhere to it.
Wikipedia. PostScript fonts — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

24

my own things to it. And then Fontographer didn’t do Type0 8 PostScript
fonts, so I figured that out.
And about this time, the little company I was working for, a tiny little
startup — we wrote a web HTML editor — where you could sit at your
desk and edit pages on the web — it was before FrontPage 9 , but similar to
FrontPage. And we were bought by AOL and then we were destroyed by
AOL, but we had stock options from AOL and they went through the roof.
So ... in the late nineties I quit. And I didn’t have to work.
And I went off to Madagascar for a while to see if I wanted to be a primatologist. And ... I didn’t. There were too many leaches in the rainforest.

(laughs)

So I came back, and I wrote a font editor instead.
And I put it up on the web and in late 99, and within a month someone
gave me a bug report and was using it.
(laughs) So it took a month

Well, you know, there was no advertisement, it was just there, and someone
found it and that was neat!
(laughs)

And that was called PfaEdit (because when it began it only did PostScript)
and I ... it just grew. And then — I don’t know — three, four, five years ago
someone pointed out that PfaEdit wasn’t really appropriate any more, so I
asked various users what would be a good name and a french guy said How
’bout FontForge? So. It became FontForge then. — That’s a much better
name than PfaEdit.

(laughs)

Used it ever since.

But your background ... you talked about your father studying ...
8
9

Type 0 is a ‘composite’ font format . A composite font is composed of a high-level font that
references multiple descendent fonts.
Wikipedia. PostScript fonts — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

Microsoft FrontPage is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and Web site administration tool from
Microsoft discontinued in December 2006.
Wikipedia. Microsoft FrontPage — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

25

I grew up in a household where Shakespeare was quoted at me every day,
and he was an English teacher, still is an English teacher, well, obviously
retired but he still occasionally teaches, and has been working for about 30
years on one of those versions of Shakespeare where you have two lines of
Shakespeare text at the top and the rest of the page is footnotes. And I went
completely differently and became a mathematician and computer scientist
and worked in those areas for almost twenty years and then went off and
tried to do my own things.

So how did you become a mathematician?
(pause) I just liked it.
(laughs) just liked it

I was good at it. I got pushed ahead in high school. It just never occurred
to me that I’d do anything else — until I met a computer. And then I still
did maths because I didn’t think computers were — appropriate — or — I
was a snob. How about that.

(laughs)

But I spent all my time working on computers as I went through university.
And then got my first job at JPL 10 and shortly thereafter the shuttle 11
blew up and we had some — some of our experiments — my little group
— flew on the shuttle and some of them flew on an airplane which went
over the US took special radar pictures of the US. We also took special radar
pictures of the world from the shuttle (SIR-A, SIR-B, SIR-C). And then
our airplane burned up. And JPL was not a very happy place to work after
that. So then I went to a little company with some college friends of mine,
that they’d started, created compilers and debuggers — do you know what
those are?
Mm-hmm.

And I worked a long time on that, and then the internet came out and found
another little company with some friends — and worked on HTML.
10
11

Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred on January 28, 1986, when the NASA Space
Shuttle orbiter Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its
seven crew members.
Wikipedia. Space Shuttle Challenger disaster — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

26

So when, before we moved, I was curious about, I wanted you to talk
about a Shakespearian influence on your interest in fonts. But on the
other hand you talk about working in a company where you did HTML
editors at the time you actually started, I think. So do you think that
is somehow present ... the web is somehow present in your — in how
FontForge works? Or how fonts work or how you think about fonts?

I don’t think the web had much to do with my — well, that’s not true.
OK, when I was working on the HTML editor, at the time, mid-90s, there
weren’t any Unicode fonts, and so part of the reason I was writing all these
scripts to add accents and get Type0 support in PostScript (which is what
you need for a Unicode font) was because I needed a Unicode font for our
HTML product.
To that extent — yes-s-s-s.
It had an effect. Aside from that, not really.
The web has certainly allowed me to distribute it. Without the web I doubt
anyone would know — I wouldn’t have any idea how to ‘market’ it. If that’s
the right word for something that doesn’t get paid for. And certainly the
web has provided a convenient infrastructure to do the documentation in.
But — as for font design itself — that (the web) has certainly not affected
me.
Maybe with this creative commons talk that Jon Phillips was giving, there
may be, at some point, a button that you can press to upload your fonts to
the Open Font Library 12 — but I haven’t gotten there yet, so I don’t want
to promise that.
(laughs) But no, indeed there was – hearing you speak about ccHost 13 –
that’s the ...

Mm-hmm.

... Software we are talking about?

That’s what the Open Font Library uses, yes.
12
13

Open Font Library is a project devoted to the hosting and encouraged creation of fonts
released under Free Licenses.
Wikipedia. Open Font Library — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

ccHost is a web-based media hosting engine upon which Creative Commons’ ccMixter remix
web community is built. Wikipedia. CcHost — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2012. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

27

Yeah. And a connection to FontForge could change the way, not only
how you distribute fonts, but also how you design fonts.

It — it might. I don’t know ... I don’t have a view of the future.
I guess to some extent, obviously font design has been affected by requiring
it (the font) to be displayed on a small screen with a low resolution display.
And there are all kinds of hacks in modern fonts formats for dealing with
low resolution stuff. PostScript calls them hints and TrueType calls them
instructions. They are different approaches to the same thing. But that,
that certainly has affected font design in the last — well since PostScript
came out.
The web itself? I don’t think that has yet been a significant influence on
font design, but then — I’m no longer a designer. I discovered I was much
better at designing font editors than at designing fonts.
So I’ve given up on that aspect of things.
Mm-K, because I’m curious about your making a division about being a
designer, or being a font-editor-maker, because for me that same definition of maker, these two things might be very related.

Well they are. And I only got in to doing it because the tools that were
available to me were not adequate. But I have found since — that I’m
not adequate at doing the design, there are many people who are better at
designing — designing fonts, than I am. And I like to design fonts, but I
have made some very ugly ones at times.
And so I think I will — I’ll do that occasionally, but that’s not where I’m
going to make a mark.
Mostly now —
I just don’t have the —
The font editor itself takes up so much of time that I don’t have the energy,
the enthusiasm, or anything like that to devote to another major creative
project. And designing a font is a major creative project.
Well, can we talk about the major creative project of designing a font
editor? I mean, because I’m curious how — how that is a creative project
for you — how you look at that.

I look at it as a puzzle. And someone comes up to me with a problem, and I
try and figure out how to solve it. And sometimes I don’t want to figure out
28

how to solve it. But I feel I should anyway. And sometimes I don’t want to
figure out how to solve it and I don’t.
That’s one of the glories of being one’s own boss, you don’t have to do
everything that you are asked.
But — to me — it’s just a problem. And it’s a fascinating problem. But
why is it fascinating? — That’s just me. No one else, probably, finds
it fascinating. Or — the guys who design FontLab probably also find it
fascinating, there are two or three other font design programs in the world.
And they would also find it fascinating.

Can you give an example of something you would find fascinating?

Well. Dave Crossland who was sitting behind me at the end was talking
to me today — he sat down — we started talking after lunch but on the
way up the stairs — at first he was complaining that FontForge isn’t written
with a standard widget set. So it looks different from everything else. And
yes, it does. And I don’t care. Because this isn’t something which interests
me.
On the other hand he was saying that what he also wanted was a paragraph
level display of the font. So that as he made changes in the font he could
see a ripple effect in the paragraph.
Now I have a thing which does a word level display, but it doesn’t do multilines. Or it does multi-lines if you are doing Japanese (vertical writing mode)
but it doesn’t do multi-columns then. So it’s either one vertical row or one
horizontal row of glyphs.
And I do also have a paragraph level display, but it is static. You bring
it up and it takes the current snapshot of the font and it generates a real
TrueType font and pass it off to the X Window 14 rasterizer — passes it off
to the standard Linux toolchain (FreeType) as that static font and asks that
toolchain to display text.
So what he’s saying is OK, do that, but update the font that you pass off every
now and then. And Yeah, that’d be interesting to do. That’s an interesting project
to work on. Much more interesting than changing my widget set which is
just a lot of work and tedious. Because there is nothing to think about.
It’s just OK, I’ve got to use this widget instead of my widget. My widget does

14

The X Window System is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on UNIX-like
computer operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment:
drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting with a mouse and
keyboard. Wikipedia. X Window System — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

29

exactly what I want — because I designed it that way — how do I make this
thing, which I didn’t design, which I don’t know anything about, do exactly
what I want?
And — that’s dull. For me.

Yeah, well.

Dave, on the other hand, is very hopeful that he’ll find some poor fool
who’ll take that on as a wonderful opportunity. And if he does, that would
be great, because not having a standard widget set is one of the biggest
complaints people have. Because FontForge doesn’t look like anything else.
And people say Well the grey background is very scary. 15
I thought it was normal to have a grey background, but uh ... that’s why we
now have a white background. A white background may be equally scary,
but no one has complained about it yet.

Try red.

I tried light blue and cream. One of them I was told gave people migraines
— I don’t remember specifically what the comment was about the light
blue, but

(someone from inkscape): Make it configurable.

Oh, it is configurable, but no one configures it.

(someone from inkscape): Yeah, I know.

So ...

So, you talked about spending a lot of time on this project, how does that
work, you get up in the morning and start working on FontForge? Or ...
Well, I do many things. Some mornings, yes, I get up in the morning and I
start working on FontForge and I cook breakfast in the background and eat
breakfast and work on FontForge. Some mornings I get up at four in the
morning and go out running for a couple of hours and come back home and
sort of collapse and eat a little bit and go off to yoga class and do a pilates
class and do another yoga class and then go to my pottery class, and go to
the farmers’ market and come home and I haven’t worked on FontForge at
all. So it varies according to the day. But yes I ...
15

It used to have a grey background, now it has a white background

30

There was a period where I was spending 40, 50 hours a week working
on FontForge, I don’t spend that much time on it now, it’s more like 20
hours, though the last month I got all excited about the release that I put
out last Tuesday — today is Sunday. And so I was working really hard —
probably got up to — oh — 30 hours some of that time. I was really excited
about the change. All kinds of things were different — I put in Python
scripting, which people had been asking for — well, I’m glad I’ve done it,
but it was actually kind of boring, that bit — the stuff that came before was
— fascinating.

Like?

I — are you familiar with the OpenType spec? No. OK. The way you ...
the way you specify ligatures and kerning in OpenType can be looked at at
several different levels. And the way OpenType wants you to look at it, I
felt, was unnecessarily complicated. So I didn’t look at it at that level. And
then after about 5 years of looking at it that way I discovered that the reason
I thought it was unnecessarily complicated was because I was only used to
Latin or Cyrillic or Greek text, and for Latin, Cyrillic or Greek, it probably
is unnecessarily complicated. But for Indic scripts it is not unnecessarily
complicated, and you need all those things. So I ripped out all of the code
for specifying strange glyph conversions. You know in Arabic a character
looks different at the beginning of a word and so on? So that’s also handled
in this area. And I ripped all that stuff out and redid it in the way that
OpenType wanted it to be done and not the somewhat simplified but not
sufficiently powerful method that I’d been using up until then.
And that I found, quite fascinating.
And once I’d done that, it opened up all kinds of little things that I could
change that made the font editor itself bettitor. Better. Bettitor?

(laughs) That’s almost Dutch.

And so after I’d done that the display I talked about which could show a
word — I realized that I should redo that to take advantage of what I had
done. And so I redid that, and it’s now, it’s now much more usable. It now
shows — at least I hope it shows — more of what people want to see when
they are working with these transformations that apply to the font, there’s
now a list of the various transformations, that can be enabled at any time
and then it goes through and does them — whereas before it just sort of —
31

well it did kerning, and if you asked it to it would substitute this glyph so
you could see what it would look like — but it was all sort of — half-baked.
It wasn’t very elegant.
And — it’s much better now, and I’m quite proud of that.
It may crash — but it’s much better.

So you bring up half-baked, and when we met we talked about bread
baking.

Oh, yes.

And the pleasure of handling a material when you know it well. Maybe
make reliable bread — meaning that it comes out always the same way,
but by your connection to the material you somehow — well — it’s a
pleasure to do that. So, since you’ve said that, and we then went on
talking about pottery — how clay might be of the same — give the same
kind of pleasure. I’ve been trying to think — how does FontForge have
that? Does it have that and where would you find it or how is the ...
I like to make things. I like to make things that — in some strange
definition are beautiful. I’m not sure how that applies to making bread,
but my pots — I think I make beautiful pots. And I really like the glazing I
put onto them.
It’s harder to say that a font editor is beautiful. But I think the ideas behind
it are beautiful in my mind — and in some sense I find the user interface
beautiful. I’m not sure that anyone else in the world does, because it’s what
I want, but I think it’s beautiful.
And there’s a satisfaction in making something — in making something
that’s beautiful. And there’s a satisfaction too (as far as the bread goes) in
making something I need. I eat my own bread — that’s all the bread I eat
(except for those few days when I get lazy and don’t get to make bread that
day and have to put it off until the next day and have to eat something that
day — but that doesn’t happen very often).
So it’s just — I like making beautiful things.

OK, thank you.
Mm-hmm.

That was very nice, thank you very much.

Thank you. I have pictures of my pots if you’d like to see them?
Yes, I would very much like to see them.
32

This conversation with Juliane de Moerlooze was recorded in March 2009.

When you hear people talk about women having more sense
for the global, intuitive and empathic ... and men are more
logical ... even if it is true ... it seems quite a good thing to
have when you are doing math or software?

Juliane is a Brussels based computer scientist, feminist
and Linux user from the beginning. She studied math,
programming and system administration and participates in Samedies. 1 In February 2009 she was voted
president of the Brussels Linux user group (BXLug).

I will start at the end ... you have recently become president of the BXLug. Can
you explain to us what it is, the BXLug?
It is the Brussels Linux user group, a group of Linux users who meet
regularly to really work together on Linux and Free Software. It is the most
active group of Linux users in the French speaking part of Belgium.

How did you come into contact with this group?

That dates a while back. I have been trained in Linux a long time ago ...
Five years? Ten years? Twenty years?

Almost twenty years ago. I came across the beginnings of Linux in 1995 or
1996, I am not sure. I had some Slackware 2 installed, I messed around with
friends and we installed everything ... then I heard people talk about Linux
distributions 3 and decided to discover something else, notably Debian. 4
1
2
3
4

Femmes et Logiciels Libres, group of women maintaining their own server
http://samedi.collectifs.net
one of the earliest Linux distributions
a distribution is a specific collection of applications and a software kernel
one of the largest Linux distributions

37

It is good to know that with Linux you really have a diversity, there are
distributions specially for audio, there are distributions for the larger public
with graphical interfaces, there are distributions that are a bit more ‘geek’,
in short you find everything: there are thousands of distributions but there
are a few principal ones and I heard people talk about an interesting development, which was Debian. I wanted to install it to see, and I discovered
the BXLug meetings, and so I ended up there one Sunday.

What was your experience, the first time you went?

(laughs) Well, it was clear that there were not many women, certainly not. I
remember some sessions ...
What do you mean, not many women? One? Or five?

Usually I was there on my own. Or maybe two. There was a time that we
were three, which was great. There was a director of a school who pushed
Free Software a lot, she organised real ’Journées du Libre’ 5 at her school,
to which she would invite journalists and so on. She was the director but
when she had free time she would use it to promote Free Software, but
I haven’t seen her in a while and I don’t know what happened since. I
also met Faty, well ... I wasn’t there all the time either because I had also
other things to do. There was a friendly atmosphere, with a little bar where
people would discuss with each other, but many were cluttered together in
the middle of the room, like autists hidden behind their computers, without
much communication. There were other members of the group who like me
realised that we were humans that were only concentrating on our machines
and not much was done to make new people feel welcome. Once I realised,
I started to move to the back of the room and say hello to people arriving.
Well, I was not the only one who started to do that but I imagine it might
have felt like a closed group when you entered for the first time. I also
remember in the beginning, as a girl, that ... when people asked questions
... nobody realised that I was actually teaching informatics. It seemed there
was a prejudice even before I had a chance to answer a question. That’s a
funny thing to remember.
Could you talk about the pleasure of handling computers? You might not be the
kind of person that loses herself in front of her computer, but you have a strong
5

Journées du Libre is a yearly festival organised by the BXLug

38

relationship with technology which comes out when you open up the commandline
... there’s something in you that comes to life.

Oh, yes! To begin with, I am a mathematician (‘matheuse’), I was a math
teacher, and I have been programming during my studies and yes, there
was something fantastic about it ... informatics for me is all about logic, but
logic in action, dynamic logic. A machine can be imperfect, and while I’m
not specialised in hardware, there is a part on which you can work, a kind
of determinism that I find interesting, it poses challenges because you can
never know all, I mean it is not easy to be a real system administrator that
knows every detail, that understands every problem. So you are partially in
the unknown, and discovering, in a mathematical world but a world that
moves. For me a machine has a rhythm, she has a cadence, a body, and her
state changes. There might be things that do not work but it can be that
you have left in some mistakes while developing etcetera, but we will get
to know the machine and we will understand. And after, you might create
things that are maybe interesting in real life, for people that want to write
texts or edit films or want to communicate via the Internet ... these are all
layers one adds, but you start ... I don’t know how to say it ... the machine is
at your service but you have to start with discovering her. I detest the kind
of software that asks you just to click here and there and than it doesn’t
work, and than you have to restart, and than you are in a situation where
you don’t have the possibility to find out where the problem is.
When it doesn’t show how it works?

For me it is important to work with Free Software, because when I have
time, I will go far, I will even look at the source code to find out what’s
wrong with the interface. Luckily, I don’t have to do this too often anymore
because software has become very complicated, twenty years later. But we
are not like persons with machines that just click ... I know many people,
even in informatics, who will say ‘this machine doesn’t work, this thing
makes a mistake’

The fact that Free Software proposes an open structure, did that have anything
to do with your decision to be a candidate for BXLug?
Well, last year I was already very active and I realised that I was at a point
in my life that I could use informatics better, and I wanted to work in this
39

field, so I spent much time as a volunteer. But the moment that I decided,
now this is enough, I need to put myself forward as a candidate, was after a
series of sexist incidents. There was for example a job offer on the BXLug
mailing list that really needed to be responded to ... I mean ... what was
that about? To be concrete: Someone wrote to the mailing list that his
company was looking for a developer in so and so on and they would like
a Debian developer type applying, or if there weren’t any available, it would
be great if it would be a blond girl with large tits. Really, a horrible thing so
I responded immediately and than it became even worse because the person
that had posted the original message, sent out another one asking whether
the women on the list were into castration and it took a large amount of
diplomacy to find a way to respond. We discussed it with the Samediennes 6
and I though about it ... I felt supported by many people that had well
understood that this was heavy and that the climate was getting nasty but
in the end I managed to send out an ironic message that made the other
person excuse himself and stop these kind of sexist jokes, which was good.
And after that, there was another incident, when the now ex-president of
the group did a radio interview. I think he explained Free Software relatively
well to a public that doesn’t know about it, but as an example how easy it is
to use Free Software, he said even my wife, who is zero with computers, knows
how it works, using the familiar cliché without any reservation. We discussed
this again with the Samediennes, and also internally at the BXLug and than
I thought: well, what is needed is a woman as president, so I need to present
myself. So it is thanks to the Samedies, that this idea emerged, out of the
necessity to change the image of Free Software.

In software and particularly in Free Software, there are relatively few women
participating actively. What kinds of possibilities do you see for women to enter?
It begins already at school ... all the clichés girls hear ... it starts there. We
possibly have a set of brains that is socially constructed, but when you hear
people talk about women having more sense for the global, intuitive and
empathic ... and men are more logic ... even if it is true ... it seems quite a
good thing to have when you are doing math or software? I mean, there is
no handicap we start out with, it is a social handicap ... convincing girls to
become a secretary rather than a system administrator.
6

Participants in the Samedies: Femmes et logiciels libres (http://www.samedies.be)

40

I am assuming there is a link between your feminism and your engagement with
Free Software ...

It is linked at the point where ... it is a political liaison which is about reappropriating tools, and an attempt to imagine a political universe where we
are ourselves implicated in the things we do and make, and where we collectively can discuss this future. You can see it as something very large, socially,
and very idealist too. You should also not idealise the Free Software community itself. There’s an anthropologist who has made a proper description 7 ...
but there are certainly relational and organisational problems, and political
problems, power struggles too. But the general idea ... we have come to the
political point of saying: we have technologies, and we want to appropriate
them and we will discuss them together. I feel I am a feminist ... but I know
there are other kinds of feminism, liberal feminism for example, that do not
want to question the political economical status quo. My feminism is a bit
different, it is linked to eco-feminism, and also to the re-appropriation of
techniques that help us organise as a group. Free Software can be ... well,
there is a direction in Free Software that is linked to ‘Free Enterprise’ and
the American Dream. Everything should be possible: start-ups or pin-ups,
it doesn’t matter. But for me, there is another branch much more ‘libertaire’
and left-wing, where there is space for collective work and where we can ask
questions about the impact of technology. It is my interest of course, and I
know well that even as president of the BXLug I sometimes find myself on
the extreme side, so I will not speak about my ‘libertaire’ ideas all the time
in public, but if anyone asks me ... I know well what is at stake but it is not
necessarily representative of the ideas within the BXLug.

Are their discussions between members, about the varying interests in Free Software?
I can imagine there are people more excited about efficiency and performativity
of these tools, and others attracted by it’s political side.
Well, these arguments mix, and also since some years there is unfortunately
less of a fundamental discussion. At the moment I have the impression that
we are more into ‘things to do’ when we meet in person. On the mailing
list there are frictions and small provocations now and then, but the really
interesting debates are over, since a few years ... I am a bit disappointed in
7

Christophe Lazarro. La liberté logicielle. Une ethnographie des pratiques d’échange et de
coopération au sein de la communauté Debian. Academia editons, 2008

41

that, actually. But it is not really a problem, because I know other groups
that pose more interesting questions and with whom I find it more interesting to have a debate. Last year we have been working away like small busy
bees, distributing the general idea of Free Software with maybe a hint to the
societal questions behind but in fact not marking it out as a counterweight
to a commercialised society. We haven’t really deepened the problematics,
because for me ... it is clear that Free Software has won the battle, they have
been completely recuperated by the business world, and now we are in a
period where tendencies will become clear. I have the impression that with
the way society is represented right now ... where they are talking about the
economical crisis ... and that we are becoming a society of ‘gestionnaires’
and ideological questions seem not very visible.
So do you think it is more or less a war between two tendencies, or can both
currents coexist, and help each other in some way?

The current in Free Software that could think about resistance and ask
political questions and so on, does not have priority at the moment. But
what we can have is debates and discussions from person to person and we
can interpolate members of the BXLug itself, who really sometimes start to
use a kind of marketing language. But it is relational ... it is from person
to person. At the moment, what happens on the level of businesses and
society, I don’t know. I am looking for a job and I see clearly that I will
need to accept the kinds of hierarchies that exist but I would like to create
something else. The small impact a group like BXLug can make ... well,
there are several small projects, such as the one to develop a distribution
specifically designed for small organisations, to which nobody could object
of course. Different directions coexist, because there is currently not any
project with enough at stake that it would shock the others.
To go once again from a large scale to a small scale ... how would you describe
your own itinerary from mathematics to working on and with software?

I did two bachelors at the University Libre de Bruxelles, and than I studied
to become a math teacher. I had a wonderful teacher, and we were into
the pleasure of exercising our brains, and discovering theory but a large part
of our courses were concentrated on pedagogy and how to become a good
teacher, how to open up the mind of a student in the context of a course.
That’s when I discovered another pleasure, of helping a journey into a kind
42

of math that was a lot more concrete, or that I learned to render concrete.
One of the difficult subjects you need to teach in high schools, is scales and
plans. I came up with a rendering of a submarine and all students, boys as
well as girls, were quickly motivated, wanting to imagine themselves at the
real scale of the vessel. I like math, because it is not linked to a pre-existing
narrative structure, it is a theoretical construct we accept or not, like the
rules of a game. For me, math is an ideal way to form a critical mind.
When you are a child, math is fundamentally fiction, full stop. I remember
that when I learned modern math at school ... I had an older teacher, and
she wasn’t completely at ease with the subject. I have the impression that
because of this ... maybe it was a question of the relation between power and
knowledge ... she did not arrive with her knowledge all prepared, I mean it
was a classical form of pedagogy, but it was a new subject to her and there
was something that woke up in me, I felt at ease, I followed, we did not go
too fast ...
It was open knowledge, not already formed and closed?

Well, we discovered the subject together with the teacher. It might sound
bizarre, and she certainly did not do this on purpose, but I immediately felt
confident, which did not have too much to do with the subject of the class,
but with the fact that I felt that my brains were functioning.
I still prefer to discover the solution to a mathematical problem together
with others. But when it comes to software, I can be on my own. In
the end it is me, who wants to ask myself: why don’t I understand? Why
don’t I make any progress? In Free Software, there is the advantage of
having lots of documentation and manuals available online, although you
can almost drown in it. For me, it is always about playing with your brain,
there is at least always an objective where I want to arrive, whether it is
understanding theory or software ... and in software, it is also clear that you
want something to work. There is a constraint of efficiency that comes in
between, that of course somehow also exists in math, but in math when you
have solved a problem, you have solved it on a piece of paper. I enjoy the
game of exploring a reality, even if it is a virtual one.

43

In September 2013 writer, developer, freestyle rapper and
poet John Haltiwanger joined the ConTeXt user meeting in
Brejlov (Czech Republic) 1 to present his ideas on Subtext,
‘A Proposed Processual Grammar for a Multi-Output PreFormat’. The interview started as a way to record John’s
impressions fresh from the meeting, but moved into discussing the future of layout in terms of ballistics.

How did you end up going to the ConTeXt meeting? Actually, where was it?

It was in Brejlov, which apparently might not even be a town or city. It
might specifically be a hotel. But it has its own ... it’s considered a location,
I guess. But arriving was already kind of a trick, because I was under the
impression there was a train station or something. So I was asking around:
Where is Brejlov? What train do I take to Brejlov? But nobody had any clue,
that this was even something that existed. So that was tricky. But it was really a beautiful venue. How I ended up at the conference specifically? That’s
a good question. I’m not an incredibly active member on the ConTeXt
mailing list, but I pop up every now and again and just kind of express a
few things that I have going on. So initially I mentioned my thesis, back in
January or maybe March, back when it was really unformulated. Maybe it
was even in 2009. But I got really good responses from Hans. 2 Originally,
when I first got to the Netherlands in 2009 in August, the next weekend
was the third annual ConTeXt meeting. I had barely used the software at
that point, but I had this sort of impulse to go. Well anyway, I did not have
the money for it at that time. So the fact that there was another one coming
round, was like: Ok, that sounds good. But there was something ... we got
into a conversation on the mailing list. Somebody, a non-native English
speaker was asking about pronouns and gendered pronouns and the proper
way of ‘pronouning’ things. In English we don’t have a suitable gender neutral pronoun. So he asked the questions and some guy responded: The
1
2

http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2013/
Hans Hagen is the principal author and developer of ConTeXt, past president of NTG, and
active in many other areas of the TeX community
Hans Hagen – Interview – TeX Users Group. http://tug.org/interviews/hagen.html, 2006. [Online; accessed 18.12.2014]

47

proper way to do it, is to use he. It’s an invented problem. This whole question is
an invented question and there is no such thing as a need for considering any other
options besides this. 3 So I wrote back and said: That’s not up to you to decide,
because if somebody has a problem, than there is a problem. So I kind of naively
suggested that we could make a Unicode character, that can stand in, like a
typographical element, that does not necessarily have a pronounciation yet.
So something that, when you are reading it, you could either say he or she
or they and it would be sort of [emergent|dialogic|personalized].
Like delayed political correctness or delayed embraciveness. But, little did I
know, that Unicode was not the answer.

Did they tell you that? That Unicode is not the answer?

Well, Arthur actually wrote back 4 , and he knows a lot about Unicode and
he said: With Unicode you have to prove that it’s in use already. In my sense,
Unicode was a playground where I could just map whatever values I wanted
to be whatever glyph I wanted. Somewhere, in some corner of unused
namespace or something. But that’s not the way it works. But TeX works
like this. So I could always just define a macro that would do this. Hans
actually wrote a macro 5 that would basically flip a coin at the beginning of
your paper. So whenever you wanted to use the gender neutral, you would
just use the macro and then it wouldn’t be up to you. It’s another way of
obfuscating, or pushing the responsibility away from you as an author. It’s
like ok, well, on this one it was she, the next it was he, or whatever.

So in a way gender doesn’t matter anymore?

Right. And then I was just like, that’s something we should talk about at the
meeting. I guess I sent out something about my thesis and Hans or Taco,
they know me, they said that it would great for you to do a presentation of
this at the meeting. So that’s very much how I ended up there.
You had never met anyone from ConTeXt before?
3
4
5

http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2010/051058.html
http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2010/051098.html
http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2010/051116.html

48

No. You and Pierre were the only people I knew, that have been using it,
besides me, at the time. It was interesting in that way, it was really ... I mean
I felt a little bit ... nervous isn’t exactly the word, but I sort of didn’t know
what exactly my positon was meant to be. Because these guys ... it’s a users’
meeting, right? But the way that tends to work out for Open Source projects
is developers talking to developers. So ... my presentation was saturated ...
I think, I didn’t realise how quickly time goes in presentations, at the time.
So I spent like 20 minutes just going through my attack on media theory in
the thesis. And there was a guy, falling asleep on the right side of the room,
just head back. So, that was entertaining. To be the black sheep. That’s
always a fun position. It was entertaining for me, to meet these people
and to be at the same time sort of an outsider. Not a really well known
user contrasted with other people, who are more like cornerstones of the
community. They were meeting everybody in person for the first time. And
somehow I could connect. So now, a month and a half later we’re starting
this ConTeXt group, an international ConTeXt users’ group and I’m on the
board, I’m editing the journal. So it’s like, it ...
... that went fast!

It went fast indeed!

What is this ‘ConTeXt User Group’?

To a certain extent the NTG, which is the Netherlands TeX Group, had sort
of been consumed from the inside by the heavyness of ConTeXt, specifically
in the Netherlands. The discussion started to shift to be more ConTeXt.
Now the journal, the MAPS journal, there are maybe 8 or 10 articles, two of
which are not written by either Hans or Taco, who are the main developers
of ConTeXt. And there is zero on anything besides ConTeXt. So the NTG
is almost presented as ok, if you like ConTeXt or if you wanna be in a ConTeXt
user group, you join the NTG. Apparently the journal used to be quite thick
and there are lots of LaTeX users, who are involved. So partially the attempt
is sort of ease that situation a little bit.
It allowed the two communities to separate?
49

Yeah, and not in any way like fast or abrupt fashion. We’re trying to be
very conscious about it. I mean, it’s not ConTeXt’s fault that LaTeX users
are not submitting any articles for the journal. That user group will always have the capacity, those people could step up. The idea is to setup a
more international forum, something that has more of the sense of support
for ... because the software is getting bigger and right now we’re really reliant on this mailing list and if you have your stupid question either Hans,
Taco or Wolfgang will shoot something back. And they become reliant on
Wolfgang to be able to answer questions, because there are more users coming. Arthur was really concerned, among other people, with the scalability
of our approach right now. And how to set up this infrastructure to support
the software as it grows bigger. I should forward you this e-mail that I
wrote, that is a response to their name choices. They were contemplating
becoming a group called ‘cows’. Which is clearly an inside joke because they
loved to do figure demonstrations with cows. And seeing ConTeXt as I do,
as a platform, a serious platform, for the future, something that ... it’s almost like it hasn’t gotten to its ... I mean it’s in such rapid development ...
it’s so undocumented ... it’s so ... like ... it’s like rushing water or something.
But at some point ... it’s gonna fill up the location. Maybe we’re still building this platform, but when it’s solid and all the pieces are ... everything
is being converted to metric, no more inches and miles and stuff. At that
point, when we have this platform, it will turn into a loadable Lua library.
It won’t even be an executable at that point.
It is interesting how quickly you have become part of this community. From being
complete outsider not knowing where to go, to now speaking about a communal
future.
To begin with, I guess I have to confront my own seemingly boundless
propensity for picking obscure projects ... as sort of my ... like the things
that I champion. And ... it often boils down to flexibility.
You think that obscurity has anything to do with the future compatibility of
ConTeXt?
50

Well, no. I think the obscurity is something that I don’t see this actually
lasting for too long in the situation of ConTeXt. As it gets more stable it’s
basically destined to become more of a standard platform. But this is all
tied into to stuff that I’m planning to do with the software. If my generative
typesetting platform ... you know ... works and is actually feasible, which is
maybe a 80% job.

Wait a second. You are busy developing another platform in parallel?

Yes, although I’m kind of hovering over it or sort of superceeding it as
an interface. You have LaTeX, which has been at version 2e since the
mid-nineties, LaTeX 3 is sort of this dim point on the horizon. Whereas
ConTeXt is changing every week. It’s converting the entire structure of this
macro package from being written in TeX to being written in Lua. And
so there is this transition from what could be best described as an archaic
approach to programming, to this shiny new piece of software. I see it as
being competitive strictly because it has so much configurability. But that’s
sort of ... and that’s the double edged sword of it, that the configuration
is useless without the documentation. Donald Knuth is famous for saying
that he realises he would have to write the software and the manual for the
software himself. And I remember in our first conversation about the sort
of paternalistic culture these typographic projects seem to have. Or at least
in the sense of TeX, they seem to sort of coagulate around a central wizard
kind of guy.

You think ConTeXt has potential for the future, while TeX and LaTeX belong
... to the past?

I guess that’s sort of the way it sounds, doesn’t it?

I guess I share some of your excitement, but also have doubts about how far the
project actually is away from the past. Maybe you can describe how you think it
will develop, what will be that future? How you see that?

Right. That’s a good way to start untangling all the stuff I was just talking
about, when I was sort of putting the cart before the horse. I see it developing in some ways ... the way that it’s used today and the way that current,
51

heavy users use it. I think that they will continue to use in it in a similar
way. But you already have people who are utilising LuaTeX ... and maybe
this is an important thing to distinguish between ConTeXt and LuaTeX.
Right now they’re sort of very tied together. Their development is intrinsic,
they drive each other. But to some extent some of the more interesting
stuff that is been being done with these tools is ... like ... XML processing.
Where you throw XML into Lua code and run LuaTeX kerning operations
and line breaking and all this kind of stuff. Things that, to a certain extent,
you needed to engage TeX on its own terms in the past. That’s why macro
packages develop as some sort of sustainable way to handle your workflow.
This introduction of LuaTeX I think is sort of ... You can imagine it being
loaded as a library just as a way to typeset the documentation for code. It
could be like this holy grail of literate programming. Not saying this is the
answer, but that at least it will come out as a nice looking .pdf.

LuaTeX allows the connection to TeX to widen?

Yeah. It takes sort of the essence of TeX. And this is, I guess, the crucial
thing about LuaTeX that up until now TeX is both a typesetting engine and
a programming language. And not a very good one. So now that TeX can
be the engine, the Tschicholdian algorithms, the modernist principles, that,
for whatever reason, do look really good, can be utilised and connected to
without having to deal with this 32 year old macro programming language.
On top of that and part of how directly engaging with that kind of movement foreward is ... not that I am switching over to LuaTeX entirely at this
point ... but that this generative typesetting platform that was sort of the
foundation of this journal proposal we did. Where you could imagine actual
humanity scholars using something that is akin to markdown or a wiki formatting kind of system. And I have a nice little buzzword for that: ‘visually
semantic markup’. XML, HTML, TeX, ... none of those are visually semantic. Because it’s all based around these primitives ‘ok, between the angle
brackets’. Everything is between angle brackets. You have to look what’s
inside the angle brackets to know what is happening to what’s between the
angle brackets. Whereas a visually semantic markup ... OK headers! OK
so it’s between two hashmarks or it’s between two whatever ... The whole
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design of those preformatting languages, maybe not wiki markup, but at
least markdown was that it could be printed as a plaintext document and
you could still get a sense of the structure. I think that’s a really crucial
development. So ... in a web browser, on one half of the browser you have
you text input, on the other half you have an real-time rendering of it into
HTML. In the meantime, the way that the interface works, the way that
the visually semantic markup works, is that it is a mutable interface. It
could be tailored to your sense of what it should look like. It can be tailored
specifically to different workflows. And because there is such a diversity
within typographic workflows, typesetting workflows ... that is akin to the
separation of form and content in HTML and CSS, but it’s not meant to be
... as problematic as that. I’m not sure if that is a real goal, or if that goal
is feasible or not. But it’s not meant to be drawing an artificial line, it’s just
meant to make things easier.

So by pulling apart historically grown elements, it becomes ... possibly modern?
Hypermodern?

Something for now and later.

Yes. Part of this idea, the trick ... This software is called ‘Subtext’ and at
this point it’s a conceptual project, but that will change pretty soon. Its
trick is this idea of separation instead of form and content, it’s translation
and effect. The parser itself has to be mutable, has to be able to pull in
the interface, print like decorations basically from a YAML configuration
file or some sort of equivalent. One of this configuration mechanisms that
was designed to be human readable and not machine readable. Like, well
both, striking that balance. Maybe we can get to that kind of ... talking
about agency a little bit. Its trick to really pull that out so that if you want
to ... for instance now in markdown if you have quotes it will be translated
in ConTeXt into \quotation. In ConTeXt that’s a very simple switch
to turn it into German quotes. Or I guess that’s more like international
quotes, everything not English. For the purposes of markdown there is
no, like really easy way, to change that part of the interface. So that when
53

I’m writing, when I use the angle brackets as a quote it would turn into
a \quotation in the output. Whereas with ‘Subtext’ you would just go
into the interface type like configuration and say: These are converted into
a quote basically. And then the effects are listed in other configuration files
so that the effects of quotes in HTML can be ...
... different.

Yes. Maybe have specific CSS properties for spacing, that kind of stuff. And
then in ConTeXt the same sort of ... both the environmental setup as well
as the raw ‘what is put into the document when it’s translated’. This kind of
separation ... you know at that point if both those effects are already the way
that you want them, then all you have to do is change the interface. And
then later on typesetting system, maybe iTeX comes out, you know, Knuth’s
joke, anyway. 6 That kind of separation seems to imply a future proofing
that I find very elegant. That you can just add later on the effects that you
need for a different system. Or a different version of a system, not that you
have to learn ‘mark 6’, or something like that ...
Back to the future ... I wonder about ConTeXt being bound to a particular
practise located with two specific people. Those two are actually the ones that
produce the most complete use cases and thereby define the kind of practise that
ConTeXt allows. Do you think this is a temporary stage or do you think that by
inviting someone like you on the board, as an outsider, that it is a sign of things
going to change?
Right. Well, yeah, this is another one of those put-up or shut-up kind of
things because for instance at the NTG meeting on Wednesday my presentation was very much a user presentation in a room of developers. Because I
basically was saying: Look like this is gonna be a presentation – most presentation are about what you know – and this presentation is really about
what I don’t know ... but what I do know is that there is a lot of room for
teaching ConTeXt in a more practical fashion, you could say. So my idea is
to basically write this documentation on how to typeset poetry, which gets
6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth#Humor

54

into a lot of interesting questions, just a lot of interesting things. Like you
gonna need to write your own macros just at the start ... to make sure you
have not to go in and change every width value at some point. you know,
this kind of thing like ... really baby steps. How to make a cover page. These
kinds of things are not documented.
Documentation is let’s say an interesting challenge for ConTeXt. How do you
think the ConTeXt community could enable different kinds of use, beyond the
ones that are envisioned right now? I guess you have a plan?

Yeah ... that’s a good question. Part of it is just to do stuff, like to get you
more involved in the ConTeXt group for instance, because I was talking to
Arthur and he hadn’t even read the article from V/J10 7 . I think that kind
of stuff is really important. It’s like the whole Blender Foundation kind
of impulse. We have some developers who are paid to do this and that’s
kind of rare already in an Open Source/Free Software project. But then to
kind of have users pushing the boundaries and hitting limits. It’s rare that
Hans will encounter some kind of use case that he didn’t think of and react
in a negative way. Or react in a way like I’m not gonna even entertain that
possibility. Part of it is moving beyond this ... even the sort of centralisation
as you call it ... how to do that directly ... I see it more as baby steps for
me personally at this point. Just getting a tutorial on how to typeset a cd
booklet. Just basically what I’m writing. That at the same time, you know,
gets you familiar with ConTeXt and TeX in general. Before my presentation
I was wondering, I was like: how do you set a variable in TeX. Well, it’s a
macro programming language so you just make a macro that returns a value.
Like that kind of stuff is not initially obvious if you’re used to a different
paradigm or you know .. So these baby steps of kind of opening the field up
a little bit and then using it my own practise of guerilla typesetting and kind
of putting it out there. and you know ... And people gonna start being like:
oh yeah, beautiful documents are possible or at least better looking documents
are possible. And then once we have them at that, like, then how do you we
7

Constant, Clementine Delahaut, Laurence Rassel, and Emma Sidgwick.
Verbindingen/Jonctions: Tracks in electr(on)ic fields. Constant Verlag, 2009.
http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/sources/vj10

55

take it to the next level. How do I turn a lyric sheet from something that
is sort of static to ... you know ... two pages that are like put directly on the
screen next to each other. Like a screen based system where it’s animated
to the point ... and this is what we actually started to karaoke last night ...
so you have an English version and a Spanish version – for instance in the
case of the music that I’ve been doing. And we can animate. We can have
timed transitions so you can have a ‘current lyric indicator’ move down the
page. That kind of use case is not something that Pragma 8 is ever going
to run into. But as soon as it is done and documented then what’s the next
thing, what kind of animations are gonna be ... or what kind of ... once that
possibility is made real or concrete ... you know, so I kind of see it as a very
iterative process at this point. I don’t have any kind of grand scheme other
than ‘Subtext’ kind of replacing Microsoft Word as the dominant academic
publishing platform, I think. (laughs)

Just take over the world.

That’s one way to do it, I think.

You talked about manuals for things that you would maybe not do in another
kind of software ...

Right.

Manuals that not just explain ‘this is how you do it’ but also ‘this is the kind of
user you could be’.

Right.

I’m not sure if instructions for how to produce a cd cover would draw me in, but
if it helped me understand how to set a variable, it would.
Right.
8

Hans Hagen’s company for Advanced Document Engineering

56

You want the complete manual of course?
Yeah!

You were saying that ConTeXt should replace Microsoft Word as the standard
typesetting tool for academic publishing. You are thinking about the future for
ConTeXt more in the context of academic publishing than in traditional design
practise?

Yes. In terms of ‘Subtext’, I mean the origins of that project, very much
... It’s an interesting mix because it’s really a hybridity of many different
processes. Some, much come directly from this obscure art project ‘the abstraction’. So I have stuff like the track changes using Git version control
and everything being placed on plaintext as a necessity. That’s a holdover
from that project as well as the idea of gradiated presence. Like software
enabling a more real-time peer review, anonymous peer review system. And
even a collaborative platform where you don’t know who you’re writing with,
until the article comes out. Someting like out that. So these interesting
tweaks that you can kind of make, those all are holdovers from this very,
very much maybe not traditional design practise but certainly like ... twisted
artistic project that was based around hacking a hole from signified to siginifier and back again. So ... In terms of its current envisionment and the
use case for which we were developing it at the beginning, or I’m developing
it, whatever ... I’ll say it the royal way, is an academic thing. But I think
that ... doesn’t have to stop there and ...

At some point at OSP we decided to try ConTeXt because we were stuck with
Scribus for page layout as the only option in Free Software. We wanted escape
that kind of stiffness of the page, or of the canvas in a way. But ConTeXt
was not the dream solution either. For us it had a lot to do, of course, with
issues of documentation ... of not understanding, not coming from that kind of
automatism of treating it as another programming language. So I think we could
have had much more fun if we had understood the culture of the project better.
I think the most frustrating experience was to find out how much the model of
typesetting is linked to the Tschichold universe, that at the moment you try to
57

break out, the system completely looses all flexibility. And it is almost as if you
can hear it freeze. So if we blame half of our troubles with ConTeXt on our
inability to actually understand what we could do with ConTeXt, I think there is
a lot also in its assumption what a legible text would look like, how it’s structured,
how it’s done. Do you think a modern version of ConTeXt will keep that kind
of inflexibility? How can it become more flexible in it’s understanding of what a
page or a book could be?

That’s an interesting question, because I’m not into the development side
of LuaTex at all, but I would be surprised if the way that it was being
implemented was not significantly more modular than for instance when
it was written in Pascal, you know, how that was. Yeah, that’s a really
interesting question of how swappable is the backend. How much can we
go in and kind of ... you know. And it its an inspirational question to me,
because now I’m trying to envision a different page. And I’m really curious
about that. But I think that ConTeXt itself will likely be pretty stable in its
scope ... in that way of being ... sort of ... deterministic in its expectations.
But where that leaves us as users ... first I’d be really surprised if the engine
itself, if LuaTeX was not being some way written to ... I feel really ignorant
about this, I wish I just knew. But, yeah, there must be ... There is no way
to translate this into a modern programming language without somehow
thinking about this in terms of the design. I guess to certain extent the
answer to your question is dependent on the conscientiousness of Taco and
the other LuaTex developers for this kind of modularity. But I don’t ... you
know ... I’m actually feeling very imaginatively lacking in terms of trying to
understand what you’re award-winning book did not accomplish for you ...
Yeah, what’s wrong with that?

I think it would be good to talk with Pierre, not Pierre Marchand but Pierre ...
... Huggybear.

Yeah. We have been talking about ‘rivers’ as a metaphor for layout ... like were
you could have things that are ... let’s say fluid and other things that could be
placed and force things around it. Layout is often a combination of those two
58

things. And this is what is frustrating in canvas based layout that it is all fixed
and you have to make it look like it’s fluid. And here it’s all fluid and sometimes
you want it to be fixed. And at the moment you fix something everything breaks.
Then it’s up to you. You’re on your own.

Right.

The experience of working with ConTeXt is that it is very much elastic, but there
is very little imagination about what this elasticity could bring.
Right.

It’s all about creating universally beautiful pages, in a way it is using flexibility
to arrive at something that is already fixed.

Right.

Well, there is a lot more possible than we ever tried, but ... again ... this goes
back to the sort of centralist question: If those possibilities are mainly details in
the head of the main developers than how will I ever start to fantasize about the
book I would want to make with it?

Right.

I don’t even need access to all the details. Because once I have a sort of sense of
what I want to do, I can figure it out. Right now you’re sort of in the dark about
the endless possibilities ...

Its existence is very opaque in some ways. The way that it’s implemented,
like everything about it is sort of ... looking at the macros that they wrote,
the macros that you invoke ... like ... that takes ... flow control in TeX is like
... I mean you might as well write it in Bash or ... I mean I think Bash would
even be more sensible to figuring out what’s going on. So, the switch to Lua
there is kind of I think a useful step just in being more transparent. To allow
you to get into becoming more intimate with the source or the operation
59

of the system ... you know ... without having to go ... I mean I guess ... the
TeX Book would still be useful in some ways but that’s ... I mean ... to go
back and learn TeX when you’re just trying to use ConTeXt is sort of ...
it’s not ... I’m not saying it’s, you know ... it’s a proper assumption to say oh
yeah, don’t worry about the rules and the way TeX is organised but you’re not
writing your documents in ConTeXt the way you would write them if you’re
using plain TeX. I mean that’s just ... it’s just not ... It’s a different workflow
... it has a completely different set of processes that you need to arrange. So
it has a very distinct organisational logic ... that I think that ... yeah ... like
being able to go into the source and be like oh OK, like I can see clearly this
is ... you know. And then you can write in your own way, you can write back
in Lua.

This kind of documentation would be the killer feature of ConTeXt ...
Yeah.

It’s kind of strange paradox in the TeX community. At one hand you’re sort of
supposed to be able to do all of it. But at the same time on every page you’re told
not to do it, because it’s not for you to worry about this.

Right. That’s why the macro packages exist.

With ConTeXt there is this strange sense of very much wanting to understand the
way the logic works, or ... what the material is, you’re dealing with. And at the
same time being completely lost in the labyrinth between the old stuff from TeX
and LaTeX, the newer stuff from LuaTex, Mark 4, 3, 5, 6 ...

So that was sort of my idea with the cd typesetting project, is not to say,
that that is something that is immediately interesting to anybody who is
not trying to do that specifically, right? But at the same time if I’m ... if it’s
broken down into ‘How to do a bitmap cover page’ (=Lesson 1).
Lesson 2: ‘How to start defining you own macros’. And so you know, it’s
this thing that could be at one point a very ... because the documentation as
it stands right now is ... I think it’s almost ... fixing that documentation, I’m
60

not sure is even possible. I think that it has to be completely approached
differently. I mean, like a real ConTeXt manual, that documents ... you
know ... command by command exactly what those things do. I mean our
reference manual now just shows you what arguments are available, but
doesn’t even list the available arguments. It’s just like: These are the positions
of the arguments. And it’s interesting.

So expecting writers of the program to write the manual fails?
Right.

What is the difference between your plans for ‘Subtext’ and a page layout program
like Scribus?

You mentioned ‘Subtext’ coming from a more academic publishing rather
than a design background. I think that this belies where I have come into
typesetting and my understanding of typography. Because in reality DTP
has never kind of drawn me in in that way. The principle differences are
really based on this distribution of agency, in my mind. That when you’re
demanding the software to be ‘what you see is what you get’ or when you
place that metaphor between you and your process. Or you and your engagement, you’re gaining the usefulness of that metaphor, which is ... it’s
almost ... I hope I don’t sound offensive ... but it’s almost like child’s play.
It’s almost like point, click, place. To me it just seems so redundant or ...
time-consuming maybe ... to really deal with it that way. There are advantages to that metaphor. For instance I don’t plan on designing covers in
ConTeXt. Or even a poster or something like that. Because it doesn’t really
give affordances for that kind of creativity. I mean you can do generative
stuff with the MetaFun package. You can sort of play around with that. But
I haven’t seen a ConTeXt generated cover that I liked, to be honest.

OK.

OK. Principle differences. I’m trying to ... I’m struggling a little bit. I think
that’s partially because I’m not super comfortable with the layout mechanism
61

and stuff yet. And you have things like \blank in order to move down the
page. Because it has this sort of literal sense of a page and movement on
a page. Obviously Scribus has a literal idea of a page as well, but because
it’s WYSIWYG it has that benefit where you don’t have to think OK, well,
maybe it should be 1.6 ems down or maybe it should be 1.2 ems down. You
move it until it looks right. And then you can measure it and you’re like
ok, I’m gonna use this measurement for the further on in my document. So it’s
that whole top-down vs. bottom-up approach. It really breaks down into
the core organisational logics of those softwares.
I think it’s too easy to make the difference based on the fact that there is a
metaphorical layer or not. I think there is a metaphorical layer in ConTeXt too
...

Right. Yeah for sure.

And they come at a different moment and they speak a different language. But I
think that we can agree that they’re both there. So I don’t think it’s about the one
being without and the other being with. Of course there is another sense of placing
something in a canvas-based software than in a ... how would you call this?

So I guess it is either ‘declarative’ or ‘sequence’ based. You could say generative in a way ... or compiled or ... I don’t even know. That’s a cool question.

What is the difference really and why would you choose the one or the other? Or
what would you gain from one to the other? Because it’s clear that posters are not
easily made in ConTeXt. And that it’s much easier to typeset a book in ConTeXt
than it is in Scribus, for example.

Declarative maybe ...

So, there’s hierarchy. There’s direction. There’s an assumption about structure
being good or bad.
62

Yeah. Boxes, Glue. 9

What is exciting in something like this is that placement is relative always.
Relative to a page, relative to a chapter, relative to itself, relative to what’s next
to it. Where in a canvas based software your page is fixed.

Right.

This is very different from a system where you make a change, then you compile
and then you look at it and then you go back into your code. So where there is a
larger distinction between output and action. It’s almost gestural ...

It’s like two different ways of having a conversation. Larry Wall has this really great metaphor. He talks about ‘ballistic design’. So when you’re doing
code, maybe he’s talking more about software design at this point, basically
it’s a ‘ballistic practise’ to write code. Ballistics comes from artillery. So you
shoot at a thing. If you hit it, you hit it. If you miss it, you change the
amount of gun powder, the angle. So code is very much a ‘ballistic practise’.
I think that filters into this difference in how the conversation works. And
this goes back to the agencies where you have to wait for the computer to
figure out. To come with its into the conversation. You’re putting the code
in and then the computer is like ok; this is what the code means
and then is this what you wanted? Whereas with the WYSIWYG
kind of interface the agency is distributed in a different way. The computer is just like ok, I m a canvas; I m just here to hold what
you re putting on and I m not going to change it any way or
affect it in any way that you don t tell me to. I mean it’s
the same way but I ... is it just a matter of the compilation time? In one
you’re sort of running a experiment, in another you’re just sort of painting.
If that’s a real enough distinction or if that’s ... you know ... it’s sort of ... I
mean I kind of see that it is like this. There is ballistics vs. maybe fencing
or something.
9

Boxes, which are things can be drawn on a page, and glue, which is invisible stretchy stuff that sticks
boxes together. Mark C. Chu-Carroll. The Genius of Donald Knuth: Typesetting with Boxes and Glue, 2008

63

Fencing?

Fencing. Like more of a ...
Or wrestling?

Or wrestling.

When you said just sort of painting I felt offended. ( laughs)
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.

Maybe back to wrestling vs. ballistics. Where am I and where is the machine?
Right.

I understand that there’s lots of childish way of solving this need to make the
computer dissapear. Because if you are not wrestling ... you’re dancing, you know.

Yeah.

But I think it’s interesting to see that ballistics, that the military term of shooting
at something, is the kind of metaphor to be used. Which is quite different than a
creative process where there is a direct feedback between something placed and the
responses you have.
Right.

And it’s not always about aiming, but also sometimes about trying and about
kind of subtle movements that spark off something else. Which is very immediate.
And needs an immediate connection to ... let’s say ... what you do and what you
get. It would be interesting to think about ways to talking about ‘what you see
is what you get’ away from this assumption that is always about those poor users
that are not able do it in code.

Right.

64

Because I think there is essential stuff that you can not do in a tool like this –
that you can do in canvas-based tools. And so ... I think it’s really a pity when
... yeah ... It’s often overlooked and very strange to see. There is not a lot of good
thinking about that kind of interaction. Like literal interaction. Which is also
about agency with the painter. With the one that makes the movement. Where
here the agency is very much in this confrontational relation between me aiming
and ...

So yeah, when we put it in those metaphors. I’m on the side with the
painting, because ...

But I mean it’s difficult to do a book while wrestling. And I think that’s why a
poster is very difficult to do in this sort of aiming sense. I mean it’s fun to do but
it’s a strange kind of posters you get.

You can’t fit it all in your head at once. It’s not possible.
No. So it’s okay to have a bit of delay.

I wondered to what extent, if it were updated in real time, all the changes
you’re making in the code, if compilation was instantaneous, how that would
affect the experience. I guess it would still have this ballistic aspect, because
what you are doing is ... and that’s really the side of the metaphor ... or
a metaphorical difference between the two. One is like a translation. The
metaphor of ok this code means this effect ... That’s very different from picking
a brush and choosing the width of the stroke. It’s like when you initialise
a brush in code, set the brush width and then move it in a circle with a
radius of x. It’s different than taking the brush in Scribus or in whatever
WYSIWYG tool you are gonna use. There is something intrinsically different about a translation from primitives to visual effect than this kind of
metaphorical translation of an interaction between a human and a canvas ...
kind of put into software terms.

But there is a translation from me, the human, to the machine, to my human eye
again, which is hard to grasp. Without wanting it to be made invisible somehow.
65

Or to assume that it is not there. This would be my dream tool that would
allow you to sense that kind of translation without losing the ... canvasness of the
canvas. Because it’s frustrating that the canvas has to not speak of itself to be able
to work. That’s a very sad future for the canvas, I think.

I agree.

But when it speaks of itself it’s usually seen as buggy or it doesn’t work. So that’s
also not fair to the canvas. But there is something in drawing digitally, which
is such a weird thing to do actually, and this is interesting in this sort of cyborgs
we’re becoming, which is all about forgetting about the machine and not feeling
what you do. And it’s completely a different world in a way than the ballistics of
ConTeXt, LaTeX or whatever typesetting platform.

Yeah, that’s true. And it’s something that my students were forced to confront and it was really interesting because that supposed invisibility or almost
necessitated invisibility of the software. As soon as they’re in Inkscape instead of Illustrator they go crazy. Because it’s like they know what they want
to do, but it’s a different mechanism. It’s the same underlying process which
itself is only just meant to give you a digital version of what you could easily
do on a piece of paper. Provided you have the right paints and stuff. So
perhaps it’s like the difference between moving from a brush to an air brush.
It’s a different ... interface. It’s a different engagement. There is a different
thing between the human and the canvas. You engage in this creative process where it’s like ok, we’ll now have an airbrush and I can play around to
see what the capacities are without being stuck in well I can’t get it to do
my fine lines the same way I can when I have my brush. It’s like when you
switch the software out from between the person and the canvas. It’s that
sort of invisibility of the interface and it’s intense for people. They actually
react quite negatively. They’re not gonna bother to learn this other software
because in the end they’re doing less. The reappearance of this software
... of software between them and their ideas is kinda too much. Whereas
people who don’t have any preconceived notions are following the tutorials
and they’re learning and they’re like ok, I’m gonna continue to play with this.
Because this software is starting to become more invisible.
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But on a sort of theoretical level the necessitated invisibility, as you said it nicely, is
something I would always speak against. Because that means you hide something
that’s there. Which seems a stupid thing to do, especially when you want to find
a kind of more flexible relation to your tools. I want to find a better word for
describing that sort of quick feedback. Because if it’s too much in the way, then
the process stops. The drawing can not be made if I’m worried too much about
the point of my pencil that might break ... or the ... I dont’t know ... the nozzle
being blocked.
Dismissing the other tools is ... I was kinda joking, but ... there is something sort of blocklike: Point. Move. This. But at the same time, like I
said, I wouldn’t do a cover in ConTeXt. Just like I probably wouldn’t try to
do something like a recreation of a Pre-Raphaelite painting in Processing or
something like that. There is just points where our metaphors break down.
And so ... It sounded sort of, ok, bottom-up über alles like always.

Ok, there’s still painters and there’s still people doing Pre-Raphaelite paintings
with Pre-Raphaelite tools, but most of us are using computers. So there should be
more clever ways of thinking about this.
Yeah. To borrow a quote from my old buddy Donald Rumsfeld: There are
the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. That
actually popped into my head earlier because when we were talking about
the potentials of the software and the way that we interact and stuff, it’s like
we know that we don’t know ... other ways of organizing. We know that
there are, like there has to be, another way, whether it is a middle path between these two or some sort of ... Maybe it’s just tenth dimensional, maybe
it’s fourth dimensional, maybe it’s completely hypermodern or something.
Anyway. But the unknown unknowns ... It’s like the stuff that we can’t
even tell we don’t know about. The questions that we don’t know about
that would come up once we figure out these other ways of organising it.
That’s when I start to get really interested in this sort of thing. How do you
even conceive of a practise that you don’t know? And once you get there,
there’s going to be other things that you know you don’t know and have to
keep finding them. And then there’s gonna be things that you don’t know
you don’t know and they just appear from nowhere and ... it’s fun.
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We discovered the work of Tom Lechner for the first time at
the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels. Tom traveled
from Portland to present Laidout, an amazing tool that he
made to produce his own comic books and also to work on
three dimensional mathematical objects. We were excited
about how his software represents the gesture of folding,
loved his bold interface decisions plus were impressed by the
fact that Tom decided to write his own programming framework for it. A year later, we met again in Montreal, Canada
for the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 where he presents a
follow-up. With Ludivine Loiseau 1 and Pierre Marchand 2 ,
we finally found time to sit down and talk.
What is Laidout?

Well, Laidout is software that I wrote to lay out my cartoon books in an
easy fashion. Nothing else fit my needs at the time, so I just wrote it.
It does a lot more than laying out cartoons?

It works for any image, basically, and gradients. It does not currently do
text. It is on my todo list. I usually write my own text, so it does not really
need to do text. I just make an image of it.
It can lay out T-shirts?

But that’s all images too. I guess it’s two forms of laying out. It’s laying
out pieces of paper that remain whole in themselves, or you can take an
image and lay it out on smaller pieces of paper. Tiling, I guess you could
call it.
Can you talk us through the process of doing the T-shirt?

1
2

amateur bookbinder and graphic designer
artist/developer, contributing amongst others to PodofoImpose and Scribus

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OK. So, you need a pattern. I had just a shirt that sort of fit and I
approximated it on a big piece of paper, to figure out what the pieces were
shaped like, and took a photograph of that. I used a perspective tool to
remove the distortion. I had placed rulers on the ground so that I could
remember the actual scale of it. Then once it was in the computer, I traced
over it in Inkscape, to get just the basic outline so that I could manipulate
further. Blender didn’t want to import it so I had to retrace it. I had to
use Blender to do it because that lets me shape the pattern, take it from
flat into something that actually makes 3D shapes so whatever errors were
in the original pattern that I had on the paper, I could now correct, make
the sides actually meet and once I had the molded shape, and in Blender
you have to be extremely careful to keep any shape, any manipulation that
you do to make sure your surface is still unfoldable into something flat. It is
very easy to get away from flat surfaces in Blender. Once I have the molded
shape, I can export that into an .off file which my unwrapper can import
and that I can then unwrap into the sleeves and the front and the back as
well as project a panoramic image onto those pieces. Once I have that, it
becomes a pattern laid out on a giant flat surface. Then I can use Laidout
once again to tile pages across that. I can export into a .pdf with all the
individual pieces of the image that were just pieces of the larger image that
I can print on transfer paper. It took forty iron-on transfer papers I ironed
with an iron provided to me by the people sitting in front of me so that
took a while but finally I got it all done, cut it all out, sewed it up and there
you go.
Could you say something about your interest in moving from 2D to 3D
and back again? It seems everything you do is related to that?
I don’t know. I’ve been making sculpture of various kinds for quite a
long time. I’ve always drawn. Since I was about eighteen, I started making
sculptures, mainly mathematical woodwork. I don’t quite have access to a
full woodwork workshop anymore, so I cannot make as much woodwork as
I used to. It’s kind of an instance of being defined by what tools you have
available to you, like you were saying in your talk. I don’t have a woodshop,
but I can do other stuff. I can still make various shapes, but mainly out of
paper. Since I had been doing woodwork, I picked up photography I guess
and I made a ton of panoramic images. It’s kind of fun to figure out how
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to project these images out of the computer into something that you can
physically create, for instance a T-shirt or a ball, or other paper shapes.
Is there ever any work that stays in the computer, or does it always need
to become physical?

Usually, for me, it is important to make something that I can actually
physically interact with. The computer I usually find quite limiting. You
can do amazing things with computers, you can pan around an image, that
in itself is pretty amazing but in the end I get more out of interacting with
things physically than just in the computer.
But with Laidout, you have moved folding into the computer! Do you
enjoy that kind of reverse transformation?

It is a challenge to do and I enjoy figuring out how to do that. In making
computer tools, I always try to make something that I can not do nearly as
quickly by hand. It’s just much easier to do in a computer. Or in the case
of spherical images, it’s practically impossible to do it outside the computer.
I could paint it with airbrushes and stuff like that but that in itself would
take a hundred times longer than just pressing a couple of commands and
having the computer do it all automatically.

My feeling about your work is that the time you spent working on the
program is in itself the most intriguing part of your work. There is of course a
challenge and I can imagine that when you are doing it like the first time you
see a rectangle, and you see it mimic a perspective you think wow I am folding
a paper, I have really done something. I worked on imposition too but more
to figure out how to work with .pdf files and I didn’t go this way of the gesture
like you did. There is something in your work which is really the way you wrote
your own framework for example and did not use any existing frameworks. You
didn’t use existing GUIs and toolboxes. It would be nice to listen to you about
how you worked, how you worked on the programming.
I think like a lot of artists, or creative people in general, you have to
enjoy the little nuts and bolts of what you’re doing in order to produce any
final work, that is if you actually do produce any final work. Part of that is
making the tools. When I first started making computer tools to help me
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in my artwork, I did not have a lot of experience programming computers.
I had some. I did little projects here and there. So I looked around at the
various toolkits, but everything seemed really rigid. If you wanted to edit
some text, you had this little box and you write things in this little box and
if you want to change numbers, you have to erase it and change tiny things
with other tiny things. It’s just very restrictive. I figured I could either
figure out how to adapt those to my own purposes, or I could just figure
out my own, so I figured either way would probably take about that same
amount of time I guessed, in my ignorance. In the process, that’s not quite
been true. But it is much more flexible, in my opinion, what I’ve developed,
compared to a lot of other toolkits. Other people have other goals, so I’m
sure they would have a completely different opinion. For what I’m doing,
it’s much more adaptable.
You said you had no experience in programming? You studied in art school?

I don’t think I ever actually took computer programming classes. I grew
up with a Commodore 64, so I was always making letters fly around the
screen and stuff like that, and follow various curves. So I was always doing
little programming tricks. I guess I grew up in a household where that
sort of thing was pretty normal. I had two brothers, and they both became
computer programmers. And I’m the youngest, so I could learn from their
mistakes, too. I hope.
You’re looking for good excuses to program.
(laughs) That could be.

We can discuss at length about how actual toolkits don’t match your needs,
but in the end, you want to input certain things. With any recent toolkit, you
can do that. It’s not that difficult or time consuming. The way you do it, you
really enjoy it, by itself. I can see it as a real creative work, to come up with new
digital shapes.
Do you think that for you, the program itself is part of the work?

I think it’s definitely part of the work. That’s kind of the nuts and bolts
that you have to enjoy to get somewhere else. But if I look back on it, I
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spend a huge amount of time just programming and not actually making
the artwork itself. It’s more just making the tools and all the programming
for the tools. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. When it comes time to
actually make artwork, I do like to have the tool that’s just right for the job,
that works just the way that seems efficient.
I think the program itself is an artwork, very much. To me it is also
a reflection on moving between 2D and 3D, about physical computation.
Maybe this is the actual work. Would you agree?
I don’t know. To an extent. In my mind, I kind of class it differently.
I’ve certainly been drawing more than I’ve been doing technical stuff like
programming. In my mind, the artwork is things that get produced, or a
performance or something like that. And the programming or the tools
are in service to those things. That’s how I think of it. I can see that ...
I’ve distributed Laidout as something in itself. It’s not just some secret tool
that I’ve put aside and presented only the artwork. I do enjoy the tools
themselves.
I have a question about how the 2D imagines 3D. I’ve seen Pierre and
Ludi write imposition plans. I really enjoy reading this, almost as a sort of
poetry, about what it would be to be folded, to be bound like a book. Why is
it so interesting for you, this tension between the two dimensions?
I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just the transformation of materials from
something more amorphous into something that’s more meaningful, somehow. Like in a book, you start out with wood pulp, and you can lay it out in
pages and you have to do something to that in order to instil more meaning
to it.
Is binding in any way important to you?
Somewhat. I’ve bound a few things by hand. Most of my cartoon books
ended up being just stapled, like a stack of paper, staple in the middle and
fold. Very simple. I’ve done some where you cut down the middle and lay
the sides on top and they’re perfect bound. I’ve done just a couple where
it’s an actual hand bound, hard cover. I do enjoy that. It’s quite a time
75

consuming thing. There’s quite a lot of craft in that. I enjoy a lot of hand
made, do-it-yourself activities.
Do you look at classic imposition plans?

I guess that’s kind of my goal. I did look up classic book binding
techniques and how people do it and what sort of problems they encounter.
I’m not sure if I’ve encompassed everything in that, certainly. But just the
basics of folding and trimming, I’ve done my best to be able to do the same
sort of techniques that have been done in the past, but only manually. The
computer can remember things much more easily.
Imposition plans are quite fixed, you have this paper size and it works with
specific imposition plans. I like the way your tool is very organic, you can play
with it. But in the end, something very classic comes out, an imposition plan you
can use over and over, which gives a sort of continuity.
What’s impressive is the attention you put into the visualization. There are
some technical programs which do really big imposition stuff, but it’s always at the
printer. Here, you can see the shape being peeled. It’s really impressive. I agree
with Femke that the program is an artwork too, because it’s not only technical,
it’s much more.
How is the material imagined in the tool?

So, far not really completely. When you fold, you introduce slight twists
and things like that. And that depends on the stiffness of the paper and
the thickness of the paper and I’ve not adequately dealt with that so much.
If you just have one fold, it’s pretty easy to figure out what the creep is for
that. You can do tests and you can actually measure it. That’s pretty easy
to compensate for. But if you have many more folds than that, it becomes
much more difficult.
Are you thinking about how to do that?

I am.

That would be very interesting. To imagine paper in digital space, to give
an idea of what might come out in the end. Then you really have to work
your metaphors, I think?
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A long time ago, I did a lot of T-shirt printing. Something that I did not
particularly have was a way to visualize your final image on some kind of shirt
and the same thing applies for book binding, too. You might have a strange
texture. It would be nice to be able to visualize that beforehand, as well
as the thickness of the paper that actually controls physical characteristics.
These are things I would like to incorporate somehow but haven’t gotten
around to.
You talked about working with physical input, having touchpads ... Can
you talk a bit more about why you’re interested in this?

You can do a lot of things with just a mouse and a keyboard. But it’s
still very limiting. You have to be sitting there, and you have to just control
those two things. Here’s your whole body, with which you can do amazing
things, but you’re restricted to just moving and clicking and you only have a
single point up on the screen that you have to direct very specifically. It just
seems very limiting. It’s largely an unexplored field, just to accept a wider
variety of inputs to control things. A lot of the multitouch stuff that’s been
done is just gestures for little tiny phones. It’s mainly for browsing, not
necessarily for actual work. That’s something I would like to explore quite a
lot more.
Do you have any fantasies about how these gestures could work for real?

There’s tons of sci fi movies, like ‘Minority Report’, where you wear these
gloves and you can do various things. Even that is still just mainly browsing.
I saw one, it was a research project by this guy at Caltech. He had made
this table and he wore polarized glasses so he could look down at this table
and see a 3D image. And then he had gloves on, and he could sculpt things
right in the air. The computer would keep track of where his hand is going.
Instead of sculpting clay, you’re sculpting this 3D mesh. That seemed quite
impressive to me.
You’re thinking about 3D printers, actually?

It’s something that’s on my mind. I just got something called the
Eggbot. You can hold spheres in this thing and it’s basically a plotter that
can print on spherical surfaces or round surfaces. That’s something I’d like
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to explore some more. I’ve made various balls with just my photographic
panoramas glued onto them. But that could be used to trace an outline for
something and then you could go in with pens or paints and add more detail.
If you’re trying to paint on a sphere, just paint and no photograph, laying out
an outline is perhaps the hardest part. If you simplify it, it becomes much
easier to make actual images on spheres. That would be fun to explore.

I’d like to come back to the folding. Following your existing aesthetic, the
stiffness and the angles of the drawing are very beautiful. Is it important you,
preserving the aesthetic of your programs, the widgets, the lines, the arrows ...

I think the specific widgets, in the end, are not really important to me
at all. It’s more just producing an actual effect. So if there is some better
way, more efficient way, more adaptable way to produce some effect, then it’s
better to just completely abandon what doesn’t work and make something
that’s new, that actually does work. Especially with multitouch stuff, a lot of
old widgets make no more sense. You have to deal with a lot of other kinds
of things, so you need different controls.

It makes sense, but I was thinking about the visual effect. Maybe it’s not
Laidout if it’s done in Qt.
Your visuals and drawings are very aesthetically precise. We’re wondering
about the aesthetics of the program, if it’s something that might change in the
future.
You mean would the quality of the work produced be changed by the
tools?

That’s an interesting question as well. But particularly the interface, it’s
very related to your drawings. There’s a distinct quality. I was wondering
how you feel about that, how the interaction with the program relates to the
drawings themselves.

I think it just comes back to being very visually oriented. If you have to
enter a lot of values in a bunch of slots in a table, that’s not really a visual
way to do it. Especially in my artwork, it’s totally visual. There’s no other
component to it. You draw things on the page and it shows up immediately.
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It’s just very visual. Or if you make a sculpture, you start with this chunk
of stuff and you have to transform it in some way and chop off this or sand
that. It’s still all very visual. When you sit down at a computer, computers
are very powerful, but what I want to do is still very visually oriented. The
question then becomes: how do you make an interface that retains the visual
inputs, but that is restricted to the types of inputs computers need to have
to talk to them?
The way someone sets up his workshop says a lot about his work. The way
you made Laidout and how you set up its screen, it’s important to define a spot
in the space of the possible.

What is nice is that you made the visualisation so important. The windows
and the rest of the interface is really simple, the attention is really focused on
what’s happening. It is not like shiny windows with shadows everywhere, you feel
like you are not bothered by the machine.
At the same time, the way you draw the thickness of the line to define the
page is a bit large. For me, these are choices, and I am very impressed because I
never manage to make choices for my own programs. The programs you wrote,
or George Williams, make a strong aesthetic assertion like: This is good. I can’t
do this. I think that is really interesting.
Heavy page borders, that still comes down to the visual thing you end
up with, is still the piece of paper so it is very important to find out where
that page outline actually is. The more obvious it is, the better.

Yes, I think it makes sense. For a while now, I paid more attention than
others in Scribus to these details like the shape of the button, the thickness of the
lines, what pattern do you chose for the selection, etcetera. I had a lot of feedback
from users like: I want this, this is too big and at some point you want to please
everybody and you don’t make choices. I don’t think that you are so busy with
what others think.
Are there many other users of the program?

Not that I know of (laughter). I know that there is at least one other
person that actually used it to produce a booklet. So I know that it is
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possible for someone other than myself to make things with it. I’ve gotten
a couple of patches from people to not make it crash at various places but
since Laidout is quite small, I can just not pay any attention to criticism.
Partially because there isn’t any, and I have particular motivations to make
it work in a certain way and so it is easier to just go forward.

I think people that want to use your program are probably happy with this
kind of visualisation. Because you wrote it alone, there is also a consistency across
the program. It is not like Scribus, that has parts written by a lot of people so you
can really recognize: this is Craig (Bradney), this is Andreas (Vox), this is Jean
(Ghali), this is myself. There is nothing to follow.
I remember Donald Knuth talking about TeX and he was saying that
the entire program was written from scratch three times before its current
incarnation. I am sympathetic to that style of programming.
Start again.
I think it is a good idea, to start again. To come back to a little detail. Is
there a fileformat for your imposition tool, to store the imposition plan? Is it a
text or a binary format?

It is text-based, an indented file format, sort of like Python. I did
not want to use XML, every time I try to use XML there are all these
greater thans and less thans. It is better than binary, but it is still a huge
mess. When everything is indented like a tree, it is very easy to find things.
The only problem is to always input tabs, not spaces. I have two different
imposition types, basically, the flat-folding sheets and the three dimensional
ones. The three dimensional one is a little more complicated.
If you read the file, do you know what you are folding?

Not exactly. It lists what folds exists. If you have a five by five grid, it
will say Fold along this line, over in such and such direction. What it actually
translates to in the end, is not currently stored in the file. Once you are in
Laidout you can export into a PodofoImpose plan file.
Is this file just values, or are there keywords, is it like a text?
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I try to make it pretty readable, like trimright or trimleft.
Does it talk about turning pages? This I find beautiful in PodofoImpose
plans, you can almost follow the paper through the hands of the program.
Turn now, flip backwards, turn again. It is an instruction for a dance.
Pretty much.

The text you can read in the PodofoImpose plans was taken from what Ludi
and me did by hand. One of us was folding the paper, and the other was writing
it into the plan. I think a lot of the things we talk about, are putting things from
the real world into the computer. But you are putting things from the computer
into the real world.
Can you describe again these two types of imposition, the first one being
very familiar to us. It must be the most frequently asked question on the
Scribus mailing list: How to do imposition. Even the most popular search
term on the OSP website is ‘Bookletprinting’. But what is the difference with
the plan for a 3D object? A classic imposition plan is also somehow about
turning a flat surface into a three dimensional object?
It is almost translatable. I’m reworking the 3D version to be able to
incorporate the flat folding. It is not quite there yet, the problem is the
connection between the pages. Currently, in the 3D version, you have a
shape that has a definitive form and that controls how things bleed across
the edges. When you have a piece of paper for a normal imposition, the
pages that are next to each other in the physical form are not necessarily
related to each other at all in the actual piece of paper. Right now, the piece
of paper you use for the 3D model is very defined, there is no flexibility.
Give me a few months!
So it is very different actually.

It is a different approach. One person wanted to do flexagons, it is sort
of like origami I guess, but it is not quite as complicated. You take a piece
of paper, cut out a square and another square, and than you can fold it and
you end up with a square that is actually made up of four different sections.
Than you can take the middle section, and you get another page and you can
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keep folding in strange ways and you get different pages. Now the question
becomes: how do you define that page, that is a collection of four different
chunks of paper? I’m working on that!
We talk about the move from 2D to 3D as if these pages are empty. But
you actually project images on them and I keep thinking about maps, transitional objects where physical space is projected on paper which then becomes a
second real space and so on. Are you at all interested in maps?
A little bit. I don’t really want to because it is such a well-explored
field already. Already for many hundreds of years the problem is how do
you represent a globe onto a more or less two dimensional surface. You
have to figure out a way to make globe gores or other ways to project it and
than glue it on to a ball for example. There is a lot of work done with that
particular sort of imagery, but I don’t know.
Too many people in the field!

Yes. One thing that might be interesting to do though is when you have
a ball that is a projection surface, then you can do more things, like overlays
onto a map. If you want to simulate earthquakes for example. That would
be entertaining.
And the panoramic images you make, do you use special equipment for
this?

For the first couple that I made, I made this 30-sided polyhedron that
you could mount a camera inside and it sat on a base in a particular way so
you could get thirty chunks of images from a really cheap point and shoot
camera. You do all that, and you have your thirty images and it is extremely
laborious to take all these thirty images and line them up. That is why I
made the 3D portion of Laidout, it was to help me do that in an easier
fashion. Since then I’ve got a fish-eyed lens which simplifies things quite
considerably. Instead of spending ten hours on something, I can do it in ten
minutes. I can take 6 shots, and one shot up, one shot down. In Hugin you
can stitch them all together.

And the kinds of things you photograph? We saw the largest rodent on
earth? How do you pick a spot for your images?
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I am not really sure. I wander around and than photograph whatever
stands out. I guess some unusual configuration of architecture frequently
or sometimes a really odd event, or a political protest sometimes. The trick
with panoramas is to find an area where something is happening all over
the globe. Normally, on sunny days, you take a picture and all your image
is blank. As pretty as the blue sky is, there is not a lot going on there
particularly.
Panoramic images are usually spherical or circular. Do you take certain
images with a specific projection surface in mind?
To an extent. I take enough images. Once I have a whole bunch of
images, the task is to select a particular image that goes with a particular
shape. Like cubes there are few lines and it is convenient to line them up to
an actual rectangular space like a room. The tetrahedron made out of cones,
I made one of Mount St. Helens, because I thought it was an interesting
way to put the two cones together. You mentioned 3D printers earlier, and
one thing I would like to do is to extend the panoramic image to be more
like a progression. For most panoramic images, the focal point is a single
point in space. But when you walk along a trail, you might have a series of
photographs all along. I think it could be an interesting work to produce,
some kind of ellipsoidal shape with a panoramic image that flows along the
trail.
Back to Laidout, and keeping with the physical and the digital. Would
there be something like a digital papercut?
Not really. Maybe you can have an Arduino and a knife?
I was more imagining a well placed crash?

In a sense there is. In the imposition view, right now I just have a green
bar to tell where the binding is. However when you do a lot of folds, you
usually want to do a staple. But if you are stapling and there is not an actual
fold there, than you are screwed.

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The following statements were recorded by Urantsetseg
Ulziikhuu (Urana) in 2014. She studied communication in
Istanbul and Leuven and joined Constant for a few months
to document the various working practices at Constant
Variable. Between 2011 and 2014, Variable housed studios
for Artists, Designers, Techno Inventors, Data Activists,
Cyber Feminists, Interactive Geeks, Textile Hackers, Video
Makers, Sound Lovers, Beat Makers and other digital creators who were interested in using F/LOS software for
their creative experiments.

Why do you think people should use and or practice
Open Source software? What is in it for you?
Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu

The knitting machine that I am using normally has a
computer from the eighties. Some have these scanners that are really old
and usually do not work anymore. They became obsolete. If it wasn’t for
Open Source, we couldn’t use these technologies anymore. Open Source
developers decided that they should do something about these machines and
found that it was not that complicated to connect these knitting machines
directly to computers. I think it is a really good example how Open Source
is important, because these machines are no longer produced and industry
is no longer interested in producing them again, and they would have died
without further use.
The idea that Open Source is about sharing is also important. If you try to
do everything from zero, you just never advance. Now with Open Source, if
somebody does something and you have access to what they do, and you can
take it further and take it into a different direction.

Claire Williams

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I haven’t always used Open Source software. It started
at the Piet Zwart Institute where there was a decision made by Matthew
Fuller and Femke Snelting who designed the program. They brought a
bunch of people together that asked questions about how our tools influence
practice, how they are used. And so, part of my process is then teaching in
that program, and starting to use Free Software more and more. I should
say, I had already been using one particular piece of Free Software which
is FFmpeg, a program that lets you work with video. So there again there
was a kind of connection. It was just by the virtue of the fact that it was
one of the only tools available that could take a video, pull out frames,
work with lots of different formats, just an amazing tool. So it started with
convenience. But the more that I learned about the whole kind of approach
of Open Source, the more Open Source I started to use. I first switched from
MacOSX to maybe Dual Booting and now indeed I am pretty much only
using Open Source. Not exclusively Open Source, because I occasionally use
platforms online that are not free, and some applications.
I am absolutely convinced that when you use these tools, you are learning
much more about inner workings of things, about the design decisions that
go into a piece of software so that you are actually understanding at a very
deep level, and this then lets you move between different tools. When
tools change, or new things are offered, I think it is really a deep learning
that helps you for the future. Whereas if you just focus on the specific
particularities of one platform or piece of software, that is a bit fragile and
will inevitably be obsolete when a software stops being developed or some
kind of new kind of way of working comes about.
Michael Murtaugh

I use Open Source software every day, as I have
Debian on my laptop. I came to it through anarchism – I don’t have a tech
background – so it’s a political thing mainly. Not that F/LOSS represents
a Utopian model of production by any means! As an artist it fits in with
my interest in collaborative production. I think the tools we use should be
malleable by the people who use them. Unfortunately, IT education needs
to improve quite a lot before that ideal becomes reality.
Politically, I believe in building a culture which is democratic and malleable
by its inhabitants, and F/LOSS makes this possible in the realm of software.
The benefits as a user are not so great unless you are tech-savvy enough to
really make use of that freedom. The software does tend to be more secure
Eleanor Greenhalgh

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and so on, though I think we’re on shaky ground if we try to defend F/LOSS
in terms of its benefits to the end user. Using F/LOSS has a learning curve,
challenges which I put up with because I believe in it socially. This would
probably be a different answer from say, a sysadmin, someone who could see
really concrete benefits of using F/LOSS.
Actually I came from Open Content and alternative licensing to the technical side of using GNU/Linux. My main motivation
right now is the possibility to develop a deeper relationship with my tools.
For me it is interesting to create my own tools for my work, rather than
to use something predefined. Something everyone else uses. With Free
Software this is easier – to invent tools. Another important point is that
with Free Software and open standards it’s more likely that you will be able
to keep track of your work. With proprietary software and formats, you are
pretty much dependent on decisions of a software company. If the company
decides that it will not continue an application or format, there is not much
you can do about it. This happened to users of FreeHand. When Adobe
acquired their competitor Macromedia they decided to discontinue the development of FreeHand in favour of their own product Illustrator. You can
sign a petition, but if there is no commercial interest, most probably nothing
will happen. Let’s see what happens to Flash.

Christoph Haag

I studied sculpture, which is a very solitary way of working. Already through my studies, this idea of an artist sitting around in a
studio somewhere, being by himself, just doing his work by himself, didn’t
make sense to me. It is maybe true for certain people, but it is definitely
not true to me today, the person I am. I always integrated other people into
my work, or do collaborative work. I don’t really care about this ‘it is my
work’ or ‘it is your work’, if you do something together, at some point the
work exists by itself. For me, that is the greatest moment, it is just independent. It actually rejoins the authorship question, because I don’t think
you can own ideas. You can kind of put them out there and share them.
It is organic, like things that can grow and that they will become bigger
and bigger, become something else that you couldn’t have ever thought. It
makes the horizon much bigger. It is a different way of working I guess.
The obvious reason is that it is free, but the sharing philosophy is really at
the core of it. I have always thought that when you share things, you do not
Christina Clar

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get back things instantly, but you do get so much things in another way,
not in the way you expect. But if you put in a idea out, use tools that are
open and change them, put them out again. So there is lot of back and
forth of communication. I think that is super important. It is the idea of
evolving together, not just by ourselves. I really do believe that we do evolve
much quicker if we are together than everybody trying to do things by his
or herselves. I think it is very European idea to get into this individualism,
this thinking of idea of doing things by myself, my thing. But I think we
can learn a lot from Asia, just ways of doing, because there community is
much more important.
I don’t necessarily develop like software or codes, because I am not a software developer. But I would say, I am involved in
analog way. I do use Open Source software, although I have to say I do not
much with computers. Most of my work is analog. But I do my researches
on the website. I am a user.
I started to develop an antipathy against large corporations, operating systems or softwares, and started to look for alternatives. Then you come to the
Linux system and Ubuntu which has a very user-friendly interface. I like the
fact that behind the software that I am using, there is a whole community,
who are until now without major financial interests and who develop tools
for people like me. So now I am totally into Open Source software, and I
try to use as much as I can. So my motivation would be I want to get off
the track of big corporates who will always kind of lead you into consuming
more of their products.
John Colenbrander

What does Free Culture mean to you? Are you taking
part in a ‘Free Culture Movement’?
Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu

Michael Murtaugh I’d like to think so, but I realised of that it is quite
hard. Only now, I am seriously trying to really contribute back to projects
and I wouldn’t even say that I am an active contributer to Free Software
projects. I am much more of a user and part of the system. I am using it in
my teaching and my work, but now I try to maybe release software myself in
some way or I try to create projects that people could actually use. I think

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it is another kind of dimension of engagement. I haven’t really fully realised
it, so yes for that question if I am contributing to Free Culture. Yes, but I
could go lot deeper.
John Colenbrander I am a big supporter of the idea of Free Culture. I
think information should be available for people, especially for those who
have little access to information. I mean we live in the West and we have
access to information more or less with physical libraries and institutions
where we can go. Specially in Asia, South America, Africa this is very
important. There is a big gap between those who have access to knowledge
and those don’t have access to knowledge.
That’s a big field to explore to be able to open up information to people who
have very poor access to information. Maybe they are not even able to write
or read. That’s already is a big handicap. So I think it is a big mission in
that sense.

Could Free Culture be seen as an opposition to commercialism?
Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu

Michael Murtaugh It is a tricky question. I think no matter what, if you
go down the stack, in terms of software and hardware, if you get down to
the deepest level of a computer then there is little free CPU design. So I
think it is really important to be able to work in this kind of hybrid spaces
and to be aware of then how free Free is, and always look for alternatives
when they are available. But to a certain degree, I think it is really hard to
go for a total absolute. Or it is a decision, you can go absolute but that may
mean that you are really isolated from other communities. So that’s always
a bit of balancing act, how independent can you be, how independent you
want to be, how big does your audience need to be, or you community needs
to be. So that’s a lot of different decisions. Certainly, when I am working
in the context of an art school with design practitioners, you know it is not
always possible to really go completely independent and there are lots of
implications in terms of how you work and whom you can work with, and
the printers you can work with. So it is always a little bit of trade-off, but it
is important to understand what the decisions are.

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Eleanor Greenhalgh I think the idea of a Free Culture movement is very
exciting and important. It has always gone on, but stating it in copyrightaware terms issues an important challenge to the ‘all rights reserved’ statusquo. At the same time I think it has limitations, at least in its current form.
I’m not sure that rich white kids playing with their laptops is necessarily a
radical act. The idea and the intention are very powerful though, because
it does have the potential to challenge the way that power – in the form of
‘intellectual property’ – is distributed.
Christoph Haag Copyright has become much more enforced over the last
years than it was ever before. In a way, culture is being absorbed by companies trying to make money out of it. And Free Culture developed as a
counter movement against this. When it comes to mainstream culture, you
are most often reduced to a consumer of culture. Free Culture then is a
obvious reaction. The idea of culture where you have the possibility to engage again, to become active and create your version, not just to consume
content.

How could Open Source software be economically sustainable, in a way that is beneficial for both developers/creators and users?
Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu

Eleanor Greenhalgh That’s a good question! A very hard one. I’m not
involved enough in that community to really comment on its economic future. But it does, to me, highlight what is missing from the analysis in
Free Culture discourse, the economic reality. It depends on where they (developers) work. A lot of them are employed by companies so they get a
salary. Others do it for a hobby. I’d be interested to get accurate data on
what percentage of F/LOSS developers are getting paid, etc. In the absence
of that data, I think it’s fair to say it is an unsolved problem. If we think
that developers ‘should’ be compensated for their work, then we need to talk
about capitalism. Or at least, about statutory funding models.

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It is interesting that you used both ‘sustainability’ and
‘economic viability’. And I think those are two things very often in opposition. I am doing a project now about publishing workflows and future electronic publishing forums. And that was the one thing we looked at. There
were several solutions on the market. One was a platform called ‘Editorial’
which was a very nice website that you could use to mark down texts collaboratively and and then it could produce ePub format books. After about
six months of running, it closed down as many platforms do. Interestingly,
in their sign-off message it said: You have a month to get your stuff out of the
website, and sorry we have decided not to Open Source the project. As much as
we loved making it, it was just too much work for us to keep this running. In
terms of real sustainability, Open Source of course would have allowed them
to work with anybody, even if it is just a hobby.
Michael Murtaugh

It is very related to passion of doing these things.
Embroidering machines have copyrighted softwares installed. The software
itself is very expensive, around 1000 , and the software for professionals is
6000 to buy. Embroidering machines are very expensive themselves too.
These softwares are very tight and closed, you even have to have special USB
key for patterns. And there are these two guys who are software developers,
they are trying to come up with a format which all embroidering machines
could read. They take their time to do this and I think in the end if the
project works out, they will probably get attention and probably get paid
also. Because instead of giving 1000 to copyrighted software, maybe you
would be happy to give 50 to these people.
Claire Williams

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Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 15:50:25 +0200
From: FS
To: OSP

Dear OSP,

For a long time I have wanted to organise a conversation with you
about the place and meaning of distributed version control in OSP
design work. First of all because after three years of working with
Git intensely, it is a good moment to take stock. It seems that many
OSP methods, ideas and politics converge around it and a conversation discussing OSP practice linked to this concrete (digital) object
could produce an interesting document; some kind of update on what
OSP has been up to over the last three years and maybe will be in
the future. Second: Our last year in Variable has begun. Under the
header Etat des Lieux, Constant started gathering reflections and documents to archive this three year working period. One of the things
I would like to talk about is the parallels and differences between a
physical studio space and a distributed workflow. And of course I am
personally interested in the idea of ‘versions’ linked to digital collaboration. This connects to old projects and ideas and is sparked again
by new ones revived through the Libre Graphics Research Unit and
of course Relearn.
I hope you are also interested in this, and able to make time for it. I
would imagine a more or less structured session of around two hours
with at least four of you participating, and I will prepare questions
(and cake).
Speak soon!
xF

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How do you usually explain Git to design students?
Before using Git, I would work on a document. Let’s say a layout, and to
keep a trace of the different versions of the layout, I would append _01, _02
to the files. That’s in a way already versioning. What Git does, is that it
makes that process somehow transparent in the sense that, it takes care of
it for you. Or better, you have to make it take care for you. So instead of
having all files visible in your working directory, you put them in a database,
so you can go back to them later on. And then you have some commands to
manipulate this history. To show, to comment, to revert to specific versions.
More than versioning your own files, it is a tool to synchronize your work
with others. It allows you to work on the same projects together, to drive
parallel projects.
It really is a tool to make collaboration easier. It allows you to see differences.
When somebody proposes you a new version of a file, it highlights what has
changed. Of course this mainly works on the level of programming code.
Did you have any experience with Git before working with OSP?
Well, not long before I joined OSP, we had a little introduction to Mercurial,
another versioning software, at school in 2009. Shortly after I switched to
Git. I was working with someone else who was working with Git, and it was
so much better.
Alex was interested in using Git to make Brainch 1 . We wanted to make a web
application to fork texts that are not code. That was our first use of Git.
I met OSP through Git in a way. An intern taught me the program and he
said: Eric once you’ll get it, you’ll get so excited!. We were in the cafeteria of
the art school. I thought it was really special, like someone was letting me
in on a secret and we we’re the only ones in the art school who knew about
it. He thought me how to push and pull. I saw quickly how Git really
is modeled on how culture works. And so I felt it was a really interesting,
promising system. And then I talked about it at the Libre Graphics Meeting
in 2010, and so I met OSP.
1

A distributed text editing platform based on Django and Git http://code.dyne.org/brainch

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I started to work on collaborative, graphic design related stuff when I was
developing a font manager. I’ve been connected to two versioning systems
and mainly used SVN. Git came well after, it was really connected to web
culture, compared to Subversion, which is more software related.
What does it mean that Git is referred to as ‘distributed versioning’?
The first command you learn in Git, is the clone command. It means that
you make a copy of a project that is somehow autonomous. Contrary to
Subversion you don’t have this server-client architecture. Every repository
is in itself a potential server and client. Meaning you can keep track of your
changes offline.
At some point, you decided to use ‘distributed versioning’ rather than a
centralized system such as Subversion. I remember there was quite some
discussion ...
I was not hard to convince. I had no experience with other versioning
systems. I was just excited by the experience that others had with this new
tool. In fact there was this discussion, but I don’t remember exactly the
arguments between SVN or Git. For what I remember Git was easier.
The discussion was not really on the nature of this tool. It was just: who
would keep Git running for OSP? Because the problem is not the system in
itself, it’s the hosting platform. We didn’t find any hosted platform which
fitted our taste. The question was: do we set up our own server, and who is
going to take care of at. At this time Alex, Steph and Ivan were quite excited
about working with Git. And I was excited to use Subversion instead, but I
didn’t have to time to take care of setting it up and everything.
You decided not to use a hosted platform such as Gitorious or GitHub?
I guess we already had our own server and were hosting our own projects. But
Pierre you used online platforms to share code?
When I started developing my own projects it was kind of the end of
SourceForge. 2 I was looking for a tool more in the Free Software tradition.
2

SourceForge is a web based source code repository. It was the first platform to offer this
service for free to Open Source projects.

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There was gna, and even though the platform was crashing all the time, I
felt it was in line with this purpose.
If I remember correctly, when we decided between Git and Subversion,
Pierre, you were also not really for it because of the personality of its main
developer, Linus Torvalds. I believe it was the community aspect of Git that
bothered you.

Well Git has been written to help Linus Torvalds receive patches for the
Linux kernel; it is not aimed at collaborative writing. It was more about
making it convenient for Linus. And I didn’t see a point in making my
practice convenient for Linus. I was already using Subversion for a while
and it was really working great at providing an environment to work together with a lot of people and check out different versions. Anything you
expect from a versioning system was there, all elements for collaborative
work were there. I didn’t see the point to change for something that didn’t
feel as comfortable with, culturally. This question of checking out different
directories of repositories was really important to me. At this time (Git has
evolved a lot) it was not possible to do that. There were other technical
aspects I was quite keen of. I didn’t see why to go for Git which was not
offering the same amount of good stuff.

But then there is this aspect of distribution, and that’s not in Subversion.
If some day somebody decides to want a complete copy of an OSP project,
including all it’s history, they would need to ask us or do something complicated to give it to them.

I was not really interested in this ‘spreading the whole repository’. I was
more concerned about working together on a specific project.

It feels like your habit of keeping things online has shifted. From making
an effort afterwards to something that happens naturally, as an integral
part of your practice.

It happened progressively. There is this idea that the Git repository is linked
to the website, which came after. The logic is to keep it all together and
linked, online and alive.
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That’s not really true ... it was the dream we had: once we have Git, we
share our files while working on them. We don’t need to have this effort
afterwards of cleaning up the sources and it will be shareable. But it is not
true. If we do not put an effort to make it shareable it remains completely
opaque. It requires still an investment of time. I think it takes about 10%
of time of the project, to make it readable from the outside afterwards.

Now, with the connection to our public website, you’re more conscious that all
the files we use are directly published. Before we had a Git web application that
allowed someone to just browse repositories, but it was not visual, so it was hard
to get into it. The Cosic project is a good example. Every time I want to show
the project to someone, I feel lost. There are so many files and you really don’t
know which ones to open.

Maybe, Eric, you can talk about ‘Visual Culture’?

Basically ‘Visual Culture’ is born out of this dream I talked about just now.
That turns out not to be true, but shapes our practice and helps us think
about licensing and structuring and all those interesting questions. I was
browsing through this Git interface that Stéphanie described, and thought
it was a missed opportunity, because here is this graphic design studio,
who publishes all their works, while they are working. Which has all kind
of consequences but if you can’t see it, if you don’t know anything about
computer programming, you have no clue on what’s going on. And also,
because it’s completely textual. And for example a .sla file, if you don’t know
about Open Source, if you don’t know about Scribus it could as well be
salad. It is clear that Git was made for text. It was the idea to show all the
information that is already there in a visual form. But an image is an image,
and type is a typeface, and it changes in a visual way. I thought it made
sense for us to do. We didn’t have anyone writing posts on our blog. But
we had all this activity in the Git repository.
It started to give some schematic view on our practice, and renders the current
activity visible, very exciting. But it is also very frustrating because we have lots
of ideas and very little time to implement them. So the ‘Visual Culture’ project
is terribly late on the ball comparing to our imagination.
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Take by example the foundry. Or the future potential of the ‘Iceberg’ folders. Or
our blog that is sometimes cruelly missing. We have ways to fill all these functions
with ‘Visual Culture’ but still no time to do it!
In a way you follow established protocols on how Open Source code is
usually published. There should be a license, a README file ... But OSP
also decided to add a special folder, which you called ‘Iceberg’. This is a
trick to make your repository more visual?

Yeah, because even if something is straightforward to visualise, it helps if
you can make a small render of it. But most of the files are a accumulation
of files, like a webpage. The idea is that in the ‘Iceberg’ folder, we can put a
screenshot, or other images ...

We wanted the files that are visible, to be not only the last files added. We wanted
to be able to show the process. We didn’t want it to be a portfolio and just show
the final output. But we wanted to show errors and try-outs. I think it’s not only
related to Git, but also to visual layout. When you want to share software, we
say release early, release often, which is really nice. But it’s not enough to just
release, because you need to make it accessible to other people to understand what
they are reading. It’s like commenting your code, making it ... I don’t want to
say ‘clean’ ... legible, using variable names that people can understand. Because,
sometimes when we code just for ourselves I use French variables so that I’m sure
that it’s not word-protected by the programming language. But then it is not
accessible to many people. So stuff like that.
You have decided to use a tool that’s deeply embedded in the world of
F/LOSS. So I’ve always seen your choice for Git both as a pragmatic
choice as well as a fan choice?

Like as fans of the world of Open Source?

Yes. By using this tool you align yourself, as designers, with people that
develop software.

I’m not sure, I join Pierre on his feelings towards Linus Torvalds, even
though I have less anger at him. But let’s say he is not someone I especially
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like in his way of thinking. What I like very much about Git is the distributed aspect. With it you can collaborate without being aligned together.
While I think Linus Torvalds idea is very liberal and in a way a bit sad, this
idea that you can collaborate without being aligned, without going through
this permission system, is interesting. With Scribus for example, I never
collaborated on it, it’s such a pain to got through the process. It’s good and
bad. I like the idea of a community which is making a decision together, at
the same time it is so hard to enter this community that you just don’t want
to and give up.
How does it feel, as a group of designer-developers, to adopt workflows,
ways of working, and also a vocabulary that comes from software development?

On the one hand it’s maybe a fan act. We like this movement of F/LOSS
development which is not always given the importance it has in the cultural
world. It’s like saying hey I find you culturally relevant and important. But
there’s another side to it. It’s not just a distant appropriation, it’s also the fact
that software development is such a pervasive force. It’s so much shaping
the world, that I feel I also want to take part in defining what are these
procedures, what are these ways of sharing, what are these ways of doing
things. Because I also feel that if I ask someone from another field as
a cultural actor, and take and appropriate these mechanisms and ways of
doing, I will be able to influence what they are. So there is the fan act, and
there’s also the act of trying to be aware of all the logic contained in these
actions.

And from another side, in the world of graphic design it is also a way to
affirm that we are different. And that we’re really engaged in doing this
and not only about designing nice pictures. That we really develop our own
tools.

It is a way to say: hey, we’re not a kind of politically engaged designers with
a different political goal each next half month, and than we do a project
about it. It really impacts our ecosystem, we’re serious about it.
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It’s true that, before we started to use Git, people asked: So you’re called
Open Source Publishing, but where are your sources? For some projects you
could download a .zip file but it was always a lot of trouble, because you needed
to do it afterwards, while you were already doing other projects.

Collaboration started to become a prominent part of the work; working
together on a project. Rather than, oh you do that and when you are finished
you send the file over and I will continue. It’s really about working together on
a project. Even if you work together in the same space, if you don’t have a
system to share files, it’s a pain in the ass.
After using it for a few years, would you say there are parts of in Git
where you do not feel at home?

In Git, and in versioning systems in general, there is that feeling that the
latest version is the best. There is an idea of linearity, even though you can
have branches, you still have an idea of linearity in the process.

Yes, that’s true. We did this workshop Please computer let me design, the first
time was in a French school, in French, and the second time for a more European
audience, in English. We made a branch, but then you have the default branch the English one - you only see that one, while they are actually on the same level.

So the convention is to always show the main branch, the ‘master’?

In a way there is no real requirement in Git to have a branch called ‘master’.
You can have a branch called ‘English’ and a branch called ‘French’. But
it’s true that all the visualization software we know (GitHub or Gitorious
are ways to visualize the content of a Git repository), you’ll need to specify
which is the branch that is shown by default. And by default, if you don’t
define it, it is ‘master’.
For certain types of things such as code and text it works really well, for
others, like you’re making a visual design, it’s still very hard to compare
differences. If I make a poster for example I still make several files instead of
branches, so I can see them together at once, without having to check-out
another branch. Even in websites, if I want to make a layout, I’ll simply make
a copy of the HTML and CSS, because I want to be able to test out and
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compare them. It might be possible with branches, it’s just to complicated.
Maybe the tools to visualize it are not there ... But it’s still easier to make
copies and pick the one you like.

It’s quite heavy to go back to another version. Also working collaboratively is
actually quite heavy. For example in workshops, or the ‘Balsamine’ project ... we
were working together on the same files at the same time, and if you want to share
your file with Git you’ll have to first add your file, then commit and pull and
push, which is four commands. And every time you commit you have to write
a message. So it is quite long. So while we were working on the .css for ‘Visual
Culture’, we tried it in Etherpad, and one of us was copying the whole text file
and committing.

So you centralized in the end.

It’s more about third-party visual software. Let’s say Etherpad for example,
it’s a versioning system in itself. You could hook into Git through Etherpad
and each letter you type could be a commit. And it would make nonsense
messages but at the same time it would speed up the process to work together. We can imagine the same thing with Git (or any other collaborative
working system) integrated into Inkscape. You draw and every time you save
... At some point Subversion was also a WebDav server, it means that for
any application it was possible to plug things together. Each time you would
save you file it would make a commit on the server. It worked pretty well
to bring new people into this system because it was just exactly the same as
the OpenOffice, it was an open WebDav client. So it was possible to say to
OpenOffice that you, where you save is a disk. It was just like saving and it
was committing.

I really agree. From the experience of working on a typeface together in
Git with students, it was really painful. That’s because you are trying to
do something that generates source code, a type design program generates
source code. You’re not writing it by hand, and if you then have two versions
of the type design program, it already starts to create conflicts that are quite
hard. It’s interesting to bring to models together. Git is just an architecture
on how to start your version, so things could hook into it.
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For example with Etherpad, I’ve looked into this API the other day, and
working together with Git, I’m not sure if having every Etherpad revision
directly mapped to a Git revision would makes sense if you work on a project
... but at the same time you could have every saved revision mapped to a
Git revision. It’s clear Git is made for asynchronous collaboration process.
So there is Linus in his office, there are patches coming in from different
people. He has the time also to figure out which patch needs to go where.
This doesn’t really work for the Etherpad-style-direct-collaboration. For
me it’s cool to think about how you could make these things work together.
Now I’m working on this collaborative font editor which does that in some
sort of database. How would that work? It would not work if every revision
would be in the Git. I was thinking you could save, or sort of commit, and
that would put it in a Git repository, this you can pull and push. But if
you want to have four people working together and they start pulling, that
doesn’t work on Git.

I never really tried Sparkleshare, that could maybe work? Sparkleshare is making
a commit message every time you save a document. In a way it works more like
Dropbox. Every time you save it’s synchronized with the server directly.

So you need to find a balance between the very conscious commits you
make with Git and the fluidness of Etherpad, where the granularity is
much finer. Sparkleshare would be in between?
I think it would be interesting to have this kind of Sparkleshare behaviour, but
only when you want to work synchronously.

So you could switch in and out of different modes?

Usually Sparkleshare is used for people who don’t want to get to much involved
in Git and its commands. So it is really transparent: I send my files, it’s synchronized. I think it was really made for this kind of Dropbox behaviour. I think
it would make sense only when you want to have your hands on the process. To
have this available only when you decide, OK I go synchronous. Like you say,
if you have a commit for every letter it doesn’t make sense.
It makes sense. A lot of things related to versions in software development
is meant to track bugs, to track programming choices.
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I don’t know for you ... but the way I interact with our Git repository since we
started to work with it ... I almost never went into the history of a project. It’s
just, it really never happened to go back into this history, to check out an old
version.

I do!

Some neat feature of Git is the dissect command. To find where it broke.

You can top from an old revision that you know that works and then track
down, like checkout, track down the bug.

Can you give a concrete example, where that would be useful, I mean,
not in code.

Not code, okay. That I don’t know.

In a design, like visual design, I think it never happens. It happens on websites,
on tools. Because there is a bug, so you need to come back to see where it broke.
But for a visual design I’m not sure.

It’s true, also because as you said before, with .svg files or .sla files we often
have several duplicates. I sometimes checkout those. But it’s true it’s often
related to merge problems. Or something, you don’t know what to do, so
you’ll just check-out, to go back to an earlier version.

It would be interesting for me to really look at our use of Git and map some
kind of tool on top of a versioning system. Because it’s not even versioning,
it is also a collaborative workflow, and to see what we mean. Just to use
maybe some feature of Git or whatever to provide the services we need and
really see what we exactly work with. And, this kind of thing where we
want to see many versions at the same time, to compare seems important.
Well it’s the kind of thing that could take advantage of a versioning system,
to build.
It is of course a bit strange that if you want to see different versions next
to each other you have to go back in time. It’s a kind of paradox, no?

But then you can’t see them at the same time
Exactly, no.

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Because there is no way to visualize your trip back in history.

Well I think, something you could all have some interesting discussion
about, is the question of exchange. Because now we are talking about the
individual. We’ve talked how it’s easier to contribute to Git based projects
but to be accepted into an existing repository someone needs to say okay,
I want it, which is like SVN. What is easier, is to publish you’re whole
Git repository online, with the only difference from the the first version,
is that you added your change, but it means that in proposing a change
you are already making a new cultural artifact. You’re already putting a new
something there. I find this to be a really fascinating phenomena because
it has all kinds of interesting consequences. Of course we can look at it
the way of, it’s the cold and the liberal way of doing things. Because the
individual is at the center of this, because you are on your own. It’s your
thing in the first place, and then you can see if it maybe becomes someone
else’s thing too. So that has all kinds of coldness about it and it leads to
many abandoned projects and maybe it leads to a decrease of social activity
around specific projects. But there’s also an interesting part of it, where it
actually resembles quite well how culture works in the first place. Because
culture deals with a lot redundancy, in the sense that we can deal with many
kinds of very similar things. We can have Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica and
the Akkurat all at the same time, and they have some kind of weird cultural
lineage thing going on in between them.

Are there any pull requests for OSP?
We did have one.

Eric is right to ask about collaboration with others, not only how to work
internally in a group.

That’s why GitHub is really useful. Because it has the architecture to exchange
changes. Because we have our own server it’s quite private, it’s really hard to
allow anyone to contribute to fonts for example. So we had e-mails: Hey here’s
a new version of the font, I did some glyphs, but also changed the shape of
the A. There we have two different things, new glyphs is one thing, we could say
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we take any new glyph. But changing the A, how do you deal with this? There’s
a technical problem, well not technical ...

An architectural problem?

Yeah, we won’t add everyone’s SSH-key to the server because it will be endless
to maintain. But at the same time, how do you accept changes? And then, who
decides what changes will be accepted?

For the foundry we decided to have a maintainer for each font project.

It’s the kind of thing we didn’t do well. We have this kind of administrative
way of managing the server. Well it’s a lot of small elements that all together
make it difficult. Let’s say at some point we start to think maybe we need to
manage our repositories, something a bit more sophisticated then Gitolite. So we
could install something like Gitorious. We didn’t do it but we could imagine
to rebuild a kind of ecosystem where people have their own repositories and
do anything we can imagine on this kind of hosting service. Gitorious is a
Free Software so you can deploy it on your own server. But it is not trivial
to do.
Can you explain the difference between Gitorious and GitHub?

Gitorious is first a free version, it’s not a free version of Git but GitHub. One
is free and one is not.
Meaning you can not install GitHub on your own server.

Git is a storage back-end, and Gitorious or GitHub are a kind of web application to interact with the repository and to manage them. And GitHub
is a program and a company deploying these programs to offer both a commercial service and a free-of-charge service. They have a lot of success with
the free service Git in a sense. And they make a lot of money at providing
the same service, exactly the same, just it means that you can have private
space on the server. It’s quite convenient, because the tools are really good
to manage repositories. And Gitorious I don’t exactly know what is their
business model, they made all their source code to run the platform Free
Software. It means they offer a bit less fancy features.
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A bit less shiny?

Yeah, because they have less success and so less money to dedicate to development of the platform. But still it’s some kind of easy to grasp web interface
management, repositories manager. Which is quite cool. We could do that,
to install this kind of interface, to allow more people to have their repositories on the OSP-server. But here comes the difficult thing: we would need
a bit more resources to run the server to host a lot of repositories. Still this
moment we have problems sometimes with the server because it’s not like
a large server. Nobody at OSP is really a sysadmin, and has time to install
and setup everything nicely etcetc. And we also would have to work on the
gitorious web application to make it a bit more in line with our visual universe. Because now it’s really some kind of thing we cannot associate with
really.

Do you think ‘Visual Culture’ can leverage some of the success of GitHub?
People seem to understand and like working this way.

Well, it depends. We also meet a lot of people who come to GitHub and say,
I don’t understand, I don’t understand anything of this! Because of it’s huge
success GitHub can put some extra effort in visualization, and they started
to run some small projects. So they can do more than ‘Visual Culture’ can
do.
And is this code available?

Some of their projects are Open Source.

Some of their projects are free. Even if we have some things going on in
‘Visual Culture’, we don’t have enough manpower to finalize this project.
The GitHub interface is really specific, really oriented, they manage to do
things like show fonts, show pictures, but I don’t think they can display
.pdf. ‘Visual Culture’ is really a good direction, but it can become obsolete
by the fact that we don’t have enough resource to work on it. GitHub starts
to cover a lot of needs, but always in their way of doing things, so it’s a
problem.
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I’m very surprised ... the quality of Git is that it isn’t centralized, and nowadays everything is becoming centralized in GitHub. I’m also wondering
whether ... I don’t think we should start to host other repositories, or maybe
we should, I don’t know.
Yeah, I think we should

You do or you don’t want to become a hosting platform?

No. What I think is nice about GitHub is of course the social aspect around
sharing code. That they provide comments. Which is an extra layer on top
of Git. I’m having fantasies about another group like OSP who would use
Git and have their own server, instead of having this big centralized system.
But still have ways to interact with each other. But I don’t know how.
It would be interesting if it’s distributed without being disconnected.

If it was really easy to setup Git, or a versioning server, that would be
fantastic. But I can remember, as a software developer, when I started to
look for somewhere to host my code it was no question to setup my own
server. Because of not having time, no time to maintain, no time to deploy
etcetc. At some point we need hosting-platforms for ourselves. We have
almost enough to run our own platform. But think of all the people who
can’t afford it.
But in a way you are already hosting other people’s projects. Because
there are quite a few repositories for workshops that actually not belong
to you.

Yeah, but we moved some of them to GitHub just to get rid of the pain of
maintaining these repositories.
We wanted the students to be independent. To really have them manage
their own projects.

GitHub is easier to manage then our own repository which is still based on
a lot of files.
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For me, if we ever make this hosting platform, it should be something else then
our own website. Because, like you say, it’s kind of centralized in the way we use
it now. It’s all on the Constant server.

Not anymore?

No, the Git repositories are still on the Constant server.

Ah, the Git is still. But they are synced with the OSP server. But still, I can
imagine it would be really nice to have many instances of ‘Visual Culture’
for groups of people running their own repositories.
It feels a bit like early days of blogging.

It would be really, really nice for us to allow other people to use our services.
I was also thinking of this, because of this branching stuff. For two reasons,
first to make it easier for people to take advantage of our repository. Just
like branching our repository would be one click, just like in Gitorious or
GitHub. So I have an account and I like this project and I want to change
something, I just click on it. You’re branched into your own account and
you can start to work with it. That’s it, and it would be really convenient
for people who would like to work with our font files etc. And once we
have all these things running on our server we can think of a lot of ideas to
promote our own dynamic over versioning systems. But now we’re really a
bit stuck because we don’t have the tools we would like to have. With the
repositories, it’s something really rigid.
It is interesting to see the limits of what actually can happen. But it is
still better than the usual (In)design practices?

We would like to test GitMX. We don’t know much about it, but we would
like to use it for the pictures in high-resolution, .pdfs. We thought about it
when we were in Seoul, because we were putting pictures on a gallery, and
we were like ah, this gallery. We were wondering, perhaps if GitMX works
well, perhaps it can be separated into different types of content. And then
we can branch them into websites. And perhaps pictures of the finalized
work. In the end we have the ‘Iceberg’ with a lot of ‘in-progress’-pictures,
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but we don’t have any portfolio or book. Again because we don’t care much
about this, but at the end we feel we miss it a bit.

A narration ...

... to have something to present. Each time we prepare a presentation, we
need to start again to find back the tools and files, and to choose what we
want to send for the exhibition.

It’s really important because at some point, working with Git, I can remember telling people ...
Don’t push images!
I remember.

The repository is there to share the resources. And that’s really where it
shines. And don’t try to put all your active files in it. At some point we miss
this space to share those files.
But an image can be a recipe. And code can be an artifact. For me the
difference is not so obvious.

It is not always so clear. Sometimes the cut-off point is decided by the weight of
the file, so if it is too heavy, we avoid Git. Another is: if it is easy to compile, leave
it out of Git. Sometimes the logic is reversed. If we need it to be online even if
not a source, but simply we need to share it, we put it on the Git. Some commits
are also errors. The distinction is quite organic until now, in my experience. The
closer the practice gets to code, the more clean the versioning process is.

There is also a kind of performative part of the repository. Where a
commit counts as a proof of something ...
When I presented the OSP’s website, we had some remarks like, ah it’s good we
can see what everybody has done, who has worked.

But strangely so far there were not many reactions from partners or clients
regarding the fact that all the projects could be followed at any stage. Even budget
wise ... Mostly, I think, because they do not really understand how it works.
And sometimes it’s true, it came to my mind, should we really show our website
to clients? Because they can check whether we are working hard, or this week
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we didn’t do shit ... And it’s, I think it’s really based on trust and the type of
collaboration you want with your client. Actually collaboration and not a hierarchical relationship. So I think in the end it’s something that we have to work
on. On building a healthy relationship, that you show the process but it’s not
about control. The meritocracy of commits is well known, I think, in platforms
like GitHub. I don’t think in OSP this is really considered at all actually.

It supports some self-time tracking that is nuanced and enriched by e-mail,
calendar events, writing in Etherpads. It gives a feeling of where is the activity
without following it too closely. A feeling rather than surveillance or meritocracy.

I know that Eric ... because he doesn’t really keep track of his working hours. He
made a script to look into his commit messages to know when he worked on a
project. Which is not always truthful. Because sometimes you make a commit on
some files that you made last week, but forgot to commit. And a commit is a
text message at a certain time. So it doesn’t tell you how much time you spent on
the file.

Although in the way you decided to visualize the commits, there is a sense
of duration between the last and the commit before. So you have a sense
of how much time passed in between. Are there ways you sometimes
trick the system, to make things visible that might otherwise go missing?
In the messages sometimes, we talk about things we tried and didn’t work.
But it’s quite rare.

I kind of regret that I don’t write so much on the commits. At the beginning
when we decided to publish the messages on the homepage we talked about
this theater dialogue and I was really excited. But in the end I see that I
don’t write as much as I would like.
I think it’s really a question of the third-party programs we use. Our
messages are like a dialogue on the website. But when you write
a commit message you’re not at all in this interface. So you don’t answer
to something. If we would have the same kind of interface we have on the
website, you would realize you can answer to the previous commit message.
You have this sort of narrative thread and it would work. We are in the
commit

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middle, we have this feeling of a dialogue on one side, but because when
you work, you’re not on the website to check the history. It’s just basically, it
would be about to make things really in line with what we want to achieve.
I commit just when I need to share the files with someone else. So I wait
until the last moment.

To push you mean?

No, to commit. And then I’ve lost track of what I’ve done and then I just
write ...

But it would be interesting, to look at the different speeds of collaboration. They might need each another type of commit message.

But it’s true, I must admit that when I start working on a project I don’t read the
last messages. And so, then you lose this dialogue as you said. Because sometimes
I say, Ludi is going to work on it. So I say, OK Ludi it’s your turn now,
but the thing is, if she says that to me I would not know because I don’t read the
commit messages.

I suppose that is something really missing from the Git client. When you
you update your working copy to synchronize with the server it just
says files change, how many changes there were. But doesn’t give you the
story.
pull,

That’s what missing when you pull. It should instead of just showing which files
have changed, show all the logs from the last time you pulled.

Your earlier point, about recipes versus artifacts. I have something to add
that I forgot. I would reverse the question, what the versioning system
considers to be a recipe is good, is a recipe. I mean, in this context ‘a
recipe’ is something that works well within the versioning system. Such as
the description of your process to get somewhere. And I can imagine it’s
something, I would say the Git community is trying to achieve that fact.
Make it something that you can share easily.

But we had a bit of this discussion with Alex for a reader we made. It is going to
be published, so we have the website with all the texts, and the texts are all under
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a free license. But the publisher doesn’t want us to put the .pdfs online. I’m quite
okay with that, because for me it’s a condition that we put the sources online. But
if you really want the .pdf then you can clone the repository and make them
yourself in Scribus. It’s just an example of not putting the .pdf, but you have
everything you need to make the .pdf yourself. For me it’s quite interesting to say
our sources are there. You can buy the book but if you want the .pdf you have
to make a small effort to generate it and then you can distribute it freely. But I
find it quite interesting to, of course the easiest way would be the .pdf but in this
case we can’t. Because the publisher doesn’t want us to.

But that distinction somehow undervalues the fact that layout for example
is not just an executed recipe, no? I mean, so there is this kind of grey
area in design that is ... maybe not the final result, but also not a sort of
executable code.
We see it with ‘Visual Culture’, for instance, because Git doesn’t make it easy
to work with binaries. And the point of ‘Visual Culture’ is to make .jpegs
visible and all the kind of graphical files we work with. So it’s like we don’t
know how to decide whether we should put for instance .pdfs in the Git
repository online. Because on the one hand it makes it less manageable with
Git to work with. But on the other hand we want to make things visible on
the website.
But it’s also storage-space. If you want to clone it, if you want people to clone
it also you don’t want a 8 gigabyte repository.

I don’t know because it’s not really what OSP is for, but you can imagine, like
Dropbox has been made to easily share large files, or even files in general.
We can imagine that another company will set up something, especially
graphic designers or the graphic industry. The way GitHub did something
for the development industry. They will come up with solutions for this
very problem.
I just want to say that I think because we’re not a developer group, at the start the
commit messages were a space where you would throw all your anger, frustration.
And we first published a Git log in the Balsamine program, because we saw that.
This was the first program we designed with ConTeXt. So we were manipulating
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code for layout. The commit messages were all really funny, because Pierre and
Ludi come from a non-coding world and it was really inspiring and we decided
to put it in the publication. Then we kind of looked, Ludi says two kind of bad
things about the client, but it was okay. Now I think we are more aware that it’s
public, we kind of pay attention not to say stuff we don’t mean to ...

It’s not such an exciting space anymore as in the first half year?

It often very formal and not very, exciting, I think. But sometimes I put
quite some effort to just make clear what I’m trying to share.

And there are also commits that you make for yourself. Because sometimes, even
if you work on a project alone, you still do a Git project to keep track, to have a
history to come back to. Then you write to yourself. I think it’s also something
else. I’ve never tried it.

It’s a lot to ask in a way, to write about what you are doing while you are
doing it.

I think we should pay more attention to the first commit of a project, and
the last. Because it’s really important to start the story and to end it. I speak
about this ‘end’ because I feel overflowed by all these not-ended projects, I’m
quite tired of it. I would like us to find a way to archive projects which are
not alive any more. To find a good way to do it. Because the list of folders
is still growing, and in a way it is okay but a lot of projects are not active.

But it’s hard to know when is the last commit. With the Balsamine project it’s
quite clear, because it’s season per season. But still, we never know when it is the
last one. The last one could be solved by the ‘Iceberg’, to make the last snapshots
and say okay now we make the screenshots of the latest version. And then you close
it ... We wanted that the last one was Hey, we sent the .pdfs to the printer.
But actually we had to send it back another time because there was a mistake.
And then the log didn’t fit on the page anymore.

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At the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008, OSP sat down with
Chris Lilley on a small patch of grass in front of the
Technical University in Wroclaw, Poland. Warmed up by
the early May sun, we talked about the way standards are
made, how ‘specs’ influence the work of designers, programmers and managers and how this process is opening up to voices from outside the W3C. Chris Lilley is
trained as a biochemist, and specialised in the application
of biological computing. He has been involved with the
World Wide Web Consortium since the 1990s, headed the
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) working group and currently looks after two W3C activity areas: graphics, including PNG, CGM, graphical quality, and fonts, including font formats, delivery, and availability of font software.
I would like to ask you about the way standards are made ... I think there’s a
relation between the way Free, Libre and Open Source software works, and
how standards work. But I am particularly interested in your announcement
in your talk today that you want to make the process of defining the SVG
standard a public process?
Right. So, there’s a famous quote that says that standards are like sausages.
Your enjoyment of them is improved by not knowing how they’re made. 1
And to some extent, depending on the standards body and depending on
what you’re trying to standardize, the process can be very messy. If you
were to describe W3C as a business proposition, it has got to fail. You’re
taking companies who all have commercial interests, who are competing and
you’re putting them in the same room and getting them to talk together and
agree on something. Oddly, sometimes that works! You can sell them the
idea that growing the market is more important and is going to get them
more money. The other way ... is that you just make sure that you get the
managers to sign, so that their engineers can come and discuss standards,

1

Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made. Otto von Bismarck, 1815–1898

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and then you get the engineers to talk and the managers are out of the way.
Engineers are much more forthcoming, because they are more interested in
sharing stuff because engineers like to share what they’re doing, and talk
on a technical level. The worst thing is to get the managers involved, and
even worse is to get lawyers involved. W3C does actually have all those
three in the process. Shall we do this work or not is a managerial level that’s
handled by the W3C advisory committee, and that’s where some people
say No, don’t work on that area or We have patents or This is a bad idea or
whatever. But often it goes through and then the engineers basically talk
about it. Occasionally there will be patents disclosed, so the W3C also has
a process for that. The first things are done are the ‘charters’. The charter
says what the group is going to work on a broad scope. As soon as you’ve got
your first draft, that further defines the scope, but it also triggers what it’s
called an exclusion opportunity, which basically gives the companies I think
ninety days to either declare that they have a specific patent and say what it’s
number is and say that they exclude it, or not. And if they don’t, they’ve just
given a royalty-free licence to whatever is needed to implement that spec.
The interesting thing is that if they give the royalty-free licence they don’t
have to say which patents they’re licencing. Other standards organizations
build up a patent portfolio, and they list all these patents and they say what
you have to licence. W3C doesn’t do that, unless they’ve excluded it which
means you have to work around it or something like that. Based on what
the spec says, all the patents that have been given, are given. The engineers
don’t have to care. That’s the nice thing. The engineers can just work away,
and unless someone waves a red flag, you just get on with it, and at the end
of the day, it’s a royalty-free specification.
But if you look at the SVG standard, you could say that it’s been quite a
bumpy road 2 ... What kind of work do you need to do to make a successful
standard?

Firstly, you need to agree on what you’re building, which isn’t always firm
and sometimes it can change. For example, when SVG was started the idea
was that it would be just static graphics. And also that it would be animated
2

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/news/whos-afraid-of-adobe-not-me-says-the-mozillafoundation

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using scripts, because with dynamic HTML and whatever, this was ’98, we
were like: OK, we’re going to use scripting to do this. But when we put it
out for a first round of feedback, people were like No! No, this is not good
enough. We want to have something declarative. We don’t want to have to write
a script every time we want something to move or change color. Some of the
feedback, from Macromedia for example was like No, we don’t think it should
have this facility, but it quickly became clear why they were saying that and
what technology they would rather use instead for anything that moved or
did anything useful ... We basically said That’s not a technical comment, that’s
a marketing comment, and thank you very much.

Wait a second. How do you make a clear distinction between marketing and
technical comments?

People can make proposals that say We shouldn’t work on this, we shouldn’t
work on that, but they’re evaluated at a technical level. If it’s Don’t do it
like that because it’s going to break as follows, here I demonstrate it then that’s
fine. If they’re like Don’t do it because that competes with my proprietary
product then it’s like Thanks for the information, but we don’t actually care.
It’s not our problem to care about that. It’s your problem to care about
that. Part of it is sharing with the working group and getting the group
to work together, which requires constant effort, but it’s no different from
any sort of managerial or trust company type thing. There’s this sort of
encouragement in it that at the end of the day you’re making the world a
better place. You’re building a new thing and people will use it and whatever.
And that is quite motivating. You need the motivation because it takes a lot
longer than you think. You build the first spec and it looks pretty good and
you publish it and you smooth it out a bit, put it out for comments and you
get a ton of comments back. People say If you combine this with this with this
then that’s not going to work. And you go Is anyone really going to do that? But
you still have to say what happens. The computer still has to know what
happens even if they do that. Ninety percent of the work is after the first
draft, and it’s really polishing it down. In the W3C process, once you get
to a certain level, you take it to what is euphemistically called the ‘last call’.
This is a term we got from the IETF. 3 It actually means ‘first call’ because

3

The Internet Engineering Task Force, http://www.ietf.org/

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you never have just one. It’s basically a formal round of comments. You log
every single comment that’s been made, you respond to them all, people can
make an official objection if you haven’t responded to the comment correctly
etcetera. Then you publish a list of what changes you’ve made as a basis of
that.

What part of the SVG standardization process would you like to make public?

The part that I just said has always been public. W3C publishes specifications on a regular basis, and these are always public and freely available.
The comments are made in public and responded to in public. What hasn’t
been public has been the internal discussions of the group. Sometimes it
can take a long time if you’ve got a lot of comments to process or if there’s a
lot of argumentation in the group: people not agreeing on the direction to
go, it can take a while. From the outside it looks like nothing is happening.
Some people like to follow this at a very detailed level, and blog about it,
and blablabla. Overtime, more and more working groups have become public. The SVG group just recently got recharted and it’s now a public group.
All of its minutes are public. We meet for ninety minutes twice a week on
a telephone call. There’s an IRC log of that and the minutes are published
from that, and that’s all public now. 4

Could you describe such a ninety minute meeting for us?

There are two chairs. I used to be the chair for eight years or so, and then
I stepped down. We’ve got two new chairs. One of them is Erik Dahlström
from Opera, and one of them is Andrew Emmons from Bitflash. Both
are SVG implementing companies. Opera on the desktop and mobile, and
Bitflash is just on mobile. They will set out an agenda ahead of time and
say We will talk about the following issues. We have an issue tracker, we have
an action tracker which is also now public. They will be going through the
actions of people saying I’m done and discussing whether they’re actually
done or not. Particular issues will be listed on the agenda to talk about
and to have to agree on, and then if we agree on it and you have to change
the spec as a result, someone will get an action to change that back to the
4

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Feedback Page:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/feedback.html

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spec. The spec is held into CVS so anyone in the working group can edit
it and there is a commit log of changes. When anyone accidentally broke
something or trampled onto someone else’s edit, or whatever - which does
happen - or if it came as the result of a public comment, then there will be
a response back saying we have changed the spec in the following way ... Is
this acceptable? Does this answer your comment?
How many people do take part in such a meeting?

In the working group itself there are about 20 members and about 8 or
so who regularly turn up, every week for years. You know, you lose some
people over time. They get all enthusiastic and after two years, when you
are not done, they go off and do something else, which is human nature.
But there have been people who have been going forever. That’s what you
need actually in a spec, you need a lot of stamina to see it through. It is a
long term process. Even when you are done, you are not done because you’ve
got errata, you’ve got revisions, you’ve got requests for new functionalities
to make it into the next version and so on.

On the one hand you could say every setting of a standard is a violent process,
some organisation forcing a standard upon others, but the process you describe
is entirely based on consensus.

There’s another good quote. Tim Berners Lee was asked why W3C works
by consensus, rather than by voting and he said: W3C is a consensus-based
organisation because I say so, damn it. 5 That’s the Inventor of the Web,
you know ... (laughs) If you have something in a spec because 51% of the
people thought it was a good idea, you don’t end up with a design, you end
up with a bureaucratic type decision thing. So yes, the idea is to work by
consensus. But consensus is defined as: ‘no articulated dissent’ so someone
can say ‘abstain’ or whatever and that’s fine. But we don’t really do it on
a voting basis, because if you do it like that, then you get people trying to
5

Consensus is a core value of W3C. To promote consensus, the W3C process requires Chairs
to ensure that groups consider all legitimate views and objections, and endeavor to resolve
them, whether these views and objections are expressed by the active participants of the
group or by others (e.g., another W3C group, a group in another organization, or the general
public). World Wide Web Consortium. General Policies for W3C Groups, 2005. [Online; accessed 30.12.2014]

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make voting blocks and convince other people to vote their way ... it is much
better when it is done on the basis of a technical discussion, I mean ... you
either convince people or you don’t.
If you read about why this kind of work is done ... you find different arguments. From enhancing global markets to: ‘in this way, we will create a
better world for everyone’. In Tim Berners-Lee’s statements, these two are
often mixed. If you for example look at the DIN standards, they are unambiguously put into the world as to help and support business. With Web
Standards and SVG, what is your position?

Yes. So, basically ... the story we tell depends on who we are telling it to and
who is listening and why we want to convince them. Which I hope is not as
duplicitous as it may sound. Basically, if you try to convince a manager that
you want 20% time of an engineer for the coming two years, you are telling
them things to convince them. Which is not untrue necessarily, but that is
the focus they want. If you are talking to designers, you are telling them how
that is going to help them when this thing becomes a spec, and the fact that
they can use this on multiple platforms, and whatever. Remember: when
the web came out, to exchange any document other than plain text was extremely difficult. It meant exchanging word processor formats, and you had
to know on what platform you were on and in what version. The idea that
you might get interoperability, and that the Mac and the PC could exchange
characters that were outside ASCII was just pie in the sky stuff. When we
started, the whole interoperability and cross-platform thing was pretty novel
and an untested idea essentially. Now it has become pretty much solid. We
have got a lot of focus on disabled accessibility, and also internationalization
which is if you like another type of accessibility. It would be very easy for
an organisation like W3C, which is essentially funded by companies joining it, and therefore they come from technological countries ... it would be
very easy to focus on only those countries and then produce specifications
that are completely unusable in other areas of the world. Which still does
sometimes happen. This is one of the useful things of the W3C. There is
the internationalization review, and an accessibility review and nowadays also
a mobile accessible review to make sure it does not just work on desktops.
Some organisations make standards basically so they can make money. Some
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of the ISO 6 standards, in particular the MPEG group, their business model
is that you contribute an engineer for a couple of years, you make a patent
portfolio and you make a killing off licencing it. That is pretty much to keep
out the people who were not involved in the standards process. Now, W3C
takes quite an opposite view. The Royalty-Free License 7 for example, explicitly says: royalty-free to all. Not just the companies who were involved
in making it, not just companies, but anyone. Individuals. Open Source
projects. So, the funding model of the W3C is that members pay money,
and that pays our salaries, basically. We have a staff of 60 odd or so, and
that’s where our salaries come from, which actually makes us quite different
from a lot of other organisations. IETF is completely volunteer based so
you don’t know how long something is going to take. It might be quick, it
might be 20 years, you don’t know. ISO is a national body largely, but the
national bodies are in practice companies who represent that nation. But in
W3C, it’s companies who are paying to be members. And therefore, when
it started there was this idea of secrecy. Basically, giving them something
for their money. That’s the trick, to make them believe they are getting
something for their money. A lot of the ideas for W3C came from the
X Consortium 8 actually, it is the same people who did it originally. And
there, what the meat was ... was the code. They would develop the code and
give it to the members of the X Consortium three months before the public
got it and that was their business benefit. So that is actually where our ‘three
month rule’ comes from. Each working group can work for three months
but then they have to go public, have to publish. ‘The heartbeat rule’, we
call it now. If you miss several heartbeats then you’re dead. But at the same
time if you’re making a spec and you’re growing the market then there’s a
need for it to be implemented. There’s an implementation page where you
encourage people to implement, you report back on the implementations,
6
7
8

International Standards for Business, Government and Society International Organization for
Standardization (ISO), http://www.iso.org
Overview and Summary of W3C Patent Policy
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/05-patentsummary.html
The purpose of the X Consortium was to foster the development, evolution, and maintenance of the
X Window System, a comprehensive set of vendor-neutral, system-architecture neutral,
network-transparent windowing and user interface standards.
http://www.x.org/wiki/XConsortium

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you make a test suite, you show that every feature in the spec that there’s
a test for ... at least two implementations pass it. You’re not showing that
everyone can use it at that stage. You’re showing that someone can read the
spec and implement it. If you’ve been talking to a group of people for four
years, you have a shared understanding with them and it could be that the
spec isn’t understandable without that. The implementation phase lets you
find out that people can actually implement it just by reading the spec. And
often there are changes and clarifications made at that point. Obviously one
of the good ways to get something implemented is to have Open Source
people do it and often they’re much more motivated to do it. For them it’s
cool when it is new, If you give me this new feature it’s great we’ll do it rather
than: Well that doesn’t quite fit into our product plans until the next quarter
and all that sort of stuff. Up until now, there hasn’t really been a good way
for the Open Source people to get involved. They can comment on specs
but they’re not involved in the discussions. That’s something we’re trying
to change by opening up the groups, to make it easier for an Open Source
group to contribute on an ongoing basis if they want to. Right from the
beginning part, to the end where you’re polishing the tiny details in the
corner.
I think the story of web fonts shows how an involvement of the Open Source
people could have made a difference.

When web fonts were first designed, essentially you had Adobe and Apple
pushing one way, Bitstream pushing the other way, both wanting W3C to
make their format the one and only official web format, which is why you
ended up with a mechanism to point to fonts without saying what format
was required. And than you had the Netscape 4, which pointed off to a
Bitstream format, and you had IE4 which pointed off to this Embedded
Open Type (EOT) format. If you were a web designer, you had to have two
different tools, one of which only worked on a Mac, and one of which only
worked on PC, and make two different fonts for the same thing. Basically
people wouldn’t bother. As Håkon 9 mentioned the only people who do
actually use that right now really, are countries where the local language
9

Håkon Wium Lie proposed Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in 1994.
http://www.w3.org/People/howcome/

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is not well provided for by the Operating Systems. Even now, things like
WindowsXP and MacOSX don’t fully support some of the Indian languages.
But they can get it into web pages by using these embedded fonts. Actually
the other case where it has been used a lot, is SVG, not so much on the
desktop though it does get used there but on mobiles. On the desktop
you’ve typically got 10 or 20 fonts and you got a reasonable coverage. On a
mobile phone, depending on how high or low ended it is, you might have
a single font, and no bold, and it might even be a pixel-based font. And
if you want to start doing text that skews and swirls, you just can’t do that
with a pixel-based font. So you need to download the font with the content,
or even put the font right there in the content just so that they can see
something.
I don’t know how to talk about this, but ... envisioning a standard before
having any concrete sense of how it could be used and how it could change the
way people work ... means you also need to imagine how a standard might
change, once people start implementing it?
I wouldn’t say that we have no idea of how it’s going to work. It’s more a
case that there are obvious choices you can make, and then not so obvious
choices. When work is started, there’s always an idea of how it would fit in
with a lot of things and what it could be used for. It’s more the case that
you later find that there are other things that you didn’t think of that you
can also use it for. Usually it is defined for a particular purpose and than
find that it can also do these other things.

Isn’t it so that sometimes, in that way, something that is completely marginal,
becomes the most important?

It can happen, yes.

For me, SVG is a good example of that. As I understood it, it was planned
to be a format for the web. And as I see it today, it’s more used on the
desktop. I see that on the Linux desktop, for theming, most internals are
using SVG. We are using Inkscape for SVG to make prints. On the other
hand, browsers are really behind.
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Browsers are getting there. Safari has got reasonably good support. Opera
has got very good support. It really has increased a lot in the last couple
of years. Mozilla Firefox less so. It’s getting there. They’ve been at it
for longer, but it also seems to be going slower. The browsers are getting
there. The implementations which I showed a couple of days ago, those
were mobile implementations. I was showing them on a PC, but they were
specially built demos. Because they’re mobile, it tends to move faster.

But you still have this problem that Internet Explorer is a slow adopter.

Yes, Internet Explorer has not adopted a lot of things. It’s been very slow
to do CSS. It hasn’t yet done XHTML, although it has shipped with an
XML parser since IE4. It hasn’t done SVG. Now they’ve got their own
thing ... Silverlight. It has been very hard to get Microsoft on board and
getting them doing things. Microsoft were involved in the early part of
SVG but getting things into IE has always been difficult. What amazes me
to some extent, is the fact that it’s still used by about 60-70% of people.
You look at what IE can do, and you look at what all the other browsers
can do, and you wonder why. The thing is ... it is still a break and some
technologies don’t get used because people want to make sure that everyone
can see them. So they go down to the lowest common denominator. Or
they double-implement. Implement something for all the other browsers,
and implement something separate for IE, and than have to maintain two
different things in parallel, and tracking revisions and whatever. It’s a nightmare. It’s a huge economic cost because one browser doesn’t implement the
right web stuff. (laughing, sighing)

My question would be: what could you give us as a kind of advice? How
could we push this adoption where we are working? Even if it only is the
people of Firefox to adopt SVG?

Bear in mind that Firefox has this thing of Trunk builds and Branch builds
and so on. For example when Firefox 3 came out, well the Beta is there.
Suddenly there’s a big jump in the SVG stuff because all the Firefox 2 was
on the same branch as 1.5, and the SVG was basically frozen at that point.
The development was ongoing but you only saw it when 3 came out. There
were a bunch of improvements there. The main missing features are the
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animation and the web fonts and both of those are being worked on. It’s
interesting because both of those were on Acid 3. Often I see an acceleration
of interest in getting something done because there’s a good test. The Acid
Test 10 is interesting because it’s a single test for a huge slew of things all at
once. One person can look at it, and it’s either right or it’s wrong, whereas
the tests that W3C normally produces are very much like unit tests. You
test one thing and there’s like five hundred of them. And you have to go
through, one after another. There’s a certain type of person who can sit
through five hundred test on four browsers without getting bored but most
people don’t. There’s a need for this sort of aggregative test. The whole
thing is all one. If anything is wrong, it breaks. That’s what Acid is designed
to do. If you get one thing wrong, everything is all over the place. Acid 3
was a submission-based process and like a competition, the SVG working
group was there, and put in several proposals for what should be in Acid 3,
many of which were actually adopted. So there’s SVG stuff in Acid 3.

So ... who started the Acid Test?

Todd Fahrner designed the original Acid 1 test, which was meant to exercise
the tricky bits of the box-model in CSS. It ended like a sort Mondrian
diagram, 11 red squares, and blue lines and stuff. But there was a big scope
for the whole thing to fall apart into a train wreck if you got anything
wrong. The thing is, a lot of web documents are pretty simple. They got
paragraphs, and headings and stuff. They weren’t exercising very much the
model. Once you got tables in there, they were doing it a little bit more. But
it was really when you had stuff floated to one side, and things going around
or whatever, and that had something floated as well. It was in that sort of
case where it was all breaking, where people wouldn’t get interoperability.
It was ... the Web Standards Project 12 who proposed this?
Yes, that’s right.
10
11
12

The Acid 3 test: http://acid3.acidtests.org is comprehensive in comparison to more detailed,
but fragmented SVG tests:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Test_Suite_Overview#W3C_Scalable_Vector_Graphics_.28SVG.29_Test
Acid Test Gallery http://moonbase.rydia.net/mental/writings/box-acid-test/
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple,
affordable access to web technologies for all http://www.webstandards.org/

145

It didn’t come from a standards body.

No, it didn’t come from W3C. The same for Acid 2, Håkon Wium Lie was
involved in that one. He didn’t blow his own trumpet this morning, but
he was very much involved there. Acid 3 was Ian Hickson, who put that
together. It’s a bit different because a lot of it is DOM scripting stuff. It
does something, and then it inquires in the DOM to see if it has been done
correctly, and it puts that value back as a visual representation so you can
see. It’s all very good because apparently it motivates the implementors to
do something. It’s also marketable. You can have a blog posting saying we
do 80% of Acid Test. The public can understand that. The people who are
interested can go Oh, that’s good.
It becomes a mark of quality.

Yes, it’s marketing. It’s like processor speed in PCs and things. There are
so much technology in computers, so than what do you market it on? Well
it’s got that clock speed and it’s got this much memory. OK, great, cool.
This one is better than that one because this one’s got 4 gigs and that one’s
got 2 gigs. It’s a lot of other things as well, but that’s something that the
public can in general look at and say That one is better. When I mentioned
the W3C process, I was talking about the engineers, managers. I didn’t talk
about the lawyers, but we do have a process for that as well. We have a patent
advisory group conformed. If someone has made a claim, and it’s disputed
then we can have lawyers talking among themselves. What we really don’t
have in that is designers, end-users, artists. The trick is to find out how to
represent them. The CSS working group tried to do that. They brought in
a number of designers, Jeff Veen 13 and these sort of people were involved
early on. The trouble is that you’re speaking a different language, you’re
not speaking their language. When you’re having weekly calls ... Reading a
spec is not bedtime reading, and if you’re arguing over the fine details of a
sentence ... (laughing) well, it will put you to sleep straight away. Some of
the designers are like: I don’t care about this. I only want to use it. Here’s what
I want to be able to do. Make it that I can do that, but get back to me when it’s
done.
13

Jeff Veen was a designer at Wired magazine, in those days.
http://adaptivepath.com/aboutus/veen.php

146

That’s why the idea of the Acid Test is a nice breed between the spec and
the designer. When I was seeing the test this morning, I was thinking
that it could be a really interesting work to do, not to really implement it
but to think about with the students. How would you conceive a visual
test? I think that this could be a really nice workshop to do in a university
or in a design academy ...
It’s the kind of reverse-reverse engineering of a standard which could help
you understand it on different levels. You have to imagine how wild you
can go with something. I talk about standards, and read them - not before
going to bed - because I think that it’s interesting to see that while they’re
quite pragmatic in how they’re put together, but they have an effect on the
practice of, for example, designers. Something that I have been following with
interest is the concept of separating form and content has become extremely
influential in design, especially in web design. Trained as a pre-web designer,
I’m sometimes a bit shocked by the ease with which this separation is made.

That’s interesting. Usually people say that it’s hard or impossible, that you
can’t ever do it. The fact that you’re saying that it’s easy or that it comes
naturally is interesting to me.

It has been appropriated by designers as something they want. That’s why it’s
interesting to look at the Web Standards Project where designers really fight
for a separation of content and form. I think that this is somehow making
the work of designers quite ... boring. Could you talk a bit about how this is
done?
It’s a continuum. You can’t say that something is exactly form or exactly
presentation because there are gradations. If you take a table, you’ve already
decided that you want to display the material in a tabular way. If it’s a real
table, you should be able to transpose it. If you take the rows and columns,
and the numbers in the middle then it should still work. If you’ve got
‘sales’ here and if you’ve got ‘regions’ there, then you should still be able to
transpose that table. If you’re just flipping it 90 degrees then you are using
it as a layout grid, and not as a table. That’s one obvious thing. Even then,
deciding to display it as a tabular thing means that it probably came from a
much bigger dataset, and you’ve just chosen to sum all of the sales data over
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one year. Another one: you have again the sales data, you could have it as pie
chart, but you could also have it as a bar chart, you could have it in various
other ways. You can imagine that what you would do is ship some XML
that has that data, and then you would have a script or something which
would turn it into an SVG pie chart. And you could have a bar chart, or you
could also say show me only February. That interaction is one of the things
that one can do, and arguably you’re giving it a different presentational form.
It’s still very much a gradation. It’s how much re-styleability remains. You
can’t ever have complete separation. If I’m describing a company, and [1]
I want to do a marketing brochure, and [2] I want to do an annual report
for the shareholders, and [3] I want to do an internal document for the
engineering team. I can’t have the same content all over those three and just
put styling on it. The type of thing I’m doing is going to vary for those
audiences, as will the presentation. There’s a limit. You can’t say: here’s the
überdocument, and it can be styled to be anything. It can’t be. The trick is
to not mingle the style of the presentation when you don’t need to. When
you do need to, you’re already halfway down the gradient. Keep them as far
apart as you can, delay it as late as possible. At some point they have to be
combined. A design will have to go into the crafting of the wording, how
much wording, what voice is used, how it’s going to fit with the graphics
and so on. You can’t just slap random things together and call it design,
it looks like a train wreck. It’s a case of deferment. It’s not ever a case of
complete separation. It’s a case of deferring it and not tripping yourself up.
Just simple things like bolds and italics and whatever. Putting those in as
emphasis and whatever because you might choose to have your emphasized
words done differently. You might have a different font, you might have a
different way of doing it, you might use letter-spacing, etc. Whereas if you
tag that in as italics then you’ve only got italics, right? It’s a simple example
but at the end of the day you’re going to have to decide how that is displayed.
You mentioned print. In print no one sees the intermediate result. You see
ink on paper. If I have some Greek in there and if I’ve done that by actually
typing in Latin letters on the keyboard and putting a Greek font on it and
out comes Greek, nobody knows. If it’s a book that’s being translated, there
might be some problems. The more you’re shipping the electronic version
around, the more it actually matters that you put in the Greek letters as
148

Greek because you will want to revise it. It matters that you have flowing
text rather than text that has been hand-ragged because when you put in
the revisions you’re going to have to re-rag the entire thing or you can just
say re-flow and fix it up later. Things like that.

The idea of time, and the question of delay is interesting. Not how, but when you
enter to fine-tune things manually. As a designer of books, you’re always facing
the question: when to edit, what, and on what level. For example, we saw this
morning 14 that the idea of having multiple skins is really entering the publishing
business, as an idea of creativity. But that’s not the point, or not the complete
point. When is it possible to enter the process? That’s something that I think we
have to develop, to think about.

The other day there was a presentation by Michael Dominic Kostrzewa 15
that shocked me. He is now working for Nokia, after working for Novell
and he was explaining how designers and programmers were fighting each
other instead of fighting the ‘real villain’, as he said, who were the managers. What was really interesting was how this division between content
and style was also recouping a kind of political or socio-organizational divide within companies where you need to assign roles, borders, responsibilities to different people. What was really frightening from the talk was
that you understood that this division was encouraging people not to try
and learn from each other’s practice. At some point, the designer would
come to the programmer and say: In the spec, this is supposed to be like this
and I don’t want to hear anything about what kind of technical problems you
face.
Designers as lawyers!

Yes ... and the programmer would say: OK, we respect the spec, but then
we don’t expect anything else from us. This kind of behaviour in the end,
blocks a lot of exchange, instead of making a more creative approach
possible.
14
15

Andy Fitsimon: Publican, the new Open Source publishing tool-chain (LGM 2008)
http://media.river-valley.tv/conferences/lgm2008/quicktime/0201-Andy_Fitzsimon.html
Michael Dominic Kostrzewa. Programmers hell: working with the UI designer (LGM 2008)

149

I read about (and this is before skinning became more common) designers
doing some multimedia things at Microsoft. You had designers and then
there were coders. Each of them hated the other ones. The coders thought
the designers were idiots who lived in lofts and had found objects in their
ears. The designers thought that the programmers were a bunch of socially
inept nerds who had no clue and never got out in sunlight and slept in their
offices. And since they had that dynamic, they would never explain to each
other ( ... )
(policeman arrives)

POLICEMAN:
Do you speak English?

Yes.

POLICEMAN:
You must go from this place because there’s a conference.

Yes, we know. We are part of this conference (shows LGM badge).

POLICEMAN:
We had a phone call that here’s a picnic. I don’t really see a picnic ...

We’re doing an interview.

POLICEMAN:
It looks like a picnic, and professors are getting nervous. You must go sit
somewhere else. Sorry, it is the rules. Have a nice day!

150

At the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008, OSP picks up a conversation that Harrison allegedly started in a taxi in Montreal, a year
earlier. We meet font designer and developer Dave Crossland
in a noisy food court to speak about his understanding of the
intertwined histories of typography and software, and the master in type design at the Department of Typography at the
University of Reading. Since the interview, a lot has happened.
Dave finished his typeface Cantarell and moved on to consult
the Google Web Fonts project, commissioning new typefaces
designed for the web. He is also currently offering lectures on
typeface design with Free Software.
Harrison (H)

1, 2.

Ludivine Loiseau (LL)
and now all:
Dave Crossland (DC)

Hello Dave.

Hellooo ...

Alright!

Well, thank you for taking a bit of time with us for the interview. First
thing is maybe to set a kind of context of your situation, your current situation.
What you’ve done before. Why are you setting fonts and these kind of things.
H

Oh yes, yeah. Well, I take it quite far back, when I was a teenager. I
was planning to do computer science university studying like mathematics
and physics in highschool. I needed some work experience. I decided I
didn’t want to work with computers. So I dropped maths and physics and
I started working at ... I mean I started studying art and design, and also
socio-linguistics in highschool. I was looking at going to Fine Arts but I
wasn’t really too worried about if I could get a job at the end of it, because
I could get a job with computers, if I needed to get a job So I studied that
at my school for like a one year course, after my school. A foundation year,
and the deal with that is that you study all the different art and design disciplines. Because in highschool you don’t really have the specialities where you
specifically study textile or photography, not every school has a darkroom,
schools are not well equipped.
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You get to experience all these areas of design and in that we studied graphic
design, motion graphics and I found in this a good opportunity to bring together the computer things with fine arts and visual arts aspects. In graphic
design in my school it was more about paper, it had nothing to do with
computers. In art school, that was more the case. So I grew into graphic
design.
Ordering coffee and change of background music: Oh yeah, African beats!

So, yes. I was looking at graphic design that was more computer based than
in art school. I wasn’t so interested in like regular illustration as a graphic
design. Graphic design has really got three purposes: to persuade people,
that’s advertising; to entertain people, movie posters, music album covers,
illustration magazines; and there is also graphic design to inform people,
in England it’s called ‘information design’, in the US it’s called ‘information
architecture’ ... stucturing websites, information design. Obviously a big
part of that is typography, so that’s why I got interested in typography, via
information design. I studied at Ravensbourne college in London, what
I applied for was graphic information design. I started working at the IT
department, and that really kept me going to that college, I wasn’t so happy
with the direction of the courses. The IT department there was really really
good and I ended up switching to the interaction design course, because that
had more freedom to do the kind of typographic work I was intersted in.
So I ended up looking at Free Sofware design tools because I became frustrated by the limitations of the Adobe software which in the college was
using, just what everybody used. And at that point I realized what ‘software freedom’ meant. I’ve been using Debian since I was like a teenager,
but I hadn’t really looked to the depth of what Free Software was about. I
mean back in the nineties Windows wasn’t very good but probably at that
time 2003-2004, MacOSX came out and it was getting pretty nice to use.
I bought a Mac laptop without really thinking about it and because it was
a Unix I could use the software like I was used to do. And I didn’t really
think about the issues with Free Software, MacOSX was Unix so it was the
same I figured. But when I started to do my work I really stood against the
limitations of Adobe software, specifically in parallel publishing which is
when you have the same basic informations that you want to communicate
in different mediums. You might want to publish something in .pdf, on the
web, maybe also on your mobile phone, etc. And doing that with Adobe
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software back then was basically impossible. I was aware of Free Software
design tools and it was kind of obvious that even if they weren’t very pushed
by then they at least had the potential to be able to do this in a powerful
way. So that’s what I figured out. What that issue with Free Software really
meant. Who’s in control of the software, who decides what it does, who
decides when it’s going to support this feature or that feature, because the
features that I wanted, Adobe wasn’t planning to add them. So that’s how I
got interested in Free Software.
When I graduated I was looking for something that I could contribute in
this area. And one of the Scribus guys, Peter Linnell, made an important
post on the Scribus blog. Saying, you know, the number one problem
with Free Software design is fonts, like it’s dodgy fonts with incorrect this,
incorrect that, have problems when printed as well ... and so yeah, I felt
woa, I have a background in typography and I know about Free Software,
I could make contributions in fonts. Looking into that area, I found that
there was some postgraduate course you can study at in Europe. There’s
two, there is one at The Hague in The Netherlands and one at Reading.
They’re quite different courses in their character and in how much they cost
and how long they last for and what level of qualification they are. But
they’re both postgraduate courses which focus on typeface design and font
software development. So if you’re interesed in that area, you can really
concentrate for about a year and bring your skills up to a high professional
level. So I applied to the course at Reading and I was accepted there and
I’m currently studying there part time. I’m studying there to work on Free
Software fonts. So that’s the full story of how I ended up in this area.
Excellent! Last time we met, you summarized in a very relevant way the
history of font design software which is a proof by itself that everything is related
with fonts and this kind of small networks and I would like you to summarize it
again.
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Alright. In that whole journey of getting into this area of parallel publishing and automated design, I was asking around for people who
worked in that area because at that time not many people had worked in
parallel publishing. It’s a lot of a bigger deal now, especially in the Free
Software community where we have Free Software manuals translated into
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many languages, written in .doc and .xml and then transformed into print
and web versions and other versions. But back then this was kind of a new
concept, not all people worked on it. And so, asking around, I heard about
the department of typography at the university of Reading. One of the lecturers there, actually the lecturer of the typeface design course put me on
to a designer in Holland, Petr van Blokland. He’s a really nice guy, really
friendly. And I dropped him an e-mail as I was in Holland that year – just
dropped by to see him and it turned out he’s not only involved in parallel
publishing and automated design, but also in typedesign. For him there is
really no distinctions between type design and typography. It’s kind of like a
big building – you have the architecture of the building but you can also go
down into the bricks. It’s kind of like that with typography, the type design
is all these little pieces you assembly to create the typography out of . He’s
an award-winning typeface designer and typographer and he was involved
in the early days of typography very actively. He kind of explained me the
whole story of type design technology.
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So, the history of typography actually starts with Free Software, with Donald
Knuth and his TeX. The TeX typesetting system has its own font software
or font system called Metafont. Metafont is a font programming language,
and algebraic programming language describing letter forms. It really gets
into the internal structure of the shapes. This is a very non-visual programming approach to it where you basically use this programming language to
describe with algebra how the shapes make up the letters. If you have a
capital H, you got essentially 3 lines, two verticals stands and a horizontal
crossbar and so, in algebra you can say that you’ve got one ratio whitch is
the height of the vertical lines and another ratio which is the width between
them and another ratio which is the distance between the top point and the
middle point of the crossbar and the bottom point. By describing all of that
in algebra, you really describe the structure of that shape and that gives you
a lot of power because it means you can trace a pen nib objects over that
skeleton to generate the final typeform and so you can apply variations, you
can rotate the pen nib – you can have different pen nib shapes And you can
have a lot of different typefaces out of that kind of source code. But that
approach is not a visual approach, you have to take it with a mathematical
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mind and that isn’t something which graphic designers typically have as a
strong part of their skill set.

The next step was describing the outline of a typeface, and the guy who
did this was working, I believe, at URW. He invented a digital typography
system or typedesign program called Ikarus. The rumor is it’s called Ikarus
because it crashed too much. Peter Karow is this guy. He was the absolute
unknown real pioneer in this area. They were selling this proprietary software powered by a tablet, with a drawing pen for entering the points and it
used it’s own kind of spline-curve technology.
This was very expensive – it ran on DMS computers and URW was making
a lot of money selling those mini computers in well I guess late 70s and
early 80s. And there was a new small home computer that came out called
the Apple Macintosh. This was quite important because not only was it a
personal computer. It had a graphical user interface and also a printer, a laser
writer which was based on the Adobe PostScript technology. This was what
made desktop publishing happen. I believe it was a Samsung printer revised
by Apple and Adobe’s PostScript technology. Those three companies, those
three technologies was what made desktop publishing happen. Petr van
Blokland was involved in it, using the Ikarus software, developing it. And
so he ported the program to the Mac. So Ikarus M was the first font
editor for personal computers and this was taken on by URW but never
really promoted because the ... Mac costs not a lot money compared to those
big expensive computers. So, Ikarus M was not widely distributed. It’s
kind of an obvious idea – you know you have those innovative computers
doing graphic interfaces and laser printing and several different people had
several different ideas about how to employ that. Obviously you had John
Warnock within Adobe and at that point Adobe was a systems company,
they made this PostScript system and these components, they didn’t make
any user applications. But John Warnock – and this is documented in the
book on the Adobe story – he really pushed within the company to develop
Adobe Illustrator, which allowed you to interact with the edit PostScript
code and do vector drawings interactively. That was the kind of illustration
and graphic design which we mentioned earlier. That was the ... page layout
sort of thing and that was taking care of by a guy called Paul Brainerd,
whose company Aldus made PageMaker. That did similar kind of things
than Illustrator, but focused on page layout and typography, text layout
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rather than making illustrations. So you had Illustrator and PageMaker and
this was the beginning of the desktop publishing tool-chain.
When was it?

H

This is in the mid-eighties. The Mac came out in 1984

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Pierre Huyghebaert (PH)

Illustrator in 1986 I think.

Yeah. And then the Apple LaserWriter, which is I believe a Samsung
printer, came out in 1985, and I believe the first edition of Illustrator was in
1988 ...
DC

No, I think Illustrator 1 was in 1986.

PH
DC
H

OK, if you read the official Adobe story book, it’s fully documented 1 .

It’s interesting that it follows so quickly after the Macintosh.

Yes! That’s right. It all happened very quickly because Adobe and
Apple had really built with PostScript and the MacOS, they had the infrastructure there, they could build on top of. And that’s a common thing we
see played out over and over ... Things are developed quite slowly when they
are getting the infrastructure right, and then when the infrastructure is in
place you see this burst of activity where people can slot it together very
quickly to make some interesting things. So, you had this other guy called
Jim von Ehr and he saw the need for a graphical user interface to develop
fonts with and so he founded a small compagny called Altsys and he made a
program called Fontographer. So that became the kind of de-facto standard
font editing program.
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PH

used?

And before that, do you know what font design software Adobe designers

I don’t know. Basically when Adobe made PostScript for the Apple
LaserWriter then they had the core 35 PostScript fonts, which is about
a thousand families, 35 differents weights or variants of the fonts. And I
believe that those were from Linotype. Linotype developed that in collaboration with Adobe, I have no idea about what software they used, they
may have had their own internal software. I know that before they had
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Pamela Pfiffner. Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Adobe Press, 2008

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Illustrator they were making PostScript documents by hand like TeX, programming PostScript sourcecode. It might have been in a very low tech way.
Because those were the core fonts that have been used in PostScript.
So you had Fontographer and this is yeah I mean a GUI application for
home computers to make fonts with. Fontographer made early 90s David
Carson graphic design posters. Because it meant that anybody could start
making fonts not only people that were in the type design guild. That all
David Carson kind of punk graphic design, it’s really because of Desktop
publishing and specifically because of Fontographer. Because that allowed
people to make these fonts. Previous printing technologies wouldn’t allow
you to make these kinds of fonts without extreme efforts. I mean a lot of the
effects you can do with digital graphics you can’t do without digital graphics
– air brushing sophisticated effects like that can be achieved but it’s really a
lot of efforts.

So going back to the guys from Holland, Petr has a younger brother called
Erik and he went to the college at the Royal Academie of design the KABK
in the Hague with a guy who is Just van Rossum and he’s the younger
brother of Guido van Rossum who is now quite famous because he’s the guy
who developed and invented Python. In the early 90s Jim von Ehr is developping Fontographer, and Fontographer 4 comes out and Petr and Just and
Erik managed to get a copy of the source code of Fontographer 3 which is the
golden version that we used, like Quark, that was what we used throughout
most of the 90s and so they started adding things to that to do scripting on
Fontographer with Python and this was called Robofog, and that was still
used until quite recently, because it had features no one has ever seen enywhere else. The deal was you had to get a Fontographer 4 license, and then
you could get a Robofont license, for Fontographer 3. Then Apple changed
the system architecture and that meant Fontographer 3 would no longer
run on Apple computers. Obviously that was a bit of a damn on Robofog.
Pretty soon after that Jim sold Fontographer to Macromedia. He and his
employes continued to develop Fontographer into Freehand, it went from a
font drawing application into a more general purpose illustration tool. So
Macromedia bought Altsys for Freehand because they were competing with
Adobe at that time. And they didn’t really have any interest in continuing
to develop Fontographer. Fonts is a really obscure kind of area. As a proprietary software company, what you are doing things to make a profit and if
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the market is too small to justify your investment then you’ll just not keep
developing the software. Fontographer shut at that point.
PH

I think they paid one guy to maintain it and answer questions.

Yeah. I think they even stop actively selling it, you had to ask them to
sell you a license. Fontographer has stopped at that point and there was no
actively developed font editor. There were a few Windows programs, which
were kind of shareware for developing fonts because in this time Apple and
Microsoft got fed up with paying Adobe’s extortion of PostScript licensing
fees. They developed their own font format called TrueType. There were
Windows font editing programs.
Yeah. I think they even stop actively selling it, you had to ask them to sell
you a license. Fontographer has stopped at that point and there was no actively developed font editor. There were a few Windows programs, which
were kind of shareware for developing fonts because in this time Apple and
Microsoft got fed up with paying Adobe’s extortion of PostScript licensing fees. They developed their own font format called TrueType. When
Fontographer stopped there was the question of which one will become the
predominant font editor and so there was Fontlab. This was developed by
a guy Yuri Yarmola, Russian originally I believe, and it became the primary
proprietary type design tool.
The Python guys from Holland started using Fontlab. They managed to
convince the Fontlab guys to include Python scripting support in Fontlab.
Python had become a major language, for doing this kind of scripting. So
Fontlab added in Python scripting. And then different type designers, font
developers started to use Python scripts to help them develop their fonts,
and a few of the guys doing that decided to join up and they created the
RoboFab project which took the ideas that had been developed for Robofob
and reimplemented them with Fontlab – so RoboFab. This is now a Free
Software package, under the MIT Python style licence. So it is a Free
Software licence but without copyleft. It has beeing developed as a collaborative project. If you’re interested in the development you can just join the
mailing list. It’s a very mature project and the really beautiful thing about
it that they developed a font object model and so in Python you have a very
clean and easily understandable object-oriented model of what a font is. It
makes it very easy to script things. This is quite exciting because that means
you can start to do things which are just not really visible with the graphic
design interface. The thing with those fonts is like there is a scale, it is like
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architecture. You’ve got the designer of the building and the designer of
the bricks. With a font it is the same. You have the designer who shapes
each letter and then you’ve got the character-spacing which makes what a
paragraph will look like. A really good example of this is if you want to do
interpolation, if you have a very narrow version of a font and a very wide one,
and you want to interpolate in different versions between those two masters
– you really want to do that in a script, and RoboFab makes this really easy
to do this within Fontlab. The ever important thing about RoboFab was
that they developed UFO, I think it’s the Universal Font Object – I’m not
sure what the exact name is – but it’s a XML font format which means that
you can interchange font source data with different programs and specifically
that means that you have a really good font interpolation program that can
read and write that UFO XML format and then you can have your regular
type design format font editor that will generate bitmap font formats that
you actually use in a system. You can write your own tool for a specific
task and push and pull the data back and forth. Some of these Dutch guys,
especially Erik has written a really good interpolation tool. So, as a kind
of thread in the story of font. Remember that time where Fontographer
was not developed actively then you have Georges Williams from California
who was interested in digital typography and fonts and Fontographer was
not being activelly developed and he found that quite frustrating so he said
like Well, I’ll write my own font editor. He wrote it from scratch. I mean
this is a great project.
LL

Can you tell us some details about your course?

DC
There are four main deliverables in the course, that you normally
do in one year, twelve months. The big thing is that you do a professional quality OpenType font, with an extended pan-european latin coverage in regular and italic, maybe bold. You also do a complex non-latin
in Arabic, Indic, maybe Cyrillic ... well not really Cyrillic because there are
problems to get a Cyrillic type experts from Russia to Britain ... or Greek,
or any script with which you have a particular background in. And so,
they didn’t mandate which software students can use, and I was already
used to FontForge, while pretty much all the other students were using
FontLab. This font development is the main thing. The second thing is
the dissertation, that goes up to 8,000 words, an academic master in typography dissertation. Then there is a smaller essay, that will be published
on http://www.typeculture.com/academic_resource/articles_essays/, and it’s

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a kind of a practice for writing the dissertation. Then you have to document
your working process throughout the year, you have to submit your working
files, source files. Every single step is documented and you have to write
a small essay describing your process. And also, of course, apart from the
type design, you make a font specimen, so you make a very nice piece of
design that show up your font in use, as commercial companies do. All that
takes a full intense year. For British people, the course costs about £3,000,
for people in the EU, it costs about £5,000 and about £10,000 for non-EU.
Have a look at the website for details, but yes, it’s very expensive.
LL

And did you also design a font?

Yes. But I do it part-time. Normally, you could do the typeface,
and the year after you do the dissertation. For personal reasons, I do the
dissertation first, in the summer, and next year I’ll do the typeface, I think
in July next year.
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LL

You have an idea on which font you’ll work?

Yes. The course doesn’t specify which kind of typeface you have to
work on. But they really prefer a textface, a serif one, because it’s the most
complicate and demanding work. If you can do a high quality serif text
typeface design, you can do almost any typeface design! Of course, lots of
students do also a sans serif typeface to be read at 8 or 9 points, or even
for by example dictionaries at 6 or 7 points. Other students design display
typefaces that can be used for pararaphs but probably not at 9 points ...
DC

It looks like you are asked to produce quite a lot of documents.
Are these documents published anywhere, are they available for other designers?
Femke Snelting (FS)

Yes, the website is http://www.typefacedesign.net and the teaching
team encourages students to publish their essays, and some people have
published their dissertation on the web, but it varies. Of course, being an
academic dissertation, you can request if from the university.
DC

I’m asking because in various presentations the figure of the ‘expert typographer’ came up, and the role Open Source software could have, to open up this
guild.
FS

Yeah, the course in The Hague is cheaper, the pound was quite high so
it’s expensive to live in Britain during the last year, and the number of people
able to produce high quality fonts is pretty small ... And these courses are
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quite inaccessible for most of the people because of being so expensive, you
have to be quite commited to follow them. The proprietary font editing
software, even with a student discount, is also a bit expensive. So yes, Free
and Open Source software could be an enabler. FontForge allows anybody
to grab it on the Internet and start making fonts. But having the tools
is just the beginning. You have to know what you’re doing to a design a
typeface, and this is separate from font software techinques. And books
on the subject, there are quite a few, but none are really a full solution.
There www.typophile.org, a type design forum on the web, where you can
post preliminary designs. But of course you do not get the kind of critical
feedback as you can get on a masters course ...

FS
We talked to Denis Jacquerye from the DéjàVu project, and most of the
people who collaborate on the project are not type designers but people who are
interested in having certain glyphs added to a typeface. And we asked him if
there is some kind of teaching going on, to be sure that the people contributing
understand what they are doing. Do you see any way of, let’s say, a more open
way of teaching typography starting to happen?

Yeah, I mean, that the part of why the Free Software movement is
going to branch down into the Free Culture movement. There is that website Freedom Defined 2 that states that the principles of Free Software can
apply to all other kind of works. This isn’t shared by everybody in the Free
Software movement. Richard Stallman makes a clear difference between
three kind of works: the ones that function like software, encyclopedias,
dictionaries, text books that tell how to makes things, and text typefaces.
Art works like music and films, and text works about opinions like scientific papers or political manifestos. He believes that different kinds of rights
should apply for that different kind of works. There is also a different view
in which anything in a computer can be edited ought to be free like Free
Software. That is certainly a position that many people take in the Free
Software community. In the WikiMedia Foundation text books project,
you can see that when more and more people are involved in typeface design
from the Free Culture community, we will see more and more education
material. There will be a snowball effect.

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PH

2

Dave, we are running out of time ...

http://freedomdefined.org

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So just to finish about the FontForge Python scripting ... There is
Python embeded in FontForge so you can run scripts to control FontForge,
you can add new features that maybe would be specific to your font and then
in FontForge there is also a Python module which means that you can type
into a Python interpretor. You type import fontforge and if it doesn’t
give you an error then you can start to do FontForge functions, just like in
the RoboFab environment. And in the process of adding that George kind
of re-architectured the FontForge source code so instead of being one large
program, there is now a large C library, libfontforge, and then a small C
program for rendering and also the Python module, a binding or interface
to that C library. This means if you are an application programmer it is very
straightforward to make a new font editor in whatever language you want,
using whatever graphic toolkit you want. So if you’re a JDK guy or a GTK
guy or even if you’re on Windows or Mac OS X, you can make a font editor
that has all the functionality of FontForge. FontForge is a kind of engine to
make font editors. This is quite exciting because it means it’s pretty straight
forward for somebody to write a font editing program which is designed for,
say, beginners.
So, to come back to what we were just talking about in term of educational
materials to get people new to typeface design to be confident with themselves. Maybe they won’t be in that professional level yet, but they will be
pleased with their own work and happy to work in a user interface where
you feel like in 2006, you know, with nice icons nice windows; anti aliasing
and these kind of things.
I mean there’s nothing wrong with the FontForge interface. It is what it
is. But it scares a lot of people away, people say that they don’t like this. I
think it is too scary, too different. I think we are going to see some exciting
stuff in the next few years in the Free Software font editor space.
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At the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Wroclaw, just before
Michael Terry presents his project ingimp to an audience of
curious GIMP developers and users, we meet up to talk more
about ‘instrumenting GIMP’ and about the way Terry thinks
data analysis could be done as a form of discourse. Michael
Terry is a computer scientist working at the Human Computer
Interaction Lab of the University of Waterloo, Canada and his
main research focus is on improving usability in Open Source
software. We speak about ingimp, a clone of the popular image
manipulation programme GIMP, but with an important difference: ingimp allows users to record data about their usage in to
a central database, and subsequently makes this data available to
anyone. This conversation was also published in the Constant
publication Tracks in electr(on)ic fields.
Maybe we could start this conversation with a description of the ingimp project
you are developing and why you chose to work on usability for GIMP?
So the project is ‘ingimp’, which is an instrumented version of GIMP, it
collects information about how the software is used in practice. The idea is
you download it, you install it, and then with the exception of an additional
start up screen, you use it just like regular Gimp. So, our goal is to be as
unobtrusive as possible to make it really easy to get going with it, and then
to just forget about it. We want to get it into the hands of as many people
as possible, so that we can understand how the software is actually used in
practice. There are plenty of forums where people can express their opinions
about how GIMP should be designed, or what’s wrong with it, there are
plenty of bug reports that have been filed, there are plenty of usability issues
that have been identified, but what we really lack is some information about
how people actually apply this tool on a day to day basis. What we want
to do is elevate discussion above just anecdote and gut feelings, and to say,
well, there is this group of people who appear to be using it in this way,
these are the characteristics of their environment, these are the sets of tools
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they work with, these are the types of images they work with and so on, so
that we have some real data to ground discussions about how the software
is actually used by people. You asked me now why GIMP? I actually used
GIMP extensively for my PhD work. I had these little cousins come down
and hang out with me in my apartment after school, and I would set them
up with GIMP, and quite often they would always start off with one picture,
they would create a sphere, a blue sphere, and then they played with filters
until they got something really different. I would turn to them looking
at what they had been doing for the past twenty minutes, and would be
completely amazed at the results they were getting just by fooling around
with it. And so I thought, this application has lots and lots of power, I’d
like to use that power to prototype new types of interface mechanisms. So
I created JGimp, which is a Java based extension for the 1.0 GIMP series,
that I can use as a back-end for prototyping novel user interfaces. I think
that it is a great application, there is a lot of power to it, and I had already
an investment in its code base so it made sense to use that as a platform for
testing out ideas of open instrumentation.
What is special about ingimp, is the fact that the data you generate is made by
the software you are studying itself. Could you describe how that works?
Every bit of data we collect, we make available: you can go to the website,
you can download every log file that we have collected. The intent really
is for us to build tools and infrastructure so that the community itself can
sustain this analysis, can sustain this form of usability. We don’t want to
create a situation where we are creating new dependencies on people, or
where we are imposing new tasks on existing project members. We want to
create tools that follow the same ethos as Open Source development, where
anyone can look at the source code, where anyone can make contributions,
from filing a bug to doing something as simple as writing a patch, where
they don’t even have to have access to the source code repository, to make
valuable contributions. So importantly, we want to have a really low barrier
to participation. At the same time, we want to increase the signal-to-noise
ratio. Yesterday I talked with Peter Sikking, an information architect working for GIMP, and he and I both had this experience where we work with
user interfaces, and since everybody uses an interface, everybody feels they
are an expert, so there can be a lot of noise. So, not only did we want to
create an open environment for collecting this data, and analysing it, but we
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also want to increase the chance that we are making valuable contributions,
and that the community itself can make valuable contributions. Like I said,
there is enough opinion out there. What we really need to do is to better
understand how the software is being used. So, we have made a point from
the start to try to be as open as possible with everything, so that anyone can
really contribute to the project.
ingimp has been running for a year now. What are you finding?
I have started analysing the data, and I think one of the things that we
realised early on is that it is a very rich data set; we have lots and lots of
data. So, after a year we’ve had over 800 installations, and we’ve collected
about 5000 log files, representing over half a million commands, representing thousands of hours of the application being used. And one of the things
you have to realise is that when you have a data set of that size, there are so
many different ways to look at it that my particular perspective might not
be enough. Even if you sit someone down, and you have him or her use the
software for twenty minutes, and you videotape it, then you can spend hours
analysing just that twenty minutes of videotape. And so, I think that one of
the things we realised is that we have to open up the process so that anyone
could easily participate. We have the log files available, but they really didn’t
have an infrastructure for analysing them. So, we created this new piece of
software called ‘StatsJam’, an extension to MediaWiki, which allows anyone
to go to the website and embed SQL-queries against the ingimp data set
and then visualise those results within the Wiki text. So, I’ll be announcing
that today and demonstrating that, but I have been using that tool now for
a week to complement the existing data analysis we have done. One of the
first things that we realized is that we have over 800 installations, but then
you have to ask, how many of those are really serious users? A lot of people
probably just were curious, they downloaded it and installed it, found that it
didn’t really do much for them and so maybe they don’t use it anymore. So,
the first thing we had to do is figure out which data points should we really
pay attention too. We decided that a person should have saved an image,
and they should have used ingimp on two different occasions, preferably at
least a day apart, where they’d saved an image on both of the instances. We
used that as an indication of what a serious user is. So with that filter in
place, then the ‘800 installations’ drops down to about 200 people. So we
had about 200 people using ingimp, and looking at the data this represents
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about 800 hours of use, about 4000 log files, and again still about half a million commands. So, it’s still a very significant group of people. 200 people
is still a lot, and that’s a lot of data, representing about 11000 images they
have been working on, there’s just a lot.
From that group, what we found is that use of ingimp is really short and
versatile. So, most sessions are about fifteen minutes or less, on average.
There are outliers, there are some people who use it for longer periods of
time, but really it boils down to them using it for about fifteen minutes, and
they are applying fewer than a hundred operations when they are working on
the image. I should probably be looking at my data analysis as I say this, but
they are very quick, short, versatile sessions, and when they use it, they use
less than 10 different tools, or they apply less than 10 different commands
when they are using it. What else did we find? We found that the two
most popular monitor resolutions are 1280 by 1024 and 1024 by 768. So,
those represent collectively 60% of the resolutions, and really 1280 by 1024
represents pretty much the maximum for most people, although you have
some higher resolutions. So one of the things that’s always contentious
about GIMP, is its window management scheme and the fact that it has
multiple windows, right? And some people say, well you know this works
fine if you have two monitors, because you can throw out the tools on one
monitor and then your images are on another monitor. Well, about 10%
to 15% of ingimp users have two monitors, so that design decision is not
working out for most of the people, if that is the best way to work. These
are things I think that people have been aware of, it’s just now we have
some actual concrete numbers where you can turn to and say, now this is
how people are using it. There is a wide range of tasks that people are
performing with the tool, but they are really short, bursty tasks.
Every time you start up ingimp, a screen comes up asking you to describe what
you are planning to do and I am interested in the kind of language users invent
to describe this, even when they sometimes don’t know exactly what it is they are
going to do. So inventing language for possible actions with the software, has in
a way become a creative process that is now shared between interface designer,
developer and user. If you look at the ‘activity tags’ you are collecting, do you
find a new vocabulary developing?
I think there are 300 to 600 different activity tags that people register
within that group of ‘significant users’. I didn’t have time to look at all of
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them, but it is interesting to see how people are using that as a medium
for communicating to us. Some people will say, Just testing out, ignore this!
Or, people are trying to do things like insert HTML code, to do like a
cross-site scripting attack, because, you have all the data on the website, so
they will try to play with that. Some people are very sparse and they say
‘image manipulation’ or ‘graphic design’ or something like that, but then
some people are much more verbose, and they give more of a plan, This
is what I expect to be doing. So, I think it has been interesting to see how
people have adopted that and what’s nice about it, is that it adds a really nice
human element to all this empirical data.
I wanted to ask you about the data, without getting too technical, could
you explain how these data are structured, what do the log files look like?

So the log files are all in XML, and generally we compress them, because
they can get rather large. And the reason that they are rather large is that we
are very verbose in our logging. We want to be completely transparent with
respect to everything, so that if you have some doubts or if you have some
questions about what kind of data has been collected, you should be able to
look at the log file, and figure out a lot about what that data is. That’s how
we designed the XML log files, and it was really driven by privacy concerns
and by the desire to be transparent and open. On the server side we take
that log file and we parse it out, and then we throw it into a database, so
that we can query the data set.
Now we are talking about privacy ... I was impressed by the work you have done
on this; the project is unusually clear about why certain things are logged, and
other things not; mainly to prevent the possibility of ‘playing back’ actions so that
one could identify individual users from the data set. So, while I understand
there are privacy issues at stake I was wondering ... what if you could look at the
collected data as a kind of scripting for use? Writing a choreography that might
be replayed later?
Yes, we have been fairly conservative with the type of information that we
collect, because this really is the first instance where anyone has captured
such rich data about how people are using software on a day to day basis,
and then made it all that data publicly available. When a company does
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this, they will keep the data internally, so you don’t have this risk of someone outside figuring something out about a user that wasn’t intended to be
discovered. We have to deal with that risk, because we are trying to go about
this in a very open and transparent way, which means that people may be
able to subject our data to analysis or data mining techniques that we haven’t
thought of and extract information that we didn’t intent to be recording in
our file, but which is still there. So there are fairly sophisticated techniques
where you can do things like look at audio recordings of typing and the timings between keystrokes, and then work backwards with the sounds made
to figure out the keys that people are likely pressing. So, just with keyboard
audio and keystroke timings alone you can often give enough information
to be able to reconstruct what people are actually typing. So we are always
sort of weary about how much information is in there. While it might be
nice to be able to do something like record people’s actions and then share
that script, I don’t think that that is really a good use of ingimp. That said,
I think it is interesting to ask, could we characterize people’s use enough, so
that we can start clustering groups of people together and then providing a
forum for these people to meet and learn from one another? That’s something we haven’t worked out. I think we have enough work cut out for us
right now just to characterize how the community is using it.
It was not meant as a feature request, but as a way to imagine how usability
research could flip around and also become productive work.

Yes, totally. I think one of the things that we found when bringing people
into to assess the basic usability of the ingimp software and ingimp website,
is that people like looking at things like what commands other people are
using, what the most frequently used commands are, and part of the reason
that they like that, is because of what it teaches them about the application.
So they might see a command they were unaware of. So we have toyed with
the idea of then providing not only the command name, but then a link
from that command name to the documentation – but I didn’t have time to
implement it, but certainly there are possibilities like that, you can imagine.

Maybe another group can figure something out like that? That’s the beauty of
opening up your software plus data set of course. Well, just a bit more on what
is logged and what not ... Maybe you could explain where and why you put the
limit and what kind of use you might miss out on as a result?
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I think it is important to keep in mind that whatever instrument you use
to study people, you are going to have some kind of bias, you are going
to get some information at the cost of other information. So if you do a
video taped observation of a user and you just set up a camera, then you
are not going to find details about the monitor maybe, or maybe you are
not really seeing what their hands are doing. No matter what instrument
you use, you are always getting a particular slice. I think you have to work
backwards and ask what kind of things do you want to learn. And so the
data that we collect right now, was really driven by what people have done
in the past in the area of instrumentation, but also by us bringing people
into the lab, observing them as they are using the application, and noticing
particular behaviours and saying, hey, that seems to be interesting, so what
kind of data could we collect to help us identify those kind of phenomena,
or that kind of performance, or that kind of activity? So again, the data that
we were collecting was driven by watching people, and figuring out what
information will help us to identify these types of activities. As I’ve said,
this is really the first project that is doing this, and we really need to make
sure we don’t poison the well. So if it happens that we collect some bit of
information, that then someone can later say, Oh my gosh, here is the person’s
file system, here are the names they are using for the files or whatever, then it’s
going to make the normal user population weary of downloading this type
of instrumented application. This is the thing that concerns me most about
Open Source developers jumping into this domain, is that they might not
be thinking about how you could potentially impact privacy.
I don’t know, I don’t want to get paranoid. But if you are doing it, then
there is a possibility someone else will do it in a less considerate way.
I think it is only a matter of time before people start doing this, because
there are a lot of grumblings about, we should be doing instrumentation, someone just needs to sit down and do it. Now there is an extension out for Firefox
that will collect this kind of data as well, so you know ...
Maybe users could talk with each other, and if they are aware that this
type of monitoring could happen, then that would add a different social
dimension ...
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It could. I think it is a matter of awareness, really, so when we bring
people into the lab and have them go to the ingimp website, download and
install it and use it, and go check out the stats on the website, and then we
ask questions like, what kind of data are we collecting? We have a lengthy
concern agreement that details the type of information we are collecting and
the ways your privacy could be impacted, but people don’t read it.
So concretely ... what information are you recording, and what information are
you not recording?
We record every command name that is applied to a document, to an image.
Where your privacy is at risk with that, is that if you write a custom script,
then that custom script’s name is going to be inserted into a log file. And so
if you are working for example for Lucas or DreamWorks or something like
that, or ILM, in some Hollywood movie studio and you are using ingimp
and you are writing scripts, then you could have a script like ‘fixing Shrek’s
beard’, and then that is getting put into the log file and then people are
going to know that the studio uses ingimp. We collect command names,
we collect things like what windows are on the screen, their positions, their
sizes, we take hashes of layer names and file names. We take a string and
then we create a hash code for it, and we also collect information about how
long is this string, how many alphabetical characters, numbers, things like
that, to get a sense of whether people are using the same files, the same
layer names time and time again, and so on. But this is an instance where
our first pass at this, actually left open the possibility of people taking those
hashes and then reconstructing the original strings from that. Because we
have the hash code, we have the length of the string, all you have to do is
generate all possible strings of that length, take the hash codes and figure
out which hashes match. And so we had to go back and create a new
scheme for recording this type of information where we create a hash and
we create a random number, we pair those up on the client machine but
we only log the random number. So, from log to log then, we can track if
people use the same image names, but we have no idea of what the original
string was. There are these little ‘gotchas’, things to look out for, that I
don’t think most people are aware of, and this is why I get really concerned
about instrumentation efforts right now, because there isn’t this body of
experience of what kind of data should we collect, and what shouldn’t we
collect.
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As we are talking about this, I am already more aware of what data I would allow
to be collected. Do you think by opening up this data set and the transparent
process of collecting and not collecting, this will help educate users about these
kinds of risks?
It might, but honestly I think probably the thing that will educate people
the most is if there was a really large privacy error and that it got a lot of
news, because then people would become more aware of it because right
now – and this is not to say that we want that to happen with ingimp – but
when we bring people in and we ask them about privacy, Are you concerned
about privacy?, and they say No, and we say Why? Well, they inherently trust
us, but the fact is that Open Source also lends a certain amount of trust to
it, because they expect that since it is Open Source, the community will in
some sense police it and identify potential flaws with it.

Is that happening?
Are you in dialogue with the Open Source community about this?

No, I think probably five to ten people have looked at the ingimp code –
realistically speaking I don’t think a lot of people looked at it. Some of the
GIMP developers took a gander at it to see how could we put this upstream,
but I don’t want it upstream, because I want it to always be an opt-in, so
that it can’t be turned on by mistake.
You mean you have to download ingimp and use it as a separate program? It
functions in the same way as GIMP, but it makes the fact that it is a different
tool very clear.

Right. You are more aware, because you are making that choice to download
that, compared to the regular version. There is this awareness about that.
We have this lengthy text based consent agreement that talks about the data
we collect, but less than two percent of the population reads license agreements. And, most of our users are actually non-native English speakers,
so there are all these things that are working against us. So, for the past
year we have really been focussing on privacy, not only in terms of how we
collect the data, but how we make people aware of what the software does.
We have been developing wordless diagrams to illustrate how the software
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functions, so that we don’t have to worry about localisation errors as much.
And so we have these illustrations that show someone downloading ingimp,
starting it up, a graph appears, there is a little icon of a mouse and a keyboard on the graph, and they type and you see the keyboard bar go up, and
then at the end when they close the application, you see the data being sent
to a web server. And then we show snapshots of them doing different things
in the software, and then show a corresponding graph change. So, we developed these by bringing in both native and non-native speakers, having
them look at the diagrams and then tell us what they meant. We had to go
through about fifteen people and continual redesign until most people could
understand and tell us what they meant, without giving them any help or
prompts. So, this is an ongoing research effort, to come up with techniques
that not only work for ingimp but also for other instrumentation efforts, so
that people can become more aware of the implications.
Can you say something about how this type of research relates to classic usability
research and in particular to the usability work that is happening in Gimp?
Instrumentation is not new, commercial software companies and researchers
have been doing instrumentation for at least ten years, probably ten to
twenty years. So, the idea is not new but what is new, in terms of the
research aspects of this, is how do we do this in a way where we can make
all the data open? The fact that you make the data open, really impacts your
decision about the type of data you collect and how you are representing it.
And you need to really inform people about what the software does. But I
think your question is ... how does it impact the GIMP’s usability process?
Not at all, right now. But that is because we have intentionally been laying
off to the side, until we got to the point where we had an infrastructure,
where the entire community could really participate with the data analysis.
We really want to have this to be a self-sustaining infrastructure, we don’t
want to create a system where you have to rely on just one other person for
this to work.

What approach did you take in order to make this project self-sustainable?

Collecting data is not hard. The challenge is to understand the data, and I
don’t want to create a situation where the community is relying on only one
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person to do that kind of analysis, because this is dangerous for a number of
reasons. First of all, you are creating a dependency on an external party, and
that party might have other obligations and commitments, and might have
to leave at some point. If that is the case, then you need to be able to pass the
baton to someone else, even if that could take a considerate amount of time
and so on. You also don’t want to have this external dependency, because
of the richness in the data, you really need to have multiple people looking
at it, and trying to understand and analyse it. So how are we addressing
this? It is through this StatsJam extension to the MediaWiki that I will
introduce today. Our hope is that this type of tool will lower the barrier
for the entire community to participate in the data analysis process, whether
they are simply commenting on the analysis we made or taking the existing
analysis, tweaking it to their own needs, or doing something brand new.

In talking with members of the GIMP project here at the Libre Graphics
Meeting, they started asking questions like, So how many people are doing
this, how many people are doing this and how many this? They’ll ask me while
we are sitting in a café, and I will be able to pop the database open and say, A
certain number of people have done this, or, no one has actually used this tool at
all. The danger is that this data is very rich and nuanced, and you can’t really
reduce these kind of questions to an answer of N people do this, you have to
understand the larger context. You have to understand why they are doing
it, why they are not doing it. So, the data helps to answer some questions,
but it generates new questions. They give you some understanding of how
the people are using it, but then it generates new questions of, Why is this
the case? Is this because these are just the people using ingimp, or is this
some more widespread phenomenon? They asked me yesterday how many
people are using this colour picker tool – I can’t remember the exact name –
so I looked and there was no record of it being used at all in my data set. So
I asked them when did this come out, and they said, Well it has been there at
least since 2.4. And then you look at my data set, and you notice that most of
my users are in the 2.2 series, so that could be part of the reasons. Another
reason could be, that they just don’t know that it is there, they don’t know
how to use it and so on. So, I can answer the question, but then you have
to sort of dig a bit deeper.
You mean you can’t say that because it is not used, it doesn’t deserve any attention?
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Yes, you just can’t jump to conclusions like that, which is again why we
want to have this community website, which shows the reasoning behind
the analysis. Here are the steps we had to go through to get this result, so
you can understand what that means, what the context means, because if you
don’t have that context, then it’s sort of meaningless. It’s like asking, what
are the most frequently used commands? This is something that people
like to ask about. Well really, how do you interpret that? Is it the numbers
of times it has been used across all log files? Is it the number of people
that have used it? Is it the number of log files where it has been used at
least once? There are lots and lots of ways in which you can interpret this
question. So, you really need to approach this data analysis as a discourse,
where you are saying, here are my assumptions, here is how I am getting to
this conclusion, and this is what it means for this particular group of people.
So again, I think it is dangerous if one person does that and you become to
rely on that one person. We really want to have lots of people looking at it,
and considering it, and thinking about the implications.
Do you expect that this will impact the kind of interfaces that can be done for
GIMP?
I don’t necessarily think it is going to impact interface design, I see it
really as a sort of reality check: this is how communities are using the
software and now you can take that information and ask, do we want to
better support these people or do we ... For example on my data set, most
people are working on relatively small images for short periods of time,
the images typically have one or two layers, so they are not really complex
images. So regarding your question, one of the things you can ask is, should
we be creating a simple tool to meet these people’s needs? All the people are
is just doing cropping and resizing, fairly common operations, so should we
create a tool that strips away the rest of the stuff? Or, should we figure out
why people are not using any other functionality, and then try to improve
the usability of that? There are so many ways to use data I don’t really
know how it is going to be used, but I know it doesn’t drive design. Design
happens from a really good understanding of the users, the types of tasks
they perform, the range of possible interface designs that are out there, lots
of prototyping, evaluating those prototypes and so on. Our data set really
is a small potential part of that process. You can say, well according to this
data set, it doesn’t look like many people are using this feature, let’s not
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much focus too on that, let’s focus on these other features or conversely,
let’s figure out why they are not using them ... Or you might even look at
things like how big their monitor resolutions are, and say well, given the size
of the monitor resolution, maybe this particular design idea is not feasible.
But I think it is going to complement the existing practices, in the best
case.

And do you see a difference in how interface design is done in free software projects,
and in proprietary software?
Well, I have been mostly involved in the research community, so I don’t have
a lot of exposure to design projects. I mean, in my community we are always
trying to look at generating new knowledge, and not necessarily at how to
get a product out the door. So, the goals or objectives are certainly different.
I think one of the dangers in your question is that you sort of lump a lot
of different projects and project styles into one category of ‘Open Source’.
‘Open source’ ranges from volunteer driven projects to corporate projects,
where they are actually trying to make money out of it. There is a huge diversity of projects that are out there; there is a wide diversity of styles, there
is as much diversity in the Open Source world as there is in the proprietary
world. One thing you can probably say, is that for some projects that are
completely volunteer driven like GIMP, they are resource strapped. There is
more work than they can possibly tackle with the number of resources they
have. That makes it very challenging to do interface design, I mean, when
you look at interface code, it costs you 50% or 75% of a code base. That
is not insignificant, it is very difficult to hack and you need to have lots of
time and manpower to be able to do significant things. And that’s probably
one of the biggest differences you see for the volunteer driven projects, it
is really a labour of love for these people and so very often the new things
interest them, whereas with a commercial software company developers are
going to have to do things sometimes they don’t like, because that is what
is going to sell the product.

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In 2007, OSP met with venture communist Dmytri Kleiner
and his wife Franziska, 1 late at night in the bar Le Coq in
Brussels. Kleiner had just finished his lecture InfoEnclosure-2.0
at Verbindingen/Jonctions and we wanted to ask what his ideas
about peer production could mean for the practice of designers and typographers. Referring to Benjamin Tucker, Yochai
Benkler, Marcel Mauss and of course Karl Marx, Kleiner explains how to prevent leakage at the point of scarcity through
operating within a total system of worker owned companies.
Between fundamentals of media- and information economy, he
talks about free typography and what it has to do with nuts
and bolts, the problem of working with estimates and why the
people that develop Scribus should own all the magazines it
enables.

First of all we have to be clear, our own company is very small and
doesn’t actually earn enough money to sustain itself right now. We sustain
our company at this point by taking on other projects; for example we are
here for a project that has really little to do with Telekommunisten, where
we’re helping a recruiting company in Canada, I’m in the UK for a very different reason than Telekommunisten, doing independent software development for a private company. So we’re still self-funding our company. So we
haven’t yet got to a stage where our company can actually sustain itself from
our own peer production, which is our goal. But how we plan to realize
that goal, is through peer production. To start we can sketch out a simple economic model, to understand how the economics work. Economics
work with the so called factors of production: you have land, labour and
capital. Land is natural resources, that which occurs naturally, that which
nobody produces, that just sort exists. Land, electromagnetic frequencies,
everything which naturally exists. Labour is work, something that people
do. Capital is what happens when you apply labour to land, and you create
products. Some of these products have to be consumed, and some of those
products are to be used in further production, and that’s capital. So capital

1

editor for a German publishing company

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is the result of labour applied to land that create output that is used for
further production, and that’s tools, machines and so forth. This system
produces commodities which are consumed in the market. In this system
the dominating input in the production owns the final product, and all of
the actual value of the products is captured at that stage. So whoever sells
the product in the marketplace captures the full value of that product, the
full marginal value, or use value. All of the inputs to that process can never
make anymore than their own cost of reproduction, make their own subsistence cost. So if as a worker you’re selling your labour to somebody else
who owns the product, you’re never going to capture anymore than your
subsistence cost.
Could you make that sort of concrete?

Well, the reason that people need design is because there’s some product
that in the end requires design as an input. For instance, a simple case is
obviously a magazine, in which design is a major input. The value is always
going to be captured by the people selling the magazine. All of the inputs
to that magazine, including design, journalism, layout, administration, are
never going to capture more than their reproduction costs. So in order for
any group of workers to really capture the value of their labour, they have to
own the final product. Which means that they can’t just simply be isolated
in one field, like design. It means that the entire productive cycle has to be
owned collectively by the workers. The designers, together with the journalists, together with the administrators, have to own the magazine, otherwise
they can’t capture their full value. As a group of designers this is very difficult, because as a group of designers you’re only selling an input, you’re not
at the end owning a product. The only way to do this is by forming alliances
with other people, and not based on wages, not based on them giving you
an arbitrary amount of money for that input, which will never be higher
than reproduction cost, but based on owning together the final product. So
you contribute design, somebody else contributes journalism, somebody else
contributes administration and together you all own this magazine. Then
it is this magazine that is sold on the market that is your wage, the value
of the magazine on the market. That is the only way that you can capture
the marginal value of your labour. You have to sell the product, not the input, not labour. Marx talks about labour being itself a commodity, and that
means that you can never capture its marginal contribution of production,
you can only capture its reproduction cost. Which means what it would
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cost to sustain a designer. A designer needs to eat, a designer needs a place
to live, to have a certain lifestyle to fit in the design community and that’s
all you get by selling your labour. You won’t get anymore because there is
no reason for the owner of the product to give you anymore. The only way
you can get more is if you own the product itself, collectively with the other
labour inputs. And I know that’s a bad answer, nobody wants to hear that
answer.
Haha!

This estimate is at the start in the possibility. Because the whole point
of a creative project is that you’re doing something that hasn’t been done
before. And we have all struggled with this before. There’s two things you
don’t know at the beginning of a contract. The first is how long it will
take and the second is what the criteria of being finished will be. You don’t
know either of those two things, and, since you don’t, determining the value
upfront of that is a complete guess. Which means that, when you agree to a
fixed-price term, you are agreeing to take on yourself the risk of the delivery
of the project. So it’s a transfer of risks. Of course the people that are buying
your labour as commodity want to put that risk back on you. They don’t
want to take the risk so they make you do that, because they can’t answer
the question of how much does it cost and how long it will take. They want
a guarantee of a fixed price and they want you to take all the risk. Which is
very unfair because it’s their product in the end; the end product is owned
by them and not by you. It’s a very exploitative relationship to force you
to take the risk for capitalizing their product. It’s a bad relationship from
the beginning. If you’re good at estimating and you know your work and
your limits and the kind of work you can do, you can make that work, and
make a living by being good at this estimates; but still first of all you’re
taking all the risk unfairly, and second you can’t make anything more than a
living. While if we’re going to build any kind of movement for social change
with these new forms of organization, we have to accumulate. Because the
political power is an extension of economic power. So if we actually think
that our peer production communities are going to have political power and
ultimately change society, that can only happen to the degree that we can
accumulate. Which means capturing more than the reproduction costs of
our labour input, it means actually capturing the full value of our labour’s
products. The Benjamin Tucker quote I mentioned before is a good way to
keep it in mind. The natural wage of labour is its product. The natural wage
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of labour isn’t 40 an hour, it isn’t some arbitrary number. The natural wage
of labour is its product.
In our case the product is making phone calls. And we don’t offer our labour
in the form of software development, we are putting together a collective
that can do everything, develop a software and bring it to the market. It is
actually the consumer making telephone calls that will pay for it. As I said,
with it we are not actually making a sustainable living from it right now.
We are only building this. We are still making most of our sustenance by
selling our labour.
Yeah.

That’s where we are starting from. But because we are going for a
model where the end product is sold directly to the consumer, there is
not mediation. There is no capitalist owners that are buying our labour and
owning the product and then selling the product for it’s value to the market.
We are selling the product directly to the consumers of the product, so there
is nothing in-between. And all of the workers that contribute to the making
of this product, whether they are programmers or into administration or
designers, together own this product and own this company. If you’re not
selling the product, then what you’re selling is behavioural control. If you’re
not paying for the magazine directly, it is paid for with the money coming
from lobbyists or from advertisers that want to control the behaviour of the
people perceiving that media, by making them buy some things or vote in a
certain way or have a certain image of a certain state department or the role
of the state. In the economical model where the actual magazine isn’t being
sold, where the media is free, in the way television is free, the base of that
model is what Dallas Smythe calls ‘audience power’. Smythe is one of the
main writers about the politically economy of communications, and this is
sort of referred to in his ‘audience commodity’ thing, which is very degraded
and unfundamental discourse, but it’s related. ‘Audience power’, ultimately,
is just behavioural control. There is money to be made by changing the
behaviours of others. And this is the fundamental source of media funding,
sometimes it is commercials to sell an actual product by ads and sometimes
it is more subtle, like legitimizing a political system or getting people to
think favourably about a party or a state department or a government.
All the artists and the designers of the poster and the people that come to
the event, they have all kinds of motivations, use value. But the exchange
values, where the money comes from, the people buying the checks, what
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they are buying is behavioural control, is to be represented in this context.
Through their commercial or political or legitimation purposes. The state
has legitimation needs, the state needs to be something that is thought of as
positive by people. And it does this by funding things that give a legitimacy,
like art, culture, social services. What it is buying, is this legitimation. It is
behavioural control. When an advertiser sponsors an art show or an event
or a television program what they are buying is the chance to make people
buy their product. So it is not that every single person, every single artists
in the show was thinking about how to manipulate the audience. Not at all,
they are just making art ... But where the money comes from, what they
are actually selling on the market, is behavioural control. It is the so called
‘audience power’.
How does that change the work itself you think?

It changes the way you work, a lot. There are so many restrictions
and limitations when you work on this model, on capital finance, because
the medium is constantly subverted and subjugated by the mediation, the
mediation is the message to make it a catch phrase. If you know that your
art show is being funded by a certain agency, you’re going to avoid talking
critically about that agency, because obviously that is going to deny you
funding further on. It’s clear that the sources of funding affect the actual
message that is delivered at the end. It’s not possible to have SONY Records
sponsor an art show that then tells you how SONY is evil. It is very unlikely
that it is going to be funded again, maybe you can trick them once, but it’s
not going to be sustainable. We were joking before about how my use of
anarchist and socialist terminology actually gets the most flak from other
people in my own field. That’s because they are trying to portray what we
do in Free Software development and peer production as being unpolitical.
With my saying that no, it’s actually quite political, explaining why, they
feel like I’m blowing their cover. Like I’m almost outing them as being
leftist radicals and they don’t want this image because they actually think
they can fool this system. Which I think is delusional, I don’t think you
can fool this system. But that’s a very clear example how it does actually
change the context and change the message. Because you are always selfconscious of how you’re going to pay your rent and how you’re going to pay
your bills. It’s impossible to separate yourself from this context and if the
funding is coming from these directions you’re always going to self-censor
and it’s going to affect what you talk about in your choices that you make.
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What to present, what not to present, where to place the emphasis where
not to place the emphasis, it will always be modified by the context you are
producing in. And if what you’re being paid for is essentially to make people
like SONY or make people like the state then it’s going to change the way
you present what you are doing.
Yochai Benkler used the term ‘commons-based peer production’ and of
course took great pains to avoid talking about communism and try to limit
this only to information production. He’s very clear, for him this is not for
real material production. Because he’s a liberal lawyer, working for a major
university, in the states ... so this is how he presents his work.
But what this means, commons-based production, means that the instruments of production are actually collectively owned but controlled by the
direct producers, which means that nobody can actually earn money simply by owning the instruments of production. You can only earn money
by employing the instruments of production in actually making something.
So, commons-based peer production. You have common things like instruments of production, land and capital, they’re are commonly controlled and
commonly owned, and individual labour of peers is applied to that shared
commons and the results of that labour is then owned by the actual producers. None of that product is owned by the people who are simply owning
instruments of production. That is what is meant by commons-based peer
production. But that’s exactly what the anarchist and the socialist call communism. There is no actual difference. Communism in a text book example
is the state less, property-less society. And that’s what it means, commonsbased peer production is a neologism, a modern way of saying communism
because for political reasons, post-war rhetoric, these words are verboten
and you can’t say them. So people invent new words, but they’re saying
exactly the same things. The point is that producers require land and capital to produce. If certain private interest controls all of the access of direct
producers to land and capital, then those private interests can extract the
surplus value. Another great quote from Benjamin Tucker is whenever one
person earns without sweating ... ehm sorry, whenever one person earns without
sweating, another person sweats without earning and that’s fundamentally true.
If anybody is earning revenue simply by owning instruments of production,
that means that people actually producing are not capturing the value of
their labour. And that’s what commons-based peer production is. The idea
that we have a commons which is all of our property, nobody controls our
instruments of production, they’re all our property together. Each of us
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have our labour and we apply that to the commons and we produce something and whatever we produce, that is ours. It’s our own, provided that we
are not taking anything away from anybody else, provided that we are not
taking any exclusive control of the commons.
In the case of Free Software development, the Free Software itself is a commons. But things that you might make with Free Software are not part of
the commons, they’re your own. But the problem with software itself is
that because software is immaterial and therefore has no reproduction costs,
it can be reproduced with no costs, it also has no exchange value. So in
order to convert it to exchange value you always have to apply other forms of
property: land, capital, hard fixed property ... And so, as commons-based
peer producers in the Yochai Benkler world, we have our little internal communism, but we can neither live in it nor feed ourselves with it. So in order
to actually sustain ourselves, to actually capture our material subsistence, we
then have to deal with people that own land an capital; fixed, scarce properties, and we have no leverage in that negotiation. The only things we can
get back from the people that consume the output of our labour, is our
reproduction costs and nothing more, while they continue to capture and
accumulate the extra value. Again, how that applies to design is another
thing, I don’t think you can isolate one kind of worker from the overall
thing. The point is you have to think of where is the value coming from,
what are you really selling? Because you’re not really selling design, design
is an input. What are you really ...
What do you mean with ‘design is an input’?

Design is an input. The average consumer doesn’t buy design. Nobody
goes to a store and says I’d like a design. They only want the design because
they want another product that has design as an input of that product. If
you’re making beer and you need a label, you find a designer to make the
label. But what you’re selling is beer, you’re not selling design. So you always
have to think about what are you really selling. What is the actual product
that people is exchanging for, what is the source for the exchange value.
And once you identify the source of the exchange value, you have to figure
out how to create a direct relationship with all the other producers that are
involved in the production cycle.
...

Seems incredibly difficult ...

If it was easy then capitalism would have been overthrown centuries ago

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... You’re now owning a magazine already with a couple of people. The
next person asks you to design a beer label ...
You have to own the beer factory!

... And I think next you should own the paper company that makes ...

And then you need people and say I know how to make design, I need
some people who know how to make beer. So then we have a beer factory.
And then you need people who drink the beer! Who’s going to make the
people that drink the beer?
Haha.

But wait, there must be a little bit of difference, a modified option to
this. For example ...

In the scenario of commons-based peer production it’s not that the designers have to own the beer factory, it’s just that there can’t be any capitalist
in the middle that owns the land, it’s enough if the designers and the beer
makers both own the land together and the capital together ...
So if the beer company is also worker-owned and you come to an arrangement ... Isn’t it the idea of shares? Applying labour and therefore having shares on something ...

Yes, but it has to be equal. Shares in a capitalist system are unequal.
That’s the idea of copy-far-left. It’s the idea of a public license that allows
free use for non-alienated forms of production and denies free use for alienated forms of production. In the case of software, for instance, which is
not the greatest application of copy-far-left, but is a good example to understand, the software would be usable by a workers’ cooperative for free
but a private corporation employing wage labour and private capital couldn’t
use it for free. They would have to either not use it at all or negotiate a
different set of terms under which they could use it. So the question is
how do we remove coercive property relationships. If you really have a situation of commons-based peer production, or communism, where there is
no state, no property, the instruments of production are collectively owned,
people just work together in a very kind of free way, than it could certainly
work. But that’s not the world we are living in, so we have to be defensive
of our commons and how we produce in order for it to grow. We have
to think about where the exchange value is and think about where the use
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value crosses into exchange value and make sure that the point is within our
boundary. If we can do that, that’s enough. If we have a worker-owned
design collective that works with a worker-owned beer company, that’s as
good as together owning a beer company. But only if they also live on land
and apartments that are also worker-owned, because otherwise the landlord will simply capture value; you have to look for the point of leakage.
Even with a workers’ design company and a workers’ beer company living
in Brussels renting from capitalist, then the people that own the apartment
and the land will simply capture all the surplus value. The surplus value
will always leak at the point of scarcity, so the system has to be complete,
what Marcel Mauss calls a ‘total system’. It has to be a total system, if it
is not, if the entire cycle of production doesn’t go through commons-based
peer production hands, then it’s going to leak at the first point of scarcity.
Then whoever privately controls the one scarce resource through which all
this cycle of production goes through, will capture all the surplus value.
Again, back to our very basic model. The price of anything is its reproduction cost, so the price of something that is immaterial is zero. So, since
the beginning of mechanical reproduction, property-based interest groups
have tried to create artificial barriers to production. When you have artificial
barriers to reproduction the immaterial assets start to behave like material
assets; this is where copyright and intellectual property come from. It’s
the desire of property groups, to make immaterial assets behave price-wise
the same as material assets, the only way to do that is creating barriers to
reproduction.
Typography obviously comes from this culture, like a lot of other media
culture. There is rules about how you can reproduce it, and it creates
the opportunity for the owners of these things to capture exchange value.
Because the reproduction costs are no longer zero, because of artificial costs
of reproduction. But in certain things the capitalists are not homogeneous,
there’s not just one group of capitalists. There is many different capitalists.
Even though some make their living from typography, many more capitalists make their living by using typography, so with typography as an input.
From the point of view of those capitalists, the ones trying to restrict the
reproduction of typography are a problem. So if they can hire their own
staff and develop free typography with other companies, they’re not selling
typography, that’s just an input for them. Like for standardized nuts and
bolts, one time this was true too, bolt-makers would make their nuts and
bolt not fit, in the sense that if you wanted to use a nut from one company
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and a bolt from another you couldn’t do so. They tried to create a barrier
from this, but since the nuts and bolts industry is not the biggest in capital,
because capital itself need nuts and bolts, the other companies got together
and said wait a minute, let’s just have standardized nuts and bolts, we don’t
want to make our money from nuts and bolts, we want to make our money
off-stream, from the product we make from nuts and bolts. Typography
falls into the same system. I imagine most of the people that are creating
free typography work for companies and they have their salary paid by companies that use typography, not companies that sell typography. Companies
that actually use typography in other production, whether it’s publishing or
whatever else they’re making, so the reproduction costs of the typographers
is paid for by not controlling the typography itself, but by employing it in
production and using it in another field. The people that are still trying
to hold on to typography as a product, as an end product that they capture
from intellectual property, are being pushed out.
In other things this is not just the case. If you look at the amount of money
that publishing companies spend on QuarkXpress, that’s not really a big
deal. From their point of view, they can hire some programmers and they
can make their own QuarkXpress and work with five other publishing companies, but the amount of money that they spend on QuarkXpress overall,
isn’t that high ...
Haha.

So the same economy of scale doesn’t apply. This is why commercial
software is still hanging on in these niche markets where there isn’t a broad
enough market. It’s not a broad enough input so that freedom is supported
by the users of it. Typography is a very general input. It’s like a nut or
a bolt, while QuarkXpress is pretty specific. Franziska was saying that in
her publishing company all they really need is two copies, or maybe one
even, of the software, and the whole company can work with it. They
just go to the computer with it when they need to do the layout, overall
it’s not a huge cost. They don’t need it every time they publish a book.
Whether if they had to pay for the font they used and every time they
wanted to use a different font, and they had to pay for it again, that would
be a problem, so they’d rather use a free font, and if that means hiring
somebody to drop the pixels down for a new font once and then having it
free forever, it can all make sense. That’s why typography is different from
software. And so the Scribus project has gone really far but the reason
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it’s obscure is because except from the ideological case, they don’t have a
business case they can make for the publishers. Because for publishers they
want a piece of software that works and if it costs 400$ once, who cares.
It doesn’t really affect their business model. You have to make the case for
the publishers that if you form an association of all the publishers and you
together develop some new Free Software to do publishing, that would be
better and cheaper and faster. Then maybe eventually this case would be
made and something like this would exist, but it’s not like an operating
system or a web browser, that is really used everywhere all the time, and
would be really inconvenient to pay for every time. If companies had to pay
every single time they put a web browser on their computer, that would be
very inconvenient for them. Even Microsoft doesn’t dare to charge money
for Internet Explorer, cos they know people would just say Fuck off. They’re
not going to buy it. In more obscure areas, like publishing, 3D animation,
film and video, it doesn’t make so much of a difference. In those business
models, for instance 3D animation, one of the biggest companies is Pixar.
They make the movies! They don’t make the software, they go all the way
through the process and they make the movie! So they completely own
everything. For that reason it makes sense for them, since they capture the
full value of their product in the end, because they make the movies, that
their software enables them to make. And this would be a good model
for peer production as well, except obviously they’re a capitalist organization
and they exploit wage labour. But basically if Scribus really wanted to have a
financial base, the people that develop Scribus would have to own a magazine
that is enabled by Scribus. And if they can own the magazine that Scribus
enables then they can capture enough of that value to fund the development
of Scribus, and it would actually develop very quickly and be very good,
because that’s actually a total system. So right from the software to the
design, to the journalism, to the editing, to the sale, to the capture of the
value of the end consumer. But because it doesn’t do that, they’re giving
Free Software away ... To who? Where is the value captured? Where is the
use value transferred into exchange value? It’s this point that you have to get
all the way to, and if you don’t make it all the way there, even if you stop a
mile short, in that mile all of the surplus value will be sucked out.

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This conversation took place in Montreal at the last day of
the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011. In the panel How to
keep and make productive libre graphics projects?, Asheesh
had responded rather sharply to a remark from the audience that only a very small number of women were
present at LGM: Bringing the problem back to gender is
avoiding the general problem that F/LOSS has with social
inclusion. Another good reason to talk to him were the
intriguing ‘Interactive training missions’ that he had been
developing as part of the OpenHatch.org project. I wanted
to know more about the tutorials he develops; why he decided to work on ‘story manuals’ that explain how to report a bug or how to work with version control. Asheesh
Laroia is someone who realizes that most of the work
that makes projects successful is hidden underneath the
surface. He volunteered his technical skills for the UN
in Uganda, the EFF, and Students for Free Culture, and
is a developer on the Debian team. Today, he lives in
Somerville, MA. He speaks about his ideas to audiences
at international F/LOSS conferences.
The interactive training missions are really linked to the background of
the OpenHatch project itself. I started working on it because to my mind,
one of the biggest reasons that people do not participate in Free Software
projects, is that they either don’t know how or don’t feel included. There is
a lot you have to know to be a meaningful contributor to Free Software and
I think that one of the major obstacle for getting that knowledge, and I am
being a bit sloppy with the use of the term maybe, is how to understand a
conversation on a bug-tracker for example. This is not something you run
into in college, learning computer science or any other discipline. In fact,
it is an almost anti-academic type of knowledge. Bug tracker conversations
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are ‘just people talking’, a combination of a comment thread on a blog and
actual planning documents. There’s also tools like version control, where
close to no one learns about in college. There is something like the culture
of participating in mailing lists and chatting on IRC ... what people will
expect to hear and what people are expecting from you.
For people like me that have been doing all these things for years, it feels
very natural and it is very easy to forget all the advantages I have in this
regard. But a lot of the ways people get to the point where I am now
involves having friends that help out, like Hey, I asked what I thought was a
reasonable question on this mailing list and I did not get any answer or what
they said wasn’t very helpful. At this stage, if you are lucky, you have a friend
that helps you stay in the community. If you don’t, you fall away and think
I’m not going to deal with this, I don’t understand. So, the training missions
are designed to give you the cultural experience and the tool familiarity in an
automated way. You can stay in the community even when you don’t have a
friend, because the robot will explain you what is going on.

So how do you ‘harvest’ this cultural information? And how do you bring it into
your tool?

There is some creative process in what I call ‘writing the plot’; this is very
linear. Each training mission is usually between three and fifteen minutes
long so it is OK to have them be linear. In writing the plot, you just imagine
what would it take a new contributor to understand not only what to do, but
also what a ‘normal community member’ would know to do. The different
training missions get this right to different extents.

How does this type of knowledge form, you think? Did you need to become a kind
of anthropologist of Free Software? How do you know you teach the right thing?
I spend a lot of time both working with and thinking about new contributions to Free Software. Last September I organized a workshop to teach
computer science students how to get involved in Open Source. And I have
also been teaching interpersonally, in small groups, for ten or eleven years.
So I use the workshops to test the missions and than I simply ask what
works. But it is tough to evaluate the training missions through workshops
because the workshops are intended to be more interpersonal. I definitely
had positive feedback, but we need more, especially from people that have
been two or three years involved in the Free Software community, because
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they understand what it feels like to be part of a community but they may
still feel somewhat unsure about whether they have everything and still remember what was confusing to learn.

I wasn’t actually asking about how successful the missions are in teaching the
culture Free Software ... I wanted to know how the missions learn from this
culture?
So far, the plots are really written by me, in collaboration with others. We
had one more recent contribution on Git written by someone called Mark
Freeman who is involved in the OpenHatch project. It did not have so
much community discussion but it was also pretty good from the start. So
I basically try to dump what is in my head?

I am asking you about this, thinking about a session we once organized at
Samedies, a woman-and-Free-Software group from Brussels. We had invited
someone to come talk to us about using IRC on the command-line and she was
discussing etiquette. She said: On IRC you should never ask permission before
asking a question. This was the kind of cultural knowledge she was teaching us
and I was a bit puzzled ... you could also say that this lack of social interfacing
on IRC is a problem. So why replicate that?
In Debian we have a big effort to check the quality of packages and maintaining that quality, even if the developer goes away. It is called the ‘Debian
QA project’ and there’s an IRC channel linked to that called #debian-qa.
Some of the people on that channel like to say hello to each other and
pay attention when other people are speaking, and others said stop with all
the noise. So finally, the people that liked saying hello moved to another
channel: #debian-sayhi.

Meaning the community has made explicit how it wants to be spoken to?

The point I am trying to make here, is that I am agreeing to part of what
you are saying, that these norms are actually flexible. But what I am further
saying, is that these norms are actually being bent.

I would like to talk about the new mission on bug reporting you said you were
working on, and how that is going. I find bug reports interesting because if
they’re good, they mix observation and narration, which asks a lot from the
imagination of both the writer and the reader of the report; they need to think
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themselves in each others place: What did I expect that would happen? What
should have happened? What could have gone wrong? Would you say your
interactive training missions are a continuation of this collective imaginary work?

A big part of that sort of imagination is understanding the kinds of things
that could be reasonable. So this is where cultural knowledge comes in. If
you program in C or even if you just read about C, you understand that
there is something called ‘pointers’ and something called ‘segfaults’ and if
your program ends in that way, that is not a good thing and you should
report a bug. This requires an imagination on the side of the person filing
the bug. The training missions give people practice in seeing these sorts of
things and understand how they could work. To build a mental model, even
if it is fuzzy, that has enough of the right components so they can enter in
discussion and imagine what happened.
Of course when there are real issues such as groping at conferences, or
making people feel unwelcome because they are shown slides of half-naked
people that look like them ... that is actually a gender issue and that needs
to be addressed. But the example I gave was: Where are the Indians, where
are the Asians in our community? This is still a confusing question, but not
awkward.

Why is it not awkward?

(laughs) As I am an Indian person ... you might not be able to tell from the
transcription?
It is an easy thing to do, to make generalizations of categories of people
based on visible characteristics. Even worse, is to make generalizations about
all individual people in that class. It is really easy for people in the Free
Software community to subconsciously think there are no women in the
room ‘because women don’t like to program’, while we know that is really
not true. I like to bring up the Indian people as an example because there
are obviously a bunch of programmers in India ... the impression that they
can’t program, can’t be the reason they are excluded.

But in a way that is even more awkward?

Well, maybe I don’t feel it is that awkward because I see how to fix it, and I
even see how to fix both problems at the same time.
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In Free Software we are not hungry for people in the same way that corporate
hiring departments are. We limp along and sometimes one or two or three
people join our project per year as if by magic and we don’t know how and
we don’t try to understand how. Sometimes external entities such as Google
Summer of Code cause many many more show up at the doorstep of our
projects, but because they are so many they don’t get any skills for how to
grow. When I co-ran this workshop at the computer science department at
the University of Pennsylvania on how to get involved in Open Source, we
were flooded with applicants. They were basically all feeling enthusiastically
about Open Source but confused about how to get involved. 35% of the
attendees were women, and if you look at the photos you’ll see that it wasn’t
just women we were diverse on, there were lots of types of people. That’s
a kind of diversity-neutral outreach we need. It is a self-empowerment
outreach: ‘you will be cooler after this, we teach you how to do stuff ’ and
not ‘we need you to do what we want you to do’, which is the hiring-kind
of outreach.

And why do you think Free Software doesn’t usually reach out in this way? Why
does the F/LOSS community have such a hard time becoming more diverse?

The F/LOSS community has problems getting more people and being more
diverse. To me, those are the same problems. If we would hand out flyers
to people with a clear message saying for example: here is this nice vector
drawings program called Inkscape. Try it out and if you want to make it even
better, come to this session and we’ll show you how. If you send out this
invitation to lots of people, you’ll reach more of them and you’ll reach more
diverse people. But the way we do things right now, is that we leave notes
on bug trackers saying: help wanted. The people that read bug trackers, also
know how to read mailing lists. To get to that point, they most likely had
help from their friends. Their friends probably looked like them, and there
you have a second or third degree diversity reinforcement problem. But
leaving gender diversity and race diversity aside, it is such a small number of
people!

So, to break that cycle you say there is a need to externalize knowledge ... like
you are doing with the OpenHatch project and with your project ‘Debian for
Shy People’? To not only explain how things technically work, but also how they
function socially?
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I don’t know about externalizing ... I think I just want to grow our community. But when I feel more radical, I’d say we should just not write ‘How
to contribute’ pages anymore. Put a giant banner there instead saying: This
is such a fun project, come hang out with us on IRC ... every Sunday at 3PM.
Five or ten people might show up, and you will be able to have an individual
conversation. Quickly you’ll cross a boundary ... where you are no longer
externalizing knowledge, but simply treat them as part of your group.
The Fedora Design Bounties are a big shining example for me. Maírín Duffy
has been writing blog posts about three times a year: We want you to join
our community and here is something specific we want you to do. If you get it
right, the prize is that you are part of our community. The person that you get
this way will stick around because he or she came to join the community.
And not because you sent a chocolate cake?

Not for the chocolate cake, and also not for the 5000$ that you get over
the course of a Google summer of code project. So, I question whether it
is worth spending any time on a wiki-page explaining ‘How to contribute’
when instead you could attract people one by one, with a 100% success-rate.

Writing a ‘How to contribute’ page does force teams to reflect on what it takes to
become part of their community?
Of course that is true. But compared to standing at a job-fair talking to
people about their resume, ‘How to contribute’ pages are like anonymous,
impersonal walls of text that are not meant to create communication necessarily. If we keep focusing on communicating at this scale, we miss out on
the opportunity to make the situation better for individual people that are
likely to help us.

I feel that the Free Software community is quite busy with efficiency. When you
emphasize the importance of individual dialogue, it sounds like you propose a
different angle, even when this in the end has the desired effect of attracting more
loyal and reliable contributors.

It is amazing how valuable patience is.

You talked about Paul, the guy that stuck around on the IRC channel saying hi
to people and than only later started contributing patches after having seen two
or three people going through the process. You said: If we had implied that this
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person would only be welcome when he was useful ... we would have lost
someone that would be useful in the future.

The obsession with usefulness is a kind of elitism. The Debian project
leader once made this sort of half-joke where he said: Debian developers
expect new Debian contributors to appear as fully formed, completely capable
Debian developers. That is the same kind of elitism that speaks from You
can’t be here until you are useful. By the way, the fact that this guy was some
kind of cheerleader was awesome. The number of patches we got because
he was standing there being friendly, was meaningful to other contributors,
I am sure of it. The truth is ... he was always useful, even before he started
submitting patches. Borrowing the word ‘useful’ from the most extreme
code-only definition, in the end he was even useful by that definition. He
had always been useful.

So it is an obsession with a certain kind of usefulness?
Yes.

It is nice to hear you bring up the value of patience. OSP uses the image of a
frog as their logo, a reference to the frog from the fairy tale ‘The frog and the
princess’. Engaging with Free Software is a bit like kissing a frog; you never know
whether it will turn into a prince before you have dared to love it! To OSP
it is important not to expect that things will go the way you are used to ... A
suspension of disbelief?

Or hopefulness! I had a couple of magic moments ... one of the biggest
magic moments for me was when I as a high school student e-mailed the
Linux kernel list and than I got a response! My file system was broken,
and fsck-tools were crashing. So I was at the end of what I could do and
I thought: let’s ask these amazing people. I ended up in a discussion with
a maintainer who told me to submit this bug-report, and use these dump
tools ... I did all these things and compiled the latest version from version
control because we just submitted a patch to it. By the end of the process
I had a working file system again. From that moment on I thought: these
magic moments will definitely happen again.
If you want magic moments, than streamlining the communication with your
community might not be your best approach?
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What do you mean by that?

I was happy to find a panel on the program of LGM that addressed how this
community could grow. But than I felt a bit frustrated by the way people were
talking about it. I think the user and developer communities around Libre
Graphics are relatively small, and all people actually ask for, is dialogue. There
seems to be lots of concern about how to connect, and what tools to use for that.
The discussion easily drifts into self-deprecating statements such as ‘our website is
not up-to-date’ or ‘we should have a better logo’ or ‘if only our documentation
would be better’. But all of this seems more about putting off or even avoiding
the conversation.
Yes, in a way it is. I think that ‘conversations’ are the best, biggest thing
that F/LOSS has to offer its users, in comparison with proprietary software.
But a lot of the behavioral habits we have within F/LOSS and also as people
living in North America, is derived from what we see corporations doing.
We accept this as our personal strategies because we do not know any alternatives. The more I say about this, the more I sound like a hippie but I
think I’ll have to take the risk (laughs).
If you go to the Flash website, it tells you the important things you need to
know about Flash, and than you click download. Maybe there is a link to a
complex survey that tries to gather data en masse of untold millions of users.
I think that any randomly chosen website of a Libre Graphics project will
look similar. But instead it could say when you click download or run the
software ... we’re a bunch of people ... why don’t you come talk to us on IRC?
There are a lot people that are not in the conversation because nobody ever
invited them. This is why I think about diversity in terms of outreach, not
in terms of criticizing existing figures. If in some alternate reality we would
want to build a F/LOSS community that exists out of 90% women and
10% men, I bet we could do it. You just start with finding a college student
at a school that has a good Computer Science program ... she develops a
program with a bunch of her friends ... she puts up flyers in other colleges
... You could do this because there are relatively so little programmers in
the world busy with developing F/LOSS that you can almost handpick the
diversity content of your community. Between one and a thousand ... you
could do that. There are 6 million thousand people on this planet and the
amount of people not doing F/LOSS is enormous. Don’t wring your hands
about ‘where are the women’. Just ask them to join and that will be that!
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Tying the story to data

In the summer of 2010, Constant commissioned artist and
researcher Evan Roth to develop a work of his choice, and
to make the development process available in some way.
He decided to use a part of his fee as prize-money for
The GML-Recorder Challenge, inviting makers to propose an Open Source device ‘that can unobtrusively record
graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer’s normal practice in the city’. In three interviews that took place in
Brussels and Paris within a period of one and a half years,
we spoke about the collaborative powers of the GMLstandard, about contact points between hacker and graffiti
cultures and the granularity of gesture.
Based on conversations between Evan Roth (ER), Femke
Snelting (FS), Peter Westenberg (PW), Michele Walther
(MW), Stéphanie Villayphiou (SV), John Haltiwanger (JH)
and momo3010.
Brussels, July 2010
ER
FS

So what should we talk about?

Can you explain what GML stands for?

GML stands for Graffiti Markup Language 1 . It is a very simple fileformat designed for amateur programmers. It is a way to store graffiti
motion data. I started working with graffiti writers, combining graffiti
and technology back in New York, in 2003. In graduate school, my thesis
ER

1

Graffiti Markup Language (.gml) is a universal, XML based, open file format designed to
store graffiti motion data (x and y coordinates and time). The format is designed to maximize
readability and ease of implementation, even for hobbyist programmers, artists and graffiti
writers. http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com

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Tying the story to data

was on graffiti analysis, and writing software that could capture their
gestures, to archive motion data from graffiti writers. Back than I was
saving the data in an x-y-time array, I was calling them .graph files and I
sensed there was something interesting about the data, the visualization
of motion data but I had never opened up the project at that time.
About a year ago I released the second part of the project, of which the
source code was open but the dataset wasn’t. In conversation with a
friend of mine named Theo 2 , who also collaborated with me on the
L.A.S.E.R. Tag project 3 , he brought up the .graph file again and how
we could bring back the file format as a way to connect all these different applications. Graffiti Analysis 4 , L.A.S.E.R. Tag, EyeWriter 5 ... so I
worked with Theo Watson, Chris Sugrue 6 and Jamie Wilkinson 7 and
other people to develop Graffiti Markup Language. It is a simple set of
guidelines, basically an .xml file format that saves x-y-time data but does
it in a way that is very specifically related to graffiti so there’s a drip tag
and there’s tags related to the size of the brush and to how many strokes
you have: is it one stroke or two strokes or three strokes.
The main idea is: How do you archive the motion of graffiti and not just
the way graffiti looks. There are a lot of people photographing graffiti,
making documentaries etc. but there hasn’t been a way to archive graffiti
in ways of code yet.
FS

What do you mean, ‘archive in terms of code’?

There hasn’t been a programmatic way to archive graffiti. So this
is like taking a gesture and trying to boil it down to a set of coordinate
points that people can either upload or download. It is a sort of midpoint
between writers and hackers. Graffiti writers can download the software
and have how-to guides for how to do this, they can digitize their tags
ER

2
3

4
5
6
7

Theo Watson http://www.theowatson.com
In its simplest form, L.A.S.E.R. Tag is a camera and laptop setup, tracking a green laser
point across the face of a building and generating graphics based on the laser’s position which
then get projected back onto the same building with a high power projector.
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/projects/laser-tag
Graffiti Analysis is a digital graffiti blackbook designed for documenting more than just ink.
http://graffitianalysis.com
The EyeWriter is a low-cast eyetracking system originally designed for paralyzed graffiti artist
TEMPT. The EyeWriter system uses inexpensive cameras and Open Source computer vision
software to track the wearer’s eye movements. http://www.eyewriter.org
Chris Sugrue http://csugrue.com
Jamie Wilkinson http://www.jamiedubs.com

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Tying the story to data

and upload it to an open database. The 000000book-site 8 hosts all this
data and some people are writing software for this.

So there are three parts: the GML-standard, software to record and
play and than there is the data itself – all of it is ‘open’ in some way. Could
you go through each of them and talk about how they produce uploads and
downloads?
FS

Right. It starts with Graffiti Analysis. It is software written in C++
using OpenFrameworks, an Open Source platform designed by artists for
visual applications. Right now you can download the recorder app and
from that you can generate your own .gml files. And from there you can
upload these files into the playback app. In the beginning that was the
only Open Source side of the project. Programmers could also make new
applications based on the software, which also happened.
Last night we met Stéphane Buellet 9 who is developing a calligraphy
analysis project and he used Graffiti Analysis as a starting point. I find it
exciting when that happens but more often people take the file-format as
a starting point, and use it as a jumping-off point for making their own
work.
Second was the database. We had this file-format that we loosely defined.
I worked with Jamie to develop the 000000book site. It is pretty nutsand-bolts but you can click ‘upload’ and click on your own .gml files and
it will playback in the browser. People have developed their own playback
mechanisms, which are some of the first Open Source collaborations that
happened around .gml files. There is a user account and you can upload
files; people have made image renderers, there are people that have made
Flash players, SVG players. Golan Levin has developed an application
that converts a .gml file into an auto-CAD format. The 000000book site
is basically where graffiti writers connect to developers.
In the middle between Graffiti Analysis and database is the Graffiti Markup
Language, that I think will have its own place on the web. But sometimes
ER

8

9

http://000000book.com. Pronounced: ‘Black Book’: ‘A black book is a graffiti artist’s
sketchbook. Often used to sketch out and plan potential graffiti, and to collect tags from
other writers. It is a writer’s most valuable property, containing all or a majority of the
person’s sketches and pieces. A writer’s sketchbook is carefully guarded from the police and
other authorities, as it can be used as material evidence in a graffiti vandalism case and link a
writer to previous illicit works.’
Wikipedia. Glossary of graffiti — wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2014. [Online; accessed 5.8.2014]

Stéphane Buellet, Camera Linea http://www.chevalvert.fr/portfolio/numerique/camera-linea

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Tying the story to data

I see it as one project. One of my interests is in archiving graffiti and all
of these things are ways of doing that. It is interesting how these three
things work together. In terms of an OS development model it has been
producing results I haven’t seen when I just released source code.
FS

How do you do that, develop a standard for graffiti?

We started by looking at Graffiti Analysis and L.A.S.E.R. Tag, the
apps that were using graffiti motion data. From those two projects I had a
lot of experience of meeting graffiti writers as a userbase. When you meet
with them, they tell you right away what pieces of the software they think
are missing. So from talking with them we developed a lot of features
that now are in GML like brushes, drips, line-thickness. Some people
had single line tags and some people had multi-line tags so that issue
came up because GML tracks both drawing and non-drawing motion so
we knew that we needed in the file format to talk about pen up and pen
down. I was interested in the connection points between lines also.
We tried to keep it very stripped down. From the beginning we knew
that people that would participate as developers or anonymous contributors were not going to be the same people that would develop a Linux
core. They are students, people just getting into programming or visual
programming. We wanted people to be able to double-click a .gml file
and than everything should verbally make sense so it is Begin stroke.
End stroke. Anyone with basic programming skills should be able to
figure out what’s going on.
ER

Did you have any moment where you had to decide: this does not belong
to graffiti or: this might be more for calligraphy tracking?
FS

The only thing that has to be in there is the format in x-y time
scenario with some information on drawing and not drawing, everything
else is bonus. So if you load an .xml file structured like that, compliant
apps will load it in. On top of that, there are features that some apps
will want and others not. Keywords are, for example, a functionality that
we are still developing applications for. It is there but we are looking for
how to use it.
ER

FS

Did you ever think about this standard as a way to define a discipline?

(laughs) I think in the beginning it was a very functional conversation.
We were having apps running this data and I don’t think we were thinking
ER

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Tying the story to data

of defining graffiti when we were writing the format. But looking back,
it is interesting to think about it.
Graffiti has a lot of privacy issues related to it too, right? So we did
discuss about what it would mean to start recording geo-located data.
There are different interests in graffiti. There is an interest in visuals and
in deconstructing characters. Another group is interested in it, because
it is a sport and more of a performance art. For this type of interest, it
is more important to know exactly where and when it happened because
it is different on a rooftop in New York to a studio in the basement of
someones house. But if someone realizes this data resulted from an illegal
action, and wanted to tie it back to someone, than it starts to be like
a surveillance camera. What happens when someone is caught with a
laptop with all this data?
FS

Your desire to archive, is it also about producing new work?

I see graffiti writers as hackers. They use the city in the same way
as hackers are using computer systems. They are finding ways of using
a system to make it do things that it wasn’t intended to do. I am not
sure graffiti writers see it this way, but I am in this position where I have
friends that are hackers, playing around with digital structures online.
Other friends are into graffiti writing and to me those two camps are
doing the most interesting things right now, but these are two communities that hardly overlap. One of the interests I have is making these
two groups of people hang out more. I was physically the person bridging these two groups; I was the nerd person meeting the graffiti writers
talking to them about software and having this database.
Now it is not about my personal collection anymore, it is making a handshake between two communities; making them run off with each other
and having fun as opposed to me having to be there all the time to make
introductions.
ER

Is GML about the distribution of signature? I mean: The gestures of
a specific person can now be reproduced by a larger community. How does
that work?

FS

This is an interesting conversation we should have with the graffiti
writers. A tag might be something they have been writing for more than
25 years and that will be very personal to them and the way they write
this is because they’ve written it a million times. So at the one hand it
ER

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Tying the story to data

is super-personal, but on the other hand a lot of graffiti writers have no
problem sharing this data. To them it is just another tag. They feel like,
I have written this tag a billion times and so when you want to keep one of
them, it is no big deal.
I don’t think the conversation has gotten as involved as it could have.
You set something in motion and cross your fingers hoping that everyone
plays nice and things go well and so far that is what has been happening.
But you are dealing with people that are uploading something that is super
personal to them and I’d be curious to see what happens in the future.
The graffiti taxonomy project that I have been doing involves a lot of
photos of graffiti. It is a visual studies based on characters, I am shooting
thousands of photos of graffiti and I don’t have an opportunity to meet
with all these writers to ask them if it is OK. So I get e-mails from writers
once in a while saying Hey, you used a photograph of one of my tags and
usually it is them feeling out where my intentions are and where I am
coming from.
It has taken a long time to gain the trust of the community I am working with. Usually when I am able to explain what I am doing and that
everything is released openly and meant to be completely free, so far at
least the people I have managed to talk toare OK with it and understand
it. Initially when people see something they’ve made being used by other
people, a lot of times it can be a point where a red flag is raised and I am
assuming there are more red flags going to go up.
FS

If you upload a .gml file, can you insert a licence?

Not yet. Right now there is not even a ‘private mode’ on the
000000book site. If you upload, everything is public. There is a lot of
interesting issues with respect to the licence that I have been reluctant to
deal with yet. Once you start talking too much about it, you will scare
off people on either side of the fence. I think that will have to happen at
some point but for now I have decided to refer to it as an ‘open database’
and I hope that people will play nicely, like I said.
ER

FS

But just imagine, what kind of licence would you need?

It might make more sense to go for a media-related licence than for
a code licence. Creative Commons licences would lend themselves easily
for this. People could choose non-commercial or pure public domain.
Does that make sense?
ER

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Tying the story to data

Well, yes but if you look at the objects that people share, we’re much
closer to code than to a video file?
FS

is?

ER

Functionally it is code. But would a graffiti writer know what GPL

I am interested in the apprentice-system you were talking about earlier.
Like a young writer learning from someone else they admire. The GML
notation of x-y-time might help someone to learn as well. But would you
ever really copy someone else’s tag?
PW

One of the reasons I think graffiti writing has this history of apprenticeship is because you don’t really have a chance to learn otherwise. You
don’t turn on the TV and see someone else doing it. You only see how it
is being written if you see other people actually do it. That was one of the
original reasons I started doing graffiti research because, having met with
graffiti writers. I thought: it is a dance, it is as much about motion as
it is about how the final image is constructed. You can come to a much
better understanding about how it is made as opposed to just seeing a
photograph of it.

ER

If you want to learn from the person writing, you would need to see
more than just the trace of a pen?
PW

Someones tag might look completely different if they had six seconds
to make it, they make different decisions. In the first version of the
Graffiti Analysis project, I had one camera recorder tracking the pen and
another camera behind the hand and another so you could see the full
body. But there was something about tracking just the pen tip that I
liked. It is an easier point of entry for dealing with the motion data than
having three different video feeds.
ER

Maybe it is more about metadata? Not a question of device or application, but about space for a comment.
FS

Maybe in the keywords there will be something like: Rooftop.
Brooklyn. Arrested.
The most interesting part is often the stories that people tell afterward
anyway. So it is an interesting idea, how to tie the story to the data.
It is a design problem too. Historically graffiti has been documented
many times by outsiders. The movie Style Wars 10 is a good example of
ER

10

Style Wars. Tony Silver, 1983. http://www.stylewars.com

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Tying the story to data

this epic documentary that was made by outsiders that became insiders.
Also, the people that have been documenting most of the graffiti are not
necessarily graffiti writers.
Graffiti has a history with documentarians entering into their community and playing a role but sharing the stories is something writers do
internally, not as much to outsiders. How do you figure out a way to get
graffiti writers to document their stories into the .gml files themselves,
or is it going to take outsiders? How does the format facilitate that?

Do you think the availability of a project like GML can have an impact
on the way graffiti is learned? If data becomes available in a community
that operates traditionally through apprenticeships and person-to-person
sharing, what does it do?
FS

I am interested in Open Source culture being influenced by graffiti,
and I am interested in Open Source culture influencing graffiti as well.
On a big picture I would love it if the graffiti community got interested
in these ideas and had more of a skill-sharing-knowledge-base.
KATSU 11 , someone I worked with in New York, has acquireda lot of
knowledge about how to make tools for graffiti and he initially wasn’t
so much into sharing them, because graffiti writers tend to save that
knowledge for themselves so that their tags are always bigger and better (laughs). Talking to him I think I convinced him to write tutorials on
how to make some of these tools. On the street art side there is Mark
Jenkins 12 , he has this technique of making 3D objects that exist within
the city and we had a lot of conversations too.
There are many ways tech circles and Open Source circles can come together with people that are making things outside, with their hands. I
think graffiti can learn from that. In the end people would be making
more things outside which would be a good thing.
ER

In a way typography has a similar culture of apprenticeship. Some
people enjoy spreading knowledge, and others resist in the name of quality
control.
FS

Interesting. I think the work I am doing is such a tangent! In general,
for something that is decidedly against the rules, the culture of writing
graffiti often has a rigid structure. To people in that community what
ER

11
12

KATSU http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=graffiti+katsu
Mark Jenkins tapesculptures http://tapesculpture.org

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I do is a blip on their radar. I am honored when I get to meet graffiti
writers and they are interested in what I am doing but I don’t think it
will change anything in what is in some ways a very strict system.
And I don’t want that either. I like the fact that they found a way to make
spraypaint and markers change the way each city in the world looks. They
have the tools they need. Digital projectors will not change that. Graffiti
writers still like to see their names projected at big scales in new ways but
it is not something they really need (laughs).

And the other way around? How does graffiti have an influence on
Open Source communities?
FS

For the people on the technology side, it is an easy jump. To think
about hacking software systems and than about making things outside.
I see that with the Free Art and Technology Group 13 that I help run.
When they start thinking about projects in the city, it takes little to come
up with great ideas. I also see that in the class I teach, Urban Hacking.
There is already a natural overlap.
ER

FS

What connects the two?

It is really about the idea of hacking. The first assignment in the
class is not to make anything, but simply to identify systems in the city.
What are elements that repeat. Trying to find which ones you can slip
into. It has been happening in graffiti forever. Graffiti in New York in
the eighties was to me a hack, a way to have giant paintings circulating in
the city ... There is a lot of room to explore there.
ER

Your experience with the Blender community 14 did not sound like an
easy bridge?

FS

Recently I released a piece of software that translates a .gml file and
translates it into a .stl file, which is a common 3D format. So you can
basically take a graffiti gesture and import it into software like Blender.
I used Blender because I wanted to highlight this tool, because I want
these communities to talk to each other.
So I was taking a tag that was created in the streets of Vienna and pulling
it into Blender and in the end I was exporting it to something that could
ER

13
14

The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the
public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media.
Release early, often and with rap music. http://fffff.at
Blender is a free Open Source 3D content creation suite. http://www.blender.org/

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be 3D printed, to become something physical. The video that I posted intentionally showed online showed screenshots from Blender and it ended
up on one of the bigger community sites. I only saw it when my cousin,
who is a big Blender user, e-mailed me the thread. There is about a hundred dedicated Blender users discussing the legitimacy of graffiti in art
and how their tools are used 15 ; pretty interesting but also pretty conservative.
FS

Why do you think the Blender community responded in that way?

It doesn’t surprise me that much. Graffiti is hard to accept, especially
when we are talking about tags. So the only reason we might be slightly
surprised by hearing people in the Open Source community react that
way, is because intellectual property doesn’t translate always to physical
property. Writing your name on someone’s door is something people universally don’t like. I understand. For me the connection makes sense but
just because you make Open Source doesn’t mean you’ll be interested in
graffiti or street art or vice versa. I think if I went to a Blender conference
and gave a talk where I explained sort of where I see these things overlap,
I could make a better case than the three minute video they reacted to.
ER

What about Gesture Markup Language instead of Graffiti Markup
Language?
FS

Essentially GML records x-y-time data. If you talk about what it
functionally does, it is probably more related to gesture than it is to graffiti. There is nothing at the core specifically related to graffiti. I am
interested in branding it in relation to graffiti and to get people to talk
about Open Source where it is traditionally not talked about. To me
that is interesting. It is a way to get people excited about open data, and
popularizing ideas about Open Source.
ER

FS

Would you be OK if it would get more popular in non-graffiti circles?

I am super excited when I see it used in bizarre places. I’ll keep using
it for graffiti, but someone e-mailed me that they were upset that it only
tracks one point. There hasn’t been a need to track multiple tags at once.
They wanted to use it to track juggling, but how to track multiple balls
in the air? I keep calling it Graffiti Markup Language because I think it
is a good story.
ER

15

http://www.blendernation.com/2010/07/09/blender-graffiti-analysis

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PW

What’s the licence on GML?

We haven’t really entered into that. Why would you need a licence
on a file format?
ER
FS

It would prevent that anyone could own the standard.

That sounds good. Actually it would be interesting for the project, if
someone would try to licence it. Legal things matter, but for the things I
do, I am most of all interested in getting the idea across.
ER

I am interested in the way GML stems from a specific practice. How
it is different and similar to large, legal, commercial, global standardization practices. Related, how can GML connect to other standard practices?
Could it be RDF compliant?

FS

PW

Gesture recognition to help out the police?

Or maps of places that are in need of some graffiti? How to link GML
to other types of data?
FS

It is hard for me to imagine something. But one thing is interesting
for example, how GML is used in the EyeWriter project. It has not
so much to do with gesture, but more with how you would draft in a
computer. TEMPT is plotting points, so the time data might not be so
interesting but because it is in the same format, the community might
pick it up and do something with it. All the TEMPT data he writes with
his eyes and it is uploaded to the 000000book site automatically. That
allowed another artist called Benjamin Gaulon 16 who I now know, but
didn’t know at the time, to use it with his Print Ball project. He took the
tag data from a paralyzed graffiti writer in Los Angeles and painted it on
a wall in Dublin. Eye-movement translated into a paint-ball gun ... that
is the kind of collaboration that I hope GML can be the middle-point
for. If that happens, things can start to extrapolate on either end.
ER

You talked about posting a wish-list and being surprised that your
wishes were fulfilled within weeks. Why do you think that a project like
EyeWriter, even if it interests a lot of people, has a hard time gathering
collaborators, while something much more general like GML seems to be
more compelling for people to contribute to?
FS

16

Benjamin Gaulon, Print Ball
http://www.eyewriter.org/paintball-shooting-robot-writes-tempt1-tag

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I’ll answer that in a second, but you reminded me of something
else: because EyeWriter was GML based, a lot of the collaborations
that happened with people outside of the project were GML related,
not EyeWriter related. So we did have artists like Ben and Golan take
data drawn by TEMPT and do completely different things which made
TEMPT a collaborator with them in a way. The software allowed him to
share his work in a format that allowed other people to work with him.
The wish-list came out of the fact that I was working on a graffiti related
project that had a lot of use but not a lot of innovation. Not so many
people were using it in ways I wasn’t expecting, which is something you
always hope of course. By saying: Here’s the things I really would like to
happen, things started to happen. I have been surprised how that drove
momentum. Something similar I hope will happen to the work we will
do together in the next months too!
ER

FS

What are you planning to do?

We are planning to make a dedicated community page for the graffiti
markup language which is one of the three points of the triangle. The
second step would be a new addition to the wish-list, a challenge with a
prize associated to it which seems funny. The project I’d like to concentrate on is making the data collection easier so that graffiti writers can be
more active in the upload sense. Taking the NASA development model:
Can you get into orbit on this budget?
ER

How is that different from the way you record graffiti motion at the
moment?
FS

If I go out with a graffiti writer, I’m stuck standing with a laptop and
a camera facing the wall and then the graffiti writer needs to have a really
bright light attached to the writing device which is a bit counter-intuitive
when you are trying to do something without being seen (laughs). It
could be infrared by the way, that could be the first step but then security
cameras would still pick it up. The design I am focusing momentum on is
a system that’s easier. A system that can work without me there, without
having to have a laptop there. The whole idea is that it would be a natural
way to get good data, to document graffiti without a red-head holding a
laptop following you around the whole time!
ER

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Paris, December 2010
FS

How is it to be the sole jury member?

I tried to get another jury-member on there actually. Do you know
Limor Fried? She runs Adafruit Industries. 17 I really like her work. She
works with her partner Phil Torrone who runs Make Blog. 18 I invited
her to be the second jury-member because she makes Open Source hardware kits; this is her full-time thing. She is very smart and has a lot of
background in making DIY kits that people actually build. She is also
very straightforward and very busy, so she wrote back and said: this is
too much work. No.
So ... yeah, I am the only jury member. Hmmm.
ER

SV

Is the contest already over?

It is not over. It was easy to launch; I tried to coincide it with the
launch of the website and there were a couple of things going on at the
same time. The launch helped spread the word about this file format, and
people making projects, and vice versa.
ER

Did you have any proposals that came close to meeting the challenge?
Did you consider giving out the prize?
FS

No.
There are a couple of people that got really close. The interesting thing
that is happening with the challenge is something that is also happening
to other high barrier projects: You end up speaking to the people you already work with the most. I have a hard time figuring out to some extent
what is really happening, but the things I hear, of people making progress,
is people that are close to me. It reminds me of the EyeWriter project
where people that are to dip their toes into this, are already in the friend
group, or one level removed. They are pretty high level programmers.
I didn’t really think that actual money would be such an incentive but
more that it would make the challenge feel serious, more in the sense
of an organization that has some kind of club behind it. If you solved
one of the design problems by the Mozilla community you could receive
ER

17
18

Limor Fried, Adafruit Industries http://www.adafruit.com
Phillip Torrone, Makezine http://makezine.com/pub/au/Phillip_Torrone

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kudo’s from the community, but if you solved one of my projects, you
don’t really get kudo’s from my community, do you?
Having the money associated makes it this big thing. At Ars Electronica
and so on, it got people talking about it and so it is out there. That
part worked. Beyond that it has been a bit hard to keep the momentum.
Friends and colleagues send me ideas and ask me to look at things, but
people I don’t know are hard to follow; I don’t think they are publishing
their progress. There is a hackerspace in Porto that has been working on
it, so I see on their blog and Twitter that they are having meetings about
this and are working on it.
Don’t you think having only one prize produces a kind of exclusivity? It
seems logical not to publish your notes?
FS

ER Maybe. Kyle 19 has been thinking up ways to do it and I know he
wanted to use an optical mouse, and then this a friend Michael 20 has been
using sensors, and he ran into a software problem but had the hardware
problem more or less solved. And then Kyle, a software expert, has been
running into hardware problems and so I kind of introduced them to each
other over e-mail so I don’t know if they are working on it together.
FS

Would you consider splitting the prize?

I don’t care, but I don’t know if the candidates would consider splitting the prize! I know Michael has already spent a lot of money because
he has been buying Arduinos and other hardware. He wants to make
a cheap version to solve the problem and then make another one that
costs 150 on top of the price limitation to make it easier to use. He is
spending a bunch of money so even if he wins, it is going to get him only
out of the hole and he will not have much left.
Actually, Golan 21 had an idea for an iPhone app that he wants to make
but I am not sure it solves it.
ER

FS

Why don’t you think his app will solve it?

He is really interested in making something where you do not need
to meet with the graffiti writer. His idea was that if you could take a
photo of it on the wall, and then with your finger you guide it for how it
ER

19
20
21

Kyle McDonald http://kylemcdonald.net
Michael Auger http://lm4k.com
Golan Levin http://www.flong.com

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was written. It has an algorithm for image processing and that combined
with your best guess of how it was written would be backed out in motion
data. But it is faked data.
FS

That it is really interesting!

Yes it is and I would love it if he would make it but I am not going to
let him win with it (laughs). I understand why he wants to do it; especially
if you are not inside the graffiti community, your only experience is what
you see on the wall and you don’t know who these people are and it is
going to be almost impossible to ever get data for those tags. If you don’t
have access to that community you are never going to get the tag of the
person that you really want. I like the idea that he is thinking about
getting some data from the wall as opposed to getting it from the hand.
ER

Learning by copying. Nowhere near solving the challenge, but interesting. OSP 22 we were discussing about the way designers are invited into
Open Source Software by way of contest. Troy James Sobotka 23 got angry
and wrote: We want to be part of this community, we don’t want to compete
for it.
FS

With the EyeWriter project, we were thinking a lot about that; how
to spur development. I think I would not have done a competition with
the EyeWriter. Making it fun, that is what makes it happen. If it would
be a really serious amount of money, with people scraping at each other,
fighting each other ...
For me, the fact that there is prize money makes something that is already
ridiculous in itself even more funny. To have prize money for such a small
community of people that are interested in coding and in graffiti. I’m not
seriously thinking that we can spur development with this kind of money.
To use the EyeWriter as an example, we’ve had money infusions from
awards mostly and we had to think about how we could use that money
to get from point A to point B. That’s also a project where we had very
ER

22
23

OSP (Open Source Publishing) is a graphic design collective that uses only Free, Libre and
Open Source software. http://ospublish.constantvzw.org
The very notion of Libre / Free software holds cooperation and community with such high regard
you would think that we would be visionary leaders regarding the means and methods we use to
collaborate. We are not. We seem to suffer from a collision of unity with diversity. How can we
more greatly create a world of legitimate discussion regarding art, design, aesthetic, music, and other
such diverse fields when we are so stuck on how much more consistent a damn panel looks with tripe
22 pixel icons of a given flavour?
http://www.librescope.com/975/spec-work-and-contests-part-two

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definable design goals of what we wanted to reach, especially between the
first version and where we are now with the second version.
FS

How did that work?

We are not talking about a ton of money here, 10 to 20.000 , and
we tried to get as far as we could. We got almost no work done between
the meetings in LA but if we flew in, it was OK to take a week out of
our schedules and really hammer at it. We were trying to think how we
could do the same thing for people that we wanted to work with and who
we had met in conferences. So that is how we thought of spending that
money.
The other way we use money in the EyeWriter project is that we buy
people kits. We know a few people that are interested in hacking on it
but they don’t have the hardware. Not that they are so expensive, but
Zach wants to buy twenty or thirty unpackaged kits and he has interns
working with him in New York helping to build them. So we have these
systems ready so as soon as someone wants to get hacking on it, we can
mail them a working system that they can just plug in and they don’t
have to waste their time ordering all these parts from all these websites
all over China. And when they are done, they just send it back.
ER

You talked about some things in the challenge that worked and some
that didn’t.
FS

I think the forum is the obvious thing that did not work. I have
friends working on OpenFrameworks, it is headed primarily by Zach and
Theo. When you see that forum, it is very involved. It is a deep system,
with many different libraries and lots of code flying around. GML is really
not large enough.
I think what makes sense for this project is when I post news about the
project, I see it ripple in Google Alerts. For people working on it, having
a place where these things show up is already a lot. The biggest success
is the project space, to see all the projects happening.
ER

FS

What happened on the site since we talked?

A project I like, is kml2gml 24 for example. It is done by a friend from
Tokyo. He was gathering GPS data riding his bike around various cities,
and building up a font based on his path. I like projects like this, where
ER

24

Yamaguchi Takahiro http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/kml2GML

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someone takes a work that is already done and just writes an application
to convert the data into another format. To see him riding his bike played
back in GML was really nice. It is super low barrier to entry, he already
did all the hard work. I like that there is now a system for piping very
different kinds of data through GML.
FS

But it could also work the other way around?

Yeah. This is maybe a tangent but depending on how someone solves
the GML challenge ... I was discussing this with Mike (the person that is
developing the sensor based version). He was thinking that if you would
turn on his system, and leave it on for a whole night of graffiti writing,
you would have the gestural data plus the GPS data. You could make
a .gml file that is tracking you down the street, and zoom in when you
start making the tag. Also you would get much more information on
3D movement, like tilt and when the pen is picking up and going down.
Right now all I am getting is a 2D view through video data. I am really
keeping my fingers crossed. But he ran into trouble though.
ER

FS

Like what?

I have my doubts about using these kind of sensors, because ‘drift’ is
a problem. When you start using these sensors too long, it tends to move
a little bit. I think he is working within a 0.25 inch margin of error right
now, which is right on the edge. If you are recording someone doing a
big piece, this is not going to ruin my day too much but if you record a
little tag than it is a problem.
The other problem is that you need to orient the system before you start
tagging. It needs to know what is up and down, you have to define your
plane of access. I don’t really understand this 100% but he thinks he can
still fit it all within the ten second calibration requirement, he’s thinking
that each time you come to a wall, you tap once, you tap twice and tap a
third time to define what plane you are writing on and that calibrates the
3D space. Once you have that calibration done, you can start writing. It
is not as easy as attaching a motion sensor. The problem is hard.
ER

So you need to touch the wall before writing on it, feeling out the
playing field before starting! It is like working on a tablet; to move from
actual movement to instruction; navigation blends into the action of drawing
itself.
FS

ER

I like that!

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SV

The guy using the iPhone did not use it as a sensor at all?

Theo was interested in using the iPhone to record motion data in
GML, but also to save the coordinates so you could try it into a Google
Earth or something but he had trouble with the sensitivity of the sensor.
Maybe it is better now but you needed to draw on a huge scale for one
letter. You could not record anything small.
ER

But it could be nice if you could record with a device that is less conspicuous.
FS

I know. I have just been experimenting with mounting cameras on
spray-cans. A tangent to GML, but related. It is not data, but video.
ER

What do you think is the difference between recording video, and
recording data? You mentioned that you wanted to move away from documentation the image to capture movement. Video is somehow indirect
data?
FS

Video is annoying in that it is computationally expensive. In Brazil 25
I have been using the laptop but the data is not very precise.
Kyle thinks he might be able to back out GML data from videos. This
might solve the challenge, depending on how many cameras you need and
how expensive they are. But so far I have not heard back from him. He
said it needs three different cameras all looking at the wall. I mean: talk
about computationally expensive! He likes video-processing, he knows
some Open Source software that can look for similar things and knows
how to relate them. To me it seems more difficult than it needs to be
(laughs).
ER

It is both overcomplicated and beautiful, trying to reverse engineer
movement from the image.
FS

I am getting more into video myself. I get more enjoyment from capturing the data than from the projections, like what most people associate
with my work.
ER

FS

Why is it so much more interesting to capture, rather than to project?

In part because it stays new, I’ve been doing those projections for a
while now and I know what happens at these events. For a while it was
very new, we just did it with friends, to project on the Brooklyn bridge
ER

25

Graffiti Analysis: Belo Horizonte, Brazil 2010 http://vimeo.com/16997642

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for example. Now it has turned into these events where everyone knows
in advance, instead of just showing up at at a certain time ate a set corner.
It has lost a lot of its magic and power.
Michele and I have done so many of these projections and we sort of
know what to expect from it, what questions people will ask. When I
meet with graffiti writers, that almost always feels new to me. When we
went to Brazil, we intentionally tried to not project anything but to spend
as much time as possible with writers. Going out with graffiti writers to
me always feels right.

FS Is the documentation an excuse to be taken along, or is the act of
documenting itself interesting to you?

To me documentation is interesting. I don’t know where all of this
is going right now, I am just trying to get the footage; I put these pieces
together showing all this movement but I don’t really know what the final
project is. It is more about collecting data so I am interested in having
video, audio and GML that can be synced up, and the sound from these
microphones is something to do something with later. This is research
for me. I like the idea of having all this data related to a 10 second gesture.
I am thinking that in the future we can do interesting things with it. I
am even thinking about how the audio could be used as a signal to tell
you what is drawing and what is not drawing. It is a really analog way of
doing it, but in that way you don’t need a button where you are getting
true and false statements for what is drawing and what is not drawing;
you can just tell by the sound:
tfffpt ... tfffpt.
ER

FS

You can hear the space, and also the surface.

I got started doing this because I love graffiti and this is a way to
get closer to it again. Like getting back out to the streets and having
very personal relationships to the graffiti writers and talking to them,
and having them give feedback. I think that is how the whole challenge
started. It didn’t start because I was projecting, but because I was out on
the street and testing the capture, having graffiti writers nearby when it
is happening. It feels like things are progressing that way.
ER

Are you thinking of other ways of capturing? You talk about capturing
movement, but do you also archive other elements? Do you take notes,
pictures? What happens to the conversations you are having?
FS

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I have been missing out on that piece. It is a small amount of time
we have, and I am already trying to get so much. I am setting up a
camera that shoots straight video from a tripod, I am capturing from the
laptop and I am also screencasting the application, my head is spinning.
One reason I screwed up this footage in the beginning is because with all
these things going on I forget to turn on some things. Maybe someone
will solve this challenge.
ER

FS

Are you actually an embedded anthropologist?

In the back of my head I am thinking this will become a longer documentary. I like to experiment with documentation, whether that is in
code or with video. I do think that there is this interesting connection
between documentation and graffiti and how these two things overlap.
I am always thinking about documentation. The graffiti writer that was
in Vienna 26 showed me a video that was amazing. It was him and a
friend going out on a sunny day at 15:30 in the afternoon with two head
mounted cameras, bombing an entire train and you hear the birds singing
and you only experience it by these two videos that are linked. There are
interesting constraints: your hands are already full, you don’t want peoples’ faces on camera so the head-mounted cameras were smart. Unless
you walk in front of a mirror (laughs).
ER

FS

Is it related to the dream of ‘self documenting code’?

I like that. Even doing the challenge is in a way a reflection on this,
how I am fighting to get GML back to the streets somehow, it has a
natural tendency to get closer to the browser, to the screen, and my job
is to get it back to the street. It is so sexy and fun and flashy and that is
important too. My job is to keep the graffiti influence on it as large as the
other part.
ER

FS
ER

Is any of this reflected in the standard itself?

I haven’t looked at the standard for a while now.

I was thinking again about live coding and notation. Simon Yuill 27
describes notation as a shared space that allows collaboration but also defines
the end of a collaboration.
FS

26
27

momo3010 http://momo1030.com
Simon Yuill. All problems of notation will be solved by the masses. Mute Magazine, 2008

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Maybe using an XML-like structure was a bad idea? Maybe if I had
started with a less code-based set of rules? If the files were raw video,
it would encourage people to go outside more often? By picking XML
I am defining where the thing heads in a way. I think I am OK in the
role of fighting that tendency. It is not just a problem in GML but with a
lot of work I have been doing with graffiti and technology and even way
back with Graffiti Analysis, before GRL (Graffiti Research Lab), the idea
was always to keep the research very close to the people doing graffiti. I
was intentionally working with people bombing a lot and not with graffiti
celebrities. I wanted to work with who’s tag was on my mailbox, who’s
tag do I see a million times when I walk down the street. Since then
a lot has happened, like with more popular projects such as L.A.S.E.R.
Tag, and it goes almost always further away from graffiti. Maybe that is
a function of technology. Technology, or the way it is now, will always
drift towards entertainment uses, commercial uses.
ER

Do you think a standard can be subversive? You chose XML because it
is accessible to amateur programmers. But it is also a very formal standard,
and so the interface between graffiti writers and hackers is written in the
language of bureaucracy.
FS

ER (laughs) I thought that there was something funny with that. People
that know XML and the web, they get the joke that something so rigid
and standardized is connected to writing your name on the wall. But to
be honest, it was really just a pragmatic choice.

It reminds me of an interview 28 with François Chastanet who wrote a
book 29 about tagging in Los Angeles. He explains that the Gothic lettering
is inspired by administrative papers!
SV

I am wondering whether you’re thinking about the standard itself as
a space for hacking?
FS

Graffiti is somehow coded in-itself. Do you mean it would be interesting
to think how GML could be coded in a way for graffiti writers, not for
coders?
There would be more space for that when more people start to program at
a younger age? When it is more common knowledge. If I would start to do
ER

28
29

Interview with François Chastanet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayPcaGVKJHg
François Chastanet, Cholo writing: Latino gang graffiti in Los Angeles. Dokument, 2009

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that now, I would quickly lose my small user-base. I love that idea though;
the way XML is programmed fits very much to the way you program for the
web. But what if it was playing more with language, starting from graffiti
which is very coded?
When I was in college, I was always thinking about how to visualize
motion in print. I was looking for ways people had developed languages
for different ways of writing.
ER

Maybe you could look at the Chinese methods for teaching writing,
because the order of the strokes is really important. If you make the stroke
from bottom to top, and not from top to bottom, it is wrong.
SV

A friend in Hong Kong, MC Yan, loves the Graffiti Analysis project
because it shows the order in which he is writing and he likes to play
with that. So he writes words in different order than people are used to
and so it changes the meaning. People can not only watch the final result,
but also the order which is an interesting part of the writing process. The
brush, the angle, direction: depicting motion!
In the beginning of the Graffiti Analysis Research project I was very
against projection, because I felt that was totally against the idea of graffiti. I was presenting all of these print ideas and the output would be
pasted back into the city because I was against making an impermanent
representation of the data. In the end Zach said, you are just fighting this
because you have a motion project and you want to project motion and
then I said alright, I’ll do a test. And the tests were so exciting that I felt
OK with it.
ER

In what way does GML bridge the gap between digital drawing and
hand writing? Could you see a sort of computer-aided graffiti? Could you
see computation enter graffiti?
FS

Yeah. When you are in a controlled environment, in a studio, it is
easy but the outdoors part always trips me up. That is why the design
constraints get interesting, playing in real time with what someone is
writing. I think graffiti writers would be into that too. How to develop
a style that is unique enough to stand out in an existing canon is already
hard enough. This could give someone an edge.
ER

I think the next challenge I’d like to run is about recreating the data
outside. I’ve been thinking about these helicopters with embedded wireless
ER

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camera’s, have you seen them? The obvious thing to me would be uploading
a .gml file to one of these helicopters that is dripping paint on a rooftop.
Scale is so important, so going bigger is always going to be better.
Gigantic rooftop tags could be a way to tie it back to the city, give it a
reason? I am thinking of ways to get an edge back to the project. The
GML-challenge is already a step into that direction; it is not about the
prettiest screensaver. To ask people to design something that is tying back
to what graffiti is, which is in a way a crime.
I think fixing the data capture is the right place to start, the next one could
be about making marks in the city. Like: the first person to recreate this
GML-tag on the roof of this building, that would be fun. The first person
that could put this ‘Hello World’ tag onto the Brooklyn bridge and get a
photo of it gets the prize. That would get us back to the question of how
we leave marks on the surface of the city.
When you capture data of an individual writer in a certain standard,
it ends up as typography?
FS

That’s another trend that happens when designers look at graffiti, and
I’ve fallen into this too sometimes, you want to be able to make fonts out of
it. People have done this actually; there’s a project in New York where they
met with pretty influential graffiti writers and asked them to write in boxes,
the whole alphabet, and I think there’s something interesting there.
The alphabet that you saw the robot write was drawn by TEMPT with the
EyeWriter and what he did was a little bit smarter than other attempts by
graffiti writers to make fonts. He intentionally picked a specific style, the
Cholo style, and the format is very tall, vertically oriented, angled. That
style is less about letter connections and pen-flow. What graffiti has developed into, and especially tags, is very much about how it is written and
the order of the letters. When TEMPT picked this style he made a smart
decision that a lot of people miss when you make a font, you miss all the
motions and the connections.
ER

What if a programmer could put this data in a font, and generate
alternating connections?
SV

ER That kind of stuff is interesting. It would help graffiti writers to design
tags maybe?
To get my feet wet, I designed a tag once, and it was so not-fun to write!
I was thinking about a tag that would look different and that would fit

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into corners, I was interested in designing something that wasn’t curved;
that would fit the angles of the city, hard edges. So I had forgotten all
my research about drafting and writing. I think I stopped writing in part
because the tag I picked wasn’t fun o write. For a font to work like writing,
it is not just about possible connections between lines. You’d need another
level in the algorithm, the way the hand likes to move.
It would be a good algorithm to dream up. It was beautiful to see a
robot write TEMPT’s letters by the way.
FS

When TEMPT saw the robot writing for the first time, his reaction was
all about the order of how the letters were constructed. The order is I think
defined by the way he dropped the points in with the EyeWriter software.
When he was writing with his eyes, he ended up writing in the same way
as he would have written with his hands. When he saw the video with the
robot, it freaked him out because he was like: That’s how my hand moved
when I did that tag!
ER

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The Graffiti Markup Field Recorder
challenge

An easily reproducible DIY device that can unobtrusively record graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer’s normal practice in the city. 30
Project Description and Design Requirements:

–

The GML Field Recorder Challenge is a DIY hardware and software solution for unobtrusively recording graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer’s
normal practice in the city. The winning project will be an easy to follow
instruction set that can be reproduced by graffiti writers and amateur technologists. The goal is to create a device that will document a night of graffiti
bombing into an easily retrievable series of Graffiti Markup Language (.gml)
files while not interfering with the normal process of writing graffiti. The
solution should be easy to produce, lightweight, cheap, secure, and require
little to no setup and calibration. The winning design solution will include
the following requirements listed below:
Material costs for the field device must not exceed 300

300 even felt expensive to me. How can this be a tool that is really
accessible? If it goes over a certain price point, it is not the kind of thing
that people can afford to make. It is a very small community, a lot of the
people that are going to have enough interest to build this are not going
to have a background in engineering, and are probably not even a part of
the maker scene that we know. The audience here might not be people
that are hanging out on Instructables. I wanted to make sure that the
price point meant that people could comfortably take a gamble to make
something for the first time. But I also did not want to make it so small
that the design would be impossible.

ER

30

GML-recorder challenge as published on:
http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/challenges

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–

Computers and equipment outside of the 300

can be used

for non-field activities (such as downloading and manipulating data captured in-field), but at the time of
capture a graffiti writer should have no more than 300
worth of equipment on him or herself.

I was trying to think of how the challenge could be gamed ... I did not
want to get into a situation where we were getting stressed out because some
smart hacker found a hole in the brief, and bought a next generation iPhone
that somehow just worked. I didn’t want to force people to buy expensive
equipment. This line was more about covering our own ass.
ER

–

The graffiti writer must be able to activate the recording function alone (i.e., without assistance from anyone else).
FS

Are you going to be out of work soon?

Thinking selfishly, I screw up on documentation a lot because I have
too many hats. When I’m going out doing this, I am carrying a laptop, a
calibration set up, I also have one video-camera on me that is just documenting, I have another one on a tripod, and I am usually screen capturing
the software as it processes the video-footage because it tells another story.
I screw up because I forget to hit stop or record. If the data-capture just
works, I can go have fun getting good video-footage.
ER

What if it had to be operated by more than one person? It is nice
how the documentation now turns the act of writing into a performancefor-one.
FS

If you record alone, the data becomes more interesting and mysterious,
right? I mean, no one else has seen it. Something captured very privately,
than gets potentially shared publicly and turned into things that are very
different. I also thought: you don’t want to be dependent on someone else.
It is a lot to ask, especially if you are doing something illegal.
ER

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–

Any setup and/or calibration should be limited to 10
seconds or less.

This came out of me dealing with the current system. It feels wrong
that it takes ten to fifteen minutes to get it running. Graffiti is not meant
to be that way. This speaks to the problem of the documentation infringing on the writing process, which ideally wouldn’t happen. The longer
the set-up takes, the more it is going to influence the actual writing. It is
supposed to be a fly on the wall.
ER

FS
ER

–

Does it scale? Does a larger piece allow longer callibration -time?

That’s true. But I think this challenge is really about recording tags.

All hardware should be able to be easily concealed within
a coat with large pockets.

A hack to get around that would have been to design a jacket with ten
gallon pockets!
I put it there again, to make the device not be intrusive. A big part of graffiti
writing is about gaining entry and you limit where you can go depending on
how much equipment you have. How bulky it is, what walls you can get up,
what holes you can get through.
ER

–

The winning solution should be discrete and not draw
any added attention to the act of graffiti writing.
ER It’s part of the same issue, but this one also came out from me going
out and trying to capture with a system where it requires you to attach
a flashlight to a graffiti implement. I didn’t want anyone solving the
problem and then, Step one is: ‘Attach a police siren to a spraypaint can’

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–

The resulting solution should be able to record at least
10 unique GML tags of approximately 10 seconds each in
length in one session without the need for connecting
to or using additional equipment.

I wasn’t thinking this was going to be an issue in terms of memorystorage, but maybe in terms of memory management. I did not want the
graffiti writer to behave as if he was on vacation with a camera that could take
only three photos. I wanted to make sure they were not making decisions
on what they were writing based and how much memory they had.
ER

–

All data recorded using the field recorder should be
saved in a secure and non-incriminating fashion.

(laughs) If I had to do that one again, I would have put that in Bonus
category actually. That’s a difficult question to ask. What does secure
mean? It seems a bit unfair, because it doesn’t fit in to the way graffiti is
currently documented. There’s not a lot of graffiti writers that currently
are shooting encrypted photos and videos, right?
But whatever bizarre format comes out from the sensor will help. I don’t
think that the NYPD will have time or make the effort to parse it. They’d
just have a file with a bunch of numbers. Time stamped GPS coordinates
would be more dangerous.
ER

FS

What would count as proof?

In most cases it is hard to convict someone on the basis of a photo
of a tag that you would tie to another tag. For good reasons, because if it
is a crew name for example, all of a sudden you are pinning one tag on a
person that could have been written by twenty people. This came up in
a trial in DC when an artist named BORF got arrested. He had written
his name everywhere, completely crushed DC and his trial was a big deal.
This issue came up and they argued that BORF was a collective, not an
individual. Who knows if that’s true, there were a lot of people around
him, but how do you really know?
ER

FS

GML could help balance the load?

You mean it would not be just the image of a tag but more like signing
at the bank?
ER

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I mean that if you copy and distribute your data, the chance is small
that you can link it to an individual.
FS

–

The winning design will have some protection in the event
that the device falls into the wrong hands.

This again should probably have been a bonus item. Wouldn’t it be
awesome if you could go home and log in and flip a one to a zero and the
evidence goes up in smoke?
One graffiti writer friend told me: If the police comes, just smash the camera
as hard as you can! It’s a silly idea, but it shows that they are thinking
about it.
ER

FS
ER

–

Edible SD cards?

That would be a good idea!

Data should be able to be captured from both spray cans
and markers.
ER
FS

Yes.

Are you prepared for tools that do not exist yet?

That was kind of what I was thinking there. Markers are about direct
contact, spraypaint is in free space. If it works in those two situations, you
should theoretically be able to tie it to anything, even outside of graffiti. If
it was too much about spraypaint, it would be harder for someone to strap
it to a skateboard.
ER

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–

System should be able to record writing on various surfaces and materials.

It is something you can easily forget about. When you are developing
something in the studio and it works well against a white wall, and than
when you go out in the city than you realize that brick is a really weird
surface. Or even writing on glass, or on metal or on other reflecting
surfaces that could screw up your reading. It is there as a reminder for
people that are not thinking about graffiti that much. The street and the
studio are so different.
ER

–

Data should be captured at 30 points per second minimum.

I was assuming that lots of people were going to use cameras, and
I wanted to make sure they were taking enough data points. With other
capturing methods it is probably not such a problem. Even at 30 points per
seconds you can start to see the facets if you zoom in, so anything less is not
ideal.
ER

–

The recording system should not interfere with the writer s
movements in anyway (including writing, running and climbing).

So this is where Muharrem is going to run into trouble. His solution
interferes. Not that much if you are just working in front of your body
space. But the way most writers write is that they are shuffling their feet
a lot, moving down the wall. Should it have said: Graffiti writer should
retain access to feet functionality? This point should be at the top almost.
ER

To me it feels strange, your emphasis on the tool blending into the
background. You could also see Muharrem’s solution as an enhancing device,
turning the writer into a tapdancer?
FS

I want to have on record: I love his solution! There’s a lot in his
design that is ‘making us more aware’ of what’s happening in the creation
of a tag. One thing that he is doing that is not in the specs, is that he is
ER

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logging strokes, like up and down. When you watch him using it, you
can see a little light going from red to green when the fingers goes on
and off the spraypaint can. When you watch graffiti, it is too small of a
movement to even notice but when you are seeing that, it adds another
level of understanding of how they are writing.
–

All motion data should be saved using the current GML
standard 31 .
FS

–

Obvious.

All aspects of the winning design should be able to be
reproduced by graffiti writers and amateur technologists.

It wouldn’t be exciting if only ten people can make this thing. This
tool should not be just for people that can make NASA qualified soldering
connections. Ideally it should not have any soldering. I always thought of
a soldering iron like a huge barrier point. I’m all for duct-taped electrical
connections.

ER

There’s nothing about weather-resistant in the challenge. You’re not
thinking about rain, are you?
FS

A lot of paint stops working in rain too.
I think what you get from this brief though is that the whole impetus for
this project is about me trying to steer the ship that clearly wants to go
into another direction, back to my interest in what graffiti is rather than
anything that people might find aesthetically pleasing. It is not about
‘graffiti influenced visuals’.
ER

31

http://graffitimarkuplanguage.com/spec

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–

All software must be released Open Source.

All hard-

ware must include clear DIY instructions/tutorials.

All

media must be released under an Open Content licence that
promotes collaboration (such as a Free Art License or
Creative Commons ShareAlike License).

I didn’t want it to be too specific, but there had to be some effort into
making it open.
ER

–

The recording must be an unobtrusive process, allowing the graffiti writer to concentrate solely on the act
of writing (not on recording).

The act of recording should

not interfere with the act of graffiti writing.

I’ve been through situations where the process gets so confusing that
you can’t keep your head straight and juggle all the variables. Your eyes
and ears are supposed to tell you about who’s coming around the corner.
Is there traffic coming or a train? There are so many other things you
need to pay attention to rather than: Is this button on?
The whole project is about getting good data. As soon as you force people
to think too much about the capture process, I think it influences when
and how they are writing.
ER

Bonus, but not required:
–

Inclusion of date, time and location saved in the .gml
file.

Yes. Security-wise that is questionable, but the nerd in me would just
love it. You could get really interesting data about a whole night of writing.
You could see a bigger story than just that of a single tag. How long did it
take to gain entry? How long were they hiding in the bushes? These things
get back to graffiti as a performance art rather than a form of visual art.
ER

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Paris, November 2011
Last time we had contact we discussed how to invite Muharrem to
Brussels 32 . But now on the day of the deadline, it seems there are new
developments?
FS

ER I think in terms of the actual challenge, the main update is that since
we extended the deadline and made another call, I got an e-mail right on
the deadline today from Joshua Noble 33 with a very solid and pretty smart
proposal that seems to solve (maybe unfortunately for Muharrem) a bit
more of the design spec. It does it for cheaper and does it in a way that I
think is going to be easier to make also.
His design solution is using an optical mouse and he changed the sensors
so it has a stronger LED. He uses a modified lens on top of a plastic lens
that comes on top of a mouse, so that it can look at a surface that is a set
distance away. It has another sensor that looks at pitch, tilt and orientation,
but he is using that only to orient, the actual data gets recorded through the
mouse. It can get very high resolution, he is looking at up to a millimeter I
guess.
FS

Muharrem’s solution seems less precise?

I think he gets away with more because his solution is only for spraypaint
and once you are writing on that scale, even if you are off a few centimeters,
it might not ruin the data. If you look at the data he is getting, it actually
looks very good. I don’t think he has any numbers on the actual resolution
he is getting but if you were using his system with a pen, I think it would
be a different case. I like a lot of his solution too, it is an interesting hack.
It is funny that two of the candidates for the prize are both mouse hacks.
One is hacking a mechanical mouse and the other an optical mouse.
ER

FS
JH

It goes from drawing on a screen, to drawing on a wall?
And back again!

Yes. When I first was working on graffiti related software, the whole
reason I was building Graffiti Analysis as a capture application was beER

32

33

By early October 2011 no winning design-solution had been entered, besides a proposal from
Muharem Yildirim that came more than halfway. We decided to use the prize money to fly
Muharrem from Phoenix (US) to Brussels (BE) and document his project in a worksession as
part of the Verbindingen/Jonctions 13 meetingdays. http://www.vj13.constantvzw.org
Joshua Noble http://www.thefactoryfactory.com/gmlchallenge/

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cause I did not want to hand graffiti writers a mouse (laughter). I had
done all this research into graffiti and started to be embedded in the
community and I knew enough about the community that if you were
going to ask them to take part in something that was already weird, you
could not give them a mouse and expect any respect on the other end
of that conversation. They respect their tools, so the reason I was using camera-input was because I wanted to have a flexible system where
they could bring in anything and I could attach a device to it. Now I am
coming back to mice finally.
Now the deadline has passed, do you think the passage from wishlist to
contest worked out?
FS

I think it was a good experiment, I am not sure how clever it was. To
take a piece of culture that a lot of people don’t even look at, or look at
it and think it is trash, to invest all this time and research and software
expertise into it makes people think about the graffiti practice and what
it actually is. The cash prize does something similar. It attaches weight
to something that most people don’t even care about. Even having the
name of an organization like Constant attached to it is showing that I am
really serious about this. In that sense it is different than a wishlist.
I just read the Linus Torvalds 34 biography, and I liked his idea that ‘fun’
is part of innovation, right? In a programming sense, it is scratching a
personal itch. The attachment of a prize is more to underline the fun
aspect than anything else.
ER

I am still puzzled about GML and how it is at the one hand stimulating
collaboration and sharing, and than it comes back to the proud individual
that wants to show off. It is kind of funny actually that now two people are
winning the prize.
FS

ER

I understand what you mean.

Also in F/LOSS, under the flag of ‘Open’ and ‘Free’ there is a lot of
competition. Do you feel that kind of tension in your work?
FS

Even ‘Open’ and ‘Free’ are in competition!
In a project like White-Glove Tracking for example, the most popular
video I had not made and it did not have my name on it but personally I
ER

34

Torvalds, Linus; David Diamond (2001). Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental
Revolutionary. New York, New York, United States: HarperCollins.

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still felt a part of it. I think when you are working in open systems, you
take pride when a project has wings. It is maybe even a selfish act. It is
the story of me receiving some art-finding and realizing that I am not the
best toolmaker for the job. Who ever manages to win the prize gets all
the glory, but I’m still going to feel awesome about it.

I have been reading the interview that Kyle McDonald did with Anton
Marini 35 and at some point he talks about being OK with sharing code and
libraries, but when it is too much of a personal style, then it is hard to share.
FS

Yes, I thought that was an interesting point. I’ve been in similar conversations on listservs with artists in the OpenFrameworks, Processing
and visual programming communities. What are the open pieces? It
makes sense to share libraries, but if I make a print from a piece of code,
do I then have to share the exact source and app for how that exact print
was made? What does it mean when I am investing money in a print, and
it is a limited series but I’m sharing the code? The art world is still based
on scarcity and we’re interested in computers that are copy-machines.
I see both sides of the argument and I am still trying to see how I fit
into it. It gets trickier when you are asked to release a piece rather than
a tool. If you are an Open Source artist and you make a toolset, that is
easier to share because people use that to make their own things. But
then an artist gets asked: how come I can’t get the file of that print? I
think that is a really hard question.
ER

FS

But isn’t the tool often the piece, and vice versa?

I agree. And I haven’t solved that question yet. Lately I’ve been a lot
less excited about running workshops for example. A lot of the people
that want to take part in the workshops are actually the opposition. Often
they own a club and they want to install a cool light-show or they are into
viral marketing. I never know which way to go with that. It depends on
what side of the curve of frustration I am on at that moment.
ER

Earlier you brought up the contrast between people that were more
visually invested and others that are more interested in the performance
aspect. I wanted to hear a bit more about the continuum in the culture and
how GML fits into that?
JH

35

Anton Marini: Some personal projects of mine, for example specific effects and ‘looks’ that I have a
personal attachment to, I don’t release
https://github.com/kylemcdonald/SharingInterviews/blob/master/antonmarini.markdown

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My focus has been on tags, this one portion of graffiti. I do think
there could be cool uses for more involved pieces. It would be great if
someone else would come in and do that, because it is a part of graffiti that
I haven’t studied that much. I would not even be able to write a specssheet for it; it requires a lot of different things when you paint these
super-involved murals, when you have an hour or more time on your
hands a lot more things come into play. Color, nozzles, nozzle changes
and so on.
ER

JH

Z-axis becomes important?

Yes, and your distance from the wall, a lot of other things my brain
isn’t wrestling with. I think tags are always fundamental, even if they are
painting murals that take three days to paint, somewhere in their graffiti
education they start with the tags. You’re still going to be judged by the
community based on how you sign your name on the blackbook.
Graffiti is funny because it is almost conservative in terms of how a successful graffiti writer is viewed and it is reflected in how graffiti is in
some way similar in the world. In some way it is a let down, to travel
from Brooklyn to Paris to Brussels and it looks all the same but I think it
stems from the fact that the community is so tight-knit. But at the end
of the day it comes back to the tag always.
In terms of the performance, in a tag the relationship between form and
function is really tight. The way your hand moves and how the tag actually looks on the wall is dictated by the gesture you are making. A piece
where you have three hours, that tight synchronization isn’t there. With
a tag, every letter looks the way it does because that’s how it needs to be
drawn, because it needs to be connected to this other letter. There’s a
lot of respect for writers that do oneliners, and even if your tag has more
than one line, a good graffiti writer has often a one line version. If you
don’t have to pick up the pen it is a really economical stroke.
ER

JH

It is almost like hacking the limitations of gesture.

It is a very specific design requirement. How to write a name that is
interesting to think about and to look at, you have to do it in 5 seconds,
you have to do it in one line, you have to do it on each type of surface.
On top of that, you have to do it a million times, for twenty years.
ER

In Seattle they call a piece that stays up for a longer time a ‘burner’. I
was connecting that to an archival practice of ephemera. It is a self-agreed
JH

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upon archival process, and it means that the piece will not be touched, even
for years.

ER Graffiti has an interesting relationship to archiving. On the one hand,
many graffiti writers think: Now that tag’s done, but I’ve got another
million of them. While others do not want people painting over them,
the city or other graffiti writers. Also if a tag has been up there for a few
years, it acquires more reverence and it is even worse when it is painted
over.
But I think that GML is different, it is really more similar to a photo of
the tag. It is not trying to be the actual thing.
FS

Once a tag is saved in GML, what can be done with the data?

I am myself reluctant to take any of these tags that I’ve collected and
do anything with it at all without talking closely to whoever’s tag it is,
because it is such an intimate thing. In that sense it is strange to have
an open data repository and to be so reluctant to use it in a way that is
looking at anyone too specifically.
The sculpture I’ve been working on is an average from a workshop; sixteen different graffiti writers merged into one. I don’t want to take advantage of any one writer. But this has nothing to do with the licence,
it is totally a different topic. If someone uploads to the 000000book site,
legally anyone should be able to do anything that they can do under the
Creative Commons licence that’s on the site but I think socially within
the community, it is a huge thing.
ER

There must be some social limits to referentiality. Like beat jacking for
DJs or biting rhymes for MCs, there must be a moment where you are not
just homaging, but stealing a style.
JH

I’ve seen cases where both parties have been happy, like when Yamaguchi
Takahiro used some GML data from KATSU and piped it into Google
Maps, so he was showing these big KATSU tags all over the earth which
was a nice web-based implementation. I think he was doing what a graffiti writer does naturally: Get out there and make the tag bigger but in
different ways. He is not taking KATSU-data from the database without
shining light back on him.
ER

GML seems very inspired by the practice of Free Software, but at the
same time it reiterates the conventional hierarchies of who are supposed to
FS

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use what ... in which way ... from who. For me the excitement with open
licences is that you can do things without asking permission. So, usage
can develop even if it is not already prescribed by the culture. How would
someone like me, pretty far removed from graffiti culture ever know what I
am entitled to do?

I have my reasons for which I would and would not use certain pieces
of data in certain contexts, but I like the fact that it is open for people
that might use it for other things, even if I would not push some of those
boundaries myself.
ER

Even when I am sometimes disappointed by the actual closedness of
F/LOSS, at least in theory through its licensing and refusal to limit who is
entitled and who’s not, it is a liberating force. It seems GML is only half
liberating?
FS

I agree. I think the lack of that is related to the data. The looseness of
its licence makes it less of an invitation in a sense. If the people that put
data up there would sit down and really talk about what this means, when
they would really walk through all the implications of what it means to
public domain a piece, that would be great. I would love that. Then you
could use it without having to worry about all the morality issues and
people’s feelings. It would be more free.
I think it would be good to do a workshop with graffiti writers where
beyond capturing data, you reserve an hour after the workshop to talk to
everybody about what it would mean to add an open licence. I’ve done
workshops with graffiti writers and I talked to everyone: Look, I am
going to upload this tag up to this place where everyone can download them
after the workshop, cool? And they go cool. But still, even then, do I really
feel comfortable that they understand what they’ve gotten into? Even if
someone has chosen a ShareAlike licence, I would be nervous I think.
Maybe I am putting too much weight on it. People outside Free Software
are already used to attaching Creative Commons licences to their videos.
Maybe I am too close to graffiti. I still hold the tag as primal!
ER

It is interesting to be worried about copyright on something that is
illegal, things you can not publicly claim ownership of.
JH

Would you agree that standards are a normalizing practice, that in a
way GML is part of a legalizing process?
FS

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For that to happen, a larger community would have to get involved. It
would need to be Gesture Markup Language, and a community other than
graffiti writers would need to get involved.
ER

FS
ER

Would you be interested in legalizing graffiti?
No. That’s why I stopped doing projections.

Not legal forms of graffiti, but more like the vision of KRS-One of
the Hip Hop city, 36 where graffiti would obviously be legal. Does that
fundamentally change the nature of graffiti?
JH

To me it is just not graffiti anymore. It is just painting. It changes what
it is. For me, its power stems from it being illegal. The motion happens
because it is illegal.
ER

In a sense, but there is also the calligraphic aspect of it. In Brooklyn,
a lot of the building owners say: yeah, throw it up and those are some
of the craziest pieces I know of, not from a tag-standpoint, but more as
complex graffiti visuals.
JH

I am always for de-criminalization. I don’t think anyone should go to
jail over a piece of paint that you could cover over in 5 seconds. And that
KRS-One city you mentioned would be cool to see.
ER

It is his Temple of Hip Hop, the idea to build a city of Hip Hop
where the entire culture can be there without any external repression.
It’s an utopian ideal obviously.
JH

Of course I would like to see that. If nothing else, you would totally
level the playing field between us and the advertisers. The only ones that
would get up messages in the city would be the ones with more time on
their hands.
ER

At the risk of stretching coherency, Hip Hop and Free Software
are both global insurgent subcultures that have emerged from being kind
of thrown away as fads and then become objects of pondering in multinational boardrooms. So I was hoping to open you up to riff on that:
zooming out, GML is a handshake point between these two cultures, but
GML is a specific thing within this larger world of F/LOSS and graffiti
JH

36

KRS-One Master Teacher. AN INTRODUCTION TO HIP HOP .
http://www.krs-one.com/#!temple-of-hip-hop/c177q

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in the larger world of hiphop. What other types of contact points might
there be? Do you see any similarities and differences?

For me, even beyond technology and beyond graffiti it all boils down to
this idea of the hack that is really a phenomenon that has been going on
forever. It’s taking this system that has some sort of rigidity and repeating
elements and flipping it into doing something else. I see this in Hip Hop,
of course. The whole idea of sampling, the whole idea of turning a playback
device into a musical instrument, the idea of touching the record: all of
these things are hacks. We could go into a million examples of how graffiti
is like hacker culture.
In terms of that handshake moment between the two communities, I think
that is about realizing that its not about the code and in some sense its not
about the spraypaint. There’s this empowering idea of individual small actors
assuming control over systems that are bigger than themselves. To me, that’s
the connection point, whether its Hip Hop or rap or programming.
The similarities are there. I think there are huge differences in those communities too. One of them is this idea of the hustler from Hip Hop: the
idea of hustling doesn’t have anything to do with the economy of giftgiving. The idea that Jay-Z has popularized in Hip Hop and that rap music
and graffiti have at their core has to do with work ethic, but there’s also a
kind of braggadocio about making it yourself and attaining value yourself
and it definitely comes back to making money in the end. The idea of being
‘self-made’ in a way is empowering but I think that in the Open Source
movement or the Free Software movement the idea of hustling does not apply. It’s not that people don’t hustle on a day to day basis. You disagree with
me?
ER

It’s interesting because the more you were talking, the more I was
not sure of whether you were speaking about Hip Hop or Free Software
or maybe even more specifically the Open Source kind of ideological development. You have people like David Hannemeier Hansson who developed Ruby on Rails and basically co-opted an entire programming
language to the point where you can’t mention Ruby without people
thinking of his framework. He’s a hustler du jour: this guy’s been in
Linux Journal in a fold-out spread of him posing with a Lamborghini or
something. Talk about braggadocio! You get into certain levels or certain
dynamics within the community where its really like pissing contests.
JH

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I like that, I think there’s something there. At the instigation of the
Open Source Initiative, though: like Linus ‘pre-stock option’, sitting in his
bedroom not seeing the sun for a year and hacking and nerding out. To me
they are so different, the idea of making this thing just for fun with a kind
of optimistic view on collaboration and sharing. I know it can turn into
money, I know it can turn into fame, I know it can turn into Lamborghinis
but I feel like where its coming from is different.
ER

I agree, that’s clearly a distinction between the two. They are not
coming from the same thing. But for me its also interesting to think
about it in terms that these are both sort of movements that have at times
been given liberational trappings, people have assigned liberatory powers
to these movements. Statistically the GPL is considerably more popular
than the Open Source licences, but I don’t know if you sat everybody
down and took a poll which side they would land on, whether they were
more about making money than they were about sharing. Are people
writing blogposts because they really want to share their ideas or because
they want to show how much cooler they are?
JH

You’re totally right and I think people in this scene are always looking
for examples of people making money, succeeding, good things coming to
people for reasons that aren’t just selflessness. People that are into Open
Source usually love to be able to point to those things, that this isn’t some
purely altruistic thing.
ER

Maybe you could take some of the hustle and turn it into something
in the Free Software world, mix and match.
JH

ER I think this line of inquiry is an interesting one that could be the
subject of a documentary or something. These communities that seem very
different until you start finding things that at their core really really similar.

It would be so interesting to have a cribs moment with some gangsta
or rapper who came from that, and he’s sort of showing off his stuff and
he has this machismo about him. Not necessarily directly mysognistic
but a macho kind of character and then take a nerd and have them do the
same.
JH

FS

Would they really be so different?

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Tying the story to data

Obviously some rappers and some nerds, I mean that’s one of the
beauties – I mean its a global movement, you can’t help but have diversity
– but if we’re just speaking in generalizations?
JH

FS

There’s a lot of showing off in F/LOSS too.

Yeah, and there’s a lot of chauvinism. And when you said that selfmade thing, that’s the Free Software idea number one.
JH
ER

I think that part is a direct connection.

And they’re coming from two completely different strata, from a
class-based analysis which is absent from a lot of discussion. Even on
that level, how to integrate them to me is a political question to some
degree.
JH

ER
FS
ER
FS

Right.

Will any features of GML ever be deprecated?

Breaking currently existing software? I hope not.
Basically I’m asking for your long-term vision?

When the spec was being made of course it wasn’t just me, it was a
group of people debating these things and of course nobody wants things
to break. The idea was that we tried to get in as many things as we could
think of and have the base stay kind of what it was with the idea that you
could add more stuff into it. It’s easy enough to do, of course its not a
super-rigid standard. If you look at what the base .gml file is, the minimum
requirements for GML to compile, its so so stripped down. As long as it
just remains time/x-y-z, I don’t think that’s going to change, no.
But I’m also hoping that I’m not gonna be the main GML developer. I’m
already not, there’s already people doing way more stuff with it than I am.
ER

FS

How does it work when someone proposes a feature?

ER They just e-mail me (laughs). But right now there hasn’t been a ton
of that because it’s such a simple thing, once you start cramming too much
into it it starts feeling wrong. But all its gonna take is for someone to make
a new app that needs something else and then there will be a reason to
change it but I think the change will always be adding, not removing.

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The following text is a transcription of a talk by and conversation with Denis Jacquerye in the context of the Libre
Graphics Research Unit in 2012. We invited him in the
context of a session called Co-position where we tried to
re-imagine layout from scratch. The text-encoding standard Unicode and moreover Denis’ precise understanding of the many cultural and political path-dependencies
involved in the making of it, felt like an obvious place
to start. Denis Jacquerye is involved in language technology, software localization and font engineering. He’s
been the co-lead of the DéjàVu Font project and works
with the African Network for Localization (ANLoc) to remove language limitations that exist in today’s technology.
Denis currently lives in London.This text is also available
in Considering your tools. 1 A shorter version has been published in Libre Graphics Magazine 2.1.
This presentation is about the struggle of some people to use typography
in their languages, especially with digital type because there is quite a complex set of elements that make this universe of digital type. One of the
basic things people do when they want to use their languages, they end up
with these type of problems down here, where some characters are shown,
some aren’t, sometimes they don’t match within the font. Because one font
has one of the character they need and then another one doesn’t. Like
for example when a font has the capital letter but not the corresponding
lowercase letter. Users don’t really know how to deal with that, they just
try different fonts and when they’re more courageous, they go online and
find how to complain about those to developers – I mean font designers or
engineers. And those people try to solve those problems as well as they
can. But sometimes it’s pretty hard to find out how to solve them. Adding
missing characters is pretty easy but sometimes you also have language re-

1

Considering your tools: a reader for designers and developers http://reader.lgru.net

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quirements that are very complex. Like here for example, in Polish, you
have the ogonek, which is like a little tail that shows that a vowel is nasalized. Most fonts actually have that character, but for some languages, people
are used to have that little tail centred which is quite rare to see in a font.
So when font designers face that issue, they have to make a choice rather
they want to go with one tradition or another, and if they want to go one
way they’re scattered to those people. Also you have problems of spacing
things differently, like a stacking of different accents – called diacritics or
diacritical marks. Stacking this high up often ends up on the line above, so
you have to find a solution to make it less heavy on a line, and then in some
languages, instead of stacking them, they end up putting them side by side,
which is yet another point where you have to make a choice.
But basically, all these things are based on how type is represented on computers. You used to have simple encodings like ASCII, the basic Western
Latin alphabet where each character was represented by bytes. The character could be displayed with different fonts, with different styles, they could
not meet the requirements of different people. And then they made different encodings because they were a lot of different requirements and it’s
technically impossible to fit them all in ASCII.
Often they would start with ASCII and then add the specific requirements
but soon they ended up having a lot of different standards because of all the
different needs. So one single byte of representation would have different
meanings and each of these meanings could be displayed differently in fonts.
But old webpages are often using old encodings. If your browser is not
using the right encoding you would have jibbish displayed because of this
chaos of encodings. So in the late eighties, they started thinking about
those problems and in the nineties they started working on Unicode: several
companies got together and worked on one single unifying standard that
would be compatible with all the pre-used standards or the new coming
ones.
Unicode is pretty well defined, you have a universal code point to represent to identify a character, and then that character can be displayed with
different glyphs depending on the font or the style selected. With that
framework, when you need to have the proper character displayed, you have
to go the code point in a font editor, change the shape of the character and
it can be displayed properly. Then sometimes there’s just no code point for
the character you need because it hasn’t been added, it wasn’t in any existing
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standard or nobody has ever needed it before or people who needed it just
used old printers and metal type.
So in this case, you have to start to deal with the Unicode organization itself.
They have a few ways to communicate like the mailing list, the public, and
recently they also opened a forum where you can ask questions about the
characters you need as you might just not find them.
In most operating systems, you have a character map application where you
can access all the characters, either all the characters that exist in Unicode or
the ones available in the font you’re using. And it’s quite hard to find what
you need, as it’s most of the time organized with a very restrictive set of
rules. Characters are just ordered in the way they’re ordered within Unicode
using their code point order: for example, capital A is 41, and then B is 42,
etc. The further you go in the alphabet the further you go in the Unicode
blocks and tables, and there is a lot of different writing systems ... Moreover
because Unicode is sort of expanding organically – work is done on one
script, and then on another, then coming back to previous scripts to add
things – things are not really in a logical or practical order. Basic Latin is all
the way up there, and more far, you have Latin Extended A, (Conditional)
Extended Latin, Latin Extended B, C and D. Those are actually quite far
apart within Unicode, and each of them can have a different setup: for
example, here you have a capital letter that is just alone, and here you have
a capital letter and a lowercase letter. So when you know the character you
want to use, sometimes you would find the uppercase letter but you’d have
to keep looking for the corresponding lowercase.
Basically when you have a character that you can’t find, people from the
mailing list or the forum can tell you if it would be relevant to include it
in Unicode or not. And if you’re very motivated, you can try to meet the
inclusion criterias. But for a proper inclusion, there has to be a formal
proposal using their template with questions to answer, you also have to
provide proof that the characters you want to add are actually used or how
they would be used.

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The criterias are quite complicated because you have to make sure that this is
not a glyphic variant (the same character but represented differently). Then
you also have to prove the character doesn’t already exist because sometimes
you just don’t know it’s a variant of another one; sometimes they just want
to make it easier and claim it’s a variant of another one even though you
don’t agree. For example, making sure it’s not just a ligature as sometimes
ligatures are used as a single character, sometimes they exist for aesthetic
reasons. Eventually you have to provide an actual font with the character so
that they can use it in their documentation.
How long does it take usually?

It depends as sometimes they accept it right away if you explain your request
properly and provide enough proof, but they often ask for revisions to the
proposals and then it can be rejected because it doesn’t meet the criterias.
Actually those criterias have changed a bit in the past. They started with
Basic Latin and then added special characters which were used: here for example is the international phonetic alphabet but also all the accented ones ...
As they were used in other encodings and that Unicode initially wanted to
be compatible with everything that already exists, they added them. Then
they figured they already had all those accented characters from other encodings so they’re also going to add all the ones they know are used even
though they were not encoded yet. They ended up with different names because they had different policies at the beginning instead of having the same
policy as now. They added here a bunch of Latin letters with marks that
were used for example in transcription. So if you’re transcribing Sanskrit for
example, you would use some of the characters here. Then at some point
they realized that this list of accented characters would get huge, and that
there must be a smarter way to do this. Therefore they figured you could
actually use just parts of those characters as they can be broken apart: a
base letter and marks you add to it. You may have a single character that
can be decomposed canonically between the letter B and a colon dot above,
and you have the character for the dot above in the block of the diacritical
marks. You have access to all the diacritical marks they thought were useful
at some point. At that point, when they realized they would end up having
thousands of accented characters they figured with this way where we can
have just any possibility, so from now on, they’re just going to say if you
want to have an accented character that hasn’t been encoded already, just
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use the parts that can represent it. Then in 1996, some people for Yoruba,
a spoken language in Nigeria, made a proposal to add the characters with
diacritics they needed and Unicode just rejected the proposal as they could
compose those characters by combining existing parts.
Weren’t the elements they needed already in the toolbox?

Yes, the encoding parts are there, meaning it can be represented with
Unicode but the software didn’t handle them properly so it made more
sense to the Yoruba speakers to have it encoded it in Unicode.

So you could type, but you’d need to type two characters of course?

Yes, the way you type things is a big problem. Because most keyboards
are based on old encodings where you have accented characters as single
characters, so when you want to do a sequence of characters, you actually
have to type more, or you’d have to have a special keyboard layout allowing
you to have one key mapped to several characters. So that’s technically
feasible but it’s a slow process to have all the possibilities. You might have
one whic is very common so developers end up adding it to the keyboard
layouts or whatever applications they’re using, but not when other people
have different needs.
There is a lot of documentation within Unicode, but it’s quite hard to find
what you want when you’re just starting, and it’s quite technical. Most of it
is actually in a book they publish at every new version. This book has a few
chapters that describe how Unicode works and how characters should work
together, what properties they have. And all the differences between scripts
are relevant. They also have special cases trying to cater to those needs that
weren’t met or the proposals that were rejected. They have a few examples
in the Unicode book: in some transcription systems they have this sequence
of characters or ligature; a t and a s with a ligature tie and then a dot above.
So the ligature tie means that t and s are pronounced together and the dot
above is err ... has a different meaning (laughs). But it has a meaning! But
because of the way characters work in Unicode, applications actually reorder
it whatever you type in, it’s reordered so that the ligature tie ends up being
moved after the dot. So you always have this representation because you
have the t, there should be the dot, and then there should be the ligature tie
and then the s. So the t goes first, the dot goes above the t, the ligature tie
goes above everything and then the s just goes next to the t. The way they
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explain how to do this is supposed to do the t, the ligature tie, and then a
special diacritical mark that prevents any kind of reordering, then you can
add the dot and then you can do the s. So this kind of use is great as you
have a solution, it’s just super hard because you have to type five characters
instead of ... well ... four (laughs). But still, most of the libraries that are
rendering fonts don’t handle it properly and then even most fonts don’t
plan for it. So even if the fonts did anyway the libraries wouldn’t handle it
properly. Then there are other things that Unicode does: because of that
separation between accents and characters and then the composition, you
can actually normalize how things are ordered. This sequence of characters
can be reordered into the pre-composed one with a circumflex or whatever;
you have combining marks in the normalized order. All these things have
to be handled in the libraries, in the application or in the fonts.
The documentation of Unicode itself is not prescriptive, meaning that the
shape of the glyphs are not set in stone. So you can still have room to
have the style you want, the style your target users want. For example
if we have different glyphs: Unicode has just one shape and it’s the font
designer’s choice to have different ones. Unicode is not about glyphs, it’s
really about how information is represented, how it’s displayed. Or you have
two characters displayed as a ligature: it is actually encoded as one character
because of previous encodings. But if ever it would be a new case, Unicode
wouldn’t stake the ligature as a single character.

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So all this information is really in a corner there. It’s quite rare to find fonts
that actually use this information to provide to the needs of the people who
need specific features. One of the way to implement all those features is
with TrueType OpenType and there are also some alternatives like Graphite
which is a subset of a TrueType OpenType font. But then, you need your
applications to be able to handle Graphite. So eventually the real unique
standard is TrueType Opentype. It’s pretty well documented and very technical because it allows to do many things for many different writing systems.
But it’s slow to update so if there’s a mistake in the actual specifications of
OpenType, it takes a while before they correct it and before that correction shows up in your application. It’s quite flexible and one of the big
issue it that it has its own language code system, meaning that some identified languages just can’t be identified in OpenType. One of the features in
OpenType is managing language environment. If I’m using Polish, I’d want
this shape; if I’m using Navajo, I’d want this shape. That’s very cool because you can make just one font that’s used by Polish speakers and Navajo
speakers without them worrying about changing fonts as long as they specify the language they’re using. But you can’t use this feature for languages
which aren’t in the OpenType specifications as they have their own way of
describing languages than Unicode. It’s really frustrating because, you can
find all the characters in Unicode, not organized in a practical way: you have
to look all around the tables to find the characters that may be used by one
language, and then you have to look around for how to actually use them.
It is a real lack of awareness within the font designer community. Because
even when they might add all the characters you need, they might just not
add the positioning, so for example you have a ... when you combine with a
circumflex, it doesn’t position well because most of the font designers still
work with the old encoding mindset when you have one character for one
accentuated letter. Sometimes they just think that following the Unicode
blocks is good enough. But then you have problems where, as you can see
in the Basic Latin charts at the beginning, the capital is in one block and
its lowercase in a different block. And then they just work on one block,
they just don’t do the other one because they don’t think it’s necessary, but
yet, two blocks of the same letter are there, so it would make sense to have
both. It’s hard because there’s very few connections between the Unicode
world, people working on OpenType libraries, font designers and the actual
needs of the users.
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At the beginning of the presentation you went for the code point of the characters,
all your characters are subtitled by their code points; it’s kind of the beauty of
Unicode to name everything, every character.
Those names are actually quite long. One funny thing about this. Unicode
has the policy of not changing the names of the characters, so they have an
errata where they realized that oh, we shouldn’t have named this that, so here’s
the actual name that makes sense, and the real name is wrong.

Pierre refers to the fact that in the character mappings that each of the glyphs
also has a description. And those are sometimes so abstract and poetic that
this was a start of a work from OSP, the Dingbats Liberation Fest, to try
to re-imagine what shapes would belong to those descriptions. So ‘combining
dot above’ that’s the textual description of the code point. But of course there
are thousands of them so they come up with the most fantastic gymnastics ...
So when people come in a project like DéjàVu, they have to understand
all that to start contributing. How does this training, teaching, learning
process takes place?

Usually most people are interested in what they know. They have a specific
need and they realize they can add it to DéjàVu, so they learn how to play
with FontForge. After a while, what they’ve done is good and we can use
it. Some people end up adding glyphs they’re not familiar with. For example we had Ben doing Arabic: it was mostly just drawing and then asking
for feedback on the mailing list; then we got some feedback, we changed
some things, eventually released it, getting more feedback (laughs) because
more people complained ... So it’s a lot of just drawing what you can from
resources you can find. It’s often based on other typefaces therefore sometimes you’re just copying mistakes from other typefaces ... So eventually it’s
just the feedback from the users that’s really helpful because you know that
people are using it, trying it, and then you know how to make it better.

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(Type) designer Pedro Amado is amongst many other things
initiator of TypeForge 1 , a website dedicated to the development
of ‘collaborative type’ with Open Source tools. While working
as design technician at FBAUP 2 , he is about to finish a MA
with a paper on collaborative methods for the creation of art
and design projects. When I e-mailed him in 2006 about open
font design and how he sees that developing, he responded with
a list of useful links, but also with:
Developing design teaching based on
Open Source is one of my goals, because
I think that is the future of education.

This text is based on the conversation about design, teaching
and software that followed.

You told me you are employed as ‘design technician’ ... what does that
mean?

It means that I provide assistance to teachers and students in the Design
Department. I implemented scanning/printing facilities for example, and
currently I develop and give workshops on Digital Technologies – software
is a BIG issue for me right now! Linux and Open Source software are slowly
entering the design spaces of our school. For me it has been a ‘battle’ to
find space for these tools. I mean – we could migrate completely to OSS
tools, but it’s a slow progress. Mainly because people (students) need (and
want) to be trained in the same commercial applications as the ones they
will encounter in their professional life.
How did Linux enter the design lab? How did that start?

It started with a personal curiosity, but also for economical reasons. Our
school can’t afford to acquire all the software licenses we’d like. For example, we can’t justify to pay approx. 100 x 10 licenses, just to implement
1
2

http://www.typeforge.net/
http://www.fba.up.pt/

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the educational version of Fontlab on some of our computers; especially because this package is only used by a part of our second year design students.
You can image what the total budget will be with all the other needs ... I
personally believe that we can find everything we need on the web. It’s a
matter of searching long enough! So this is how I was very happy to find
Fontforge. An Open Source tool that is solid enough to use in education
and can produce (as far as I have been able to test) almost professional results in font development. At first I couldn’t grasp how to use it under X 3
on Windows, so one day I set out to try and do it on Linux ... and one thing
lead to another ...

What got you into using OSS? Was it all one thing leading to another?

Uau ... can’t remember ... I believe it had to do with my first experiences
online; I don’t think I knew the concept before 2000. I mean I’ve started
using the web (IRC and basic browsing) in 1999, but I think it had to do
with the search of newer and better tools ...
I think I also started to get into it around that time. But I think I was
more interested in copyleft though, than in software.

Oh ... (blush) not me ... I got into it definitely for the ‘free beer’ aspect!
By 2004 I started using DTP applications on Linux (still in my own time)
and began to think that these tools could be used in an educational context,
if not professionally. In the beginning of 2006 I presented a study to the
coordinator of the Design Department at FBAUP, in which I proposed to
start implementing Open Source tools as an alternative to the tools we were
missing. Blender for 3D animation, FontForge for type design, Processing
for interactive/graphic programming and others as a complement to proprietary packages: GIMP, Scribus and Inkscape to name the most important
ones. I ran into some technical problems that I hope will be sorted out
soon; one of the strategies is to run these software packages on a migration
basis – as the older computers in our lab won’t be able to run MacOS 10.4+,
we’ll start converting them to Linux.
3

Cygwin/X is a port of the X Window System to the Cygwin API layer for the Microsoft
Windows family of operating systems
Cygwin/x: X windows – on windows! http://x.cygwin.com/, 2014. [Online; accessed 5.8.2014]

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I wanted to ask you about the relation between software and design.
To me, economy, working process, but also aesthetics are a product of
software, and at the same time software itself is shaped through use. I
think the borders between software and design are not so strictly drawn.

It’s funny you put things in that perspective. I couldn’t agree more.
Nevertheless I think that design thinking prevails (or it should) as it must
come first when approaching problems. If the design thinking is correct,
the tools used should be irrelevant. I say ‘should’ because in a perfect environment we could work within a team where all tools (software/hardware)
are mastered. Rarely this happens, so much of our design thinking is still
influenced by what we can actually produce.

Do you mean to say that what we can think is influenced by what we
can make? This would work for me! But often when tools are mastered,
they disappear in the background and in my opinion that can become a
problem.

I’m not sure if I follow your point. I agree with the border between design
and software is not so strict nevertheless, I don’t agree with economy, process
and aesthetics are a product of software. As you’ve come to say what we think
is influenced by what we can make ... this is an outside observation ...
A technique is produced inside a culture,
therefore one s society is conditioned by
it s techniques. Conditioned, not determined 4

Design, like economics and software, is a product of culture. Or is it
the other way around? The fact is that we can’t really tell what comes first.
Culture is defined by and defines technology. Therefore it’s more or less
simple to accept that software determines (and is determined) by it’s use.
This is an intricate process ... it kind of goes roundabout on itself ...
4

Pierre Lévy. Cyberculture (Electronic Mediations). University Of Minnesota Press, 2001

277

And where does design fit in in your opinion? Or more precisely:
designers?

Design is a cultural aspect. Therefore it does not escape this logic. Using
a practical standpoint: Design is a product of economics and technology.
Nevertheless the best design practices (or at least the one’s that have endured
the test of time) and the most renowned designers are the one’s that can
escape the the economic and technological boundaries. The best design
practices are the ones that are not products of economics and technology
... they are kind of approaching a universal design status (if one exists). Of
course ... it’s very theoretical, and optimistic ... but it should be like this ...
otherwise we’ll stop looking for better or newer solutions, and we’ll stop
pushing boundaries and design as technology and other areas will stagnate.
On the other hand, there is a special ‘school’ of thought manifested through
some of the Portuguese Design Association members, saying that the design
process should lead the process of technological development. Henrique
Cayate (I think it was in November last year) said that design should lead the
way to economy and technology in society. I think this is a bit far fetched ...

Do you think software defines form and/or content? How is software
related to design processes?
I think these are the essential questions related to the use of OSS. Can
we think about what we can make without thinking about process? I believe
that in design processes, as in design teaching, concepts should be separated
from techniques or software as much as possible.
To me, exactly because techniques and software are intertwined, software matters and should offer space for thinking (software should therefore not be separated from design). You could also say: design becomes
exceptionally strong when it makes use of its context, and responds to it
in an intelligent way. Or maybe I did not understand what you meant by
being ‘a product of ’. To me that is not necessarily a negative point.
Well ... yes ... that could be a definition of good design, I guess. I think
that as a cultural produce, techniques can’t determine society. It can and
will influence it, but at the same time it will also just happen. When we talk
278

about Design and Software I see the same principle reflected. Design being
the ‘culture’ or society and software being the tools or techniques that are
developed to be used by designers. So this is much the same as Which came
first? The chicken, or the egg? Looking at it from a designers (not a software
developers) point of view, the tools we use will always condition our output.
Nevertheless I think it’s our role as users to push tools further and let developers know what we want to do with them. Whether we do animation on
Photoshop, or print graphics on Flash that’s our responsibility. We have to
use our tools in a responsible way. Knowing that the use we make of them
will eventually come back at us. It’s a kind of responsible feedback.
Using Linux in a design environment is not an obvious choice. Most
designers are practically married to their Adobe Suite. How come it is
entering your school after all?

Very slowly! Linux is finally becoming valuable for Design/DTP area as
it has been for long on the Internet/Web and programming areas. But you
can’t expect GIMP to surpass Photoshop. At least not in the next few years.
And this is the reality. If we can, we must train our students to use the
best tools available. Ideally all tools available, so they won’t have problems
when faced with a tool professionally. The big question is still, how we
besides teaching students theory and design processes (with the help of free
tools), help them to become professionals. We also have to teach them
how to survive a professional relationship with professional tools like the
Adobe Suite. As I am certain that Linux and OSS (or F/LOSS) will be
part of education’s future, I am certain of it’s coexistence along side with
commercial software like Adobe’s. It’s only a matter of time. Being certain
of this, the essential question is: How will we manage to work parallel in
both commercial and free worlds?

Do you think it is at all possible to ‘survive’ on other tools than the
ones Adobe offers?

Well ... I seem not to be able to dedicate myself entirely to these new
tools ... To depend solely on OSS tools ... I think that is not possible, at
least not at this moment. But now is the time to take these OSS tools
and start to teach with them. They must be implemented in our schools.
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I am certain that sooner or later this will be common practice throughout
European schools.
Can you explain a bit more, what you mean by ‘real world’?

Being a professional graphic designer is what we call the ‘real world’ in
our school. I mean, having to work full time doing illustration, corporate
identity, graphic design, etc., to make a living, deliver on time to clients and
make a profit to pay the bills by the end of the month!

Do you think OSS can/should be taught differently? It seems selfteaching is built in to these tools and the community around it. It means
you learn to teach others in fact ... that you actually have to leave the
concept of ‘mastering’ behind?
I agree. The great thing about Linux is precisely that – as it is developed
by users and for users – it is developing a sense of community around it, a
sense of given enough eyeballs, someone will figure it out.
Well, that does not always work, but most of the time ...

I believe that using Open Source tools is perfect to teach, especially
first year students. Almost no one really understands what the commands
behind the menus of Photoshop mean, at least not the people I’ve seen in
my workshops. I guess GIMP won’t resolve this matter, but it will help
them think about what they are doing to digital images. Especially when
they have to use unfamiliar software. You first have to teach the design
process and then the tool can be taught correctly, otherwise you’ll just be
teaching habits or tricks. As I said before, as long as design prevails and not
the tool/technique, and you teach the concepts behind the tools in the right
way, people will adapt seamlessly to new tools, and the interface will become
invisible!

Do you think this means you will need to restructure the curriculum?
I imagine a class in bugreporting ... or getting help online ...

mmhh ... that could be interesting. I’ve never thought about it in that
way. I’ve always seen bugreporting and other community driven activities
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as part of the individual aspect of working with these tools ... but basically
you are suggesting to implement an ‘Open Source civic behavior class’ or
something like that?

Ehm ... Yes! I think you need to learn that you own your tools, meaning
you need to take care of them (ie: if something does not work, report)
but at the same time you can open them up and get under the hood ...
change something small or something big. You also need to learn that
you can expect to get help from other people than your tutor ... and that
you can teach someone else.

The aspect of taking responsibility, this has to be cultivated – a responsible use of these tools. About changing things under the hood ... well this I
think it will be more difficult. I think there is barely space to educate people to hack their own tools let alone getting under the hood and modifying
them. But you are right that under the OSS communication model, the
peer review model of analysis, communication is getting less and less hierarchical. You don’t have to be an expert to develop new or powerful tools or
other things ... A peer-review model assumes that you just need to be clever
and willing to work with others. As long as you treat your collaborators
as peers, whether or not they are more or less advanced than you, this will
motivate them to work harder. You should not disregard their suggestions
and reward them with the implementations (or critics) of their work.

How does that model become a reality in teaching? How can you
practice this?

Well ... for example use public communication/distribution platforms
(like an expanded web forum) inside school, or available on the Internet;
blog updates and suggestions constantly; keep a repository of files; encourage the use of real time communication technologies ... as you might have
noticed is almost the formula used in e-learning solutions.
And also often an argument for cutting down on teaching hours.

That actually is and isn’t true. You can and will (almost certainly) have
less and less traditional classes, but if the teachers and tutors are dedicated,
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they will be more available than ever! This will mean that students and
teachers will be working together in a more informal relationship. But it
can also provoke an invasion of the personal space of teachers ...
It is hard to put a border when you are that much involved. I am
just thinking how you could use the community around Open Source
software to help out. I mean ... if the online teaching tools would be
open to others outside the school too, this would be the advantage. It
would also mean that as a school, you contribute to the public domain
with your classes and courses.

That is another question. I think schools should contribute to public
domain knowledge. Right now I am not sharing any of the knowledge
about implementing OSS on a school like ours with the community. But
if all goes well I’ll have this working by December 2006. I’m working on
a website where I can post the handbooks for workshops and other useful
resources.
I am really curious about your experiences. However convinced I am
of the necessity to do it, I don’t think it is easy to open education up to
the public, especially not for undergraduate education.

I do have my doubts too. If you look at it on a commercial perspective,
students are paying for their education ... should we share the same content
to everyone? Will other people explore these resources in a wrong way?
Will it really contribute to the rest of the community? What about profit?
Can we afford to give this knowledge away for free, I mean, as a school this
is almost our only source of income? Will the prestige gained, be worth
the possible loss? These are important questions that I need to think more
about.

OK, I will be back with you in 6 month to find out more! My last question ... why would you invest time and energy in OSS when you think
good designers should escape economical and technological boundaries?
If we invest energy on OSS tools now, we’ll have the advantage of already
being savvy by the time they become widely accepted. The worst case scenario would be that you’ve wasted time perfecting your skills or learned a
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new tool that didn’t become a standard ... How many times have we done
this already in our life? In any way, we need to learn concepts behind
the tools, learn new and different tools, even unnecessary ones in order to
broaden our knowledge base – this will eventually help us think ‘out of the
box’ and hopefully push boundaries further [not so much as escaping them].
For me OSS and its movement have reached a maturity level that can prove
it’s own worth in society. Just see Firefox – when it reached general user
acceptance level (aka ‘project maturity’ or ‘development state’), they started
to compete directly with MS Internet Explorer. This will happen with the
rest (at least that’s what I believe). It’s a matter of quality and doing the
correct broadcast to the general public. Linux started almost as a personal
project and now it’s a powerhouse in programming or web environments.
Maybe because these are areas that require constant software and hardware
attention it became an obvious and successful choice. People just modified it
as they needed it done. Couldn’t this be done as effectively (or better) with
commercial solutions? Of course. But could people develop personalized
solutions to specific problems in their own time frame? Probably not ... But
it means that the people involved are, or can resource to, computer experts.
What about the application of these ideas to other areas? The justice department of the Portuguese government (Ministério da Justiça) is for example
currently undergoing a massive informatics (as in the tools used) change –
they are slowly migrating their working platform to an Open Source Linux
distribution – Caixa Mágica (although it’s maintained and given assistance
by a commercial enterprise by the same name). By doing this, they’ll cut
costs dramatically and will still be able to work with equivalent productivity
(one hopes: better!). The other example is well known. The Spanish region of Estremadura looked for a way to cut costs on the implementation
of information technologies in their school system and developed their own
Linux Distro called Linex – it aggregates the software bundle they need,
and best of all has been developed and constantly tweaked by them. Now
Linux is becoming more accessible for users without technical training, and
is in a WYSIWYG state of development, I really believe we should start
using it seriously so we can try and test it and learn how we can use in in
our everyday life (for me this process has already started ... ). People aren’t
stupid. They’re just ‘change resistant’. One of the aspects I think that will
get peoples’ attention will be that a ‘free beer’ is as good as a commercial
one.
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August 2006. One of the original co-conspirators of the
OSP adventure is the Brussels graphiste going under the
name Harrisson. His interest in Open Source software
flows with the culture of exchange that keeps the offcentre music scene alive, as well as with the humanist
tradition persistingly present in contemporary typography. Harrisson’s visual frame of reference is eclectic and
vibrant, including modernist giants, vernacular design,
local typographic culture, classic painting, drawing and
graffiti. Too much food for one conversation.

FS
H

FS
H

FS

H

You could say that ‘A typeface is entirely derivative’, but others argue, that maybe
the alphabet is, but not the interpretations of it.

The main point of typography and ownership today is that there is a blurred
border between language and letters. So: now you can own the ‘shape’ of
a letter. Traditionally, the way typographers made a living was by buying
(more or less expensive) lead fonts, and with this tool they printed books
and got paid for that. They got paid for the typesetting, not for the type.
That was the work of the foundries. Today, thanks to the digital tools, you
can easily switch between type design, type setting and graphic design.

What about the idea that fonts might be the most ‘pirated’ digital object possible?
Copying is much more difficult when you’ve got lead type to handle!

Yes, digitalisation changed the rules. Just as .mp3 changed the philosophy
of music. But in typography, there is a strange confrontation between this
flux of copied information, piracy and old rules of ownership from the past.

Do you think the culture of sharing fonts changed? Or: the culture of distributing
them? If you look at most licences for fonts, they are extremely restrictive. Even
99% of free fonts do not allow derivative works.

The public good culture is paradoxically not often there. Or at least the
economical model of living with public good idea is not very developed.
While I think typography, historically, is always seen as a way to share
knowledge. Humanist stuff.

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The art and craft of typeface design is
currently headed for extinction due to the
illegal proliferation of font software,
piracy, and general disregard for proper
licensing etiquette. 1

H
FS

H

FS

Emigré ... Did they not live
from the copyrights of fonts?!

You are right.
They are
like a commercial record company. Can you imagine what
would happen if you would
open up the typographic trade
– to ‘Open Source’ this economy? Stop chasing piracy and
allow users to embed, study,
copy, modify and redistribute
typefaces?

Well we are not that far from
this in fact. Every designer
has at least 500 fonts on their
computer, not licenced, but
copied because it would be impossible to pay for!

Even the distribution model of fonts is very peer-to-peer as well. The reality
might come close, but font licences tell a different story.
I believe that we live in an era where
anything that can be expressed as bits
will be. I believe that bits exist to
be copied. Therefore, I believe that any
business-model that depends on your bits
not being copied is just dumb, and that
lawmakers who try to prop these up are like
governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the
sides of active volcanoes. 2

1
2

http://redesign.emigre.com/FAQ.php
Cory Doctorow in http://craphound.com/bio.php

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H
FS

H

FS
H

FS

H

FS

I am not saying all fonts should be open, but it is just that it would be interesting
when type designers were testing and experimenting with other ways of developing
and distributing type, with another economy.

Yes, but fonts have a much more reduced user community than music or
bookpublishing, so old rules stay.

Is that it? I am surprised to see that almost all typographers and foundries take the
‘piracy is a crime’ side on this issue. While typographers are early and enthusiastic
adopters of computer technology, they have not taken much from the collaborative
culture that came with it.
This is the ‘tradition’ typography inherited. Typography was one of the
first laboratories for fractioning work for efficiency. It was one of the first
modern industries, and has developed a really deep culture where it is not
easy to set doubts in. 500 years of tradition and only 20 years of computers.
The complexity comes from the fact it is influenced by a multiple series of
elements, from history and tradition to the latest technologies. But it is
always related to an economic production system, so property and ‘secretsof-the-trade’ have a big influence on it.

I think it is important to remember how the current culture of (not) sharing fonts
is linked to its history. But books have been made for quite a while too.
Open Source systems may be not so much influencing distribution, licences
and economic models in typography, but can set original questions to this
problematic of digital type. Old tools and histories are not reliable anymore.

Yes. with networked software it is rather obvious that it is useful to work together.
I try to understand how this works with respect to making a font. Would that
work?

Collaborative type is extremely important now, I think. The globalisation of
computer systems sets the language of typography in a new dimension. We
use computers in Belgium and in China. Same hardware. But language is
the problem! A French typographer might not be the best person to define
a Vietnamese font. Collaborativity is necessary! Pierre Huyghebaert told me
he once designed an Arabic font when he was in Lebanon. For him, the
font was legible, but nobody there was able to read it.
But how would you collaborate than? I mean ... what would be the reason for
a French typographer to collaborate with one from China? What would that
bring? I’m imagining some kind of hybrid result ... kind of interesting.
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H

FS
H

FS
H

Again, sharing. We all have the idea that English is the modern Latin,
and if we are not careful the future of computers will result in a language
reductionism.

What interest me in Open Source, is the potential for ‘biodiversity’.

I partially agree, and the Open Source idea contradicts the reductionist
approach by giving more importance to local knowledge. A collaboration
between an Arabic typographer and a French one can be to work on tools
that allow both languages to co-exist. LaTeX permits that, for example.
Not QuarkXpress!

Where does your interest in typography actually come from?

I think I first looked at comic books, and then started doodling in the
margins of schoolbooks. As a teenager, I used to reproduce film titles such
as Aliens, Terminator or other sci-fi high-octane typographic titles.

Basically, I’m a forger! In writing, you need to copy to understand. Thats an
old necessity. If you use a typeface, you express something. You’re putting
drawings of letters next to each other to compose a word/text. A drawing
is always emotionally charged, which gives color (or taste) to the message.
You need to know what’s inside a font to know what it expresses.

FS
H

How do you find out what’s inside?

By reproducing letters, and using them. A Gill Sans does not have the same
emotional load as a Bodoni. To understand a font is complicated, because
it refers to almost every field in culture. The banners behind G.W. Bush
communicate more than just ‘Mission Accomplished’. Typefaces carry a
‘meta language’.
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FS
H

FS
H

It is truly embedded content

Exactly! It is still very difficult to bridge the gap between personal emotions
and programming a font. Moreover, there are different approaches, from
stroke design to software that generates fonts. And typography is standardisation. The first digital fonts are drawn fixed shapes, letter by letter,
‘outstrokes’. But there is another approach where the letters are traced by
the computer. It needs software to be generated. In Autocad, letters are
‘innerstroke’ that can vary of weight. Letterrors’ Beowolf 3 is also an example of that kind of approach. interesting way to work, but the font depends
on the platform it goes with. Beowolf only works on OS9. It also set the
question of copyright very far. It’s a case study in itself.

So it means, the font is software in fact?

Yes, but the interdependence between font
and operating systems is very strong, contrary to a fixed format such as TrueType.
For printed matter, this is much more
complicated to achieve. There are inbetween formats, such as Multiple Master
Technology for example. It basically
means, that you have 2 shapes for 1 glyph,
and you can set an ‘alternative’ shape between the 2 shapes. At Adobe they still do
not understand why it was (and still is) a
failure ...
3

Beowolf by Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland (1989)

Instead of recreating a fixed outline or bitmap, the Randomfont redefines its outlines every
time they are called for. http://letterror.com/writing/is-best-really-better

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The Metapolator Uinverse by Simon Egli (2014)

FS

H

FS

I really like this idea ... to have more than one master. Imagine you own one
master and I own the other and than we adjust and tweak from different sides.
That would be real collaborative type! Could ‘multiple’ mean more than one you
think?

It is a bit more complicated than drawing a simple font in Fontographer or
Fontforge. Pierre told me that the MM feature is still available in Adobe
Illustrator, but that it is used very seldomly. Multiple Master fonts are also
a bit complicated to use. I think there were a lot of bugs first, and then you
need to be a skilled designer to give these fonts a nice render. I never heard
of an alternative use of it, with drawing or so. In the end it was probably
never a success because of the software dependency.

While I always thought of fonts as extremely cross media. Do you remember which
classic font was basically the average between many well-known fonts? Frutiger?
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H

FS

H
FS

Fonts are Culture Capsules! It was Adrian Frutiger. But he wasn’t the only
one to try ... It was a research for the Univers font I think. Here again we
meet this paradox of typography: a standardisation of language generating
cultural complexity.

Univers. That makes sense. Amazing to see those examples
together. It seems digital typography got stuck at some
point, and I think some of the ideas and practices that are
current in Open Source could help break out of it.
Yes of course. And it is almost virgin space.

In 2003 the Danish government released ‘Union’, a
font that could be freely used for publications concerning
Danish culture. I find this an intrigueing idea, that a font
could be seen as some kind of ‘public good’.

Univers by Adrian Frutiger (1954)

Union by Morten Rostgaard Olsen (2003)

H

FS

H

I am convinced that knowledge needs to be open ...
(speaking as the son of a teacher here!). One medium
for knowledge is language and its atoms are letters.

But if information wants to be free, does that mean that
design needs to be free too? Is there information possible
without design?

This is why I like books. Because it’s a mix between
information and beauty – or can be. Pfff, there is nothing without design
... It is like is there something without language, no?

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One of the things that is notable about
OSP is that the problems that you encounter
are also described, appearing on your blog.
This is something unusual for a company attempting to produce the impression of an
efficient solution . Obviously the readers
of the blog only get a formatted version
of this, as a performed work? What s the
thinking here?"

This interview about the practice of OSP was carried out by
e-mail between March and May 2008. Matthew Fuller writes
about software culture and has a contagious interest in technologies that exceed easy fit solutions. At the time, he was
David Gee reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural
Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and had
just edited Software Studies, A Lexicon, 1 and written Media
Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture 2 and
Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. 3

OSP is a graphic design agency working solely with Open Source software. This
surely places you currently as a world first, but what exactly does it mean in
practice? Let’s start with what software you use?

There are other groups publishing with Free Software, but design collectives
are surprisingly rare. So much publishing is going on around Open Source
and Open Content ... someone must have had the same idea? In discussions
about digital tools you begin to find designers expressing concern over the
fact that their work might all look the same because they use exactly the
same Adobe suite and as a way to differentiate yourself, Free Software could
soon become more popular. I think the success of Processing is related
to that, though I doubt such a composed project will ever make anyone
seriously consider Scribus for page layout, even if Processing is Open Source.
1

2
3

Matthew Fuller. Software Studies: A Lexicon. The MIT Press, 2008
Matthew Fuller. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture.
The MIT Press, 2007
Matthew Fuller. Behind the Blip: Essays on the culture of software. Autonomedia, 2003

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OSP usually works between GIMP, 4 Scribus 5 and Inkscape 6 on Linux distributions and OSX. We are fans of FontForge, 7 and enjoy using all kinds
of commandline tools, psnup, ps2pdf and uniq to name a few.
How does the use of this software change the way you work, do you see some
possibilities for new ways of doing graphic design opening up?

For many reasons, software has become much more present in our work; at
any moment in the workflow it makes itself heard. As a result we feel a bit
less sure of ourselves, and we have certainly become slower. We decided to
make the whole process into some kind of design/life experiment and that
is one way to keep figuring out how to convert a file, or yet another discussion with a printer about which ‘standard’ to use, interesting for ourselves.
Performing our practice is as much part of the project as the actual books,
posters, flyers etc. we produce.
One way a shift of tools can open up new ways of doing graphic design, is
because it makes you immediately aware of the ‘resistance’ of digital material. At the point we can’t make things work, we start to consider formats,
standards and other limitations as ingredients for creative work. We are
quite excited for example about exploring dynamic design for print in SVG,
a by-product of our battle with converting files from Scalable Vector Format
into Portable Document Format.
Free Software allows you to engage on many levels with the technologies
and processes around graphic design. When you work through it’s various
interfaces, stringing tools together, circumventing bugs and/or gaps in your
own knowledge, you understand there is more to be done than contributing
code in C++. It is an invitation to question assumptions of utility, standards
and usability. This is exactly the stuff design is made of.

Following this, what kind of team have you built up, and what new competencies
have you had to develop?

The core of OSP is five people 8 , and between us we mix amongst others typography, layout, cartography, webdesign, software development, drawing,
4
5
6
7
8

image manipulation
page layout
vector editing
font editor
Pierre Huyghebaert, Harrisson, Yi Jiang, Nicolas Malevé and me

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programming, open content licensing and teaching. Around it is a larger
group of designers, a mathematician, a computer scientists and several Free
Software coders that we regularly exchange ideas with.
It feels we often do more unlearning than learning; a necessary and interesting skill to develop is dealing with incompetence – what can it be else than
a loss of control? In the mean time we expand our vocabulary so we can fuel
conversations (imaginary and real life) with people behind GIMP, Inkscape,
Scribus etc.; we learn how to navigate our computers using commandline
interfaces as well as KDE, GNOME and others; we find out about file formats and how they sometimes can and often cannot speak to each other;
how to write manuals and interact with mailing lists. The real challenge is
to invent situations that subvert strict divisions of labour while leaving space
for the kind of knowledge that comes with practice and experience.
Open fonts seem to be the beginnings of a big success, how does it fit into the
working practices of typographers or the material with which they work?

Type design is an extraordinary area where Free Software and design naturally meet. I guess this area of work is what kernel coding is for a Linux
developer: only a few people actually make fonts but many people use them
all the time. Software companies have been inconsistent in developing proprietary tools for editing fonts, which has made the work of typographers
painfully difficult at times. This is why George Williams decided to develop
FontForge, and release it under a BSD license: even if he stops being interested, others can take over. FontForge has gathered a small group of fans
who through this tool, stay into contact with a more generous approach to
software, characters and typefaces.
The actual material of a typeface has since long migrated from poisonous
lead into sets of ultra light vector drawings, held together in complicated
kerning systems. When you take this software-like aspect as a startingpoint,
many ways to collaborate (between programmers and typographers; between
people speaking different languages) open up, as long as you let go of the
uptight licensing policies that apply to most commercial fonts. I guess the
image of the solitary master passing on the secret trade to his devoted pupils
does not sit very well with the invitation to anyone to run, copy, distribute,
study, change and improve. How open fonts could turn the patriarchal guild
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system inside out that has been carefully preserved in the closed world of
type design, is obviously of interest as well.
Very concretely, computer-users really need larger character sets that allow
for communication between let’s say Greek, Russian, Slovak and French.
These kinds of vast projects are so much easier to develop and maintain in
a Free Software way; the DéJàVu font project shows that it is possible to
work with many people spread over different countries modifying the same
set of files with the help of versioning systems like CVS.
But what it all comes down to probably ... Donald Knuth is the only person
I have seen both Free Software developers and designers wear on their Tshirts.

The cultures around each of the pieces of software are quite distinct. People
often lump all F/LOSS development into one kind of category, whereas even in
the larger GNU/Linux distros there is quite a degree of variation, but with the
smaller more specialised projects this is perhaps even more the case. How would
you characterise the scenes around each of these applications?

The kinds of applications we use form a category in themselves. They are
indeed small projects so ‘scene’ fits them better than ‘culture’. Graphics
tools differ from archetypal Unix/Linux code and language based projects
in that Graphical User Interfaces obviously matter and because they are used
in a specialised context outside its own developers circle. This is interesting because it makes F/LOSS developer communities connect with other
disciplines (or scenes?) such as design, printing and photography.
A great pleasure in working with F/LOSS is to experience how software
can be done in many ways; each of the applications we work with is alive
and particular. I’ll just portray Scribus and Inkscape here because from the
differences between these two I think you can imagine what else is out there.
The Scribus team is rooted in the printing and pre-press world and naturally
their first concern is to create an application that produces reliable output.
Any problem you might run in to at a print shop will be responded to
immediately, even late night if necessary. Members of the Scribus team are
a few years older than average developers and this can be perceived through
the correct and friendly atmosphere on their mailing list and IRC channel,
and their long term loyalty to this complex project. Following its more
industrial perspective, the imagined design workflow built in to the tool is
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linear. To us it feels almost pre-digital: tasks and responsibilities between
editors, typesetters and designers are clearly defined and lined up. In this
view on design, creative decisions are made outside the application, and the
canvas is only necessary for emergency corrections. Unfortunately for us,
who live of testing and trying, Scribus’ GUI is a relatively underdeveloped
area of a project that otherwise has matured quickly.
Inkscape is a fork of a fork of a small tool initially designed to edit vector
files in SVG format. It stayed close to its initial starting point and is in a way
a much more straightforward project than Scribus. Main developer Bryce
Harrington describes Inkscape as a relatively unstructured coming and going
of high energy collective work much work is done through a larger group of
people submitting small patches and it’s developers community is not very
tightly knit. Centered around a legible XML format primarily designed
for the web, Inkscape users quickly understand the potential of scripting
images and you can find a vibrant plug in culture even if the Inkscape code
is less clean to work with than you might expect. Related to this interest
in networked visuals, is the involvement of Inkscape developers in the Open
Clip Art project and ccHost, a repository system wich allows you to upload
images, sounds and other files directly from your application. It is also no
surprise that Inkscape implemented a proper print dialogue only very late,
and still has no way to handle CMYK output.
There’s a lot of talk about collaboration in F/LOSS development, something
very impressive, but often when one talks to developers of such software there is
a lot to discuss about the rather less open ways in which power struggles over the
meaning or leadership of software projects are carried out by, for instance, hiding
code in development, or by only allowing very narrowly technical approaches to
development to be discussed. This is only one tendency, but one which tends to
remain publicly under-discussed. How much of this kind of friction have you
encountered by acting as a visible part of a new user community for F/LOSS?

I can’t say we feel completely at home in the F/LOSS world, but we have not
encountered any extraordinary forms of friction yet. We have been allowed
the space to try our own strategies at overcoming the user-developer divide:
people granted interviews, accepted us when we invited ourselves to speak
at conferences and listened to our stories. But it still feels a bit awkward,
and I sometimes wonder whether we ever will be able to do enough. Does
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constructive critique count as a contribution, even when it is not delivered
in the form of a bug report? Can we please get rid of the term ‘end-user’?
Most discussions around software are kept strictly technical, even when
there are many non-technical issues at stake. We are F/LOSS enthusiasts
because it potentially pulls the applications we use into some form of public
space where they can be examined, re-done and taken apart if necessary; we
are curious about how they are made because of what they (can) make you
do. When we asked Andreas Vox, a main Scribus developer whether he saw
a relation between the tool he contributed code to, and the things that were
produced by it, he answered: Preferences for work tools and political preference
are really orthogonal. This is understandable from a project-management
point of view, but it makes you wonder where else such a debate should take
place.
The fact that compared to proprietary software projects, only a very small
number of women is involved in F/LOSS makes apparent how openness
and freedom are not simple terms to put in practice. When asked whether
gender matters, the habitual answer is that opportunities are equal and from
that point a constructive discussion is difficult. There are no easy solutions,
but the lack of diversity needs to be put on the roadmap somehow, or as a
friend asked: Where do I file a meta-bug?
Visually, or in terms of the aesthetic qualities of the designs you have developed
would you say you have managed to achieve anything unavailable through the
output of the Adobe empire?

The members of OSP would never have come up with the idea to combine
their aesthetics and skills using Adobe, so that makes it difficult to do a
‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison. Or maybe we should call this an achievement
of Free Software too?
Using F/LOSS has made us reconsider the way we work and sometimes this
is visible in the design we produce, more often in the commissions we take
on or the projects we invest in. Generative work has become part of our
creative suite and this certainly looks different than a per-page treatment;
also deliberate traces of the production process (including printing and prepress) add another layer to what we make.
Of all smaller and larger discoveries, the Spiro toolkit that Free Software
activist, Ghostscript maintainer, typophile and Quaker Raph Levien devel302

ops, must be the most wonderful. We had taken Bézier curves for granted,
and never imagined how the way it is mathematically defined would matter
that much. Instead of working with fixed anchor points and starting from
straight lines that you first need to bend, Spiro is spiral-based and vectors
suddenly have a sensational flow and weight. From Pierre Bézier writing his
specification as an engineer for the Renault car factory to Levien’s Spiro,
digital drawing has changed radically.

You have a major signage project coming up, how does this commission map across
to the ethics and technologies of F/LOSS?

We are right in the middle of it. At this moment ‘The Pavilion of Provisionary
Happiness’ celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Belgian World Exhibition,
is being constructed out of 30.000 beer crates right under the Brussels’
Atomium. That’s a major project done the Belgian way.
We have developed a signage system, or actually a typeface, which is defined
through the strange material and construction work going on on site. We
use holes in the facade that are in fact handles of beer crates as connector
points to create a modular font that is somewhere between Pixacao graffiti
and Cuneiform script. It is actually a play on our long fascination with
engineered typefaces such as DIN 1451; mixing universal application with
specific materials, styles and uses – this all links back to our interest in Free
Software.
Besides producing the signage, OSP will co-edit and distribute a modest
publication documenting the whole process; it makes legible how this temporary yellow cathedral came about. And the font will of course be released
in the public domain.
It is not an easy project but I don’t know how much of it has to do with
our software politics; our commissioners do not really care and also we have
kept the production process quite simple on purpose. But by opening our
sources, we can use the platform we are given in a more productive way; it
makes us less dependent because the work will have another life long after
the deadline has passed.
On this project, and in relation to the seeming omnipresence in F/LOSS of the
idea that this technology is ‘universal’, how do you see that in relation to fonts,
and their longer history of standards?
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That is indeed a long story, but I’ll give it a try. First of all, I think the idea
of universal technology appears to be quite omnipresent everywhere; the
mix-up between ubiquitousness and ‘universality’ is quickly made. In Free
Software this idea gains force only when it gets (con)fused with freedom
and openness and when conditions for access are kept out of the discussion.
We are interested in early typographic standardization projects because their
minimalist modularity brings out the tension between generic systems and
specific designs. Ludwig Goller, a Siemens engineer wo headed the Committee
for German Industry Standards in the 1920s stated that For the typefaces of
the future neither tools nor fashion will be decisive. His committee supervised
the development of DIN 1451, a standard font that should connect economy of use with legibility, and enhance global communication in service of
the German industry. I think it is no surprise that a similar phrasing can be
found in W3C documents; the idea to unify the people of the world through
a common language re-surfaces and has the same tendency to negate materiality and specificity in favour of seamless translation between media and
markets.
Type historian Ellen Lupton brought up the possibility of designing typographic systems that are accessible but not finite nor operating within a
fixed set of parameters. Although I don’t know what she means by using the
term ‘open universal’, I think this is why we are attracted to Free Software:
it has the potential to open up both the design of parameters as well as their
application. Which leads to your next question.
You mentioned the use of generative design just now. How far do you go into
this? Within the generative design field there seem to be a couple of tendencies, one
that is very pragmatic, simply about exploring a space of possible designs through
parametric definition in order to find, select and breed from and tweak a good
result that would not be necessarily imaginable otherwise, the other being more
about the inefible nature of the generative process itself, something vitalist. These
tendencies of not of course exclusive, but how are they inflected or challenged in
your use of generative techniques?

I feel a bit on thin ice here because we only start to explore the area and we
are certainly not deep into algorithmic design. But on a more mundane level
... in the move from print to design for the web, ‘grids’ have been replaced by
‘templates’ that interact with content and context through filters. Designers
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have always been busy with designing systems and formats, 9 but stepped in
to manipulate singular results if necessary.
I referred to ‘generative design’ as the space opening up when you play
with rules and their affordances. The liveliness and specificity of the work
results from various parameters interfering with each other, including the
ones we can get our hands on. By making our own manipulations explicit,
we sometimes manage to make other parameters at play visible too. Because
at the end of the day, we are rather bored by mysterious beauty.

One of the techniques OSP uses to get people involved with the process and the
technologies is the ‘Print Party’, can you say what that is?

‘Print Parties’ are irregular public performances we organise when we feel
the need to report on what we discovered and where we’ve been; as antiheroes of our own adventures we open up our practice in a way that seems
infectious. We make a point of presenting a new experiment, of producing
something printed and also something edible on site each time; this mix of
ingredients seems to work best. ‘Print Parties’ are how we keep contact with
our fellow designers who are interested in our journey but have sometimes
difficulty following us into the exotic territory of BoF, Version Control and
GPL3.

You state in a few texts that OSP is interested in glitches as a productive force in
software, how do you explain this to a printer trying to get a file to convert to the
kind of thing they expect?
Not! Printing has become cheap through digitization and is streamlined to
the extreme. Often there is literally no space built in to even have a second
look at a differently formatted file, so to state that glitches are productive
is easier said than done. Still, those hickups make processes tangible, especially at moments you don’t want them to interfere.
For a book we are designing at the moment, we might partially work by
hand on positive film (a step now also skipped in file-to-plate systems). It
makes us literally sit with pre-press professionals for a day and hopefully we
can learn better where to intervene and how to involve them into the process.
To take the productive force of glitches beyond predictable aesthetics, means

9

it really made me laugh to think of Joseph Müller Brockman as vitalist

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most of all a shift of rhythm – to effect other levels than the production
process itself. We gradually learn how our ideas about slow cooking design
can survive the instant need to meet deadlines. The terminology is a bit
painful but to replace ‘deadline’ by ‘milestone’, and ‘estimate’ by ‘roadmap’
is already a beginning.

One of the things that is notable about OSP is that the problems that you encounter are also described, appearing on your blog. This is something unusual
for a company attempting to produce the impression of an efficient ‘solution’.
Obviously the readers of the blog only get a formatted version of this, as a performed work? What’s the thinking here?

‘Efficient solutions’ is probably the last thing we try to impress with, though
it is important for us to be grounded in practice and to produce for real
under conventional conditions. The blog is a public record of our everyday
life with F/LOSS; we make an effort to narrate through what we stumble
upon because it helps us articulate how we use software, what it does to us
and what we want from it; people that want to work with us, are somehow
interested in these questions too. Our audience is also not just prospective
clients, but includes developers and colleagues. An unformatted account,
even if that was possible, would not be very interesting in that respect; we
turn software into fairytales if that is what it takes to make our point.
In terms of the development of F/LOSS approaches in areas outside software,
one of the key points of differentiation has been between ‘recipes’ and ‘food’, bits
and atoms, genotype and phenotype. That is that software moves the kinds of
rivalry associated with the ownership and rights to use and enjoy a physical object
into another domain, that of speed and quality of information, which network
distribution tends to mitigate against. This is also the same for other kinds of
data, such as music, texts and so on. (This migration of rivalry is often glossed
over in the description of ‘goods’ being ‘non-rivalrous’.) Graphic Design however
is an interesting middle ground in a certain way in that it both generates files of
many different kinds, and, often but not always, provides the ‘recipes’ for physical
objects, the actual ‘voedingstof ’, such as signage systems, posters, books, labels and
so on. Following this, do you circulate your files in any particular way, or by
other means attempt to blur the boundary between the recipe and the food?
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We have just finished the design of a font (NotCourier-sans), a derivative of
Nimbus Mono, which is in turn a GPL’ed copy of the well known Courier
typeface that IBM introduced in 1955. Writing a proper licence for it,
opened up many questions about the nature of ‘source code’ in design, and
not only from a legalist perspective. While this is actually relatively simple
to define for a font (the source is the object), it is much less clear what it
means for a signage system or a printed book.
One way we deal with this, is by publishing final results side by side with ingredients and recipes. The raw files themselves seem pretty useless once the
festival is over and the book printed, so we write manuals, stories, histories.
We also experiment with using versioning systems, but the softwares available are only half interesting to us. Designed to support code development,
changes in text files can be tracked up to the minutest detail but unless you
are ready to track binary code, images and document layouts function as
black boxes. I think this is something we need to work on because we need
better tools to handle multiple file formats collaboratively, and some form
of auto-documentation to support the more narrative work.
On the other hand, manuals and licences are surprisingly rich formats if you
want to record how an object came into life; we often weave these kinds
of texts back into the design itself. In the case of NotCourierSans we will
package the font with a pdf booklet on the history of the typeface – mixing
design geneology with suggestions for use.
I think the blurring of boundaries happens through practice. Just like
recipes are linked in many ways to food, 10 design practice connects objects
to conditions. OSP is most of all interested in the back-and-forth between
those two states of design; rendering their interdepence visible and testing
out ways of working with it rather than against it. Hopefully both the food
and the recipe will change in the process.

10

tasting, trying, writing, cooking

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This brief interview with Ludivine Loiseau and Pierre Marchand
from OSP was made in December 2012 by editor and designer
Manuel Schmalstieg. It unravels the design process of Aether9,
a book based on the archives of a collaborative adventure exploring the danger zones of networked audio-visual live performance. The text was published in that same publication.
Can you briefly situate the collective work of Open Source Publishing
(OSP)?

OSP is a working group producing graphic design objects using only
Libre and/or Open Source software. Founded in 2006 in the frame of the
arts organisation Constant 1 , the OSP caravan consists today of a dozen
individuals of different backgrounds and practices.
Since how long are you working as a duo, and as a team in OSP?
3 to 4 years.

And how many books have you conceived?

As a team, it’s our first ‘real’ book. We previously worked together on a
somewhat similar project of archive exploration, but without printed material in
the end. 2
Similar in the type of content or in the process?

The process: we developed scripts to ‘scrap’ the project archives, but it’s output
was more abstract; we collected the fonts used in all the files and produced a graph
from this process. These archives weren’t structured, so the exploration was less
linear.
You rapidly chose TeX/ConTeXt as a software environment to produce
this book. Was it an obvious choice given the nature of the project, or did you
hesitate between different approaches?

The construction of the book focused on two axes/threads: chronology
and a series of ‘trace-route’ keywords. Within this approach of reading and
navigation using cross-references, ConTeXt appeared as an appropriate tool.
1
2

http://www.constantvzw.org
http://www.ooooo.be/interpunctie/

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The world of TeX 3 is very intriguing, in particular for graphic designers.
It seems to me that it is always a struggle to push back the limits of what is
‘intended’ by the software.
ConTeXt is a constant fight! I wouldn’t say the same about other TeX
system instances. With ConTeXt, we found ourselves facing a very personal
project, because composition decisions are hardcoded to the liking of the package
main maintainer. And when we clash with these decisions, we are in the strange
position of using a tool while not agreeing with its builder.
As a concrete example, we could mention the automatic line spacing
adjustments. It was a struggle to get it right on the lines that include
keywords typeset with our custom ‘traced’ fonts. ConTeXt tried to do better,
and was increasing the line height of those words, as if it wanted to avoid
collisions.
Were you ever worried that what you wanted to obtain was not doable?
Did you reject some choices – in the graphic design, the layout, the structure
– because of software limitations?
Yes. Opting for a two column layout appeared to be quite tough when
filling in the content, as it introduced many gaps. At some point we decided
to narrow the format on a single column. To obtain the two columns
layout in the final output, the whole book was recomposed during the pdfconstruction, through OSPImpose.
This allowed us to make micro adjustments in the end of the production
process, while introducing new games, such as shifting the images on double pages.
What is OSPImpose?
It’s a re-writing of a pdf imposition software that I wrote a couple years ago
for PoDoFo.
Again regarding ConTeXt: this system was used for other OSP works
– notably for the book Verbindingen/Jonctions 10; Tracks in electr(on)ic
fields. 4 Is it currently the main production tool at OSP?
It’s more like an in-depth initiation journey!
But it hasn’t become a standard in our workflow yet. In fact, each
new important book layout project raises each time the question of the
3
4

a software written in 1978 by Donald Knuth
distinguished by the Fernand Baudin Prize 2009

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tool. Scribus and LibreOffice (spreadsheet) are also part of our book making
toolbox.
During our work session with you at Constant Variable, we noticed
that it was difficult to install a sufficiently complete TeX/ConTeXt/Python
environment to be able to generate the book. Is Pierre’s machine still the only
one, or did you manage to set it up on other computers?

Now we all have similar setups, so it’s a generalized generation. But it’s true
that this represented a difficulty at some times.
The source code and the Python scripts created for the book are publicly
accessible on the OSP Git server. Would these sources be realistically reusable? Could other publication projects use parts of the code ? Or, without
any explicit documentation, would it be highly improbable?

Indeed, the documentation part is still on the to-do list. Yet a large part
of the code is quite directly reusable. The code allows to parse different types
of files. E-mails and chat-logs are often found in project archives. Here the
Python scripts allows to order them according to date information, and will
automatically assign a style to the different content fields.

The code itself is a documentation source, as much on concrete aspects, such
as e-mail parsing, than on a possible architecture, on certain coding motives, etc.
And most importantly, is consists in a form of common experience.
Do you think you will reuse some of the general functions/features of
archive parsing for other projects ?
Hard to say. We haven’t anything in perspective that is close to the Aether9
project. But for sure, if the need of such treatment comes up again, we’ll retrieve
these software components.
Maybe for a publication/compilation of OSP’s adventures.

Have there been ‘revelations’, discoveries of unsuspected Python/ConText
features during this development?

I can’t recall having this kind of pleasure. The revelation, at least from
my point of view, happened in the very rich articulation of a graphical intention enacted in programming objects. It remains a kind of uncharted territory,
exploring it is always an exciting adventure.
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Three fonts are used in the book: Karla, Crimson and Consola Mono.
Three pretty recent fonts, born in the webfonts contexts I believe. What
considerations brought you to this choice?
Our typographical choices and researches lead us towards fonts with
different style variations. As the textual content is quite rich and spreads
on several layers, it was essential to have variation possibilities. Also, each
project brings the opportunity to test new fonts and we opted for recently
published fonts, indeed published, amongst others, on the Google font directory. Yet Karla and Crimson aren’t fonts specifically designed for a web
usage. Karla is one of the rare libre grotesque fonts, and it’s other specificity
it that it includes Tamil glyphs.
Apart from the original glyphs specially created for this book, you drew the
Ç glyph that was missing to Karla ... Is it going to be included to its official
distribution?
Oh, that’s a proposal for Jonathan Pinhorn. We haven’t contacted him
yet. For the moment, this cedilla has been snatched from the traced variant
collections.
Were there any surprises when printing? I am thinking in particular of
your choice of a colored ink instead of the usual black, or to the low res quality
(72dpi) of most of the images.
At the end of the process, the spontaneous decision to switch to blue ink was
a guaranteed source of surprise. We were confident that it wouldn’t destroy the
book, and we surely didn’t take too many risks since we were working with low
res images. But we weren’t sure how the images would react to such an offense. It
was an great surprise to see that it gave the book a very special radiance.
What are your next projects?
We are currently operating as an invited collective at the Valence Academy
of Fine Arts in the frame of a series of workshops named ‘Up pen down’.
We’re preparing a performance for the Balsamine theatre 5 on the topic of
Bootstrapping. In April we will travel as a group to Madrid to LGRU 6 and
LGM 7 . We also continually work on ‘Co-position”’, a project for building
a post-gutenberg typographical tool.
5
6
7

http://www.balsamine.be/
http://lgru.net/
the international Libre Graphics Meeting: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2013/

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Performing Libre Graphics

In April 2014 I traveled from Leipzig to the north of
Germany to meet with artist Cornelia Sollfrank. It was
right after the Libre Graphics Meeting, and the impressions from the event were still very fresh. Cornelia had
asked me for a video interview as part of Giving what you
don’t have, 1 a series of conversations about what she refers
to as ‘complex copyright-critical practices’. She was interested in forms of appropriation art that instead of claiming
some kind of ‘super-user’ status for artists, might provide
a platform for open access and Free Culture not imaginable elsewhere. I’ve admired Cornelia’s contributions to
hacker culture for long. She pioneered as a cyberfeminist
in the 1990s with the hilarious and intelligent net-art piece
Female Extension 2 , co-founded Old Boys Network 3 and
developed seminal projects such as the Net Art Generator.
The opportunity to spend two sunny spring days with her
intelligence, humour and cyberfeminist wisdom could not
have come at a better moment.
What is Libre Graphics?

Libre Graphics is quite a large ecosystem of software tools; of people, people
that develop these tools but also people that use these tools; practices, like
how do you work with them, not just how do you make things quickly and
in an impressive way, but also how these tools might change your practice;
and cultural artifacts that result from it. It is all these elements that come
together, I would call Libre Graphics. The term ‘libre’ is chosen deliberately.
1
2
3

http://postmedialab.org/GWYDH
http://artwarez.org/femext/content/femextEN.html
http://www.obn.org/

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Performing Libre Graphics

It is slightly more mysterious than the term ‘free’, especially when it turns up
in the English language. It sort of hints that there is something different,
something done on purpose. And it is also a group of people that are
inspired by Free Software culture, by Free Culture, by thinking about how
to share both their tools, their recipes and the outcomes of all this. Libre
Graphics goes in many directions. But it is an interesting context to work
in, that for me has been quite inspiring for a few years now.

The context of Libre Graphics

The context of Libre Graphics is multiple. I think that I am excited about
it and also part of why it is sometimes difficult to describe it in a short
sentence. The context is design, and people that are interested in design, in
creating visuals, animation, videos, typography ... and that is already multiple contexts, because each of these disciplines have their own histories,
and their own types of people that get touched by them. Then there is
software, people that are interested in the digital material. They say, I am
excited about raw bits and the way a vector gets produced. And that is a
very, almost formal, interest in how graphics are made. Then there is people that do software. They’re interested in programming, in programming
languages, in thinking about interfaces, and thinking about ways software
can become a tool. And then there are people that are interested in Free
Software. How can you make digital tools that can be shared, but also,
how can that produce processes that can be shared. Free Software activists
to people that are interested in developing specific tools for sharing design
and software development processes, like Git or Subversion, those kind of
things. I think the multiple contexts are really special and rich in Libre
Graphics.

Free Software culture

Free Software culture, and I use the term ‘culture’ because I am interested
in, let’s say, the cultural aspect of it, and this includes software. For me
software is a cultural object. But I think it is important to emphasize this,
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because it easily turns into a technocentric approach, which I think is important to stay away from. Free Software culture is the thinking that, when
you develop technology, and I am using technology in the sense that it is
cultural as well to me, deeply cultural, you need to take care as well of sharing the recipes, for how this technology has been developed. This produces
many different other tools, ways of working, ways of speaking, vocabularies, because it changes radically the way we make and the way we produce
hierarchies. It means for example, if you produce a graphic design artifact,
that you share all the source files that were necessary to make it; but you
also share as much as you can, descriptions or narrations of how it came to
be, which does include maybe how much was paid for it, where difficulties
were in negotiating with the printer; and what elements were included, because a graphic design object is usually a compilation of different elements;
what software was used to make it, and where it might have resisted. The
consequences of taking the Free Software culture serious in a design context, means that you care about all these different layers of the work, all the
different conditions that actually made the work happen.

Free Culture

The relationship from Libre Graphics to Free Culture is not always that
explicit. For some people it is enough to work with tools that are released
under a GPL, an open content licence. And there it stops. Even their work
will be released under proprietary licences. For others, it is important to
make the full circle and to think about what the legal status is of the work
they release. That is the more general one. Then, Free Culture, we can use
that very loosely, as in ‘everything that is circulating under conditions that
it can be reused and remade’. That would be my position. Free Culture
is of course also referred to a very specific idea of how that would work,
namely Creative Commons. For myself Creative Commons is problematic, although I value the fact that it exists and has really created a broader
discussion around licences in creative practices. I value that. For me the distinction Creative Commons makes for almost all the licences they promote,
between commercial and non-commercial work, and as a consequence, between professional and amateur work, I find that very problematic. Because
I think one of the most important elements of Free Software culture for me,
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is the possibility for people from different backgrounds, with different skill
sets, to actually engage with the digital artifacts they’re surrounded with.
By making this lazy separation between commercial and non-commercial,
which especially in the context of the web as it is right now, is not really
easy to hold up, seems really problematic. It creates an illusion of clarity
that I think actually makes more trouble than clarity. So I use Free Culture
licences, I use licences that are more explicit about the fact that anyone can
use whatever I produce in any context. Because I think that is where the
real power is of Free Software culture. For me Free Software licences and
all the licences that are around it, because I think there is many different
types and that is interesting, is that they have a viral power built in. So if
you apply a Free Software licence to, for example, a typeface, it means that
someone else, even someone else you don’t know, has the permission and
doesn’t have to ask for a permission, to reuse the typeface, to change it, to
mix it with something else, to distribute it and to sell it. That is one part,
that is already very powerful. But the real secret of such a licence is, that
once this person re-releases the typeface, it means that they need to keep
that same licence and it propagates across the network and that is where it
is really powerful.

Free tools

It is important to use tools that are released under conditions that allow
me to look further than its surface. For many reasons. There is an ethical
reason. It is very problematic I think, as a friend explained last week, to feel
that you’re renting a room in a hotel. That is often the way practitioners
nowadays relate to their tools. They have no right to move the furniture.
They have no right to invite friends to their hotel room. They have to check
out at eleven, etc. it is a very sterile relationship to the tools. That is one
part. The other is that there is little way to come into contact with the
cultural aspects of the tools. Some things that I suspected before starting
to use Free Software tools for my practice, but has been already for almost
ten years, continuously exciting, is the whole, let’s say, all the other elements
around it. The way people organize themselves in conferences, mailing lists,
the kinds of communication that happens, the vocabularies, the histories,
the connections between different disciplines ... And all that is available to
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look at, to work with, to come into contact with; to speak to people that do
these tools and ask them, why is it like this and not like that. And that to
me seems obvious that artists want to have that kind of layered relationship
with their tools, and not just only accept whatever comes out of next door
shop. I have a very different, almost different physical experience of these
tools, because I can enter on many levels. That makes them part of my
practice, not just means to an end. I really can take them into my practice.
That I find interesting, as an artist and as a designer.

Artifacts

The outcomes of this type of practice are different, or at least, let’s say, in
the kind of work I make, try to make and the people I like to work with.
There is obviously also groups of people that would like to do Hollywood
movies with those tools. That is kind of interesting, that that happens.
For me somehow the technological context or conditions that made a work
possible, will always occur in the final result. So, that is one part. And
the other is that the product is never the end. It means that in whatever
way source materials will be released, will be made available, it means that
a product is always the beginning of another product, either by me or by
other people. I think that is two things that you can always see in the kind
of works we make when we do libre-graphics-my-style. When we make a
book, for example, what is already different, is when we start the process, it
is not yet defined what tool we will use. There is a whole array of tools you
can choose from. I mean, books are basically text on paper, and there are
many ways to arrive at that output. For one book we did a few years ago,
we decided for the first time, because we had never used this tool before,
to use TeX, a typesetting system that is developed by Donald Knuth in the
context of academic publishing. That has been around as an almost mythological solution for a perfect typesetting. We were curious about whether
we could use that system that is developed in a very specific context for an
art catalog that we wanted to make. We had to learn how to use this tool,
which meant that we somehow had to learn the vocabulary, understand its
sort of perspective; things that were possible or not, get used to the kind of
humor that is quite terrible in these manuals; accept that certain things that
we thought would be easy, were actually not easy at all; and then understand
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how we could use the things that were popping up or not working or that
were different, how we could use them in our advantage. The final result
is a book that is slightly strange, because there are some mistakes that have
been left in, deliberately or by accident sometimes. The book contains an
extensive description of how it was made. Both visually, like it explains the
technical details of how it was made, but also the description of that learning
process. Another example of how tools, practice and outcomes are somehow
connected, but also the whole politics around it, because often these projects
are also ways of teasing out; ways licences, practice and tools somehow interact, is a project called ‘Sans Guilt’. It is a play with the ‘Gill Sans’ which
is a famous classic typeface that is claimed to be owned by a company called
Monotype. But according to our understanding, they have no right to actually claim this typeface as such. But through their communication they do
so. OSP was invited to work in an art academy in London, where they had
a lead version. And we decided to play with the typeface. The typeface OSP
released has many different versions, not versions as in bold, light etc. but
it has different levels of ‘licencing risk’. One is a straight scan of the prints
that were made at that workshop. Another version is more guilty, in the
sense that it is an extraction from a .pdf using the Monotype Gill. Another
is a redrawn version that takes the matrix, the spacing of a Monotype Gill,
but combines it with a redrawn example. All different variations of this font
touch on different elements of licencing problems that might occur with
typefaces. We sent our experiment to Monotype, because we wanted to hear
from them what they thought. After a few months we received a letter from
a lawyer saying, would you please identify yourself. We decided to write
back as we are, which is, 25 people from 20 different countries with stable
and unstable addresses. This long list probably made that we never heard
anything again, and ‘Sans Guilt’ is still available from our website under an
open font licence. What the is important, the typeface is different, in the
sense that the specimen is not much about showing off how beautiful it will
look in any context, but has the description of the process, the motivation
of why we did it, the letter we sent to Monotype, the response we got, ...
The whole packaging of the font becomes then a way of speaking about all
these layers that are in our practice.

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Libre fonts

A very exciting part of Libre Graphics is the Libre Font movement, which
is strong and has been strong for a long time. Fonts are the basic building
blocks of how graphics come to life. When you type something, it is there.
And the fact that that part of the work is free, is important on many levels.
Things you often don’t think about when you speak English and you stay
within a limited character set, is that, when you live in let’s say India, the
language you speak is not available as a digital typeface, meaning that when
you want to produce a book in the tools that are available or publish it
online, your language has no way of expressing itself. That has to do with
commercial interests, laws, ways the technical infrastructure has been built.
By understanding that it is important that you can express yourself in the
language and with the characters you need, it is also obvious that that part
needs to be free. Fonts are also interesting because they exist on many
levels. They exist in your system; they’re almost software because they’re
quite complicated objects; they appear in your screen, they are when you
print a document; they are there all the time. We consider the alphabet as
a totally accessible and available and a universal right to have the alphabet
at our disposal. So it is about ‘freeing the A’, you know. That’s quite a
beautiful energy. I think that has made the Libre Font movement very
strong. Something that has happened the last years and brings up new
problems and potential areas to work on, is fonts available for the web.
Web fonts have really exploded the amount of free fonts available. Before,
fonts were always, let’s say, when they were used, tied to a document, and
there was some kind of fantasy about that you could hold them, you could
somehow contain them, licence them and keep them in check. With the
web that idea has gone. And many people have decided to liberate their
fonts to be able to make them usable for a website. Because if you think
about it, if you use a font on a website, it means that it has to be able to
travel everywhere. Everyone has to be able to look at what the font does,
but it is not just an output. It is not just an endpoint. The font is active,
it means it is available. In theory, any font that appears on the web is both
display and program. By displaying the page, you need to run the font.
That means the font needs to be available as a source and as a result. That
means you have to publish your font. This has really created a big boom in
the last few years in Free Fonts, because that is the easiest way to deal with
that problem: allow people to download these fonts, but in a way that keeps
authorship clear, that keeps genealogy clear, and also propagates then the
possibility of making new fonts based on someone else’s work.
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Free artifacts / open standards

It took me a while to figure this out. For me it was obvious that if you would
use Free Software, you would produce free artifacts. It seems obvious, but it
is not at all the case. There is full-fledged commercial production happening
with these tools. But one thing that keeps the results, the outcomes of these
projects freer than most commercial tools, is that there is really an emphasis
on open document formats. That is extremely important, because first of
all, it is very obvious that the documents that you produce with the tool,
should not belong to the software vendor. They are yours. And to be able
to own your own documents, you need to be able to inspect how they’re
produced. I know many tragic stories of designers that lost documents
because they could never open them again. There is really an emphasis
and a lot of work on making sure that the documents produced from these
tools remain ‘inspectable’, are documented, that either you can open them
in another tool or could develop a tool to have these files available for you.
It is really part and parcel of Free Software culture, that you care about that
what generates your artifact, but also the materiality of your artifact. Open
standards are important. Or maybe let’s say it is is important that file formats
are documented and can be understood. What is interesting to see is that in
this whole Libre Graphics world there is also a strong tradition of reverse
engineering, document activism, I would call it. They claim: documents need
to be free, and we will risk breaking the law to be able to understand how nonfree documents actually are constructed. They are really working on trying to
understand non-free documents, to be able to read them and to be able to
develop tools for them, that they can be reused and remade. The difference
between a free and a non-free document is that, for example, an InDesign
file, which is the result of a commercial product, there is no documentation
available of how this file works. This means that the only way to open the
document, is with that particular program. It means there is a connection
between that what you’ve made and the software you used to produce it. It
also means that if the software updates or the licence runs out, you will not
have access to your own file. It means it is fixed. You can never change it
and you can never allow anyone else to change it. An open document format
has documentation. That means that not only the software that created it,
is available, and in that way you can understand how it was made, but also
there is independent documentation available that whenever a project, like
a software, doesn’t work anymore, or is too old to be run, or you don’t have
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it available, you have other ways of understanding the document and being
able to open it and reuse and remake it. What is important, is that around
these open formats, you see a whole ecosystem exists of tools to inspect, to
create, to read, to change, to manipulate these formats. I think it is very
easy to see how around InDesign files this culture does not exist at all.

Sharing practise / re-learn

This way of working changes the way you learn, and therefore the way you
teach. And as many of us have understood the relation between learning
and practice, we’ve all been somehow involved in education. Many of us are
teaching in formal design or art education. And it is very clear how those
traditional schools are really not fit for the type of learning and teaching that
needs to happen around Libre Graphics. One of the problems we run into, is
the fact that validation systems are really geared towards judging individuals.
And our type of practice is always multiple. It is always about things that
happen with many people. And it is really difficult to inspire students to
work that way, and at the same time know that at the end of the day, they’ll
be judged on what they produced as an individual. In traditional education
there is always a separation between teaching technology and practice. You
have, in different ways, you have the studio practice, and then you have the
workshops. And it is very difficult to make conceptual connections between
the two. We end up trying to make that happen, but it is clearly not made
for that. And then there is the problem of hierarchies between tutor and
student, that are hard to break in formal education, just because the setup is,
even in very informal situations, that someone comes to teach and someone
else comes to be taught. And there is no way to truly break that hierarchy,
because that is the way a school works. For years we are thinking about how
to do teaching differently or how to do learning differently, and last year, for
the first time, we organized a summer school. Just like a kind of experiment
to see if we could learn and teach differently. The title, the name of the
school is Relearn. Because the sort of relearning for yourself but also to
others, through teaching learning, has become really a good methodology,
it seems.
If I say ‘we’, that’s always a bit uncomfortable, because I like to be clear about
who that is, but when I’m speaking here, there is many ‘wes’ in my mind.
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Performing Libre Graphics

There is a group of designers called OSP. They have started in 2006 with
the simple decision to not use any proprietary software anymore for their
work. And from that this whole set of questions and practices and methods developed. Right now, that’s about twelve people working in Brussels,
having a design practice. I am lucky to be honory member of this group.
I’m in close contact with them, but I’m not actively working with the design
group. Another ‘we’, an overlapping ‘we’, is Constant, an association for
arts and media active in Brussels since 1996. Or 1997 maybe. Our interest
is more in mixing Copyleft thinking, Free Software thinking and feminism.
In many ways that intersects with OSP but they might phrase it in a different way. Another ‘we’ is the Libre Graphics community, which is even a
more uncomfortable ‘we’. Because it includes engineers that would like to
conquer the world ... and small hyper intelligent developers that creep out
of their corners to talk about the very strange worlds they’re creating. Or
typographers that care about universal typefaces, or ... I mean there is many
different people that are involved in that world. I think for this conversation, the ‘wes’ are: OSP, Constant and the Libre Graphics community,
whatever that is.

Libre Graphics annual meeting Leipzig 2014

We worked on a Code of conduct, which is something that seems to appear
in Free Software or tech conferences more and more. It comes a bit from
US context. We have started to understand that the fact that Free Software
is free, doesn’t mean that everyone feels welcome. For long there have been
and there still are large problems with diversity in this community. The
excitement about freedom has led people to think that people that were not
there would probably not want to be there and therefore had no role to be
there. For example, the fact that there are not a lot of women active in Free
Software, a lot less than in proprietary software, which is quite painful if
you think about it. It has to do with this sort of cyclical effect of because
women are not there, they will probably not be interested, and because they’re
not interested, they might not be capable or feel capable of being active. So they
might not belong. There is also a very brutal culture of harassment, of
racist and sexist language, of using imagery that is let’s say unacceptable,
and that needs to be dealt with. Over the last two years I think, documents
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like Codes of conduct have started to come up from feminists that are active
in this world, like Geek feminism or the Ada initiative, as a way to deal
with this. And what it does, is it describes ... it is slightly pompous, in the
sense that it describes your values. But it is a way to acknowledge the fact
that these communities have a problem with harassment, first. That they
explicitly say we want diversity, which is important. That it gives very clear
and practical guidelines for what someone that feels harassed can do, who
he or she can speak to, and what will be the consequences. Meaning that
it takes away the burden, at least as much as possible, from someone that is
harassed to defend actually the gravity of the case.

Art as integrative concept

For me calling myself an artist is useful, is very useful. I’m not busy with
let’s say, the constitutional art context. That doesn’t help me, at all. But
what does help me is the figure of the artist, the kinds of intelligences that
I sort of project on myself and I use from others and my colleagues, before
and contemporary. Because it allows me to not have too many ... to be able
to define my own context and concepts, without forgetting practice. And I
think art is one of the rare places that allows this. Not only allows it, but
actually rigorously asks for it. It is really wanting me to be explicit about my
historical connections, my way of making, my references, my choices, that
are part of the situation I build. And the figure of the artist is a very useful
toolbox in itself. And I think I use it, more than I would have thought. It
allows me to make these cross connections in a productive way.

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The making of Conversations was on many levels a process of dialogue, between people, processes, and systems.
Xavier Klein and Christoph Haag were as much involved
in editorial decisions as they were in creating an experimental platform that would allow us to produce a publication in a way true to the content of the conversations
it would contain. In August 2014 we discussed the ideas
behind their designs and the status of the systems they
were developing for the book that you are reading right
now.
I wanted to ask you Xavier, how did you end up in Germany?
It’s a long story, so I’ll make it short. I benefit from the Leonardo program, a
scholarship to do an internship abroad. So I searched for graphic design studios
that use Open Source and Free Software. I asked OSP first, but they said No.
I didn’t know LAFKON at this time, and a friend told me: Hey there is this
graphic design studio in Germany, so I asked and they said Yes. So I was
happy. ( laughs)
How did you start working on this book?

I thought it would be nice to have a project during Xavier’s stay in Augsburg
with a specific outcome. Something going beyond pure experimentation.
So I asked Constant if there were any projects that need to be worked on.
And I’m really happy with the Conversations publication, because it is a
good mixture. There is the technical experiment, how you would approach
something like this using Free Software. And there is the editing side.
To read all these opinions and reflections. It’s really interesting from the
content side, at least for me – I don’t dare to speak for Xavier. So that’s
basically how it started.
You developed a constellation of tools that together are producing the book.
Can you explain what the elements are, how this book is made?
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We decided in the beginning to use Etherpad for the editing. A lot of
documentation during Constant events was done with Etherpad and I found
its very direct access to editing quite inspiring. Earlier this year we prepared a
workshop for the Libre Graphics Meeting, where we’d have a transformation
from Etherpad pages to a printable .pdf. The idea was to somehow separate
the content editing and the rendering. Basically I wanted to follow some
kind of ‘pull logic’. At a certain point in the process, there is an interface
where you can pull out something without the need to interfere too much
with the inner workings of this part. There is the stable part, the editing on
the Etherpad, and there is something, that can be more experimental and
unstable which transforms the content to again a stable, printable version. I
tried to create a custom markdown dialect, meant to be as simple as possible.
It should reduce to some elements, the elements that are actually needed.
For example if we have an interview, what is required from the content side?
We have text and changing speakers. That’s more or less the most important
informations.
So on the first level, we have this simple format and from there the transformation process starts. The idea was to have a level, where basically anybody,
who knows how to use a text editor, can edit the text. But at the same
time it should have more layers of complexity. It actually can get quite
complex during the transformation process. But it should always have this
level, where it’s quite simple. So just text and for example this one markup
element for ok now the speaker changes.
In the beginning we experimented with differents tools, basically small
scripts to perform all kinds of layout task. Xavier for example prepared a
hotglue2svg converter. After that, we thought, why don’t we try to connect different approaches? Not only the very strict markdown to TeX to
.pdf transformations, but to think about, under which circumstances you
would actually prefer a canvas-based approach. What can you do on a canvas
that you can’t do or is much harder with a markup language.
It seems you are developing an adhoc markup language? Is that related to
what you wrote in the workshop description for Operating Systems: 1 Using
operating systems as a metaphor, we try to imagine systems that are both
structured and open?

Yes. The idea was to have these connected/disconected parts. So you have
the part where the content is edited in collaboration and you have the transformer script running separately on the individuals’ computers. For me this
1

http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2014/program/

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solved in a way the problem of stability. You can use a quite elaborated,
reliable software like Etherpad and derive something from it without going
to its inner workings. You just pull the content from it, without affecting
the software too much. And you have the part, where it can get quite experimental and unreliable, without affecting all collaborators. Because the
process runs on your own computer and not on the server.
The markup concept comes from the documentation of a video streaming
workshop in Linz. There we wanted to have the possibility to write the
documentation collaboratively during the workshop and we needed also to
solve problems like How about the inclusion of images? That is where the first
markup element came from, which basically just was was a specific line of
text, which indicates ‘here should be this/that image’. If this specific line
appears in the text during the transformation process, it triggers an action
that will look for a specific file in the repository. If the image exists, it will
write the matching macro command for LaTeX. If the image is not in the
repository, it will do nothing. The idea was, that the creation of the .pdf
should happen anyway, e.g. although somebody’s repository might be not at
the latest state and a missing image would prevent LaTeX from rendering
the document. It should also ignore errors, for example if someone mistypes
the name of image or the command. It should not stop the process, but
produce a different output, e.g. without the image.
Why do you think the process should not stop when there’s an error? Why is
that so important?

For me it was important to ensure some kind of feedback, even if there might
be ‘errors’ in the output. Not just ‘not work’. It can be really frustrating,
when the first thing you have to do, is to find and solve a problem – which
can be quite hard with this sort of unprofessional scripts – before there’s is
happening anything at all. So at a certain point, at least something should
appear, even if it’s not necessarily the way it was originally intended. Like
a tolerance for errors, which would even produce something, that maybe
different from what you expected. But it should produce ‘something’.
You imagine a kind of iterative development that we know from working with
code, that allows you to keep differents versions, that keeps flowing in a way.
For example, this specific markup format. It’s basically markdown and
I wanted some more elements, like footnotes and the option to include
citations and comments. I find it quite handy, when you write software,
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that you have the possibility to include comments that are not part of the
actual output, but part of the working process. I also enjoy this while
writing text (e.g. with LaTeX), because I can keep comments or previous
versions or drafts. So I really have my working version and transform this
to some kind of output.
But back to the etherpash workshop. Commands are basically comments
that will trigger some action, for example the inclusion of a graphic or
changing the font or anything. These commands are referenced in a separate
file, so everybody can have different versions of the commands on their own
machine. It would not affect the other people. For example, if you wanted
to have a much more elaborated GRAFIK command, you could write it and
use it within your transformer of the document or you could introduce new
commands, that are written on the main pad, but would be ignored for
other people, because they have a different reference file. Does this make
sense?
Yes. In a way, there are a lot of grey zones. There are elements that are
global and elements that are local; elements can easily go parallel and none
of the commands actually has always the same output, for everyone.

They can, but they do not need to. You can stick to the very basic version
that comes directly from the repository. You could use this version to create
a .pdf in the ‘original’ way, but you can easily change it on different levels.
You can change the Bash commands that are triggered by the transformer
script, you can work on the LaTeX macros or change the script itself. I
found it quite important to have different levels of complexity. You may go
deeper, but you do not necessarily have to. The Etherpad content is the very
top level. You don’t have to install a software on your computer, you can
just open up a browser and edit the text. So this should make the access to
collaboration easier. Because for a lot of experimental software you spend a
lot of time to get it even running. Most often you have a very steep learning
curve and I found it interesting, to separate this learning curve in a way. So
you have different layers and if you really want to reconfigure on a deep level,
you can, but you do not necessarily have to.
I guess you are talking about collaboration across different levels of complexity, where different elements can transform the final outcome. But if you
take the analogy of CSS, or let’s say a Content Management System that
generates HTML, you could say that this also creates divisions of labour. So
rather than making collaboration possible, it confines people to to different
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files. How do you think your systems invite people to take part in different
levels? Are these layers porous at all? Can they easily slip between different
roles, let’s say an editor, a typographer and a programmer?
Up to a certain extent it’s like a division of labour. But if you call it a
separation of tasks, it makes definitely sense for me. It can be quite hard, if
you have to take over responsability for everything at the same time. So it
makes sense for me, also for collaboration, to offer this separation. Because
it can be good to have the possibility not to have to deal with the whole
system and everything at the same time. You should be able to do so, but
you should not necessarily have to. I think this is important, because a lot
of frustration regarding Free Software systems comes from the necessity to
go to the deep level at an early stage. I mean it’s an interesting problem.
The promise of convenience is quite hard, because most times is does not
really work. And it’s also fine that it doesn’t really work. At the same time
it’s frightening for people to get into it and so I think, it’s good to do this
step by step and also to have an easy top level opportunity to go into, for
example, programming. This is also a thing I became really interrested in.
The principle of the commandline to ‘extend usage into programming’. 2
You do not have to have a development environment and then you compile
software and then you have software, but you have this flexible interface for
your daily tasks. If you really need to go a deeper level, you can, at least with
Free Software. But you don’t have to ... compile your kernel every time.

Not every time! What I find interesting about your work is that you prefer not
to conceal any layers. References, commands, markup hints at the existence
of other layers, and the potential to go somewhere else. I wanted you to ask
about your fascination or interest in something ‘old school’ as Bash scripting.
Why is it so interesting?

Maybe at first point, it’s a bit of a fascination for the obscure. That normally,
as a graphic designer you wouldn’t think of using the commandline for your
work. When I started to use GNU/Linux, I’d try to stay away from the terminal. Which is basically, as I realised pretty soon, not possible. 3 At some
point, Bash scripting became really fascinating, because of the possibility to
use automation to correct or add functionalities. With the commandline
it’s easy to automate repetitive tasks, e.g. you can write a small script that
2
3

Florian Cramer. (echo echo) echo (echo): Command Line Poetics, 2007
let’s say hard

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creates a separate .svg file for each layer in a .svg file 4 , convert this separated .svg files to .pdf files 5 and combine the .pdf files to a multipage
.pdf 6 . Just by collecting commands you’d normally type on your commandline interface. So in this case, automation helps to work around a missing
multipage support in inkscape. Not by changing the application itself, but
by plugging something ‘on top’ of it. I like to think of the Bash as glue
between different applications. So if we have a look now at the setup for
the conversations publication, we may see that Bash makes it really easy to
develop own configurations and setups. I actually thought about prefering
the word ‘setup’ to ‘writing software’ ...

Are you saying you prefer setup ‘over’ configuration?

Setup or configuration of software ‘over’ actually writing software. Because
for me it’s often more about connecting different applications. For example,
here we have a browser-based text editor, from which the content is automatically pulled and transformed via text-transform tools and then rendered
as a .pdf. What I find interesting, is that the scripts in between may actually be not very stable, but connect two stables parts. One is the Etherpad,
where the export function is taken ‘as is’ and you’ve got the final state of a
.pdf. In between, I try to have this flexible thing, that just needs to work
at this moment, in my special case. I mean certain scripts may reach quite
an amount of stability, but not necessarily. So it’s very good to have this
fixed state at the end.

You mean the .pdf?

I mean the .pdf, because ... These scripts are quite personal software and
so I don’t really think about other users beside me. For me it’s a whole
different subject to go to the usability level. That’s maybe also a cause for
the open state of the scripts. It would not make much sense – if I want to
have the opportunity for other people to make use of these things – to have
black boxes. Because for this, they are much too fragile. They can be taken
over, but there is no promise of ... convenience? 7 And it’s also important
for myself, because the setups are really tailored to a specific use case and
4
5
6
7

using sed, stream editor for filtering and transforming text
using inkscape on the commandline
using pdftk
... distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without
even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. Free Software Foundation. GNU General Public License, 2007

338

therefore more or less temporary. So I need to be able to read and adapt
them myself.
I know that you usually afterwards you provide a description of how the collage
was made. You publish the scripts, and sketches and intermediary outcomes.
So it seems that usability is more in how you give access to the process rather
than the outcome. Or would you say that software is the outcome?

Actually for me the process is the more interesting part of the work. A lot of
the projects are maybe more like a proof of concept, than finished pieces of
software. I often reuse parts of these setups or software pieces, so it’s more
collections of ‘How to do something’ then really a finished thing, that’s now
suitable to produce this or that.
I’m just wondering, looking at your designs, if you would like that layering,
this unstability to be somehow legible in the .pdf or the printed object?

I don’t think that this unstability is really legible. Because in the process
there’s a certain point where definitive decisions are taken. It’s also part of
the concept. You make decisions and that make the final state of the object
what it is. And if you want to get back to the more flexible part, then you
would really have to get back. So I don’t actually think that it is legible in
the final output, on the first sight, that it is based on a very fluid working
process. And for me that’s quite ok. It’s also important for me – because
I tend not to do so – to take a decision at a certain point. But that’s not
necessarily the ultimate decision and therefore it’s also important to keep
the option open to redefine ... ‘the thing’.

What you’re saying, is that you can be decisive in your design decisions because
the outcome could also be another. You could always regenerate the .pdf
with other decisions.
Yes. For example, I would regenerate the .pdf with the same decisions,
another person maybe would take different decisions. But that’s one step
before the final object. For example, if we do not talk about the .pdf, but
we actually talk about the book, then it’s very clear, that there are decisions,
that need to be taken or that have been taken. And actually I like the feeling
of convenience when things get finished. They are done. Not configurable
forever.

( laughs) That’s convenient, if things get done!
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For this specific book, you have made a few decisions, for example your selection of fonts is particular.
Xavier, can you say something about the typography of Conversations?

Huuumn yep, for the typographic decisions ... in the beginning we searched for
fancy fonts, but in a way came back to use very classic fonts, respectively one classic
font. So the Junicode 8 for the text and the OCR-A 9 for anything else. Because
we decided to focus on testing different ways of layouting and use the fonts as a
way to keep a certain continuity between the parts. We thought this can be more
interesting, than to show that we can find a lot of beautiful, fancy fonts.

So in the beginning, we thought about having a different font for every
speaker, but sooner or later we realised that it would be good to have something that keeps the whole thing together. Right now, this are the two
fonts. The Junicode, which is a font for medievalists, and the OCR-A,
which is a optical character recognition font from the early age of computer technology. So the hypothesis was, to have this combination – a very
classical typeface inspired by the 16th century and a typeface optimized for
machine reading – that maybe will produce an interesting clash of two different approaches. While at the same time providing a continuous element
throughout the book. But that still has to be proven in the final layout.

I find it interesting that both fonts in their own way are somehow conversational. They are both used in situations where one system needs to talk to
another.

Yeah, definitely in a way. They are both optimised for a special usage, which,
by the way, isn’t the usage of our case. One for the display of medieval
texts, where you have to have lot of different signs and ligatures and ... that’s
the Junicode. The other one, the OCR-A, is optimized to be legible by
machines. So that are two different directions of conversation. And they’re
both Free and Open Source fonts ...
And for the layout? How are the divider pages going to be constructed?

For the divider pages, it’s an application ‘Built with Processing’, done by
Benjamin 10 . In a way, it’s a different approach, because it’s a software with
an extensive Graphical User Interface, with a lot of options. So it’s different
8
9

10

http://junicode.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocr-a-font/
Stephan

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from the very modular, connective approach. There we decided to have this
software, which is directly controlled by the controller, the person who uses
it. And again, there is this moment of definitive decision. Ok, this is exactly
how I want the title pages to look. And then they are put in a fixed state.
At the same time, the software will be part of the repository, to be usable
as a tool. So it’s a very ... not a ‘very classic’ ... approach. To write ‘your’
software for ‘your’ very specific use case. In a more monolithic way ...
Just to add this. In this custom markdown dialect, I decided at a point
to include a command, which is INCLUDEPAGES, where you can provide
a .pdf file via an url to be included in the document. So the .pdf may
be stored anywhere, as long as it is accessible over the internet. I found
this an interesting opportunity for collaboration. Because if somebody does
not want to stick to the grid given by the LaTeX configuration or to this
kind of working in general, this person could create a .pdf, store it online,
reference it and the file will be included. This can be a very disconnected
way of contributing to the final book. And that’s also a thing we’re now
trying to test ourselves. Because in the beginning we developed a lot of
different little scripts, for example the hotglue2svg converter. And right
now we’re trying to extend this. For example, to create one interview in
Scribus and include the .pdf made with Scribus. To also test ourselves
different approaches.
This book will be both a collage and have a overall, predefined structure
provided by the lay-out engine?

I’m trying to make pragmatic use of the functionalities of LaTeX, which is
used for the final compiling of the .pdf. So for example, also ready-made
.pdf files included into the final document are referenced in the table of
contents.

Can you explain that again ?

Separate .pdfs, that are included into the final document will be referenced
in the table of contents. We can still make use of the automatic generation
of page numbers in the table of contents, so there it goes together. There
are certain borders, for example since the .pdfs are more like finished documents, indexing will probably not work. Because even if you can extract
references from the .pdf, I didn’t find a way until now, how to find out the
page number in a reliable way. There you also realise, that you can do much
more with the plain text sources than you can do with a finished document.
341

But I think that’s ok. In this case you wouldn’t to have a keyword reference
to the .pdf, while it’s still in the table of contents ...
What if someone would want to use one of these interviews for something else?
How could this book becoming source for an another publication?
That’s also an advantage of the quite simple source format on the Etherpad.
It can be easily converted to e.g. simple markdown, just by a little script.
I found this quite important – because at this point we’re putting quite an
amount of work into the preparation of the texts – to have it not in a format
that is not parseable. I really wanted to keep the documents transformable
in a easy way. So now you could just have a ~fiveliner, that will pull the text
from the Etherpad and convert it to simple markdown or to HTML.
Wonderful.

If you have a more or less clean source format, then it’s in most cases easy
to convert it to different formats. For example, the Evan Roth interview,
you provided as a ConTeXt file. So with some text manipulation, it was
easy to do the transformation to our Etherpad markup. And it would be
harder if the content is stored as an Open Office document, but still feasible.
.pdf in a way is the worst case, because it’s much harder to extract usable
content again, depending on the creator. So I think it’s important to keep
the content in a readable and understandable source format.

Xavier, what is going to happen next?

Right now, I’m the guy who tests on Scribus, Inkscape. But I don’t know if it’s
the answer to your question.

I was just curious because you have a month to work on this still, so I was
wondering ... are there other things you are testing or trying ?

Yeah, I think I want to finish the hotglue2svg.sh, I mean it’s my first
Bash program, I want to raise my baby. ( laughs) But right now I’m trying to
find different ways of layouts. The first one is the one with the big squares, the
big unicode characters and all the arrows. So it’s very complicated, but it’s the
attempt to find an another way to express a conversation in text.

Can you say more about that ?

Because in the beginning, my first try was to keep the ‘life’ of a conversation in
the text with some things, like indentation or with graphic things, like the choice
342

of the unicode characters. If this can be a way to express a conversation. Because
it’s hard to it with programming stuff so we’re using GUI based software.

It’s a bit coming to the question, what you are doing differently, if you work
with a direct visual feedback. So you don’t try to reduce the content to get
it through a logical structure. Because that’s in a way how the markdown
to LaTeX transformation is doing it. You set certain rules, that may be in
special cases soft rules, but you really try to establish a logical structure and
have a set of rules and apply them. For me, it’s also an interesting question.
If you think of grid based graphic design, where you try to introduce a set
of rules in the beginning and then to keep for the rest of the project, that’s
in a way a very obvious case for computation. Where you just apply a set of
rules. With this application of rules you are a lot confronted in daily graphic
design. And this is also a way of working you learn during your studies.
Stick to certain logical or maybe visual grids. And so now the question is:
What’s the difference if you do a really visual layout. Do you deal differently
with the content, does it make sense, or if you’re just always coming back
to a certain grid, then you might as well do it by computation. So that’s
something that we wanted to find out. What advantage do you really gain
from having a canvas-based approach throughout the layout process.
In a way the interviews are very similar, because it’s always peoples speaking,
but at the same time each of the conversations is slightly different. So in what
way is the difference between them made legible, through the same set of rules
or by making specifics rules for each of them?
If you do the layout by hand you can take decisions that would be much
harder to translate to code. For example, how to emphasize certain part
of the text or the speaker. You’re much closer to the interpretation of the
content? You’re not designing the ruleset but you are really working on the
visual design of the content ... The point why it’s interesting to me is because
working as a designer you get quite often reduced to this visual design of the
content, at the same it may make sense in a lot of cases. So it’s a evaluation
of these different approaches. Do you design the ruleset or do you design
the final outcome? And I think it has both advantages and disadvantages.

343

Colophon

In conversation with: Agnes Bewer, Alexandre Leray, An Mertens, Andreas Vox, Asheesh
Laroia, Carla Boserman,Christina Clar, Chris Lilley, Christoph Haag, Claire Williams, Cornelia
Sollfrank, Dave Crossland, Dmytry Kleiner, Denis Jacquery, Dmytri Kleiner, Eleanor Greenhalgh,
Eric Schrijver, Evan Roth, Femke Snelting, Franziska Kleiner, George Williams, Gijs de Heij,
Harrisson, Ivan Monroy Lopez, John Haltiwanger, John Colenbrander, Juliane De Moerlooze,
Julien Deswaef, Larisa Blazic, Ludivine Loiseau, Manuel Schmalstieg, Matthew Fuller, Michael
Murtaugh, Michael Terry, Michele Walther, Miguel Arana Catania, momo3010, Nicolas Malevé,
Pedro Amado, Peter Westenberg, Pierre Huyghebaert, Pierre Marchand, Sarah Magnan, Stéphanie
Vilayphiou, Tom Lechner, Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu, Xavier Klein

Concept, development and design: Christoph Haag, Xavier Klein, Femke Snelting

Editorial team: Thomas Buxó, Loraine Furter, Maryl Genc, Pierre Huyghebaert, Martino Morandi
Transcriptions: An Mertens, Boris Kish, Christoph Haag, Femke Snelting, George Williams, Gijs
de Heij, ginger coons, Ivan Monroy Lopez, John Haltiwanger, Ludivine Loiseau, Martino Morandi,
Pierre Huyghebaert, Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu, Xavier Klein
Chapter opener: Built with petter by Benjamin Stephan
-> http://github.com/b3nson/petter

Tools: basename, bash, bibtex, cat, Chromium, cp, curl, dpkg, egrep, Etherpad, exit,
ftp, gedit, GIMP, ghostscript, Git, GNU coreutils, grep, ImageMagick, Inkscape, Kate, man,
makeindex, meld, ne, pandoc, pdflatex, pdftk, Processing, python, read, rev, Scribus,
sed, vim, wget
Fonts: Junicode by Peter S. Baker, OCR-A by John Sauter

Source Files:
Texts, fonts and pdf: http://conversations.tools
Software: https://github.com/lafkon/conversations
Published by: Constant Verlag (Brussels, January 2015)
ISBN: 9789081145930

Copyright (C) Constant 2014
Copyleft: This work is free. You may copy, distribute and modify
it according to the terms of the Free Art License (see appendix)
This publication is made possible by the Libre Graphics Community, through the financial support
from the European Commission (Libre Graphics Research Unit) and the Flemish authorities.

Printed in Germany.

http://www.online-druck.biz

351

Acid Test, 145–147
Activism, 302, 320, 326
Adafruit, 225
Adobe Illustrator, 66, 101, 159–161, 292
Adobe InDesign, 15, 16, 19, 326, 327
Adobe PageMaker, 16, 17, 159, 160
Adobe Photoshop, 279, 280
Adobe Systems, 8, 24, 101, 142, 156,
157, 159–162, 279, 291,
297, 302
Algorithm, 227, 236
Amado, Pedro, 275
Anthropology, 41, 202, 232
AOL Inc., 25
Apple Inc., 8, 23, 24, 142, 159–162
Application Programming Interface, 118,
276
Arana Catania, Miguel, 88
Arduino, 83, 226
Artist, 7–9, 17, 73, 99–101, 146, 190,
191, 213–215, 223, 224,
240, 247, 319, 323, 329

Bézier, Pierre, 303
Baker, Peter S., 351
Barragán, Carlos, 88
Beauty, 14, 23, 32, 47, 55, 59, 78, 81,
162, 176, 230, 236, 268,
293, 305, 324, 325, 340
Benkler, Yochai, 187, 192, 193
Bewer, Agnes, 37
Blanco, Chema, 90
Blazic, Larisa, 7
Blender, 55, 72, 221, 222, 276
Blokland, Petr van, 158, 159
Body, 39, 77, 135, 141, 146, 178, 219,
242
Boserman, Carla, 86
Bradney, Craig, 13, 16, 80
Brainch, 110
Brainerd, Paul, 159
Brussels, 3, 37, 71, 187, 195, 203, 213,
245, 248, 287, 303, 328,
351
Buellet, Stéphane, 215
Bug, 17, 23, 25, 66, 119, 171, 172, 201,
203–205, 292, 298, 302

Bugreport, 280
Bush, George W., 290
Buxó, Thomas, 351

Canvas, 13, 17, 57, 58, 63, 65, 66, 301,
334
Carson, David, 161
Cayate, Henrique, 278
Chastanet, François, 233
Clar, Christina, 99
Colenbrander, John, 99
Collaboration, 3, 7, 9, 57, 100, 101, 109–
112, 116–120, 126, 127,
160, 162, 203, 213, 215,
223, 224, 232, 244, 246,
253, 275, 289, 290, 292,
301, 311, 334, 336, 337,
341
Commandline Interface, 39, 59, 298,
299, 336–338, 342, 351
Commons, 192–194
Communism, 187, 192–194
computer department, 275
Constant, 3, 99, 109, 124, 137, 171, 213,
246, 283, 311–313, 328,
333, 334, 351
ConTeXt, 42, 47–55, 57–62, 66, 67, 103,
127, 128, 155, 181, 182,
191, 192, 261, 276, 278,
300, 304, 311–314, 320–
324, 328, 329, 342
Contract, 189
coons, ginger, 351
Copyleft, 162, 276, 328
Creative Commons, 18, 27, 218, 244,
249, 250, 321
Crossland, Dave, 29, 92, 155, 351
CSS, 53, 54, 116, 117, 142, 144–146, 336

Dahlström, Erik, 138
Dance, 64, 81, 219
de Heij, Gijs, 351
de Moerlooze, Juliane, 37
Debian, 3, 37, 38, 40, 41, 100, 156, 201,
203, 205, 207
Designer, 3, 7–9, 16, 17, 23, 28, 99, 114,
115, 135, 140, 142, 146,

147, 149, 150, 155, 158,
160, 163, 164, 174, 187–
190, 193, 194, 227, 235,
261, 262, 266, 267, 275,
278, 279, 282, 288, 292,
297, 299–301, 304, 305,
311, 323, 326, 328, 343
Desktop Publishing, 9, 61, 159–161,
276, 279
Deswaef, Julien, 88
Developer, 3, 7–9, 13–15, 17, 19, 23, 40,
47, 49, 54, 55, 58, 59, 71,
74, 99, 102, 104, 105, 112,
115, 123, 128, 135, 149,
150, 155, 162, 166, 171,
174, 177, 179, 183, 190,
196, 201, 203, 204, 207,
208, 213, 215, 216, 225,
233, 235, 254, 261, 265,
279, 299–302, 306, 328,
337
Documentation, 27, 43, 51, 52, 54, 55,
57, 60, 176, 208, 230–232,
238, 239, 264–266, 307,
313, 326, 334, 335
Dropbox, 118, 128
Duffy, Maírín, 206

Education, 8, 42, 43, 100, 165, 166, 248,
275, 276, 279, 282, 327
Efficiency, 41, 43, 75, 78, 206, 289, 297,
306
Egli, Simon, 292
Ehr, Jim von, 160, 161
Emmons, Andrew, 138
Encoding, 24, 261, 262, 264–267
ePub, 105
Etherpad, 117, 118, 334–336, 338, 342,
351
EyeWriter, 214, 223–225, 227, 228, 235,
236
Farhner, Todd, 145
Feminism, 37, 41, 328, 329
Firefox, 144, 177, 283
Flash, 101, 208, 215, 279

FontForge, 23, 25–27, 29, 30, 32,
165, 166, 268, 276,
298, 299
FontLab, 28, 162, 163, 276
Fontographer, 24, 160–163, 292
Free Art License, 244, 351, 354
Free Culture, 7, 8, 13, 102–104,
201, 319–322
Freeman, Mark, 203
Fried, Limor, 225
FrontPage, 25
Frutiger, Adrian, 293
Fuller, Matthew, 297
Fun, 14, 15, 49, 57, 65, 67, 72, 78,
217, 227, 232, 235,
238, 246, 253
Furter, Loraine, 351

163,
292,

165,

206,
236,

Gaulon, Benjamin, 223
Genc, Maryl, 351
Gender, 9, 47, 48, 201, 204, 205, 302
Ghali, Jean, 80
GIMP, 171, 172, 174, 179–183, 276, 279,
280, 298, 299, 351
Git, 57, 109–121, 123–125, 127–129,
203, 313, 320, 351
GitHub, 7, 111, 116, 120–124, 126, 128
Gitorious, 111, 116, 121, 122, 124
Glitch, 305
Glyph, 31, 48, 120, 121, 165, 262, 266,
268, 291, 314
Gnu General Public License, 219, 253,
305, 321, 338
Goller, Ludwig, 304
Google Summer of Code, 205, 206
Graphic Design, 7, 9, 111, 113, 115, 116,
119, 156, 159, 161, 162,
175, 227, 280, 287, 297,
298, 306, 311, 312, 321,
333, 343
Graphical User Interface, 14, 29, 73,
159–161, 300, 301, 340,
343
Greenhalgh, Eleanor, 90, 99
Haag, Christoph, 99, 333, 351

Hagen, Hans, 47–50, 55, 56
Haltiwanger, John, 47, 213, 351
Hannemeier Hansson, David, 252
Harrington, Bryce, 301
Harrison, 155, 187, 287
Hello World, 235
Hickson, Ian, 146
HTML, 24–27, 48, 52–54, 116, 137,
138, 141, 149, 175, 319,
336, 342
Hugin, 82
Huyghebaert, Pierre, 48, 58, 109, 135,
155, 289, 298, 351

Imposition, 73, 75, 76, 80, 81, 83, 312
Infrastructure, 27, 50, 160, 172, 173,
180, 325
Inkscape, 66, 72, 117, 143, 205, 276,
298–301, 338, 342, 351
Internet Explorer, 142, 144, 197, 283
Internet Relay Chat, 19, 138, 203, 206,
208, 276, 300
iPhone, 226, 230, 238
IT Department, 8, 156, 275
Jacquerye, Denis, 165, 261
Jay-Z, 252
Jenkins, Mark, 220
Joint Photographic Experts Group, 128
Juan Coco, Mireia, 94

Karow, Peter, 159
KATSU, 220, 249
Kerning, 31, 52, 299
Kish, Boris, 351
Klein, Xavier, 333, 351
Kleiner, Dmytri, 187
Kleiner, Franziska, 187
Knuth, Donald, 51, 54, 80, 158, 300,
312, 323
Kostrzewa, Michael Dominic, 149
KRS-One, 251

Labour, 183, 187–190, 192–194, 197,
299, 336, 337
LAFKON Publishing, 333

Laidout, 71–73, 75, 78–80, 82, 83
Laroia, Asheesh, 201
LaTeX, 49–51, 60, 66, 290, 335, 336,
341, 343
Laughing, 23, 25–27, 31, 38, 56, 64,
74, 79, 139, 144, 146, 189,
194, 196, 204, 208, 216,
220, 221, 224, 227, 230,
232, 233, 240, 246, 254,
265, 266, 268, 305, 333,
339, 342
Lawyer, 136, 146, 149, 192, 324
Lechner, Tom, 71
Lee, Tim Berners, 139
Leray, Alexandre, 109
Levien, Raph, 302
Libre Fonts, 196, 275, 287, 299, 324, 325
Libre Graphics Meeting, 3, 7, 8, 13,
23, 71, 110, 135, 149, 150,
155, 171, 181, 201, 208,
314, 319, 328, 334
Libre Graphics Research Unit, 3, 109,
261, 314, 351
Lilley, Chris, 135
Linnell, Peter, 13, 17, 18
Loiseau, Ludivine, 71, 109, 155, 311,
351
Lua, 50–52, 59, 60
Lupton, Ellen, 304
Müller Brockman, Joseph, 305
Macromedia, 24, 101, 137, 161
Magnan, Sarah, 109
Mailing list, 40, 41, 47, 50, 162, 202,
205, 263, 299, 300, 322
Malevé, Nicolas, 135, 261
Mansoux, Aymeric, 8
Manual, 43, 51, 56, 60, 61, 157, 201, 299,
307
Marchand, Pierre, 58, 71, 109, 261, 311,
351
Marini, Anton, 247
Markdown, 52, 53, 105, 247, 334, 335,
341–343
Markup, 52, 53, 213–215, 222, 224, 237,
251, 334, 335, 337, 342
Marx, Karl, 187, 188

Mathematics, 26, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 71,
72, 155, 158
Mauss, Marcel, 187, 195
MediaWiki, 173, 181
Mercurial, 110
Meritocracy, 126
Mertens, An, 37, 351
Metafont, 158
Microsoft, 16, 18, 24, 25, 56, 57, 144,
150, 162, 197, 276, 283
Monotype, 324
Monroy Lopez, Ivan, 111, 171, 351
Morandi, Martino, 351
Moskalenko, Oleksandr, 13
Multiple Master, 291, 292
Murtaugh, Michael, 99
Netscape, 142

Open Font Library, 27
OpenOffice, 117, 342
Opera, 138, 144
OSP, 3, 57, 81, 109–112, 114, 120, 122–
126, 128, 135, 155, 187,
207, 227, 268, 287, 297,
298, 302, 303, 305–307,
311–313, 324, 328, 333
OSPimpose, 312
Otalora, Olatz, 94

Pérez Aguilar, Ana, 94
PDF, 14, 18, 52, 72, 73, 122, 128, 129,
156, 298, 307, 312, 324,
334–336, 338, 339, 341,
342
Peer production, 187, 189, 191, 192, 194,
195, 197, 288
PfaEdit, 25
Pinhorn, Jonathan, 314
Piracy, 15, 287–289
Pixar, 197
Plain Text, 80, 140, 341
Podofoimpose, 71, 80, 81
Police, 150, 179, 215, 223, 239–241
PostScript, 18, 24, 25, 27, 159–162
Printing, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 24, 53, 72,
76, 77, 83, 103, 129, 148,

158–161, 223, 234, 247,
263, 275, 279, 298, 300–
302, 304, 305, 314, 324,
325
Problems, 28, 39, 42, 43, 47, 48, 80–82,
104, 111, 121, 122, 128,
137, 144, 157, 187, 193,
195, 196, 201, 203, 205,
217, 219, 226, 229, 233,
239, 242, 265, 277, 289,
300, 327, 329, 335, 337
processing.org, 67, 247, 276, 297, 340
Public Domain, 218, 221, 250, 282, 303
Qt, 78
QuarkXpress, 15, 161, 196, 290

Recipe, 125, 127, 128, 306, 307, 320, 321
Relearn Summerschool, 109, 327
Release early, release often, 114, 221
Robofog, 161
Robofont, 161
Rossum, Just van, 161
Roth, Evan, 213

Safari, 144
Samedies, 37, 40, 203
Sauter, John, 351
Schmalstieg, Manuel, 311
Schmid, Franz, 13, 15, 17
Schrijver, Eric, 109
Scribus, 13–19, 57, 61, 62, 65, 71, 79–81,
113, 115, 128, 157, 187,
196, 197, 276, 297–302,
313, 341, 342, 351
Scribus file, 113, 119
Sexism, 40, 328
Shakespeare, William, 23, 25, 26
Sikking, Peter, 172
Smythe, Dallas, 190
Snelting, Femke, 3, 297, 319, 351
Sobotka, Troy James, 227
Sollfrank, Cornelia, 319
SourceForge, 111
Sparkleshare, 118
Spencer, Susan, 92

Stable, 51, 58, 324, 334, 335, 338
Stallman, Richard, 165
Standards, 17, 101, 135, 136, 138, 140,
141, 145–147, 223, 250,
262, 291, 293, 298, 303,
304, 326
Stephan, Benjamin, 340, 351
Stroke, 65, 214, 216, 234, 243, 248, 291
Subtext, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61
Sugrue, Chris, 214
SVG, 119, 135, 136, 138, 140, 143–145,
148, 215, 298, 301, 334,
338, 341
SVN, 111, 112, 117, 120, 320
Telekommunisten, 187
TEMPT, 214, 223, 224, 235, 236
Terry, Michael, 171
TeX, 47–49, 51, 52, 55, 59, 60, 80, 158,
161, 312, 323, 334
Torrone, Phil, 225
Torvalds, Linus, 112, 114, 115, 118, 246,
252
Tschichold, Jan, 52, 57
Tucker, Benjamin, 187, 189, 192
Typesetting, 24, 51–55, 57, 60, 61, 66,
158, 287, 323
Typography, 3, 9, 16, 24, 48, 51, 53,
61, 117, 155–159, 161–
165, 187, 195, 196, 220,
235, 261, 276, 287–291,
293, 298–300, 304, 314,
340
Ubuntu, 102
Ulziikhuu, Urantsetseg, 99, 351
Undocumented, 50
Unicode, 23, 24, 26, 27, 48, 261–268,
342, 343
Universal Font Object, 163
Unstable, 324, 334
User, 3, 9, 13–17, 19, 25, 32, 37, 47, 49,
50, 52, 54–56, 58, 64, 79,

100–102, 104, 141, 146,
159, 160, 166, 171–177,
179, 181, 182, 196, 208,
215, 222, 261, 266–268,
279, 280, 283, 288, 289,
300–302, 319, 338, 340
Utopia, 100, 251

Veen, Jeff, 146
Version Control, 7, 57, 109–112, 116–
119, 123–125, 127, 144,
149, 201, 202, 207, 264,
300, 305, 307
Vilayphiou, Stéphanie, 109, 213
Visual Culture, 113, 114, 117, 122, 124,
128
Vox, Andreas, 13, 80, 302, 351

Wall, Larry, 63
Walther, Michele, 213
Warnock, John, 159
Watson, Theo, 214
Westenberg, Peter, 187, 213
What You See Is What You Get, 25, 61–
65, 283
Wilkinson, Jamie, 214
Williams, Claire, 99
Williams, George, 14, 23, 79, 299, 351
Wishlist, 246
Wium Lie, Håkon, 142, 146
Workflow, 52, 53, 60, 105, 109, 115, 119,
298, 300, 312
World Wide Web Consortium, 135–142,
145, 146, 304
XML, 52, 80, 144, 148, 158, 163, 175,
213, 214, 216, 233, 234,
301
Yildirim, Muharrem, 242, 245
Yuill, Simon, 232

Free Art License 1.3. (C) Copyleft Attitude, 2007. You can make reproductions and distribute this license verbatim (without any changes). Translation: Jonathan Clarke, Benjamin
Jean, Griselda Jung, Fanny Mourguet, Antoine Pitrou. Thanks to framalang.org
PREAMBLE

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Constant
Mondotheque: A Radiated Book
2016


P.1

Mondotheque::a
radiated
book/
un
livre
irradiant/
een
irradiërend
boek

P.2

P.3

Index
• Mondotheque::a radiated book/un livre irradiant/een
irradiërend boek
◦ Property:Person (agents + actors)
◦ EN Introduction
◦ FR Préface
◦ NL Inleiding
• Embedded hierarchies
◦ FR+NL+EN A radiating interview/Un entrevue irradiant/Een irradiërend gesprek
◦ EN Amateur Librarian - A Course in Critical Pedagogy TOMISLAV MEDAK &
MARCELL MARS (Public Library project)
◦ FR Bibliothécaire amateur - un cours de pédagogie critique TOMISLAV MEDAK
& MARCELL MARS

◦
◦
◦
◦
◦

EN

A bag but is language nothing of words MICHAEL MURTAUGH
A Book of the Web DUSAN BAROK
EN
The Indexalist MATTHEW FULLER
NL
De Indexalist MATTHEW FULLER
FR
Une lecture-écriture du livre sur le livre ALEXIA DE VISSCHER
EN

• Disambiguation
◦ EN An experimental transcript SÎNZIANA PĂLTINEANU
◦ EN+FR LES UTOPISTES and their common logos/et leurs logos communs
DENNIS POHL

◦
◦
◦

EN

X = Y DICK RECKARD
Madame C/Mevrouw C FEMKE SNELTING
EN
A Pre-emptive History of the Google Cultural Institute GERALDINE
EN+NL

JUÁREZ

◦
◦

FR
EN

Une histoire préventive du Google Cultural Institute GERALDINE JUÁREZ
Special:Disambiguation

• Location, location, location
◦ EN From Paper Mill to Google Data Center SHINJOUNG YEO
◦ EN House, City, World, Nation, Globe NATACHA ROUSSEL
◦ EN The Smart City - City of Knowledge DENNIS POHL
◦ FR La ville intelligente - Ville de la connaissance DENNIS POHL
◦ EN The Itinerant Archive
• Cross-readings
◦ EN Les Pyramides
◦ EN Transclusionism
◦ EN Reading list
◦ FR+EN+NL Colophon/Colofon
Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

P.4

P.5

Property:Person
Meet the cast of historical, contemporary and fictional people that populate La
Mondotheque.

Unknown man,Andrew
Warden Boyd Carnegie
Rayward, Françoise
Levie, Alex Wright

André CanonneArni Jonsson , Barack ObamaBernard Otlet Bernard Otlet, Bernard Otlet, Bill Echikson
Sauli Niinistö
Patrick
Patrick
Lafontaine Lafontaine

Bill Echikson, Delphine JenartDelphine Jenart,
Elio Di Rupo Unknown man,Elio Di Rupo, Elio Di Rupo, Elio Di Rupo, Sylvia Van
Delphine Jenart
Nooka Kiili ,
Elio Di Rupo, Sylvia Van Sylvia Van Thierry GeertsPeteghem, Elio
Joyce Proot
Roi Albert II, Peteghem
Peteghem
Di Rupo, JeanJean-Claude
Paul Deplus
Marcourt

Elio Di Rupo, Elio Di Rupo, Elio Di Rupo, Elio Di Rupo Alexander De Elio Di Rupo, Nicolas Sarkozy,
Eric E. SchmidtErnest de Potter
Thierry Geerts,Guy Quaden , Rudy Demotte
Croo, Elio Di Unknown man,Eric E. Schmidt
Unknown man Yves Vasseur
Rupo
Roi Albert II,
Jean-Claude
Marcourt

Evgeny
Rodionov

P.6

Stéphanie
Alexia de Visscher,
Femke Snelting,Robert M. Nicolas Malevé,
Stéphanie
Stéphanie
François
Manfroid, Femke
Michael Murtaugh,
Dennis Pohl, Ochshorn, JanMichael
Manfroid, Femke
Manfroid, Femke
Schuiten
Snelting, Dick Femke Snelting,Alexia de
Gerber , FemkeMurtaugh, Alexia
Snelting, Natacha
Snelting, Natacha
Reckard
Sînziana
Visscher, Andre
Snelting, Marcell
de Visscher, Roussel, Dick Roussel, Dick
Castro
Mars, Sebastian
Femke Snelting,Reckard
Reckard
Păltineanu, Nicolas
Luetgert , Donatella
Sînziana
Malevé
Portoghese Păltineanu

P.7

Gustave AbeelsHarm Post

Henri La
Fontaine

Henri La
Fontaine

Henri La
Fontaine

Mathilde Lhoest,
Henri La
Henri La
Fontaine
Fontaine

Igor PlatounoffWilhelmina
Coops, Igor
Platounoff

Annie Besant, Jean François Jean Otlet Jr. Bill Echikson, Jean-Paul Deplus
Annie Besant, Louis Masure,Unidentified Woman,
Marcel Flamion
Jean Delville Fueg
Jean-Paul Deplus
Jiddu
Mademoiselle Poels,
Mademoiselle Poels
Krishnamurti Mademoiselle de
Bauche

Marie-Louise Paul Otlet, Paul Otlet
Philips
Madame Taupin
, Pierre
Bourgeois

Paul Otlet

Wilhelmina Paul Otlet
Coops, Paul
Otlet

Marie Van Paul Otlet, Cato
Paul Otlet, Cato
Mons , Paul van Nederhasselt
van Nederhasselt
Otlet

Unidentified Wilhelmina Paul Otlet
Woman, Paul Coops, Paul
Otlet
Otlet

Paul Otlet

Jiddu Krishnamurti
Paul Otlet
, Paul Otlet, Jean
Delville

Unidentified Paul Otlet
Woman, Paul
Otlet, Georges
Lorphèvre

P.8

Paul Otlet

P.9

Cato van
Le Corbusier, Paul Otlet,
Nederhasselt, Paul
Paul Otlet, Georges
Otlet
Hélène de
Lorphèvre
Mandrot

Unidentified Paul Otlet, Henri
Paul Otlet
Woman, Jean La Fontaine,
Delville, Paul Mathilde Lhoest
Otlet, Henri La
Fontaine

Unidentified Unidentified Paul Otlet, Unidentified Paul Otlet,
Woman, Paul Woman, Paul Mathilde La Woman, W.E.B.
Unidentified
Otlet
Otlet, GeorgesFontaine , Henri
Du Bois, Paul Woman
Lorphèvre
La Fontaine Otlet, Henri La
Fontaine, Jean
Delville

Paul Panda, Unidentified Paul Otlet
Unidentified Woman, Paul
Woman, HenriOtlet
La
Fontaine, Cato van
Nederhasselt, Paul
Otlet, W.E.B. Du
Bois, Blaise Diagne
, Mathilde Lhoest

Unidentified Woman,
Sebastien
Paul Otlet, Cato
Delneste
van
Nederhasselt, Georges
Lorphèvre, André
Colet, Thea Coops,
Broese van Groenou

Steve Crossan Stéphanie
Manfroid

Sylvia Van
Peteghem

Thea Coops Unidentified Unidentified Unidentified Unidentified Unidentified Unidentified Unidentified
Woman
Woman
Woman
Woman, LouisWoman
Woman, LouisWoman
Masure
Masure

Unidentified Unidentified Unidentified Unidentified Unidentified Unidentified Vint Cerf, Chris
Vint Cerf
Woman
Woman
Woman
Woman
Woman
Woman
Burns

P.10

Vint Cerf

P.11

Wilhelmina
Coops

Wilhelmina
Coops

Wilhelmina
Coops

Wilhelmina
Coops

Yves Bernard

Introduction
This Radiated Book started three years ago with an e-mail from the Mundaneum archive
center in Mons. 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' [1]. 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[2]. 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[3] 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 reinsert 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.
We installed a Semantic MediaWiki and named it after the Mondotheque, a device
imagined by Paul Otlet in 1934. The wiki functioned as an online repository and frame of
reference for the work that was developed through meetings, visits and presentations[4]. For
Otlet, the Mondotheque was to be an 'intellectual machine': at the same time archive, link
generator, writing desk, catalog and broadcast station. Thinking the museum, the library, the
encyclopedia, and classificatory language as a complex and interdependent web of relations,
Otlet imagined each element as a point of entry for the other. He stressed that responses to

P.12

P.13

displays in a museum involved intellectual and social processes that where different from
those involved in reading books in a library, but that one in a sense entailed the other. [5]. The
dreamed capacity of his Mondotheque was to interface scales, perspectives and media at the
intersection of all those different practices. For us, by transporting a historical device into the
future, it figured as a kind of thinking machine, a place to analyse historical and social
locations of the Mundaneum project, a platform to envision our persistent interventions
together. The speculative figure of Mondotheque enabled us to begin to understand the
situated formations of power around the project, and allowed us to think through possible
forms of resistance. [6]
The wiki at http://mondotheque.be grew into a labyrinth of images, texts, maps and semantic
links, tools and vocabularies. MediaWiki is a Free software infrastructure developed in the
context of Wikipedia and comes with many assumptions about the kind of connections and
practices that are desirable. We wanted to work with Semantic extensions specifically
because we were interested in the way The Semantic Web[7] seemed to resemble Otlet's
Universal Decimal Classification system. At many moments we felt ourselves going down
rabbit-holes of universal completeness, endless categorisation and nauseas of scale. It made
the work at times uncomfortable, messy and unruly, but it allowed us to do the work of
unravelling in public, mixing political urgency with poetic experiments.
This Radiated Book was made because we wanted to create a moment, an incision into that
radiating process that allowed us to invite many others a look at the interrelated materials
without the need to provide a conclusive document. As a salute to Otlet's ever expanding
Radiated Library, we decided to use the MediaWiki installation to write, edit and generate
the publication which explains some of the welcome anomalies on the very pages of this
book.
The four chapters that we propose each mix fact and fiction, text and image, document and
catalogue. In this way, process and content are playing together and respond to the specific
material entanglements that we encountered. Mondotheque, and as a consequence this
Radiated book, is a multi-threaded, durational, multi-scalar adventure that in some way
diffracts the all-encompassing ambition that the 19th century Utopia of Mundaneum stood
for.
Embedded hierarchies addresses how classification systems, and the dream of their universal
application actually operate. It brings together contributions that are concerned with
knowledge infrastructures at different scales, from disobedient libraries, institutional practices
of the digital archive, meta-data structures to indexing as a pathological condition.
Disambiguation dis-entangles some of the similarities that appear around the heritage of Paul
Otlet. Through a close-reading of seemingly similar biographies, terms and vocabularies it relocates ambiguity to other places.

Location, location, location is an account of geo-political layers at work. Following the
itinerant archive of Mundaneum through the capital of Europe, we encounter local, national
and global Utopias that in turn leave their imprint on the way the stories play out. From the
hyperlocal to the global, this chapter traces patterns in the physical landscape.
Cross-readings consists of lists, image collections and other materials that make connections
emerge between historical and contemporary readings, unearthing possible spiritual or
mystical underpinnings of the Mundaneum, and transversal inclusions of the same elements in
between different locations.
The point of modest operations such as Mondotheque is to build the collective courage to
persist in demanding access to both the documents and the intellectual and technological
infrastructures that interface and mediate them. Exactly because of the urgency of the
situation, where the erosion of public institutions has become evident, and all forms of
communication seem to feed into neo-liberal agendas eventually, we should resist
simplifications and find the patience to build a relation to these histories in ways that makes
sense. It is necessary to go beyond the current techno-determinist paradigm of knowledge
production, and for this, imagination is indispensable.

Paul Otlet, design for Mondotheque (Mundaneum archive center, Mons)
Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

1. Jean-Michel Djian, Le Mundaneum, Google de papier, Le Monde Magazine, 19 december 2009

P.14

P.15

2. « À plusieurs
reprises, on a eu chaud, parce qu’il était prévu qu’au moindre couac sur ce point, Google arrêtait tout » Libre Belgique, 27 april
2007
3. Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new
efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort. We are also stoked about growing our investment arms, Ventures and Capital, as
part of this new structure. Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity (...) Google will become a whollyowned subsidiary of Alphabet https://abc.xyz/
4. http://mondotheque.be
5. The Mundaneum is an Idea, an Institution, a Method, a Body of workmaterials and Collections, a Building, a Network. Paul
Otlet, Monde (1935)
6. The analyses of these themes are transmitted through narratives -- mythologies or fictions, which I have renamed as "figurations"
or cartographies of the present. A cartography is a politically informed map of one's historical and social locations, enabling the
analysis of situated formations of power and hence the elaboration of adequate forms of resistance Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic
Theory (2011)
7. Some people have said, "Why do I need the Semantic Web? I have Google!" Google is great for helping people find things, yes!
But finding things more easily is not the same thing as using the Semantic Web. It's about creating things from data you've
complied yourself, or combining it with volumes (think databases, not so much individual documents) of data from other sources
to make new discoveries. It's about the ability to use and reuse vast volumes of data. Yes, Google can claim to index billions of
pages, but given the format of those diverse pages, there may not be a whole lot more the search engine tool can reliably do.
We're looking at applications that enable transformations, by being able to take large amounts of data and be able to run models
on the fly - whether these are financial models for oil futures, discovering the synergies between biology and chemistry researchers
in the Life Sciences, or getting the best price and service on a new pair of hiking boots. Tim Berners-Lee interviewed in
Consortium Standards Bulletin, 2005 http://www.consortiuminfo.org/bulletins/semanticweb.php

P.20

P.21
Embedded
hierarchies

P.26

P.27

A
radiating
interview/
Un
entrevue
irradiant/
Een
irradiërend
gesprek
Stéphanie Manfroid and Raphaèle Cornille are responsible for the
Mundaneum archives in Mons. We speak with them about the relationship
between the universe of Otlet and the concrete practice of scanning, meta-data
and on-line publishing, and the possibilities and limitations of their work with
Google. How to imagine a digital archive that could include the multiple
relationships between all documents in the collection? How the make visible
the continuous work of describing, maintaining and indexing?

EN

The interview is part of a series of interviews with Belgian knowledge
institutions and their vision on digital information sharing. The voices of Sylvia
Van Peteghem and Dries Moreels (Ghent University), Églantine Lebacq and
Marc d'Hoore (Royal library of Belgium) resonate on the following pages.
We hear from them about the differences and similarities in how the three
institutions deal with the unruly practice of digital heritage.

The full interviews with the Royal Library of Belgium and Ghent University
Library can be found in the on-line publication.

• RC = Raphaèle Cornille (Mundaneum archive center, responsable des collections
iconographiques)
• SM = Stéphanie Manfroid (Mundaneum archive center, responsable des archives)
• ADV = Alexia de Visscher
• FS = Femke Snelting

Mons, 21 avril 2016
PAS MAL DE CHOSES À FAIRE

ADV : Dans votre politique de numérisation, quelle infrastructure d’accès envisagez-vous et
pour quel type de données et de métadonnées ?
RC : On numérise depuis longtemps au Mundaneum, depuis 1995. À l’époque, il y avait
déjà du matériel de numérisation. Forcément pas avec les même outils que l’on a aujourd’hui,
on n’imaginait pas avoir accès aux bases de données sur le net. Il y a eu des évolutions
techniques, technologiques qui ont été importantes. Ce qui fait que pendant quelques années
on a travaillé avec le matériel qui était toujours présent en interne, mais pas vraiment avec un
plan de numérisation sur le long terme. Juste pour répondre à des demandes, soit pour nous,
parce qu’on avait des publications ou des expositions ou parce qu’on avait des demandes
extérieures de reproductions.
L’objectif évidemment c’est de pouvoir mettre à la disposition du public tout ce qui a été
numérisé. Il faut savoir que nous avons une base de données qui s’appelle Pallas[1] qui a été
soutenue par la Communauté Française depuis 2003. Malheureusement, le logiciel nous
pose pas mal de problème. On a déjà tenté des intégrations d’images et ça ne s’affiche pas
toujours correctement. Parfois on a des fiches descriptives mais nous n’avons pas l’image qui
correspond.
SM : Les archives soutenues par la Communauté française, mais aussi d’autres centres, ont
opté pour Pallas. C’est ainsi que ce système permettait une compréhension des archives en
Belgique et en Communauté française notamment.

L’idée c’est que les centres d’archives utilisent tous un même système. C’est une belle
initiative, et dans ce cadre là, c’était l’idée d’avoir une plateforme générale, où toutes les
sources liées aux archives publiques, enfin les archives soutenues par la Communauté
Française - qui ne sont pas publiques d’ailleurs - puissent être accessibles à un seul et même
endroit.
RC : Il y avait en tout cas cette idée par la suite, d’avoir une plate-forme commune, qui
s’appelle numériques.be[2]. Malheureusement, ce qu’on trouve sur numeriques.be ne
correspond au contenu sur Pallas, ce sont deux structures différentes. En gros, si on veut
diffuser sur les deux, c’est deux fois le travail.
En plus, ils n’ont pas configuré numérique.be pour qu’il puisse être moissonné par
Europeana[3]. Il y a des normes qui ne correspondent pas encore.
SM : Ce sont des choix politiques là. Et nous on dépend de ça. Et nous, nous dépendons de
choix généraux. Il est important que l’on comprenne bien la situation d'centre d’archives
comme le nôtre. Sa place dans le paysage patrimoniale belge et francophone également.
Notre intention est de nous situer tant dans ce cadre qu’à un niveau européen mais aussi
international. Ce ne sont pas des combinaisons si aisées que cela à mettre en place pour ces
différents publics ou utilisateurs par exemple.
RC : Soit il y a un problème technique, soit il y a un problème d’autorisation. Il faut savoir
que c’est assez complexe au niveau des métadonnées, il y a pas mal de choses à faire. On a
pendant tout un temps numérisé, mais on a généré les métadonnées au fur et à mesure, donc
il y aussi un gros travail à réaliser par rapport à ça. Normalement, pour le début 2017 on
envisagera le passage à Europeana avec des métadonnées correctes et le fait qu’on puisse
verser des fichiers corrects.
C’est assez lourd comme travail parce que nous devons générer les métadonnées à chaque
fois. Si vous prenez le Dublin Core[4], c’est à chaque fois 23 champs à remplir par document.
On essaye de remplir le maximum. De temps en temps, ça peut être assez lourd quand
même.
LA VIE DE LA PIÈCE

FS : Pouvez-vous nous parler du détail de la lecture des documents d’Otlet et de la rédaction
de leur description, le passage d’un document « Otletien » à une version numérisée ?

P.30

P.31

RC : Il faut déjà au minimum avoir un inventaire. Il faut
que les pièces soient numérotées, sinon c’est un peu
difficile de retracer tout le travail. Parfois, ça passe par
une petite phase de restauration parce qu’on a des
documents poussiéreux et quand on scanne ça se voit.
Parfois, on doit faire des mises à plat, pour les journaux
par exemple, parce qu’ils sont pliés dans les boîtes. Ça
prend déjà un petit moment avant de pouvoir les
numériser. Ensuite, on va scanner le document, ça c’est la
partie la plus facile. On le met sur le scanner, on appuie
sur un bouton, presque.
Si c’est un manuscrit, on ne va pas pouvoir océriser. Par
contre, si c’est un document imprimé, là, on va l’océriser
en sachant qu’il va falloir le revérifier par la suite, parce
qu’il y a toujours un pourcentage d’erreur. Par exemple,
dans les journaux, en fonction de la typographie, si vous
avez des mots qui sont un peu effacés avec le temps, il
faut vérifier tout ça. Et puis, on va générer les
métadonnées Dublin Core. L’identifiant, un titre, tout ce
qui concerne les contributeurs : éditeurs, illustrateurs,
imprimeurs etc . c’est une description, c’est une
indexation par mots clefs, c’est une date, c’est une
localisation géographique, si il y en a une. C’est aussi,
faire des liens avec soit des ressources en interne soit des
ressources externes. Donc par exemple, moi si je pense à
une affiche, si elle a été dans une exposition si elle a été
publiée, il faut mettre toutes les références.

From Voor elk boek is een gebruiker:
SVP: Wij scannen op een totaal
andere manier. Bij Google gaat het
om massa-productie. Wij kiezen zelf
voor kleinere projecten. We hebben
een vaste ploeg, twee mensen die
voltijds scannen en beelden
verwerken, maar daarmee begin je
niet aan een project van 250.000
boeken. We doen wel een scan-ondemand of selecteren volledige
collecties. Toen we al onze
2.750.000 fiches enkele jaren
geleden door een externe firma lieten
scannen had ik medelijden met de
meisjes die de hele dag de
invoerscanner bedienden. Hopeloos
saai.
From X = Y:
According to the ideal image
described in "Traité", all the tasks of
collecting, translating, distributing,
should be completely automatic,
seemingly without the necessity of
human intervention. However, the
Mundaneum hired dozens of women
to perform these tasks. This humanrun version of the system was not
considered worth mentioning, as if it
was a temporary in-between phase
that should be overcome as soon as
possible, something that was staining
the project with its vulgarity.

SM : La vie de la pièce.
RC : Et faire le lien par exemple vers d’autres fonds, une autre lettre… Donc, vous avez
vraiment tous les liens qui sont là. Et puis, vous avez la description du fichier numérique en
lui-même. Nous on a à chaque fois quatre fichiers numériques : Un fichier RAW, un fichier
Tiff en 300 DPI, un JPEG en 300 DPI et un dernier JPE en 72 DPI, qui sont en fait les
trois formats qu’on utilise le plus. Et puis, là pareil, vous remettez un titre, une date, vous
avez aussi tout ce qui concerne les autorisations, les droits… Pour chaque document il y a
tout ces champs à remplir.
SM : Face à un schéma d’Otlet, on se demandait parfois ce que sont tous ces gribouillons.
On ne comprend pas tout de suite grand chose.
FS : Qui fait la description ? Plusieurs personnes ou quelqu’un qui travaille seul ?

RC : Ça demande quand même une certaine discipline, de la concentration et du temps pour
pouvoir le faire bien.
RC : Généralement c’est quelqu’un seul qui décrit. Là c’est un texte libre, donc c’est encore
assez facile. Maintenant quand vous devez indexer, il faut utiliser des Thesaurus existants, ce
qui n’est pas toujours facile parce que parfois ce sont des contraintes, et que ce n’est pas tout
à fait le vocabulaire que vous avez l’habitude d’utiliser.
SM : On a rencontré une firme, effectivement, quelqu’un qui pensait qu’on allait pouvoir
automatiser la chaîne de description des archives avec la numérisation y compris. Il ne
comprenait pas que c’était une tâche impossible. C’est une tâche humaine. Et franchement,
toute l’expérience qu’on peut avoir par rapport à ça aide énormément. Je ne pense pas, là
maintenant, qu’un cerveau humain puisse être remplacé par une machine dans ce cadre. Je
n’y crois pas.
UNE MÉTHODE D’INDEXATION STANDARDISÉE

FS : Votre travail touche très intimement à la pratique d’Otlet même. En fait, dans les
documents que nous avons consultés, nous avons vus plusieurs essais d’indexation, plusieurs
niveaux de systèmes de classement. Comment cela se croise-t-il avec votre travail de
numérisation ? Gardez-vous une trace de ces systèmes déjà projetés sur les documents euxmêmes ?
SM : Je crois qu’il y a deux éléments. Ici, si la question portait sur les étapes de la
numérisation, on part du document lui-même pour arriver à un nommage de fichier et il y a
une description avec plusieurs champs. Si finalement la pièce qui est numérisée, elle a sa
propre vie, sa propre histoire et c’est ça qu’on comprend. Par contre, au départ, on part du
principe que le fond est décrit, il y a un inventaire. On va faire comme si c’était toujours le
cas, ce n’est pas vrai d’ailleurs, ce n’est pas toujours le cas.
Et autre chose, aujourd’hui nous sommes un centre d’archives. Otlet était dans une
conception d’ouverture à la documentation, d’ouverture à l’Encyclopédie, vraiment quelque
chose de très très large. Notre norme de travail c’est d’utiliser la norme de description
générale des archives[5], et c’est une autre contrainte. C’est un gros boulot ça aussi.
On doit pouvoir faire des relations avec d’autres éléments qui se trouvent ailleurs, d’autres
documents, d’autres collections. C’est une lecture, je dirais presque en réseau des documents.
Évidemment c’est intéressant. Mais d’un autre côté, nous sommes archivistes, et c’est pas
qu’on n’aime pas la logique d’Otlet, mais on doit se faire à une discipline qui nous impose
aussi de protéger le patrimoine ici, qui appartient à la Communauté Française et qui donc
doit être décrit de manière normée comme dans les autres centres d’archives.

P.32

P.33

C’est une différence de dialogues. Pour moi ce n’est pas un détail du tout. Le fait que par
exemple, certains vont se dire « vous ne mettez pas l’indice CDU dans ces champs » ... vous
n’avez d’ailleurs pas encore posé cette question … ?
ADV : Elle allait venir !
SM : Aujourd’hui on ne cherche pas par indice CDU, c’est tout. Nous sommes un centre
d’archives, et je pense que ça a été la chance pour le Mundaneum de pouvoir mettre en
avant la protection de ce patrimoine en tant que tel et de pouvoir l’ériger en tant que
patrimoine réel, important pour la communauté.
RC : En fait la classification décimale n’étant pas une méthode d’indexation standardisée,
elle n’est pas demandée dans ces champs. Pour chaque champ à remplir dans le Dublin
Core, vous avez des normes à utiliser. Par exemple, pour les dates, les pays et la langue vous
avez les normes ISO, et la CDU n’est pas reconnue comme une norme.
Quand je décris dans Pallas, moi je mets l’indice CDU. Parce que les collections
iconographiques sont classées par thématique. Les cartes postales géographiques sont
classées par lieu. Et donc, j’ai à chaque fois l’indice CDU, parce que là, ça a un sens de le
mettre.
FS : C’est très beau d’entendre cela mais c’est aussi tragique dans un sens. Il y a eu tellement
d’efforts faits à cette époque là pour trouver un standard ...
UN AXE DE COMMUNICATION

SM : La question de la légitimité du travail d’Otlet se place sur un débat contemporain qui
est amené sur la gestion des bases de données, en gros. Ça c’est un axe qui est de
communication, ce n’est pas le seul axe de travail de fond dans nos archives. Il faut distinguer
des éléments et la politique de numérisation, je ne suis pas en train de vouloir dire : « Tiens,
on est dans la gestion de méga-données chez nous. »
Nous ne gérons pas de grandes quantités de données. Le Big Data ne nous concerne pas
tout à fait, en terme de données conservées chez nous. Le débat nous intéresse au même titre
que ce débat existait sous une autre forme fin du 19e siècle avec l’avènement de la presse
périodique et la multiplication des titres de journaux ainsi que la diffusion rapide d’une
information.
RC : Le fait d’avoir eu Paul Otlet reconnu comme père de l’internet etcetera, d’avoir pu le
rattacher justement à des éléments actuels, c’était des sujets porteurs pour la communication.
Ça ne veut pas dire que nous ne travaillons que là dessus. Il en a fait beaucoup plus que ça.
C’était un axe porteur, parce qu’on est à l’ère de la numérisation, parce qu’on nous demande

de numériser, de valoriser. On est encore à travailler sur les archives, à dépouiller les
archives, à faire des inventaires et donc on est très très loin de ces réflexions justement Big
Data et tout ça.
FS : Est-il imaginable qu’Otlet ait inventé le World Wide Web ?
SM : Franchement, pour dire les choses platement : C’est impossible, quand on a un regard
historique, d’imaginer qu’Otlet a imaginé… enfin il a imaginé des choses, oui, mais est-ce
que c’est parce que ça existe aujourd’hui qu’on peut dire « il a imaginé ça » ?. C’est ce qu’on
appelle de l’anachronisme en Histoire. Déontologiquement, ce genre de choses un historien
ne peut pas le faire. Quelqu’un d’autre peut se permettre de le faire. Par exemple, en
communication c’est possible. Réduire à des idées simples est aussi possible. C’est même un
avantage de pouvoir le faire. Une idée passera donc mieux.
RC : Il y a des concepts qu’il avait déjà compris.
From Voor elk boek is een gebruiker:
Maintenant, en fonction de l’époque, il n’a pas pu tout
Dus in de 19e eeuw wou Vander
mettre en place mais, il y a des choses qu’il avait
Haeghen een catalogus, en Otlet een
comprises dès le départ. Par exemple, standardiser les
bibliografie. En vandaag heeft Google
alles samen met de volledige tekst
choses pour pouvoir les changer. Ça il le comprend dès
erbij die dan nog op elk woord
le départ, c’est pour ça, la rédaction des fiches, c’est
doorzoekbaar is. Dat is de droom van
standardisé, vous ne pouvez pas rédiger n’importe
zowel Vander Haeghen als Otlet
méér dan verder zetten. Vanuit die
comment. C’est pour ça qu’il développe la CDU, il faut
gedachte zijn wij vanzelfsprekend
un langage qui soit utilisable par tous. Il imagine avec les
meegegaan. We hebben aan de
Google onderhandelaars gevraagd:
moyens de communications qu’il a à l’époque, il imagine
waarom doet Google dit? Het
déjà un moment pouvoir les combiner, sans doute parce
antwoord was: “Because it's in the
qu’il a vu un moment l’évolution des techniques et qu’il
heart of the founders”. Moesten wij de
idealen van Vander Haeghen en
pense pouvoir aller plus loin. Il pense à la
Otlet niet als voorbeeld hebben
dématérialisation quand il utilise des microfilms, il se dit
gehad, dan was er misschien twijfel
« attention la conservation papier, il y a un soucis. Il faut
geweest, maar nu niet.
conserver le contenu et donc il faut le passer sur un autre
support ». D’abord il va essayer sur des plaques
photographiques, il calcule le nombre de pages qu’il peut mettre sur une plaque et voilà. Il
transforme ça en autre support.
Je pense qu’il a imaginé des choses, parce qu’il avait cette envie de communiquer le savoir,
ce n’est pas quelqu’un qui a un moment avait envie de collectionner sans diffuser, non. C’était
toujours dans cette idée de diffuser, de communiquer quelques soient les personnes, quelque
soit le pays. C’est d’ailleurs pour ça qu’il adapte le Musée International, pour que tout le
monde puisse y aller, même ceux qui ne savaient pas lire avaient accès aux salles et
pouvaient comprendre, parce qu’il avait organisé les choses de telles façons. Il imagine à
chaque fois des outils de communication qui vont lui servir pour diffuser ses idées, sa pensée.

P.34

P.35

Qu’il ait imaginé à un moment donné qu’on puisse lire des choses à l’autre bout du monde ?
Il a du y penser, mais maintenant, techniquement et technologiquement, il n’a pas pu
concevoir. Mais je suis sûre qu’il avait envisagé le concept.
CELUI QUI FAIT UN PEU DE TOUT, IL LE FAIT UN PEU
MOINS BIEN

SM : Otlet, à son époque, a par moments réussi à se faire détester par pas mal de gens,
parce qu’il y avait une sorte de confusion au niveau des domaines dans lesquels il exerçait. À
la fois, cette fascination de créer une cité politique qui est la Cité Mondiale, et le fait de
vouloir mélanger les genres, de ne pas être dans une volonté de standardisation avec des
spécialistes, mais aussi une volonté de travailler avec le monde de l’industrie, parce que c’est
ce qu’il a réussi. C’est un réel handicap à cette époque là parce que vous avez une
spécialisation dans tous les domaines de la connaissance et finalement celui qui fait un peu de
tout, il le fait un peu mal moins bien. Dans certains milieux ou après une lecture très
superficielle du travail mené par Otlet, on comprend que le personnage bénéficie d’un a
priori négatif car il a mélangé les genres ou les domaines. Par exemple, Otlet s’est attaqué à
différentes institutions pour leur manque d’originalité en terme de bibliographie. La
Bibliothèque Royale en a fait les frais. Ça peut laisser quelques traces inattendues dans
l’histoire. L’héritage d’Otlet en matière bibliographique n’est pas forcément mis en évidence
dans un lieu tel que la bibliothèque nationale. C’est on le comprend difficile d’imaginer une
institution qui explique certains engagements de manière aussi personnalisée ou
individualisée. On va plutôt parler d’un service et de son histoire dans une période plus
longue. On évite ainsi d’entrer dans des détails tels que ceux-là.
Effectivement, il y a à la fois le Monsieur dans son époque, la vision que les scientifiques vont
en garder aujourd’hui et des académiques. Et puis, il y a la fascination de tout un chacun.
Notre travail à nous, c’est de faire de tout. C’est à la fois de faire en sorte que les archives
soient disponibles pour le tout un chacun, mais aussi que le scientifique qui a envie d’étudier,
dans une perspective positive ou négative, puisse le faire.
ON EST PAS DANS L’OTLETANEUM ICI !

FS : Le travail d’Otlet met en relation l’organisation du savoir et de la communication.
Comment votre travail peut-il, dans un centre d’archives qui est aussi un lieu de rencontre et
un musée, être inspiré - ou pas - par cette mission qu’Otlet s’était donné ?
SM : Il y a quand même un chose qui est essentielle, c’est qu’on est pas dans l’Otletaneum
ici, on n’est pas dans la fondation Otlet.

Nous sommes un centre d’archives spécialisé, qui a conservé toutes les archives liées à une
institution. Cette institution était animée par des hommes et des femmes. Et donc, ce qui les
animaient, c’était différentes choses, dont le désir de transmission. Et quand à Otlet, on a
identifié son envie de transmettre et il a imaginé tous les moyens. Il n’était pas ingénieur non
plus, il ne faut pas rire. Et donc, c’est un peu comme Jules Verne, il a rêvé le monde, il a
imaginé des choses différentes, des instruments. Il s’est mis à rêver à certaines choses, à des
applications. C’est un passionné, c’est un innovateur et je pense qu’il a passionné des gens
autour de lui. Mais, autour de lui, il y avait d’autres personnes, notamment Henri La
Fontaine, qui n’est pas moins intéressant. Il y avait aussi le Baron Descamps et d’autres
personnes qui gravitaient autour de cette institution. Il y avait aussi tout un contexte
particulier lié notamment à la sociologie, aux sciences sociales, notamment Solvay, et voilà.
Tout ceux qu’on retrouve et qui ont traversé une quarantaine d’années.
Aujourd’hui, nous sommes un centre d’archives avec des supports différents, avec cette
volonté encyclopédique qu’ils ont eu et qui a été multi supports, et donc l’œuvre phare n’a
pas été uniquement Le Traité de Documentation. C’était intéressant de comprendre sa
genèse avec les visites que vous aviez fait, mais il y d’autres fonds, notamment des fonds liés
au pacifisme, à l’anarchisme et au féminisme. Et aussi tout ce département iconographique
avec ces essais un peu particuliers qui ne sont pas super connus.
Donc on n’est pas dans l’Otletaneum et nous ne sommes pas dans le sanctuaire d’Otlet.
ADV : La question est plutôt : comment s’emparer de sa vision dans votre travail ?
SM : J’avais bien compris la question.
En rendant accessible ses archives, son patrimoine et en participant à la meilleure
compréhension à travers nos efforts de valorisation : des publications, visites guidées mais
aussi le programme d’activités qui permettent de mieux comprendre son travail. Ce travail
s’effectue notamment à travers le label du Patrimoine Européen mais aussi dans le cadre de
Mémoire du Monde[6].
RC : Ce n’est pas parce que Otlet a écrit que La Fontaine n’a pas travaillé sur le projet. Ce
n’était pas du tout les mêmes personnalités.
SM : On est sur des stéréotypes.
ADV : Otlet a tout de même énormément écrit ?
SM : Otlet a beaucoup synthétisé, diffusé et lu. Il a été un formidable catalyseur de son
époque.
RC : C’est plutôt perdre la pensée d’Otlet en allant dans un seul sens, parce que lui il voulait
justement brasser des savoirs, diffuser l’ensemble de la connaissance. Pour nous l’objectif

P.36

P.37

c’est vraiment de pouvoir tout exploiter, tous les sujets, tous les supports, toutes les
thématiques… Quand on dit qu’il a préfiguré internet, c’est juste deux schémas d’Otlet et on
tourne autour de deux schémas depuis 2012, même avant d’ailleurs, ces deux schémas A4.
Ils ne sont pas grands.
SM : Ce qui n’est pas juste non plus, c’est le caractère réducteur par lequel on passe quand
on réduit le Mundaneum à Otlet et qu’on ne réduit Otlet qu’à ça. Et d’un autre côté, ce que
je trouve intéressant aussi, c’est les autres personnalités qui ont décidé de refaire aussi le
monde par la fiche et là, notre idée était évidemment de mettre en évidence toutes ces
personnes et les compositions multiformes de cette institution qui avait beaucoup d’originalité
et pas de s’en tenir à une vision « La Fontaine c’est le prix Nobel de la paix, Otlet c’est
monsieur Internet, Léonie La Fontaine c’est Madame féminisme, Monsieur Hem Day[7] c’est
l’anarchiste … » On ne fait pas l’Histoire comme ça, en créant des catégories.
RC : Je me souviens quand je suis arrivée ici en 2002 : Paul Otlet c’était l’espèce de savant
fou qui avait voulu créer une cité mondiale et qui l’avait proposée à Hitler. Les gens avaient
oublié tout ce qu’il avait fait avant.
Vous avez beaucoup de bibliothèques qui aujourd’hui encore classent au nom de la CDU
mais ils ne savent pas d’où ça vient. Tout ce travail on l’a fait et ça remettait, quand même,
les choses à leur place et on l’a ouvert quand même au public. On a eu des ouvertures avec
des différents publics à partir de ce moment là.
SM : C’est aussi d’avoir une vision globale sur ce que les uns et les autres ont fait et aussi de
ce qu’a été l’institution, ce qui est d’ailleurs l’une des plus grosse difficulté qui existe. C’est de
s’appeler Mundaneum dans l’absolu.
On est le « Mundaneum Centre d’archives » depuis 1993. Mais le Mundaneum c’est une
institution qui nait après la première guerre mondiale, dont le nom est postérieur à l'IIB.
Dans ses gênes, elle est bibliographique et peut-être que ce sont ces différentes notions qu’il
faut essayer d’expliquer aux gens.
Mais c’est quand même formidable de dire que Paul Otlet a inventé internet, pourquoi pas.
C’est une formule et je pense que dans l’absolu la formule marque les gens. Maintenant, il
n’a pas inventé Google. J’ai bien dit Internet.
POUR LA CARICATURE, C’EST SYMPA. POUR LA RÉALITÉ
MOINS.

FS : Qu’est ce que votre collaboration avec Google vous a-t-elle apportée ? Est-ce qu'ils vous
ont aidé à numériser des documents?

RC : C’est nous qui avons numérisé. C’est moi qui met les images en ligne sur Google.
Google n’a rien numérisé.
ADV : Mais donc vous vous transmettez des images et des métadonnées à Google mais le
public n’a pas accès à ces images … ?
RC : Ils ont accès, mais ils ne peuvent pas télécharger.
FS : Les images que vous avez mises sur Google Cultural Institute sont aujourd’hui dans le
domaine public et donc en tant que public, je ne peux pas voir que les images sont libres de
droit, parce qu’elles sont toutes sous la licence standard de Google.
RC : Ils ont mis « Collection de la Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles » à chaque fois. Puisque
ça fait partie des métadonnées qui sont transmises avec l’image.
ADV : Le problème, actuellement, comme il n’y a pas de catalogue en ligne, c’est qu’il n’y a
pas tant d’autres accès. À part quelques images sur numeriques.be, quand on tape « Otlet »
sur un moteur de recherche, on a l’impression que ce n’est que via le Google Cultural Institute
par lequel on a accès et en réalité c’est un accès limité.
SM : C’est donc une impression.
RC : Vous avez aussi des images sur Wikimedia commons. Il y a la même chose que sur
Google Cultural Institute. C’est moi qui les met des deux cotés, je sais ce que je mets. Et là
je suis encore en train d’en uploader dessus, donc allez y. Pour l’instant, c’est de nouveau des
schémas d’Otlet, en tout cas des planches qui sont mises en ligne.
Sur Wikimédia Commons je sais pas importer les métadonnées automatiquement. Enfin
j’importe un fichier et puis je dois entrer les données moi-même. Je ne peux pas importer un
fichier Excel. Dans Google je fais ça, j’importe les images et ça se fait tout seul.
AV : Et vous pouvez pas trouver une collaboration avec les gens de Wikimédia Commons ?
RC : En fait, ils proposent des systèmes d’importations mais qui ne fonctionnent pas ou alors
qui ne fonctionnent pas avec Windows. Et donc, moi je ne vais pas commencer à installer un
PC qui fonctionne avec Linux ou Ubuntu juste pour pouvoir uploader sur Wikimédia.
AV : Mais eux peuvent le faire ?
RC : On a eu la collaboration sur Le traité de Documentation, puisque c’est eux qui ont
travaillés. Ils ont tout retranscrit.
Aussi, il faut dédommager les bénévoles. Ça je peux vous garantir. Ils sont bénévoles jusqu’à
un certain point. Mais si vous leur confiez du travail comme ça … Ils sont bénévoles parce

P.38

P.39

que quand ils retravaillent des fiches sur Wikipédia, parce que c’est leur truc, ils en ont envie,
c’est leur volonté.
Je ne mets pas plus sur Google Cultural Institute que sur Wikipédia. Je ne favorise pas
Google. Ce qu’il y a sur le Cultural Institute, c’est qu’on a la possibilité de réaliser des
expositions virtuelles et quand j’upload là, c’est parce qu’on a une exposition qui va être faite.
On essaye de faire des expositions virtuelles. C’est vrai que ça fonctionne bien pour nous en
matière de communication pour les archives. Ça, il ne faut pas s’en cacher. J’ai beaucoup de
demandes qui arrivent, des demandes d’images, par ce biais là. Ça nous permet de valoriser
des fonds et des thématiques qu’on ne pourrait pas faire dans l’espace.
On a fait une exposition sur Léonie Lafontaine, qui a permis de mettre en ligne une centaine
de documents liés au féminisme, ça n’avait jamais été fait avant. C’était très intéressant et ça
a eu un bon retour pour les autres expositions aussi. Moi, c’est plutôt comme ça que j’utilise
Google Cultural Institute. Je ne suis pas pro Google mais là, j’ai un outil qui me permet de
valoriser les archives.
ADV : Google serait-il la seule solution pour valoriser vos archives ?
SM : Notre solution c’est d’avoir un logiciel à nous. Pourquoi avoir cette envie d’alimenter
d’autres sites ? Parce qu’on ne l’a pas sur le nôtre. Pour rappel, on travaille pour la
Communauté Française qui est propriétaire des collections et avec laquelle on est
conventionné. Elle ne nous demande pas d’avoir un logiciel externe. Elle demande qu’on ait
notre propre produit aussi. Et c’est là dessus que l’on travaille depuis 2014, pour le
remplacement de Pallas, parce que ça fait des années qu’ils nous disent qu’ils ne vont plus
soutenir. C’est plutôt ça qui nous met dans une situation complètement incompréhensible.
Comment voulez vous qu’on puisse faire transparaître ce que nous avons si on n’a pas un
outil qui permette aux chercheurs, quels qu’ils soient, scientifiques ou non, pour qu’ils
puissent être autonomes dans leur recherches ? Et pour nous, le travail que nous avons fait
en terme d’inventaire et de numérisation, qu’il soit exploitable de manière libre ?
Moi, franchement, je me demande, si cette question et cette vision que vous avez, elle ne se
poserait pas si finalement nous étions déjà sur autre chose que Pallas. On est dans un
inconfort de travail de base.
Je pense aussi que l’information à donner de notre part c’est de dire « il y a tout ceci qui
existe, venez le voir ».
On arrive à sensibiliser aussi sur les collections qu’il y a au centre d’archives et c’est bien,
c’est tout à fait intéressant. Maintenant ce serait bien aussi de franchir une autre étape et
d’éduquer sur l'ouverture au patrimoine. C’est ça aussi notre mission.

Donc Google a sa propre politique. Nous avons mis à disposition quelques expositions et
ceci en est l’intérêt. Mais on a quand même tellement de partenaires différents avec lesquels
on a travaillé. On ne privilégie pas un seul partenaire. Aujourd’hui, certaines firmes viennent
vers nous parce qu’elles ont entendu parler justement plus de Google que du Mundaneum et
en même temps du Mundaneum par l’intermédiaire de Google.
Ce sont des éléments qui nous permettent d’ouvrir peut-être le champ du dialogue avec
d’autres partenaires mais qui ne permettent pas d’aller directement en profondeur dans les
archives, enfin, dans le patrimoine réel que l’on a.
Je veux dire, on aura beau dire qu’on fait autre chose, on ne verra que celui là parce que
Google est un mastodonte et parce que ça parle à tout le monde. On est dans une aire de
communication particulière.
RC : Maintenant la collaboration Google et l’image que vous en avez et bien nous on en
pâtit énormément au niveau des archives. Et encore, parce que souvent les gens nous disent
« mais vous avez un gros mécène »
SM : Ils nous réduisent à ça. Pour la caricature c’est sympa. Pour la réalité moins.
FS : Quand on parle aux gens de l’Université de Gand, c’est clair que leur collaboration avec
Google Books a eu une autre fonction. Ce ne sont que des livres, des objets qui sont scannés
de manière assez brutes. Il n’y a pas de métadonnées complexes, c’est plutôt une question de
volume.
SM : La politique de numérisation de l’Université de
Gand, je pense, est plus en lien avec ce que Google
imagine. C’est-à-dire quelle est la plus value que ça leur
apporte de pouvoir travailler à la fois une bibliothèque
universitaire telle que la bibliothèque de l’Université de
Gand, et le fait de l’associer avec le Mundaneum ?
FS : C’est aussi d'autres besoins, un autre type d’accès ?
Dans une bibliothèque les livres sont là pour être lus, j’ai
l’impression que ce n’est pas la même vision pour un
centre d’archives.
SM : C’est bien plus complexe dans d’autres endroits.

From Voor elk boek is een gebruiker:
SVP: Maar ... je kan niet bij Google
gaan aankloppen, Google kiest jou.
Wij hebben wel hun aandacht
gevraagd voor het Mundaneum met
de link tussen Vander Haeghen en
Otlet. Als Google België iets
organiseert, proberen ze ons altijd te
betrekken, omdat wij nu eenmaal een
universiteit zijn. U heeft het
Mundaneum gezien, het is een zeer
mooi archief, maar dat is het ook.
Voor ons zou dat enkel een stuk van
een collectie zijn. Ze worden ook op
een totaal andere manier gesteund
door Google dan wij.

Notre intention en terme de numérisation n’est pas celle
là, et nous ne voyons pas notre action, nous, uniquement
par ce biais là. À Gand, ils ont numérisé des livres. C’est leur choix soutenu par la Région
flamande. De notre côté, nous poursuivons une même volonté d’accès pour le public et les

P.40

P.41

chercheurs mais avec un matériel un patrimoine, bien différent de livres publiés uniquement !
Le travail avec Google a permis de collaborer plusieurs fois avec l’Université mais nous
l’avions déjà fait avant de se retrouver avec Google sur certaines activités et l’accueil de
conférenciers. Donc, il y a un partenariat avec l’Université gantoise qui est intéressée par
l’histoire d’Otlet, l’histoire des idées mais aussi de l’internationalisme, de l’architecture de la
schématique. C’est d’ailleurs très enrichissant comme réflexion.
TOUT NUMÉRISER

FS : J’ai entendu quelqu’un se demander « pourquoi ne pas numériser toutes les fiches
bibliographiques qui sont dans les tiroirs » ?
RC : Ça ne sert à rien. Toutes les fiches ça n’aurait pas de sens. Maintenant, ce serait
intéressant d’en étudier quelques-unes.
Il y avait un réseau aussi autour du répertoire. C’est à dire que si on a autant de fiches, ce
n'est pas seulement parce qu’on a des fiches qui ont été rédigées à Bruxelles, on a des fiches
qui viennent du monde entier. Dans chaque pays il y avait des institutions responsables de
réaliser des bibliographies et de les renvoyer à Bruxelles.
Ça serait intéressant d’avoir un échantillon de toutes ces institutions ou de toutes ces fiches
qui existent. Ça permettrait aussi de retrouver la trace de certaines institutions qui n’existent
plus aujourd’hui. On a quand même eu deux guerres, il y a eu des révolutions etcetera. Ils
ont quand même travaillé avec des institutions russes qui n’existent plus aujourd’hui. Par ce
biais là, on pourrait retrouver leur trace. Même chose pour des ouvrages. Il y a des ouvrages
qui n’existent plus et pour lesquels on pourrait retrouver la trace. Il faut savoir qu’après la
deuxième guerre mondiale, en 46-47, le président du Mundaneum est Léon Losseau. Il est
avocat, il habite Mons, sa maison d’ailleurs est au 37 rue de Nimy, pas très loin. Il collabore
avec le Mundaneum depuis ses débuts et donc vu que les deux fondateurs sont décédés
pendant la guerre, à ce moment là il fait venir l’UNESCO à Bruxelles. Parce qu’on est dans
une phase de reconstruction des bibliothèques, beaucoup de livres ont été détruits et on
essaye de retrouver leur traces. Il leur dit « venez à Bruxelles, nous on a le répertoire de tous
ces bouquins, venez l’utiliser, nous on a le répertoire pour reconstituer toutes les
bibliothèques ».
Donc, tout numériser, non. Mais numériser certaines choses pour montrer le mécanisme de
ce répertoire, sa constitution, les différents répertoires qui existaient dans ce répertoire et de
pouvoir retrouver la trace de certains éléments, oui.
Si on numérise tout, cela permettrait d’avoir un état des lieux des sources d’informations qui
existaient à une époque pour un sujet.
SM : Le cheminement de la pensée.

Il y a des pistes très intéressantes qui vont nous permettre d’atteindre des aspects
protéiformes de l’institution, mais c’est vaste.
LA MÉMOIRE VIVE DE L’INSTITUTION

FS : Nous étions très touchées par les fiches annotées de la CDU que vous nous avez
montrées la dernière fois que nous sommes venues.
RC : Le travail sur le système lui-même.
SM : C’est fantastique effectivement, avec l’écriture d’Otlet.
SM : Autant on peut dire qu'Otlet est un maître du marketing, autant il utilisait plusieurs
termes pour décrire une même réalité. C’est pour ça que ne s’attacher qu’à sa vision à lui
c’est difficile. Comme classer ses documents, c’est aussi difficile.
ADV : Otlet n’a-t-il pas laissé suffisamment de documentation ? Une documentation qui
explicite ses systèmes de classement ?
RC : Quand on a ouvert les boîtes d'Otlet en 2002, c’était des caisses à bananes non
classées, rien du tout. En fonction de ce qu’on connaissait de l’histoire du Mundaneum à
l’époque on a pu déterminer plus ou moins des frontières et donc on avait l'Institut
international de bibliographie, la CDU, la Cité Mondiale aussi, le Musée International.
SM : Du pacifisme ...
RC : On a appelé ça « Mundapaix » parce qu’on ne savait pas trop comment le mettre dans
l’histoire du Mundaneum, c’était un peu bizarre. Le reste, on l'avait mis de côté parce qu’on
n'était pas en mesure, à ce moment là, de les classer dans ce qu’on connaissait. Puis, au fur
et à mesure qu’on s’est mis à lire les archives, on s’est mis à comprendre des choses, on a
découvert des institutions qui avaient été créées en plus et ça nous a permis d’aller
rechercher ces choses qu’on avait mises de coté.
Il y avait tellement d’institutions qui ont été créées, qui ont pu changer de noms, on ne sait
pas si elles ont existé ou pas. Il faisait une note, il faisait une publication où il annonçait :
« l’office centrale de machin chose » et puis ce n'est même pas sûr qu’il ait existé quelque
part.

P.42

P.43

Parfois, il reprend la même note mais il change certaines
choses et ainsi de suite … rien que sa numérotation c’est
pas toujours facile. Vous avez l’indice CDU, mais
ensuite, vous avez tout le système « M » c’est la référence
aux manuels du RBU. Donc il faut seulement aller
comprendre comment le manuel du RBU est organisé.
C’est à dire trouver des archives qui correspondent pour
pouvoir comprendre cette classification dans le « M ».
RC : On n’a pas trouvé un moment donné, et on aurait
bien voulu trouver, un dossier avec l’explication de son
classement. Sauf qu’il ne nous l’a pas laissé.
SM : Peut-être qu’il est possible que ça ait existé, et je
me demande comment cette information a été expliquée
aux suivants. Je me demande même si George Lorphèvre
savait, parce qu'il n’a pas pu l’expliquer à Boyd
Rayward. En tout cas, les explications n’ont pas été
transmises.

From De Indexalist:
"Bij elke verwijzing stond weer een
andere verwijzing, de één nog
interessanter dan de ander. Elk
vormde de top van een piramide van
weer verdere literatuurstudie, zwanger
met de dreiging om af te dwalen. Elk
was een strakgespannen koord dat
indien niet in acht genomen de auteur
in de val van een fout zou lokken, een
vondst al uitgevonden en
opgeschreven."
From The Indexalist:
“At every reference stood another
reference, each more interesting than
the last. Each the apex of a pyramid
of further reading, pregnant with the
threat of digression, each a thin high
wire which, if not observed might lead
the author into the fall of error, a
finding already found against and
written up.”

L’équipe du Mundaneum a développé une expérience
de plusieurs années et une compréhension sur les archives et leur organisation. Nous avons
par exemple découvert l’existence de fichiers particuliers tels que les fichiers « K ». Ils sont
liés à l’organisation administrative interne. Il a fallu montrer les éléments et archives sur
lesquels nous nous sommes basés pour bien prouver la démarche qui était la nôtre. Certains
documents expliquaient clairement cela. Mais si vous ne les avez jamais vu, c’est difficile de
croire un nouvel élément inconnu !
RC : On n’a pas beaucoup d’informations sur l’origine des collections, c’est-à-dire sur
l’origine des pièces qui sont dans les collections. Par hasard, je vais trouver un tiroir où il est
mis « dons » et à l’intérieur, je ne vais trouver que des fiches écrites à la main comme « dons
de madame une telle de deux drapeaux pour le Musée International » et ainsi de suite.
Il ne nous a pas laissé un manuel à la fin de ses archives et c’est au fur et à mesure qu’on lit
les archives qu’on arrive à faire des liens et à comprendre certains éléments. Aujourd’hui,
faire une base de données idéale, ce n’est pas encore possible, parce qu’il y a encore
beaucoup de choses que nous-mêmes on ne comprend pas. Qu’on doit encore découvrir.
ADV : Serait-il imaginable de produire une documentation issue de votre cheminement dans
la compréhension progressive de cette classification ? Par exemple, des textes enrichis donnant
une perception plus fine, une trace de la recherche. Est-ce que c’est quelque chose qui pourrait
exister ?
RC : Oui, ce serait intéressant.

Par exemple si on prend le répertoire bibliographique. Déjà, il n’y a pas que des références
bibliographiques dedans. Vous avez deux entrées : entrée par matière, entrée par auteur,
donc vous avez le répertoire A et le répertoire B. Si vous regardez les étiquettes, parfois,
vous allez trouver autre chose. Parfois, on a des étiquettes avec « ON ». Vous savez ce que
c’est ? C’est « catalogue collectif des bibliothèque de Belgique ». C’est un travail qu’ils ont
fait à un moment donné. Vous avez les « LDC » les « Bibliothèques collectifs de sociétés
savantes ». Chaque société ayant un numéro, vous avez tout qui est là. Le « K » c’est tout ce
qui est administratif donc à chaque courrier envoyé ou reçu, ils rédigeaient une fiche. On a
des fiches du personnel, on sait au jour le jour qui travaillait et qui a faisait quoi… Et ça, il
ne l’a pas laissé dans les archives.
SM : C’est presque la mémoire vive de l’institution.
On a eu vraiment cette envie de vérifier dans le répertoire cette façon de travailler, le fait
qu’il y ait des informations différentes. Effectivement, c’était un peu avant 2008, qu’on l'a su
et cette information s’est affinée avec des vérifications. Il y a eu des travaux qui ont pu être
faits avec l’identification de séries particulières des dossiers numérotés que Raphaèle a
identifié. Il y avait des correspondances et toute une structuration qu’on a identifié aussi. Ce
sont des sections précises qui ont permis d’améliorer, à la fois la CDU, au départ de faire la
CDU, de faire le répertoire et puis de créer d’autres sections, comme la section féministe,
comme la section chasse et pêche comme la section iconographique. Et donc, par rapport à
ça, je pense qu’il y a vraiment tout un travail qui doit être mis en relation à partir d’une
observation claire, à partir d’une réflexion claire de ce qu’il y a dans le répertoire et dans les
archives. Et ça, c’est un travail qui se fait étape par étape. J’espère qu’on pourra quand
même bien avancer là dessus et donner des indications qui permettront d’aller un peu plus
loin, je ne suis pas sûre qu’on verra le bout.
C’est au moins de transmettre une information, de faire en sorte qu’elle soit utilisable et que
certains documents et ces inventaires soient disponibles, ceux qui existent aujourd’hui. Et que
ça ne se perde pas dans le temps.
FS : Un jour, pensez-vous pouvoir dire « voilà, maintenant c’est fini, on a compris » ?
SM : Je ne suis pas sûre que ce soit si impossible que ça.
Ça dépend de notre volonté et dialogue autour de ces documents. Un dialogue entre les
chercheurs de tout type et l’équipe du Mundaneum enrichit la compréhension. Plus on est
nombreux autour de certains points, plus la compréhension s’élargit. Ça implique bien
entendu une implication de partenaires externes également.
Aujourd’hui on est passé à une politique de numérisation par un matériel, par une
spécialisation du personnel. Et je pense que cette spécialisation nous a permis, depuis des
années, d’aller un peu plus profondément dans les archives et donc de mieux les comprendre.

P.44

P.45

Il y a un historique que l’on comprend véritablement bien aussi, il ne demande qu’à se
déployer. Il y a à comprendre comment on va pouvoir valoriser cela autour de journées,
autour de publications, autour d’outils qui sont à notre disposition. Et donc, autour de
catalogues en ligne, notamment, et de notre propre catalogue en ligne.
C’EST ÇA QU’IL FAUT IMAGINER

FS : Les méthodes et les standards de documentation changent, l’histoire institutionnelle et les
temps changent, les chercheurs passent… vous avez vécu avec tout ça depuis longtemps. Je
me demande comment le faire transparaître, le faire ressentir?
SM : C’est vrai qu’on aimerait bien pouvoir axer aussi la communication de l’institution sur
ces différents aspects. C’est bien ça notre rêve en fait, ou notre aspiration. Pour l’instant, on
est plutôt en train de se demander comment on va mieux communiquer, sur ce que nous
faisons nous ?
RC : Est-ce que ce serait uniquement en mettant en ligne des documents ? Ou imaginer une
application qui permettrait de les mettre en œuvre? Par exemple, si je prends la
correspondance, moi j’ai lu à peu près 3000 courriers. En les lisant, on se rend vraiment
compte du réseau. C’est-à-dire qu’on se rend compte qu’il a de la correspondance à peu près
partout dans le monde. Que ce soit avec des particuliers, avec des bibliothèques, avec des
universités, avec des entreprises et donc déjà rien qu’avec cet échantillon-là, ça donne une
masse d’informations. Maintenant, si on commence à décrire dans une base de données,
lettre par lettre, je ne suis pas sûre que cela apporte quelque chose. Par contre, si on imagine
une application qui permette de faire ressortir sur une carte à chaque fois le nom des
correspondants, là, ça donne déjà une idée et ça peut vraiment mettre en œuvre toute cette
correspondance. Mais prise seule juste comme ça, est-ce que c’est vraiment intéressant ?
Dans une base de données dite « classique », c’est ça aussi le problème avec nos archives, le
Mundaneum n'étant pas un centre d’archives comme les autres de par ses collections, c’est
parfois difficile de nous adapter à des standards existants.
ADV : Il n’y aurait pas qu’un seul catalogue ou pas une seule manière de montrer les
données. C’est bien ça ?
RC : Si vous allez sur Pallas vous avez la hiérarchie du fond Otlet. Est-ce que ça parle à
quelqu’un, à part quelqu’un qui veut faire une recherche très spécifique ? Mais sinon ça ne
lui permet pas de vraiment visualiser le travail qui a été fait, et même l’ampleur du travail.
Nous, on ne peut pas se conformer à une base de donnée comme ça. Il faut que ça existe
mais ça ne transparaît pas le travail d'Otlet et de La Fontaine. Une vision comme ça, ce n'est
pas Mundaneum.

SM : Il n’y a finalement pas de base de données qui arrive à la cheville de ce qu’ils ont
imaginés en terme de papier. C’est ça qu’il faut imaginer.
FS : Pouvez-vous nous parler de cette vision d’un catalogue possible ? Si vous aviez tout
l’argent et tout le temps du monde ?
SM : On ne dort plus alors, c’est ça ?
Il y a déjà une bonne structure qui est là, et l’idée c’est vraiment de pouvoir lier les
documents, les descriptions. On peut aller plus loin dans les inventaires et numériser les
documents qui sont peut-être les plus intéressants et peut-être les plus uniques. Maintenant,
le rêve serait de numériser tout, mais est-ce que ce serait raisonnable de tout numériser ?
FS : Si tous les documents étaient disponibles en ligne ?
RC : Je pense que ça serait difficile de pouvoir transposer la pensée et le travail d'Otlet et
La Fontaine dans une base de données. C’est à dire, dans une base de données, c’est
souvent une conception très carrée : vous décrivez le fond, la série, le dossier, la pièce. Ici
tout est lié. Par exemple, la collection d’affiches, elle dépend de l’Institut International de
Photographie qui était une section du Mundaneum, c’était la section qui conserve l’image.
Ça veut dire que je dois d’abord comprendre tous les développements qui ont eu lieu avec le
concept de documentation pour ensuite lier tout le reste. Et c’est comme ça pour chaque
collection parce que ce ne sont pas des collections qui sont montées par hasard, elles
dépendaient à chaque fois d’une section spécialisée. Et donc, transposer ça dans une base de
données, je ne sais pas comment on pourrait faire.
Je pense aussi qu’aujourd’hui on n’est pas encore assez loin dans les inventaires et dans toute
la compréhension parce qu’en fait à chaque fois qu’on se plonge dans les archives, on
comprend un peu mieux, on voit un peu plus d’éléments, un peu plus de complexité, pour
vraiment pouvoir lier tout ça.
SM : Effectivement nous n’avons pas encore tout compris, il y a encore tous les petits
offices : office chasse, office pêche et renseignements…
RC : À la fin de sa vie, il va aller vers tout ce qui est standardisation, normalisation. Il va être
membre d’associations qui travaillent sur tout ce qui est norme et ainsi de suite. Il y a cet
aspect là qui est intéressant parce que c’est quand même une grande évolution par rapport au
début.
Avec le Musée International, c’est la muséographie et la muséologie qui sont vraiment une
grosse innovation à l’époque. Il y a déjà des personnes qui s’y sont intéressé mais peut-être
pas suffisamment.

P.46

P.47

Je rêve de pouvoir reconstituer virtuellement les salles d’expositions du Musée International,
parce que ça devait être incroyable de voyager là dedans. On a des plans, des photos. Même
si on n’a plus d’objets, on a suffisamment d’informations pour pouvoir le faire. Et il serait
intéressant de pouvoir étudier ce genre de salle même pour aujourd’hui, pour la
muséographie d’aujourd’hui, de reprendre exemple sur ce qu’il a fait.
FS : Si on s’imagine le Mundaneum virtuel, vraiment, si on essaye de le reconstruire à partir
des documents, c’est excitant !
SM : On en parle depuis 2010, de ça.
FS : C’est pas du tout comme le scanner hig-tech de Google Art qui passe devant le Mona
Lisa …
SM : Non. C’est un autre travail
FS : Ce n’est pas ça le musée virtuel.
RC : C’est un autre boulot.
Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

1. Logiciel fourni par la Communauté française aux centres d’archives privées. « Pallas permet de décrire, de gérer et de consulter
des documents de différents types (archives, manuscrits, photographies, images, documents de bibliothèques) en tenant compte
des conditions de description spécifiques à chaque type de document. » http://www.brudisc.be/fr/content/logiciel-pallas
2. « Images et histoires des patrimoines numérisés » [1]
3. « Notre mission : On transforme le monde par la culture! Nous voulons construire sur le riche héritage culturel européen et
donner aux gens la possibilité de le réutiliser facilement, pour leur travail, pour leur apprentissage personnel ou tout simplement
pour s’amuser. » http://www.europeana.eu
4. « The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) supports shared innovation in metadata design and best practices across a
broad range of purposes and business models. » http://dublincore.org/about-us/
5. La norme générale et internationale de description archivistique, ISAD(G) http://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/

CBPS_2000_Guidelines_ISAD%28G%29_Second-edition_FR.pdf

6. « L'UNESCO a mis en place le Programme Mémoire du monde en 1992. Cette mise en oeuvre est d'abord née de la prise
de conscience de l'état de préservation alarmant du patrimoine documentaire et de la précarité de son accès dans différentes
régions du monde. » http://www.unesco.org/new/fr/communication-and-information/memory-of-the-

world/about-the-programme

7. Marcel Dieu dit Hem Day

Amateur
Librarian
-A
Course
in
Critical
Pedagogy
Tomislav Medak & Marcell Mars (Public Library project)

A proposal for a curriculum in amateur librarianship, developed through the
activities and exigencies of the Public Library project. Drawing from a historic
genealogy of public library as the institution of access to knowledge, the
proletarian tradition of really useful knowledge and the amateur agency driven
by technological development, the curriculum covers a range of segments from
immediately applicable workflows for scanning, sharing and using e-books,
over politics and tactics around custodianship of online libraries, to applied
media theory implicit in the practices of amateur librarianship. The proposal is
made with further development, complexification and testing in mind during the
future activities of the Public Library and affiliated organizations.
PUBLIC LIBRARY, A POLITICAL GENEALOGY

Public libraries have historically achieved as an institutional space of exemption from the
commodification and privatization of knowledge. A space where works of literature and
science are housed and made accessible for the education of every member of society
regardless of their social or economic status. If, as a liberal narrative has it, education is a
prerequisite for full participation in a body politic, it is in this narrow institutional space that
citizenship finds an important material base for its universal realization.

P.48

P.49

The library as an institution of public access and popular literacy, however, did not develop
before a series of transformations and social upheavals unfolded in the course of 18th and
19th century. These developments brought about a flood of books and political demands
pushing the library to become embedded in an egalitarian and democratizing political
horizon. The historic backdrop for these developments was the rapid ascendancy of the book
as a mass commodity and the growing importance of the reading culture in the aftermath of
the invention of the movable type print. Having emerged almost in parallel with capitalism, by
the early 18th century the trade in books was rapidly expanding. While in the 15th century
the libraries around the monasteries, courts and universities of Western Europe contained no
more than 5 million manuscripts, the output of printing presses in the 18th century alone
exploded to formidable 700 million volumes.[1] And while this provided a vector for the
emergence of a bourgeois reading public and an unprecedented expansion of modern
science, the culture of reading and Enlightenment remained largely a privilege of the few.
Two social upheavals would start to change that. On 2 November 1789 the French
revolutionary National Assembly passed a decision to seize all library holdings from the
Church and aristocracy. Millions of volumes were transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale
and local libraries across France. At the same time capitalism was on the rise, particularly in
England. It massively displaced the impoverished rural population into growing urban
centres, propelled the development of industrial production and, by the mid-19th century,
introduced the steam-powered rotary press into the commercial production of books. As
books became more easily mass-produced, the
commercial subscription libraries catering to the better-off
parts of society blossomed. This brought the class aspect
of the nascent demand for public access to books to the
fore.
After the failed attempt to introduce universal suffrage
and end the system of political representation based on
property entitlements through the Reform Act of 1832,
the English Chartist movement started to open reading
rooms and cooperative lending libraries that would
quickly become a popular hotbed of social exchange
between the lower classes. In the aftermath of the
revolutionary upheavals of 1848, the fearful ruling
classes finally consented to the demand for tax-financed
public libraries, hoping that the access to literature and
edification would after all help educate skilled workers
that were increasingly in demand and ultimately
hegemonize the working class for the benefits of
capitalism's culture of self-interest and competition.[2]

management hierarchies, and national
security issues. Various sets of these
conditions that are at work in a
particular library, also redefine the
notion of publishing and of the
publication, and in turn the notion of
public.

From Bibliothécaire amateur un cours de pédagogie
critique:
Puisqu'il était de plus en plus facile de
produire des livres en masse, les
bibliothèques privées payantes, au
service des catégories privilégiées de
la société, ont commencé à se
répandre. Ce phénomène a mis en
relief la question de la classe dans la
demande naissante pour un accès
public aux livres.

REALLY USEFUL KNOWLEDGE
[3]

It's no surprise that the Chartists, reeling from a political defeat, had started to open reading
rooms and cooperative lending libraries. The education provided to the proletariat and the
poor by the ruling classes of that time consisted, indeed, either of a pious moral edification
serving political pacification or of an inculcation of skills and knowledge useful to the factory
owner. Even the seemingly noble efforts of the Society for the Diffusion of the Useful
Knowledge, a Whig organization aimed at bringing high-brow learning to the middle and
working classes in the form of simplified and inexpensive publications, were aimed at dulling
the edge of radicalism of popular movements.[4]
These efforts to pacify the downtrodden masses pushed them to seek ways of self-organized
education that would provide them with literacy and really useful knowledge – not applied,
but critical knowledge that would allow them to see through their own political and economic
subjection, develop radical politics and innovate shadow social institutions of their own. The
radical education, reliant on meagre resources and time of the working class, developed in the
informal setting of household, neighbourhood and workplace, but also through radical press
and communal reading and discussion groups.[5]
The demand for really useful knowledge encompassed a critique of “all forms of ‘provided’
education” and of the liberal conception “that ‘national education’ was a necessary condition
for the granting of universal suffrage.” Development of radical “curricula and pedagogies”
formed a part of the arsenal of “political strategy as a means of changing the world.”[6]
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

This is the context of the emergence of the public library. A historical compromise between a
push for radical pedagogy and a response to dull its edge. And yet with the age of
digitization, where one would think that the opportunities for access to knowledge have
expanded immensely, public libraries find themselves increasingly limited in their ability to
acquire and lend both digital and paper editions. It is a sign of our radically unequal times
that the political emancipation finds itself on a defensive fighting again for this material base of
pedagogy against the rising forces of privatization. Not only has mass education become
accessible only under the condition of high fees, student debt and adjunct peonage, but the
useful knowledge that the labour market and reproduction of the neoliberal capitalism
demands has become the one and only rationale for education.

P.50

P.51

No wonder that over the last 6-7 years we have seen self-education, shadow libraries and
amateur librarians emerge again to counteract the contraction of spaces of exemption that
have been shrunk by austerity and commodity.
The project Public Library was initiated with the counteraction in mind. To help everyone
learn to use simple tools to be able to act as an Amateur Librarian – to digitize, to collect, to
share, to preserve books and articles that were unaffordable, unavailable, undesirable in the
troubled corners of the Earth we hail from.
Amateur Librarian played an important role in the narrative of Public Library. And it seems
it was successful. People easily join the project by 'becoming' a librarian using Calibre[7] and
[let’s share books].[8] Other aspects of the Public Library narrative add a political articulation
to that simple yet disobedient act. Public Library detects an institutional crisis in education,
an economic deadlock of austerity and a domination of commodity logic in the form of
copyright. It conjures up the amateur librarians’ practice of sharing books/catalogues as a
relevant challenge against the convergence of that crisis, deadlock and copyright regime.
To understand the political and technological assumptions and further develop the strategies
that lie behind the counteractions of amateur librarians, we propose a curriculum that is
indebted to a tradition of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is a productive and theoretical
practice rejecting an understanding of educational process that reduces it to a technique of
imparting knowledge and a neutral mode of knowledge acquisition. Rather, it sees the
pedagogy as a broader “struggle over knowledge, desire, values, social relations, and, most
important, modes of political agency”, “drawing attention to questions regarding who has
control over the conditions for the production of knowledge.”[9]

No industry in the present demonstrates more the
asymmetries of control over the conditions of production
of knowledge than the academic publishing. The denial
of access to outrageously expensive academic
publications for many universities, particularly in the
Global South, stands in stark contrast to the super-profits
that a small number of commercial publishers draws from
the free labour of scientists who write, review and edit
contributions and the extortive prices their institutional
libraries have to pay for subscriptions. It is thus here that
the amateur librarianship attains its poignancy for a
critical pedagogy, inviting us to closer formulate and
unfold its practices in a shared process of discovery.
A CURRICULUM

Public library is:
• free access to books for every member of society,
• library catalogue,
• librarian.

The curriculum in amateur librarianship develops aspects
and implications of this definition. Parts of this curriculum
have evolved over a number of workshops and talks
previously held within the Public Library project, parts of
it are yet to evolve from a process of future research,
exchange and knowledge production in the education
process. While schematic, scaling from the immediately
practical, over strategic and tactical, to reflexive registers
of knowledge, there are actual – here unnamed – people
and practices we imagine we could be learning from.
The first iteration of this curriculum could be either a
summer academy rostered with our all-star team of
librarians, designers, researchers and teachers, or a small
workshop with a small group of students delving deeper
into one particular aspect of the curriculum. In short it is
an open curriculum: both open to educational process
and contributions by others. We welcome comments,
derivations and additions.

From Bibliothécaire

amateur un cours de pédagogie
critique:
Actuellement, aucune industrie ne
montre plus d'asymétries au niveau du
contrôle des conditions de production
de la connaissance que celle de la
publication académique. Refuser
l'accès à des publications
académiques excessivement chères
pour beaucoup d'universités, en
particulier dans l'hémisphère sud,
contraste ostensiblement avec les
profits énormes qu'un petit nombre
d'éditeurs commerciaux tirent du
travail bénévole de scientifiques qui
écrivent, révisent et éditent des
contributions et avec les prix
exorbitants des souscriptions que les
bibliothèques institutionnelles doivent
payer.
From Voor elk boek is een
gebruiker:
FS: Hoe gaan jullie om met boeken
en publicaties die al vanaf het begin
digitaal zijn? DM: We kopen e-books
en e-tijdschriften en maken die
beschikbaar voor onderzoekers. Maar
dat zijn hele andere omgevingen,
omdat die content niet fysiek binnen
onze muren komt. We kopen toegang
tot servers van uitgevers of de
aggregator. Die content komt nooit bij
ons, die blijft op hun machines staan.
We kunnen daar dus eigenlijk niet
zoveel mee doen, behalve verwijzen
en zorgen dat het evengoed vindbaar
is als de print.

P.52

P.53

MODULE 1: WORKFLOWS
• from book to e-book
◦ digitizing a book on a
book scanner
◦ removing DRM and
converting e-book
formats
• from clutter to catalogue
◦ managing an e-book
library with Calibre
◦ finding e-books and
articles on online
libraries
• from reference to bibliography
◦ annotating in an ebook reader device or
application
◦ creating a scholarly
bibliography in Zotero
• from block device to network device
◦ sharing your e-book
library on a local
network to a reading
device
◦ sharing your e-book
library on the
internet with [let’s
share books]
• from private to public IP space
◦ using [let’s share
books] &
library.memoryoftheworld.org
◦ using logan & jessica
◦ using Science Hub
◦ using Tor

MODULE 2: POLITICS/TACTICS
• from developmental subordination to subaltern disobedience
◦ uneven development &
political strategies
◦ strategies of the
developed v strategies
of the
underdeveloped : open
access v piracy
• from property to commons
◦ from property to
commons
◦ copyright, scientific
publishing, open
access
◦ shadow libraries,
piracy,
custodians.online
• from collection to collective action
◦ critical pedagogy &
education
◦ archive, activation &
collective action

MODULE 3: ABSTRACTIONS IN ACTION
• from linear to computational
◦ library &
epistemology:
catalogue, search,
discovery, reference
◦ print book v e-book:
page, margin, spine
• from central to distributed
◦ deep librarianship &
amateur librarians

P.54

P.55

◦ network infrastructure
(s)/topologies (ruling
class studies)
• from factual to fantastic
◦ universe as library as
universe

READING LIST
• Mars, Marcell; Vladimir, Klemo. Download & How to:
Calibre & [let’s share books]. Memory of the World (2014)
https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/28/
calibre-lets-share-books/
• Buringh, Eltjo; Van Zanden, Jan Luiten. Charting the “Rise of
the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A
Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth
Centuries. The Journal of Economic History (2009) http://
journals.cambridge.org/article_S0022050709000837
• Mattern, Shannon. Library as Infrastructure. Places Journal
(2014) https://placesjournal.org/article/library-asinfrastructure/
• Antonić, Voja. Our beloved bookscanner. Memory of the
World (2012) https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/
blog/2012/10/28/our-beloved-bookscanner-2/
• Medak, Tomislav; Sekulić, Dubravka; Mertens, An. How to:
Bookscanning. Memory of the World (2014) https://
www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/12/08/how-tobookscanning/
• Barok, Dusan. Talks/Public Library. Monoskop (2015)
http://monoskop.org/Talks/Public_Library
• Custodians.online. In Solidarity with Library Genesis and
Science Hub (2015) http://custodians.online
• Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History Random
House (2014)
• Harris, Michael H. History of Libraries of the Western World.
Scarecrow Press (1999)
• MayDay Rooms. Activation (2015) http://
maydayrooms.org/activation/
• Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards &
Catalogs, 1548-1929. MIT Press (2011) https://
library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/
PaRC3gldHrZ3MuNPXyrh1hM1meyyaqvhaWlHTvr53NRjJ2k

For updates: https://www.zotero.org/groups/amateur_librarian__a_course_in_critical_pedagogy_reading_list
Last
Revision:
1·08·2016

1. For an economic history of the book in the Western Europe see Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise
of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth
Centuries,” The Journal of Economic History 69, No. 02 (June 2009): 409–45, doi:10.1017/S0022050709000837,
particularly Tables 1-5.
2. For the social history of public library see Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (Random House, 2014) chapter 5:
“Books for all”.
3. For this concept we remain indebted to the curatorial collective What, How and for Whom/WHW, who have presented the
work of Public Library within the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge they organized at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid,
October 29, 2014 – February 9, 2015.
4. “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, June 25, 2015, https://

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Society_for_the_Diffusion_of_Useful_Knowledge&oldid=668644340.

5. Richard Johnson, “Really Useful Knowledge,” in CCCS Selected Working Papers: Volume 1, 1 edition, vol. 1 (London u.a.:
Routledge, 2014), 755.
6. Ibid., 752.
7. http://calibre-ebook.com/
8. https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/28/calibre-lets-share-books/
9. Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 5.

P.56

P.57

Bibliothécaire
amateur
- un
cours de
pédagogie
critique
Tomislav Medak & Marcell Mars (Public Library project)

Proposition de programme d'études de bibliothécaire amateur développé à
travers les activités et les exigences du projet Public Library. Prenant pour
base la généalogie historique de la bibliothèque publique en tant qu'institution
permettant l'accès à la connaissance, la tradition prolétaire de la connaissance
réellement utile et la puissance de l'amateur motivée par le développement
technologique, le programme couvre différents secteurs : depuis les flux de
travail directement applicables comme la numérisation, le partage et l'utilisation
de livres électroniques, à la politique et la tactique de conservation des
bibliothèques en ligne, en passant par la théorie médiatique appliquée qui est
implicite dans les pratiques du bibliothécaire amateur. La proposition est plus
amplement développée, complexifiée et sera testée durant les futures activités
de Public Library et des organisations affiliées.
BIBLIOTHÈQUE PUBLIQUE : UNE GÉNÉALOGIE POLITIQUE

Historiquement, les bibliothèques publiques sont parvenues à être un espace institutionnel
exempté de la marchandisation et de la privatisation de la connaissance. Un espace dans
lequel les œuvres littéraires et scientifiques sont abritées et rendues accessibles pour
l'éducation de chaque membre de la société, quel que soit son statut social ou économique.
Si, du point de vue libéral, l'éducation est un prérequis à la véritable participation au corps

politique, c'est dans cet espace institutionnel étroit que la citoyenneté trouve une base
matérielle importante à sa réalisation universelle.
Si aujourd'hui elle est une institution d'accès public et de savoir populaire, il a fallu une série
de transformations et de bouleversements sociaux au 18e et 19e siècle pour que la
bibliothèque se développe. Ces développements ont provoqué l'arrivée d'un flot de livres et
d'exigences politiques qui ont encouragé la bibliothèque à s'intégrer dans un horizon politique
démocratisant et égalitaire. En toile de fond historique de ces développements, il y eut
l'ascendance rapide du livre en tant que commodité de masse et l'importance croissante de la
culture de la lecture suite à l'invention des caractères d'imprimerie mobiles. Ayant émergé à
la même époque que le capitalisme, au début du 18e siècle le commerce des livres, était en
pleine expansion. Alors qu'au 15e siècle, en Europe occidentale, les bibliothèques qui se
trouvaient autour des monastères, des tribunaux et des universités ne contenaient pas plus de
cinq millions de manuscrits, la production de l'imprimerie a atteint 700 millions de volumes,
et ce, au 18e siècle seulement.[1] Et alors que cela a offert un vecteur à l'émergence d'un
public de lecteurs bourgeois et contribué à une expansion sans précédent de la science
moderne, la culture de la lecture et des Lumières restait alors principalement le privilège
d'une minorité.
Deux bouleversements sociaux allaient commencer à changer cela. Le 2 novembre 1789,
l'Assemblée nationale de la Révolution française a approuvé la saisie de tous les biens
bibliothécaires de l'Église et de l'aristocratie. Des millions de volumes ont été transférés à la
Bibliothèque Nationale ainsi qu'aux bibliothèques régionales, à travers la France. Au même
moment, le capitalisme progressait, en particulier en Angleterre. Ce mouvement a
massivement déplacé une population rurale pauvre dans les centres urbains en pleine
croissance et propulsé le développement de la production industrielle. À la moitié du 19e
siècle, il a également a introduit la presse typographique à vapeur dans la production
commerciale de livres. Puisqu'il était de plus en plus facile de produire des livres en masse,
les bibliothèques privées payantes, au service des
catégories privilégiées de la société, ont commencé à se
répandre. Ce phénomène a mis en relief la question de la
classe dans la demande naissante pour un accès public
aux livres.
Après une tentative ratée d'introduction du suffrage
universel en vue d'en finir avec le système de
représentation politique basée sur les droits de propriété à
travers l'Acte de réforme de 1832, le mouvement anglais
du chartisme a commencé à ouvrir des salles de lectures
et des bibliothèques de prêts coopératifs qui allaient
bientôt devenir un foyer pour l'échange social entre les
classes populaires. Suite aux mouvements
révolutionnaires de 1848, les classes dirigeantes

P.58

P.59

apeurées ont fini par accepter de répondre à la demande qui réclamait des librairies financées
par l'argent public. Elles espéraient qu'un accès à la littérature et à l'édification favoriserait
l'éducation des travailleurs qualifiés qui étaient de plus en plus en demande, mais
souhaitaient aussi maintenir l'hégémonie sur la classe ouvrière au profit de la culture du
capitalisme, de l'intérêt personnel et de la compétition.[2]
LA CONNAISSANCE RÉELLEMENT UTILE
[3]

Sans surprise, les chartistes, qui s'étaient retrouvés chancelants après une défaite politique,
avaient commencé à ouvrir des salles de lecture et des bibliothèques de prêts coopératifs. En
effet, à l'époque, l'éducation proposée au prolétariat et aux pauvres par les classes dirigeantes
consistait, soit à une édification morale pieuse au service de la pacification politique, soit à
l'inculcation de qualifications ou de connaissances qui seraient utiles au propriétaire de
l'usine. Même les efforts aux allures nobles de la Society for the Diffusion of the Useful
Knowledge, une organisation du parti whig cherchant à apporter un apprentissage intellectuel
à la classe ouvrière et à la classe moyenne sous la forme de publications bon marché et
simplifiées, avaient pour objectif l'atténuation de la tendance radicale des mouvements
populaires[4]
Ces efforts de pacification des masses opprimées les ont poussées à chercher des manières
d'organiser par elles-mêmes une éducation qui leur apporterait l'alphabétisation et une
connaissance réellement utile : une connaissance non pas appliquée, mais critique qui leur
permettrait de voir à travers leur propre soumission politique et économique, de développer
une politique radicale et d'innover leurs propres institutions sociales d'opposition. L'éducation
radicale, dépendante du peu de ressources et du manque de temps de la classe ouvrière, s'est
développée dans les cadres informels des foyers, des quartiers et des lieux de travail, mais
également à travers une presse radicale, une lecture commune et des groupes de discussion.[5]
La demande pour une connaissance réellement utile comprenait une critique de « toute
forme d'éducation “fournie” » et de la conception libérale selon laquelle « une “éducation
nationale” était une condition nécessaire à la garantie du suffrage universel ». Un
développement de « programmes et de pédagogies » radicaux constituait une part de l'arsenal
de « stratégie politique comme moyen de changer le monde »[6]
PÉDAGOGIE CRITIQUE

L'émergence de la bibliothèque publique a donc eu lieu dans le contexte d'un compromis
historique entre la formation des fondements d'une pédagogie radicale et une réaction visant
à l'atténuer. Pourtant, à l'âge de la numérisation dans lequel nous pourrions penser que les
opportunités pour un accès à la connaissance se sont largement étendues, les bibliothèques

publiques se retrouvent particulièrement limitées dans leurs possibilités d'acquérir et de prêter
des éditions aussi bien sous une forme papier que numérique. Cette difficulté est un signe de
l'inégalité radicale de notre époque : une fois encore, l'émancipation politique se bat de
manière défensive pour une base matérielle pédagogique contre les forces croissantes de la
privatisation. Non seulement l'éducation de masse est devenue accessible à prix d'or
uniquement, entrainant la dette étudiante et la servitude qui y est associée, mais la
connaissance utile exigée par le marché du travail et la reproduction du capitalisme néolibéral
sont devenues la seule logique de l'éducation.
Sans surprise, au cours des six-sept dernières années, nous avons vu l'apprentissage
autodidacte, les bibliothèques de l'ombre et les bibliothécaires amateurs émerger pour contrer
la contraction des espaces d'exemption réduits par l'austérité et la commodification. Le projet
Public Library a été initié dans l'idée de contrer ce phénomène. Pour aider tout le monde à
apprendre l'utilisation d'outils simples permettant d'agir en tant qu'Amateur Librarian :
numériser, rassembler, partager, préserver des livres, des articles onéreux, introuvables ou
indésirables dans les coins mouvementés de notre planète.
Amateur Librarian a joué un rôle important dans le système narratif de Public Library. Un
rôle qui semble avoir porté ses fruits. Les gens rejoignent facilement le projet en « devenant »
bibliothécaire grâce à l'outil Calibre[7] et [let’s share books].[8] D'autres aspects du narratif de
Public Library ajoutent une articulation politique à cet acte simple, mais désobéissant. Public
Library perçoit une crise institutionnelle dans l'éducation, une impasse économique
d'austérité et une domination de la logique de commodité sous la forme du droit d'auteur.
Elle fait apparaitre la pratique du partage de livres et de catalogues des bibliothécaires
amateurs comme un défi pertinent à l'encontre de la convergence de cette crise, de cette
impasse et du régime du droit d'auteur.
Pour comprendre les hypothèses politiques et technologiques et développer plus en
profondeur les stratégies sur lesquelles les réactions des bibliothécaires amateurs se basent,
nous proposons un programme issu de la tradition pédagogique critique. La pédagogie
critique est une pratique productive et théorique qui rejette la définition du procédé
éducationnel comme réduit à une simple technique de communication de la connaissance et
présentée comme un mode d'acquisition neutre. Au contraire, la pédagogie est perçue plus
largement comme « une lutte pour la connaissance, le désir, les valeurs, les relations sociales,
et plus important encore, les modes d'institution politique », « une attention portée aux
questions relatives au contrôle des conditions de production de la connaissance. »[9]

P.60

P.61

Actuellement, aucune industrie ne montre plus
d'asymétries au niveau du contrôle des conditions de
production de la connaissance que celle de la publication
académique. Refuser l'accès à des publications
académiques excessivement chères pour beaucoup
d'universités, en particulier dans l'hémisphère sud,
contraste ostensiblement avec les profits énormes qu'un
petit nombre d'éditeurs commerciaux tirent du travail
bénévole de scientifiques qui écrivent, révisent et éditent
des contributions et avec les prix exorbitants des
souscriptions que les bibliothèques institutionnelles
doivent payer. C'est donc ici que la bibliothèque amateur
atteint le sommet de son intensité en matière de
pédagogie critique : elle nous invite à formuler et à narrer
plus précisément sa pratique à travers un processus
partagé de découverte.
UN PROGRAMME

Une bibliothèque publique, c'est :
• un libre accès aux livres pour tous les membres de la
société,
• un catalogue de bibliothèque,
• un bibliothécaire.

From Amateur

Librarian - A
Course in Critical Pedagogy:
No industry in the present
demonstrates more the asymmetries of
control over the conditions of
production of knowledge than the
academic publishing. The denial of
access to outrageously expensive
academic publications for many
universities, particularly in the Global
South, stands in stark contrast to the
super-profits that a small number of
commercial publishers draws from the
free labour of scientists who write,
review and edit contributions and the
extortive prices their institutional
libraries have to pay for subscriptions.
From Voor elk boek is een
gebruiker:
FS: Hoe gaan jullie om met boeken
en publicaties die al vanaf het begin
digitaal zijn? DM: We kopen e-books
en e-tijdschriften en maken die
beschikbaar voor onderzoekers. Maar
dat zijn hele andere omgevingen,
omdat die content niet fysiek binnen
onze muren komt. We kopen toegang
tot servers van uitgevers of de
aggregator. Die content komt nooit bij
ons, die blijft op hun machines staan.
We kunnen daar dus eigenlijk niet
zoveel mee doen, behalve verwijzen
en zorgen dat het evengoed vindbaar
is als de print.

Le programme de bibliothécaire amateur développe
plusieurs aspects et implications d'une telle définition.
Certaines parties du programme ont été construites à
partir de différents ateliers et exposés qui se déroulaient précédemment dans le cadre du
projet Public Library. Certaines parties de ce programme doivent encore évoluer s'appuyant
sur un processus de recherche futur, d'échange et de production de connaissance dans le
processus éducatif. Tout en restant schématique en allant de la pratique immédiate, à la
stratégie, la tactique et au registre réflectif de la
connaissance, il existe des personnes et pratiques - non
citées ici - desquelles nous imaginons pouvoir apprendre.
La première itération de ce programme pourrait aussi
bien être une académie d'été avec notre équipe
sélectionnée de bibliothécaires, concepteurs, chercheurs,
professeurs, qu'un petit atelier avec un groupe restreint
d'étudiants se plongeant dans un aspect précis du
programme. En résumé, ce programme est ouvert, aussi

bien au processus éducationnel qu'aux contributions des autres. Nous sommes ouverts aux
commentaires, aux dérivations et aux ajouts.
MODULE 1 : FLUX DE TRAVAIL
• du livre au livre électronique
◦ numériser un livre
avec un scanner de
livres
◦ supprimer la gestion
des droits numériques
et convertir au format
livre numérique
• du désordre au catalogue
◦ gérer une bibliothèque
de livres numériques
avec Calibre
◦ trouver des livres
numériques et des
articles dans des
bibliothèques en ligne
• de la référence à la bibliographie
◦ annoter à partir d'une
application ou d'un
appareil de lecture de
livres électroniques
◦ créer une
bibliographie
académique sur Zotero
• du dispositif de bloc au périphérique réseau
◦ partager votre
bibliothèque de livres
numériques d'un
périphérique local à
un appareil de lecture
◦ partager votre
bibliothèque de livres
numériques sur
internet avec [let’s
share books]

P.62

P.63

• de l'espace IP privé à l'espace IP public
◦ utiliser [let’s share
books] et
library.memoryoftheworld.org
◦ utiliser logan &
jessica
◦ utiliser Science Hub
◦ utiliser Tor

MODULE 2 : POLITIQUE/TACTIQUE
• du développement de la subordination à la désobéissance
subalterne
◦ développement inégal
et stratégies
politiques
◦ stratégies de
développement contre
les stratégies de sous
développement : accès
ouvert contre piratage
• de la propriété au commun
◦ de la propriété au
commun
◦ droit d'auteur,
publication
scientifique, accès
ouvert
◦ bibliothèque de
l'ombre, piratage,
custodians.online
• de la collection à l'action collective
◦ pédagogie critique et
éducation
◦ archive, activation et
action collective

MODULE 3 : ABSTRACTIONS DANS L'ACTION
• du linéaire à l'informatique
◦ bibliothèque

◦ livre imprimé et livre
numérique : page,
marge, dos
• du central au distribué
◦ bibliothécaires
professionnels et
bibliothécaires
amateurs
◦ infrastructure(s) de
réseau/topologies
(études des classes
dirigeantes)
• du factuel au fantastique
◦ l'univers pour
bibliothèque, la
bibliothèque pour
univers

LISTE DE LECTURE
• Mars, Marcell; Vladimir, Klemo. Download & How to:
Calibre & [let’s share books]. Memory of the World (2014)
https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/28/
calibre-lets-share-books/
• Buringh, Eltjo; Van Zanden, Jan Luiten. Charting the “Rise of
the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A
Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth
Centuries. The Journal of Economic History (2009) http://
journals.cambridge.org/article_S0022050709000837
• Mattern, Shannon. Library as Infrastructure. Places Journal
(2014) https://placesjournal.org/article/library-asinfrastructure/
• Antonić, Voja. Our beloved bookscanner. Memory of the
World (2012) https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/
blog/2012/10/28/our-beloved-bookscanner-2/
• Medak, Tomislav; Sekulić, Dubravka; Mertens, An. How to:
Bookscanning. Memory of the World (2014) https://
www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/12/08/how-tobookscanning/
• Barok, Dusan. Talks/Public Library. Monoskop (2015)
http://monoskop.org/Talks/Public_Library
• Custodians.online. In Solidarity with Library Genesis and
Science Hub (2015) http://custodians.online

P.64

P.65

• Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History Random
House (2014)
• Harris, Michael H. History of Libraries of the Western World.
Scarecrow Press (1999)
• MayDay Rooms. Activation (2015) http://
maydayrooms.org/activation/
• Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards &
Catalogs, 1548-1929. MIT Press (2011) https://
library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/
PaRC3gldHrZ3MuNPXyrh1hM1meyyaqvhaWlHTvr53NRjJ2k

Dernière version: https://www.zotero.org/groups/amateur_librarian__a_course_in_critical_pedagogy_reading_list
Last
Revision:
1·08·2016

1. 1. Pour une histoire économique du livre en Europe occidentale, voir Eltjo Buringh et Jan Luiten Van Zanden, « Charting the
‘Rise of the West’ : Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth
Centuries, » The Journal of Economic History 69, n°. 02 (juin 2009) : 409–45, doi :10.1017/S0022050709000837, en
particulier les tableaux 1-5.
2. 2. Pour une histoire sociale de la bibliothèque publique, voir Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (Random House,
2014) chapitre 5 : “Books for all”.
3. 3. Pour ce concept, nous sommes redevables au collectif de curateurs What, How and for Whom/WHW, qui a présenté le
travail de Public Library dans le cadre de l'exposition Really Useful Knowledge qu'ils ont organisée au Museo Reina Sofía à
Madrid, entre 29 octobre 2014 et le 9 février 2015.
4. 4. « Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, » Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Juin 25, 2015, https://

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Society_for_the_Diffusion_of_Useful_Knowledge&oldid=668644340.

5. 5. Richard Johnson, « Really Useful Knowledge, » dans CCCS Selected Working Papers: Volume 1, 1 édition, vol. 1
(Londres u.a. : Routledge, 2014), 755.
6. Ibid., 752.
7. http://calibre-ebook.com/
8. https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/28/calibre-lets-share-books/
9. Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 5.

A bag
but is
language
nothing
of words
(language is nothing but a bag of words)
MICHAEL MURTAUGH

In text indexing and other machine reading applications the term "bag of
words" is frequently used to underscore how processing algorithms often
represent text using a data structure (word histograms or weighted vectors)
where the original order of the words in sentence form is stripped away. While
"bag of words" might well serve as a cautionary reminder to programmers of
the essential violence perpetrated to a text and a call to critically question the
efficacy of methods based on subsequent transformations, the expression's use
seems in practice more like a badge of pride or a schoolyard taunt that would
go: Hey language: you're nothin' but a big BAG-OF-WORDS.
BAG OF WORDS

In information retrieval and other so-called machine-reading applications (such as text
indexing for web search engines) the term "bag of words" is used to underscore how in the
course of processing a text the original order of the words in sentence form is stripped away.
The resulting representation is then a collection of each unique word used in the text,
typically weighted by the number of times the word occurs.
Bag of words, also known as word histograms or weighted term vectors, are a standard part
of the data engineer's toolkit. But why such a drastic transformation? The utility of "bag of
words" is in how it makes text amenable to code, first in that it's very straightforward to
implement the translation from a text document to a bag of words representation. More

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P.67

significantly, this transformation then opens up a wide collection of tools and techniques for
further transformation and analysis purposes. For instance, a number of libraries available in
the booming field of "data sciences" work with "high dimension" vectors; bag of words is a
way to transform a written document into a mathematical vector where each "dimension"
corresponds to the (relative) quantity of each unique word. While physically unimaginable
and abstract (imagine each of Shakespeare's works as points in a 14 million dimensional
space), from a formal mathematical perspective, it's quite a comfortable idea, and many
complementary techniques (such as principle component analysis) exist to reduce the
resulting complexity.
What's striking about a bag of words representation, given is centrality in so many text
retrieval application is its irreversibility. Given a bag of words representation of a text and
faced with the task of producing the original text would require in essence the "brain" of a
writer to recompose sentences, working with the patience of a devoted cryptogram puzzler to
draw from the precise stock of available words. While "bag of words" might well serve as a
cautionary reminder to programmers of the essential violence perpetrated to a text and a call
to critically question the efficacy of methods based on subsequent transformations, the
expressions use seems in practice more like a badge of pride or a schoolyard taunt that would
go: Hey language: you're nothing but a big BAG-OF-WORDS. Following this spirit of the
term, "bag of words" celebrates a perfunctory step of "breaking" a text into a purer form
amenable to computation, to stripping language of its silly redundant repetitions and foolishly
contrived stylistic phrasings to reveal a purer inner essence.
BOOK OF WORDS

Lieber's Standard Telegraphic Code, first published in 1896 and republished in various
updated editions through the early 1900s, is an example of one of several competing systems
of telegraph code books. The idea was for both senders and receivers of telegraph messages
to use the books to translate their messages into a sequence of code words which can then be
sent for less money as telegraph messages were paid by the word. In the front of the book, a
list of examples gives a sampling of how messages like: "Have bought for your account 400
bales of cotton, March delivery, at 8.34" can be conveyed by a telegram with the message
"Ciotola, Delaboravi". In each case the reduction of number of transmitted words is
highlighted to underscore the efficacy of the method. Like a dictionary or thesaurus, the book
is primarily organized around key words, such as act, advice, affairs, bags, bail, and bales,
under which exhaustive lists of useful phrases involving the corresponding word are provided
in the main pages of the volume. [1]

P.68

P.69

P.70

P.71

[...] my focus in this chapter is on the inscription technology that grew parasitically
alongside the monopolistic pricing strategies of telegraph companies: telegraph code
books. Constructed under the bywords “economy,” “secrecy,” and “simplicity,”

telegraph code books matched phrases and words with code letters or numbers. The
idea was to use a single code word instead of an entire phrase, thus saving money by
serving as an information compression technology. Generally economy won out over
[2]
secrecy, but in specialized cases, secrecy was also important.

In Katherine Hayles' chapter devoted to telegraph code books she observes how:
The interaction between code and language shows a steady movement away from a
human-centric view of code toward a machine-centric view, thus anticipating the
[3]
development of full-fledged machine codes with the digital computer.

Aspects of this transitional moment are apparent in a notice included prominently inserted in
the Lieber's code book:
After July, 1904, all combinations of letters that do not exceed ten will pass as one
cipher word, provided that it is pronounceable, or that it is taken from the following
languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese or Latin -[4]
International Telegraphic Conference, July 1903

Conforming to international conventions regulating telegraph communication at that time, the
stipulation that code words be actual words drawn from a variety of European languages
(many of Lieber's code words are indeed arbitrary Dutch, German, and Spanish words)

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P.73

underscores this particular moment of transition as reference to the human body in the form
of "pronounceable" speech from representative languages begins to yield to the inherent
potential for arbitrariness in digital representation.
What telegraph code books do is remind us of is the relation of language in general to
economy. Whether they may be economies of memory, attention, costs paid to a
telecommunicatons company, or in terms of computer processing time or storage space,
encoding language or knowledge in any form of writing is a form of shorthand and always
involves an interplay with what one expects to perform or "get out" of the resulting encoding.
Along with the invention of telegraphic codes comes a paradox that John Guillory has
noted: code can be used both to clarify and occlude. Among the sedimented structures
in the technological unconscious is the dream of a universal language. Uniting the
world in networks of communication that flashed faster than ever before, telegraphy
was particularly suited to the idea that intercultural communication could become
almost effortless. In this utopian vision, the effects of continuous reciprocal causality
expand to global proportions capable of radically transforming the conditions of human
[5]
life. That these dreams were never realized seems, in retrospect, inevitable.

P.74

P.75

Far from providing a universal system of encoding messages in the English language,
Lieber's code is quite clearly designed for the particular needs and conditions of its use. In
addition to the phrases ordered by keywords, the book includes a number of tables of terms
for specialized use. One table lists a set of words used to describe all possible permutations of
numeric grades of coffee (Choliam = 3,4, Choliambos = 3,4,5, Choliba = 4,5, etc.); another
table lists pairs of code words to express the respective daily rise or fall of the price of coffee
at the port of Le Havre in increments of a quarter of a Franc per 50 kilos ("Chirriado =
prices have advanced 1 1/4 francs"). From an archaeological perspective, the Lieber's code
book reveals a cross section of the needs and desires of early 20th century business
communication between the United States and its trading partners.
The advertisements lining the Liebers Code book further situate its use and that of
commercial telegraphy. Among the many advertisements for banking and law services, office
equipment, and alcohol are several ads for gun powder and explosives, drilling equipment
and metallurgic services all with specific applications to mining. Extending telegraphy's
formative role for ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communication for reasons of safety,
commercial telegraphy extended this network of communication to include those parties
coordinating the "raw materials" being mined, grown, or otherwise extracted from overseas
sources and shipped back for sale.

"RAW DATA NOW!"
Tim Berners-Lee: [...] Make a beautiful website, but
first give us the unadulterated data, we want the data.
We want unadulterated data. OK, we have to ask for
raw data now. And I'm going to ask you to practice
that, OK? Can you say "raw"?
Audience: Raw.
Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "data"?
Audience: Data.
TBL: Can you say "now"?
Audience: Now!
TBL: Alright, "raw data now"!
[...]

From La ville intelligente - Ville de la
connaissance:
Étant donné que les nouvelles formes
modernistes et l'utilisation de
matériaux propageaient l'abondance
d'éléments décoratifs, Paul Otlet
croyait en la possibilité du langage
comme modèle de « données brutes »,
le réduisant aux informations
essentielles et aux faits sans ambiguïté,
tout en se débarrassant de tous les
éléments inefficaces et subjectifs.
From The Smart City - City of
Knowledge:
As new modernist forms and use of
materials propagated the abundance
of decorative elements, Otlet believed
in the possibility of language as a
model of 'raw data', reducing it to
essential information and
unambiguous facts, while removing all
inefficient assets of ambiguity or
subjectivity.

So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this -the people who think it's a great idea. And all the
people -- and I think there's a lot of people at TED
who do things because -- even though there's not an
immediate return on the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody
else has done it -- they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does things
which would be good if everybody else did them. OK, so it's called linked data. I want
[6]
you to make it. I want you to demand it.
UN/STRUCTURED

As graduate students at Stanford, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page had an early
interest in producing "structured data" from the "unstructured" web. [7]
The World Wide Web provides a vast source of information of almost all types,
ranging from DNA databases to resumes to lists of favorite restaurants. However, this
information is often scattered among many web servers and hosts, using many different
formats. If these chunks of information could be extracted from the World Wide Web
and integrated into a structured form, they would form an unprecedented source of
information. It would include the largest international directory of people, the largest
and most diverse databases of products, the greatest bibliography of academic works,
and many other useful resources. [...]

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P.77

2.1 The Problem
Here we define our problem more formally:
Let D be a large database of unstructured information such as the World Wide Web
[8]
[...]

In a paper titled Dynamic Data Mining Brin and Page situate their research looking for rules
(statistical correlations) between words used in web pages. The "baskets" they mention stem
from the origins of "market basket" techniques developed to find correlations between the
items recorded in the purchase receipts of supermarket customers. In their case, they deal
with web pages rather than shopping baskets, and words instead of purchases. In transitioning
to the much larger scale of the web, they describe the usefulness of their research in terms of
its computational economy, that is the ability to tackle the scale of the web and still perform
using contemporary computing power completing its task in a reasonably short amount of
time.
A traditional algorithm could not compute the large itemsets in the lifetime of the
universe. [...] Yet many data sets are difficult to mine because they have many
frequently occurring items, complex relationships between the items, and a large
number of items per basket. In this paper we experiment with word usage in documents
on the World Wide Web (see Section 4.2 for details about this data set). This data set
is fundamentally different from a supermarket data set. Each document has roughly
150 distinct words on average, as compared to roughly 10 items for cash register
transactions. We restrict ourselves to a subset of about 24 million documents from the
web. This set of documents contains over 14 million distinct words, with tens of
thousands of them occurring above a reasonable support threshold. Very many sets of
[9]
these words are highly correlated and occur often.
UN/ORDERED

In programming, I've encountered a recurring "problem" that's quite symptomatic. It goes
something like this: you (the programmer) have managed to cobble out a lovely "content
management system" (either from scratch, or using any number of helpful frameworks)
where your user can enter some "items" into a database, for instance to store bookmarks.
After this ordered items are automatically presented in list form (say on a web page). The
author: It's great, except... could this bookmark come before that one? The problem stems
from the fact that the database ordering (a core functionality provided by any database)
somehow applies a sorting logic that's almost but not quite right. A typical example is the
sorting of names where details (where to place a name that starts with a Norwegian "Ø" for
instance), are language-specific, and when a mixture of languages occurs, no single ordering
is necessarily "correct". The (often) exascerbated programmer might hastily add an
additional database field so that each item can also have an "order" (perhaps in the form of a
date or some other kind of (alpha)numerical "sorting" value) to be used to correctly order
the resulting list. Now the author has a means, awkward and indirect but workable, to control

the order of the presented data on the start page. But one might well ask, why not just edit
the resulting listing as a document? Not possible! Contemporary content management
systems are based on a data flow from a "pure" source of a database, through controlling
code and templates to produce a document as a result. The document isn't the data, it's the
end result of an irreversible process. This problem, in this and many variants, is widespread
and reveals an essential backwardness that a particular "computer scientist" mindset relating
to what constitutes "data" and in particular it's relationship to order that makes what might be
a straightforward question of editing a document into an over-engineered database.
Recently working with Nikolaos Vogiatzis whose research explores playful and radically
subjective alternatives to the list, Vogiatzis was struck by how from the earliest specifications
of HTML (still valid today) have separate elements (OL and UL) for "ordered" and
"unordered" lists.
The representation of the list is not defined here, but a bulleted list for unordered lists,
and a sequence of numbered paragraphs for an ordered list would be quite appropriate.
[10]
Other possibilities for interactive display include embedded scrollable browse panels.

Vogiatzis' surprise lay in the idea of a list ever being considered "unordered" (or in
opposition to the language used in the specification, for order to ever be considered
"insignificant"). Indeed in its suggested representation, still followed by modern web
browsers, the only difference between the two visually is that UL items are preceded by a
bullet symbol, while OL items are numbered.
The idea of ordering runs deep in programming practice where essentially different data
structures are employed depending on whether order is to be maintained. The indexes of a
"hash" table, for instance (also known as an associative array), are ordered in an
unpredictable way governed by a representation's particular implementation. This data
structure, extremely prevalent in contemporary programming practice sacrifices order to offer
other kinds of efficiency (fast text-based retrieval for instance).
DATA MINING

In announcing Google's impending data center in Mons, Belgian prime minister Di Rupo
invoked the link between the history of the mining industry in the region and the present and
future interest in "data mining" as practiced by IT companies such as Google.
Whether speaking of bales of cotton, barrels of oil, or bags of words, what links these subjects
is the way in which the notion of "raw material" obscures the labor and power structures
employed to secure them. "Raw" is always relative: "purity" depends on processes of
"refinement" that typically carry social/ecological impact.

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P.79

Stripping language of order is an act of "disembodiment", detaching it from the acts of writing
and reading. The shift from (human) reading to machine reading involves a shift of
responsibility from the individual human body to the obscured responsibilities and seemingly
inevitable forces of the "machine", be it the machine of a market or the machine of an
algorithm.
The computer scientists' view of textual content as
"unstructured", be it in a webpage or the OCR scanned
pages of a book, reflect a negligence to the processes and
labor of writing, editing, design, layout, typesetting, and
eventually publishing, collecting and cataloging [11].

From X = Y:
Still, it is reassuring to know that the
products hold traces of the work, that
even with the progressive removal of
human signs in automated processes,
the workers' presence never
disappears completely. This presence
is proof of the materiality of
information production, and becomes
a sign of the economies and
paradigms of efficiency and
profitability that are involved.

"Unstructured" to the computer scientist, means nonconformant to particular forms of machine reading.
"Structuring" then is a social process by which particular
(additional) conventions are agreed upon and employed.
Computer scientists often view text through the eyes of
their particular reading algorithm, and in the process
(voluntarily) blind themselves to the work practices which have produced and maintain these
"resources".
Berners-Lee, in chastising his audience of web publishers to not only publish online, but to
release "unadulterated" data belies a lack of imagination in considering how language is itself
structured and a blindness to the need for more than additional technical standards to connect
to existing publishing practices.
Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

1. Benjamin Franklin Lieber, Lieber's Standard Telegraphic Code, 1896, New York; https://archive.org/details/
standardtelegrap00liebuoft
2. Katherine Hayles, "Technogenesis in Action: Telegraph Code Books and the Place of the Human", How We Think: Digital
Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, 2006
3. Hayles
4. Lieber's
5. Hayles
6. Tim Berners-Lee: The next web, TED Talk, February 2009 http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web/
transcript?language=en
7. "Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception." from Brin's Stanford webpage
8. Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web, Sergey Brin, Proceedings of the WebDB Workshop at EDBT
1998, http://www-db.stanford.edu/~sergey/extract.ps
9. Dynamic Data Mining: Exploring Large Rule Spaces by Sampling; Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998; p. 2 http://
ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/424/
10. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): "Internet Draft", Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel Connolly, June 1993, http://
www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
11. http://informationobservatory.info/2015/10/27/google-books-fair-use-or-anti-democratic-preemption/#more-279

A Book
of the
Web
DUSAN BAROK

Is there a vital difference between publishing in print versus online other than
reaching different groups of readers and a different lifespan? Both types of texts
are worth considering preserving in libraries. The online environment has
created its own hybrid form between text and library, which is key to
understanding how digital text produces difference.
Historically, we have been treating texts as discrete units, that are distinguished by their
material properties such as cover, binding, script. These characteristics establish them as
either a book, a magazine, a diary, sheet music and so on. One book differs from another,
books differ from magazines, printed matter differs from handwritten manuscripts. Each
volume is a self-contained whole, further distinguished by descriptors such as title, author,
date, publisher, and classification codes that allow it to be located and referred to. The
demarcation of a publication as a container of text works as a frame or boundary which
organises the way it can be located and read. Researching a particular subject matter, the
reader is carried along by classification schemes under which volumes are organised, by
references inside texts, pointing to yet other volumes, and by tables of contents and indexes of
subjects that are appended to texts, pointing to places within that volume.
So while their material properties separate texts into distinct objects, bibliographic information
provides each object with a unique identifier, a unique address in the world of print culture.
Such identifiable objects are further replicated and distributed across containers that we call
libraries, where they can be accessed.
The online environment however, intervenes in this condition. It establishes shortcuts.
Through search engine, digital texts can be searched for any text sequence, regardless of
their distinct materiality and bibliographic specificity. This changes the way they function as a
library, and the way its main object, the book, should be rethought.
(1) Rather than operate as distinct entities, multiple texts are simultaneously accessible
through full-text search as if they are one long text, with its portions spread across the

P.80

P.81

web, and including texts that had not been considered as candidates for library
collections.
(2) The unique identifier at hand for these text portions is not the bibliographic
information, but the URL.
(3) The text is as long as web-crawlers of a given search engine are set to reach,
refashioning the library into a storage of indexed data.

These are some of the lines along which online texts appear to produce difference. The first
contrasts the distinct printed publication to the machine-readable text, the second the
bibliographic information to the URL, and the third the library to the search engine.
The introduction of full-text search has created an
environment in which all machine-readable online
documents in reach are effectively treated as one single
document. For any text-sequence to be locatable, it
doesn't matter in which file format it appears, nor whether
its interface is a database-powered website or mere
directory listing. As long as text can be extracted from a
document, it is a container of text sequences which itself
is a sequence in a 'book' of the web.
Even though this is hardly news after almost two decades
of Google Search ruling, little seems to have changed
with respect to the forms and genres of writing. Loyal to
standard forms of publishing, most writing still adheres to
the principle of coherence, based on units such as book
chapters, journal papers, newspaper articles, etc., that are
designed to be read from beginning to end.

From Voor elk boek is een gebruiker:
FS: Maar het gaat toch ook over de
manier waarop jullie toegang bieden,
de bibliotheek als interface? Online
laten jullie dat nu over aan Google.
SVP: De toegang gaat niet meer
over: “deze instelling heeft dit, deze
instelling heeft iets anders”, al die
instellingen zijn via dezelfde interface
te bereiken. Je kan doorheen al die
collecties zoeken en dat is ook weer
een stukje van die originele droom van
Otlet en Vander Haeghen, het idee
van een wereldbibliotheek. Voor elk
boek is er een gebruiker, de
bibliotheek moet die maar gaan
zoeken.
Wat ik intrigerend vind is dat alle
boeken één boek geworden zijn
doordat ze op hetzelfde niveau
doorzoekbaar zijn, dat is ongelooflijk
opwindend. Dat is een andere manier
van lezen die zelfs Otlet zich niet had
kunnen voorstellen. Ze zouden zot
worden moesten ze dit weten.

Still, the scope of textual forms appearing in search
results, and thus a corpus of texts in which they are being
brought into, is radically diversified: it may include
discussion board comments, product reviews, private emails, weather information, spam etc., the type of content
that used to be omitted from library collections. Rather than being published in a traditional
sense, all these texts are produced onto digital networks by mere typing, copying, OCR-ing,
generated by machines, by sensors tracking movement, temperature, etc.
Even though portions of these texts may come with human or non-human authors attached,
authors have relatively little control over discourses their writing gets embedded in. This is
also where the ambiguity of copyright manifests itself. Crawling bots pre-read the internet
with all its attached devices according to the agenda of their maintainers, and the decisions

about which, how and to whom the indexed texts are served in search results is in the code of
a library.
Libraries in this sense are not restricted to digitised versions of physical public or private
libraries as we know them from history. Commercial search engines, intelligence agencies,
and virtually all forms of online text collections can be thought of as libraries.
Acquisition policies figure here on the same level with crawling bots, dragnet/surveillance
algorithms, and arbitrary motivations of users, all of which actuate the selection and
embedding of texts into structures that regulate their retrievability and through access control
produce certain kinds of communities or groups of readers. The author's intentions of
partaking in this or that discourse are confronted by discourse-conditioning operations of
retrieval algorithms. Hence, Google structures discourse through its Google Search
differently from how the Internet Archive does with its Wayback Machine, and from how the
GCHQ does it with its dragnet programme.
They are all libraries, each containing a single 'book' whose pages are URLs with
timestamps and geostamps in the form of IP address. Google, GCHQ, JStor, Elsevier –
each maintains its own searchable corpus of texts. The decisions about who, to which
sections and under which conditions is to be admitted are
From Amateur Librarian - A Course
informed by a mix of copyright laws, corporate agendas,
in Critical Pedagogy:
management hierarchies, and national security issues.
As books became more easily massVarious sets of these conditions that are at work in a
produced, the commercial
subscription libraries catering to the
particular library, also redefine the notion of publishing
better-off parts of society blossomed.
and of the publication, and in turn the notion of public.
This brought the class aspect of the
Corporate journal repositories exploit publicly funded
research by renting it only to libraries which can afford it;
intelligence agencies are set to extract texts from any
moving target, basically any networked device, apparently
in public interest and away from the public eye; publiclyfunded libraries are being prevented by outdated
copyright laws and bureaucracy from providing digitised
content online; search engines create a sense of giving
access to all public record online while only a few know
what is excluded and how search results are ordered.

P.82

nascent demand for public access to
books to the fore.
From Bibliothécaire amateur - un
cours de pédagogie critique:
Puisqu'il était de plus en plus facile de
produire des livres en masse, les
bibliothèques privées payantes, au
service des catégories privilégiées de
la société, ont commencé à se
répandre. Ce phénomène a mis en
relief la question de la classe dans la
demande naissante pour un accès
public aux livres.

P.83

It is within and against this milieu that libraries such as
the Internet Archive, Wikileaks, Aaaaarg, UbuWeb,
Monoskop, Memory of the World, Nettime, TheNextLayer
and others gain their political agency. Their countertechniques for negotiating the publicness of publishing
include self-archiving, open access, book liberation,
leaking, whistleblowing, open source search algorithms
and so on.
Digitization and posting texts online are interventions in
the procedures that make search possible. Operating
online collections of texts is as much about organising
texts within libraries, as is placing them within books of
the web.

Originally written 15-16 June 2015 in Prague, Brno
and Vienna for a talk given at the Technopolitics seminar in Vienna on 16 June 2015.
Revised 29 December 2015 in Bergen.
Last
Revision:
1·08·2016

The
Indexalist
MATTHEW FULLER

I first spoke to the patient in the last week of that August. That evening the sun was tender in
drawing its shadows across the lines of his face. The eyes gazed softly into a close middle
distance, as if composing a line upon a translucent page hung in the middle of the air, the
hands tapping out a stanza or two of music on legs covered by the brown folds of a towelling
dressing gown. He had the air of someone who had seen something of great amazement but
yet lacked the means to put it into language. As I got to know the patient over the next few
weeks I learned that this was not for the want of effort.
In his youth he had dabbled with the world-speak
language Volapük, one designed to do away with the
incompatibility of tongues, to establish a standard in
which scientific intercourse might be conducted with
maximum efficiency and with minimal friction in
movement between minds, laboratories and publications.
Latin biological names, the magnificent table of elements,
metric units of measurement, the nomenclature of celestial
objects from clouds to planets, anatomical parts and
medical conditions all had their own systems of naming
beyond any specific tongue. This was an attempt to bring
reason into speech and record, but there were other
means to do so when reality resisted these early
measures.

The dabbling, he reflected, had become a little more than
that. He had subscribed to journals in the language, he
wrote letters to colleagues and received them in return. A
few words of world-speak remained readily on his tongue, words that he spat out regularly
into the yellow-wallpapered lounge of the sanatorium with a disgust that was lugubriously
palpable.
According to my records, and in piecing together the notes of previous doctors, there was
something else however, something more profound that the language only hinted at. Just as
the postal system did not require the adoption of any language in particular but had its

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P.85

formats that integrated them into addressee, address line, postal town and country, something
that organised the span of the earth, so there was a sense of the patient as having sustained
an encounter with a fundamental form of organisation that mapped out his soul. More thrilling
than the question of language indeed was that of the system of organisation upon which
linguistic symbols are inscribed. I present for the reader’s contemplation some statements
typical of those he seemed to mull over.
“The index card system spoke to my soul. Suffice it to say that in its use I enjoyed the
highest form of spiritual pleasure, and organisational efficiency, a profound flowering of
intellect in which every thought moved between its enunciation, evidence, reference and
articulation in a mellifluous flow of ideation and the gratification of curiosity.” This sense of
the soul as a roving enquiry moving across eras, across forms of knowledge and through the
serried landscapes of the vast planet and cosmos was returned to over and over, a sense that
an inexplicable force was within him yet always escaping his touch.
“At every reference stood another reference, each more
interesting than the last. Each the apex of a pyramid of
further reading, pregnant with the threat of digression,
each a thin high wire which, if not observed might lead
the author into the fall of error, a finding already found
against and written up.” He mentions too, a number of
times, the way the furniture seemed to assist his thoughts
- the ease of reference implied by the way in which the
desk aligned with the text resting upon the pages of the
off-print, journal, newspaper, blueprint or book above
which further drawers of cards stood ready in their
cabinet. All were integrated into the system. And yet,
amidst these frenetic recollections there was a note of
mourning in his contemplative moods, “The superposition
of all planes of enquiry and of thought in one system
repels those for whom such harmonious speed is
suspicious.” This thought was delivered with a stare that
was not exactly one of accusation, but that lingered with
the impression that there was a further statement to follow
it, and another, queued up ready to follow.

As I gained the trust of the patient, there was a sense in
which he estimated me as something of a junior
collaborator, a clerk to his natural role as manager. A
lucky, if slightly doubtful, young man whom he might
mentor into efficiency and a state of full access to
information. For his world, there was not the corruption and tiredness of the old methods.
Ideas moved faster in his mind than they might now across the world. To possess a register of

thoughts covering a period of some years is to have an asset, the value of which is almost
incalculable. That it can answer any question respecting any thought about which one has
had an enquiry is but the smallest of its merits. More important is the fact that it continually
calls attention to matters requiring such attention.
Much of his discourse was about the optimum means of arrangement of the system, there
was an art to laying out the cards. As the patient further explained, to meet the objection that
loose cards may easily be mislaid, cards may be tabbed with numbers from one to ten. When
arranged in the drawer, these tabs proceed from left to right across the drawer and the
absence of a single card can thus easily be detected. The cards are further arranged between
coloured guide cards. As an alternative to tabbed cards, signal flags may be used. Here,
metal clips may be attached to the top end of the card and that stand out like guides. For use
of the system in relation to dates of the month, the card is printed with the numbers 1 to 31
at the top. The metal clip is placed as a signal to indicate the card is to receive attention on
the specified day. Within a large organisation a further card can be drawn up to assign
responsibility for processing that date’s cards. There were numerous means of working the
cards, special techniques for integrating them into any type of research or organisation, means
by which indexes operating on indexes could open mines of information and expand the
knowledge and capabilities of mankind.
As he pressed me further, I began to experiment with such methods myself by withdrawing
data from the sanatorium’s records and transferring it to cards in the night. The advantages of
the system are overwhelming. Cards, cut to the right mathematical degree of accuracy,
arrayed readily in drawers, set in cabinets of standard sizes that may be added to at ease,
may be apportioned out amongst any number of enquirers, all of whom may work on them
independently and simultaneously. The bound book, by contrast, may only be used by one
person at a time and that must stay upon a shelf itself referred to by an index card system. I
began to set up a structure of rows of mirrors on chains and pulleys and a set of levered and
hinged mechanical arms to allow me to open the drawers and to privately consult my files
from any location within the sanatorium. The clarity of the image is however so far too much
effaced by the diffusion of light across the system.
It must further be borne in mind that a system thus capable of indefinite expansion obviates
the necessity for hampering a researcher with furniture or appliances of a larger size than are
immediately required. The continuous and orderly sequence of the cards may be extended
further into the domain of furniture and to the conduct of business and daily life. Reasoning,
reference and the order of ideas emerging as they embrace and articulate a chaotic world and
then communicate amongst themselves turning the world in turn into something resembling
the process of thought in an endless process of consulting, rephrasing, adding and sorting.
For the patient, ideas flowed like a force of life, oblivious to any unnatural limitation. Thought
became, with the proper use of the system, part of the stream of life itself. Thought moved
through the cards not simply at the superficial level of the movement of fingers and the
mechanical sliding and bunching of cards, but at the most profound depths of the movement

P.86

P.87

between reality and our ideas of it. The organisational grace to be found in arrangement,
classification and indexing still stirred the remnants of his nervous system until the last day.
Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

P.138

P.139

An
experimental
transcript
SÎNZIANA PĂLTINEANU

Note: The editor has had the good fortune of finding a whole box of
handwritten index cards and various folded papers (from printed screenshots to
boarding passes) in the storage space of an institute. Upon closer investigation,
it has become evident that the mixed contents of the box make up one single
document. Difficult to decipher due to messy handwriting, the manuscript
poses further challenges to the reader because its fragments lack a preestablished order. Simply uploading high-quality facsimile images of the box
contents here would not solve the problems of legibility and coherence. As an
intermediary solution, the editor has opted to introduce below a selection of
scanned images and transcribed text from the found box. The transcript is
intended to be read as a document sample, as well as an attempt at manuscript
reconstruction, following the original in the author's hand as closely as possible:
pencilled in words in the otherwise black ink text are transcribed in brackets,
whereas curly braces signal erasures, peculiar marks or illegible parts on the
index cards. Despite shifts in handwriting styles, whereby letters sometimes
appear extremely rushed and distorted in multiple idiosyncratic ways, the
experts consulted unanimously declared that the manuscript was most likely
authored by one and the same person. To date, the author remains unknown.
Q

I've been running with a word in my mouth, running with this burning untitled shape, and I
just can't spit it out. Spit it with phlegm from a balcony, kiss it in a mirror, brush it away one
morning. I've been running with a word in my mouth, running...

… it must have been only last month that I began half-chanting-half-mumbling this looped
sequence of sentences on the staircase I regularly take down to work and back up to dream,
yet it feels as if it were half a century ago. Tunneling through my memory, my tongue begins
burning again and so I recollect that the subject matter was an agonizing, unutterable
obsession I needed to sort out most urgently. Back then I knew no better way than to keep
bringing it up obliquely until it would chemically dissolve itself into my blood or evaporate
through the pores of my skin. To whisper the obsession away, I thought not entirely so
naïvely, following a peculiar kind of vengeful logic, by emptying words of their pocket
contents on a spiraling staircase. An anti-incantation, a verbal overdose, a semantic dilution or
reduction – for the first time, I was ready to inflict harm on words! [And I am sure, the
thought has crossed other lucid minds, too.]
N

During the first several days, as I was rushing up and down the stairs like a Tasmanian devil,
swirling those same sentences in my expunction ritual, I hardly noticed that the brown
marbled staircase had a ravenous appetite for all my sound making and fuss: it cushioned the
clump of my footsteps, it absorbed the vibrations of my vocal chords and of my fingers
drumming on the handrail. All this unusual business must have carried on untroubled for
some time until that Wed. [?] morning when I tried approaching the employee at the
reception desk in the hideously large building where I live with a question about elevator
safety. I may take the elevator once in a blue moon, but I could not ignore the new
disquieting note I had been reading on all elevator doors that week:
m a k e / s u r e / t h e / e l e v a t o r / c a r / i s / s t a t i o n e d / o n / y o u r / f l
o o r / b e f o r e / s t e p p i n g / i n

T

P.140

P.141

Walking with a swagger, I entered the incandescent light field around the fancy semicircular,
brown reception desk, pressed down my palms on it, bent forward and from what I found to
be a comfortable inquiry angle, launched question mark after question mark: “Is everything
alright with the elevators? Do you know how worrisome I find the new warning on the
elevator doors? Has there been an accident? Or is this simply an insurance disclaimer-trick?”
Too many floors, too many times reading the same message against my will, must have
inflated my concern, so I breathed out the justification of my anxiety and waited for a
reassuring head shake to erase the imprint of the elevator shaft from my mind. Oddly, not the
faintest or most bored acknowledgment of my inquiry or presence came from across the desk.
From where I was standing, I performed a quick check to see if any cables came out of the
receptionist's ears. Nothing. Channels unobstructed, no ear mufflers, no micro-devices.
Suspicion eliminated, I waved at him, emitted a few other sounds – all to no avail. My
tunnel-visioned receptionist rolled his chair even closer to one of the many monitors under his
hooked gaze, his visual field now narrowed to a very acute angle, sheltered by his high desk.
How well I can still remember that at that exact moment I wished my face would turn into
the widest, most expensive screen, with an imperative, hairy ticker at the bottom –
h e y t o u c h m y s c r e e n m y m u s t a c h e s c r e e n e l e v a t o r t o u c h d o w n s
c r e a m

J

That's one of the first red flags I remember in this situation (here, really starting to come
across more or less as a story): a feeling of being silenced by the building I inhabited. [Or to
think about it the other way around: it's also plausible and less paranoid that upon hearing
my flash sentences the building manifested a sense of phonophobia and consequently
activated a strange defense mechanism. In any case, t]hat day, I had been forewarned, but I
failed to understand. As soon as I pushed the revolving door and left the building with a wry
smile [on my face], the traffic outside wolfed down the warning.
E

The day I resigned myself to those forces – and I assume, I had unleashed them upon myself
through my vengeful desire to hxxx {here, a 3-cm erasure} words until I could see carcass
after carcass roll down the stairs [truth be said, a practice that differed from other people's
doings only in my heightened degree of awareness, which entailed a partially malevolent but
perhaps understandable defensive strategy on my part] – that gloomy day, the burning
untitled shape I had been carrying in my mouth morphed into a permanent official of my
cavity – a word implant in my jaw! No longer do I feel pain on my tongue, only a tinge of
volcanic ash as an aftermath of this defeat.

U

I've been running with a word in my mouth, running with this burning untitled shape, and I
just can't spit it out. Spit it with phlegm from a balcony, kiss it in a mirror, brush it away one
morning. It has become my tooth, rooted in my nervous system. My word of mouth.
P

Since then, my present has turned into an obscure hole, and I can't climb out of it. Most of
the time, I'm sitting at the bottom of this narrow oubliette, teeth in knees, scribbling notes with
my body in a terribly twisted position. And when I'm not sitting, I'm forced to jump.
Agonizing thoughts numb my limbs so much so that I feel my legs turning to stone. On some
days I look up, terrified. I can't even make out whether the diffuse opening is egg- or squareshaped, but there's definitely a peculiar tic-tac sequence interspersed with neighs that my
pricked ears are picking up on. A sound umbrella, hovering somewhere up there, high above
my imploded horizon.
{illegible vertical lines resembling a bar code}
Hypotheses scanned and merged, I temporarily conclude that a horse-like creature with
metal intestines must be galloping round and round the hole I'm in. When I first noticed the
sound, its circular cadence was soft and unobtrusive, almost protective, but now the more laps
the clock-horse is running, the deeper the ticking and the neighing sounds are drilling into the
hole. I picture this as an ever rotating metal worm inside a mincing machine. If I point my
chin up, it bores through my throat!
B

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P.143

What if, in returning to that red flag in my reconstructive undertaking [instead of “red flag”,
whose imperialist connotations strike me today, we cross it out and use “pyramid” to refer to
such potentially revealing frames, when intuitions {two words crossed out, but still legible:
seem to} give the alarm and converge before thoughts do], we posit that an elevator accident
occurred not long after my unanswered query at the High Reception Desk, and that I –
exceptionally – found myself in the elevator car that plummeted. Following this not entirely
bleak hypothesis, the oubliette I'm trapped in translates to an explainable state of blackout
and all the ticking and the drilling could easily find their counterparts in the host of medical
devices (and their noise-making) that support a comatose person. What if what I am
experiencing now is another kind of awareness, inside a coma, which will be gone once I
wake up in a few hours or days on a hospital bed, flowers by my side, someone crying / loud
as a horse / in the other corner of the room, next to a child's bed?
[Plausible as this scenario might be, it's still strange how the situation calls for reality-like
insertions to occur through “what if”s...]
H

Have I fallen into a lucid coma or am I a hallucination, made in 1941 out of gouache and
black pencil, paper, cardboard and purchased in 1966?
[To visualize the equation of my despair, the following elements are given: the abovewhispered question escalates into a desperate shout and multiplies itself over a considerable
stretch of time at the expense of my vocal chords. After all, I am not made of black pencil or
cardboard or paper. Despite this conclusion, the effort has left me sulking for hours without
being able to scribble anything, overwhelmed by a sensation of being pinched and pulled
sideways by dark particles inside the mineral dampness of this open tomb. What's the use of
a vertical territory if you can't sniff it all the way up?]
{several overlapping thumbmarks in black ink, lower right corner}
W

/ one gorgeous whale \
my memory's biomorphic shadow
can anyone write in woodworm language?

how to teach the Cyrillic alphabet to woodworms?
how many hypotheses to /re-stabilize\ one's situation?
how many pyramids one on top of the other to the \coma/ surface?
the denser the pyramid net, the more confusing the situation. true/false\fiction

O

Hasty recordings of several escape attempts. A slew of tentacle-thoughts are rising towards
the ethereal opening and here I am / hopeful and unwashed \ just beneath a submundane
landscape of groping, shimmering arms, hungry to sense and to collect every memory detail in
an effort of sense making, to draw skin over hypotheses and hypotheses over bones. It might
be morning, it might be yesterday's morning out there or any other time in the past, when as I
cracked the door to my workplace, I entered my co-workers' question game and paraverbal
exchange:
Puckered lips open: “Listen, whose childhood dream was it to have one of their eye-bulbs
replaced with a micro fish-eye lens implant?” Knitted eyebrows: “Someone whose neural
pathways zigzagged phrenologist categories?” Microexpressionist: “How many semioticiandentists and woodworm-writers have visited the Chaos Institute to date?” A ragged mane:
“The same number as the number of neurological tools for brain mapping that the Institute
owns?” {one lengthy word crossed out, probably a name}: “Would your brain topography get
upset and wrinkle if you imagined all the bureaucrats' desks from the largest country on earth
[by pop.] piled up in a pyramid?” Microexpressionist again: “Who wants to draft the call for
asemic writers?” Puckered lips closes {sic} the door.
I

It's a humongous workplace, with a blue entrance door, cluttered with papers on both sides.
See? Left hand on the entrance door handle, the woman presses it and the three of them
[guiding co-worker, faceless cameraman, scarlet-haired interviewer] squeeze themselves

P.144

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inside all that paper. [Door shuts by itself.] Doesn't it feel like entering a paper sculpture? [,
she herself appearing for a split second to have undergone a material transformation, to have
turned into paper, the left side of her face glowing in a retro light. It's still her.] This is where
we work, a hybrid site officially called The Institute for Chaos and Neuroplasticity – packed
with folders, jammed with newspapers, stacks of private correspondence left and right,
recording devices, boxes with photographs, xeroxed documents on shelves, {several pea-sized
inkblots} printed screenshots and boarding passes – we keep it all, everything that museums
or archives have no interest in, all orphaned papers, photographic plates and imperiled books
or hard disks relatives might want to discard or even burn after someone's death. Exploring
leftovers around here can go up and down to horrifying and overwhelming sensorial levels...
Z

{a two-centimeter line of rust from a pin in the upper left corner of the index card}
Sociological-intelligence rumors have it that ours is the bureau for studying psychological
attachment to “garbage” (we very much welcome researchers), while others refer to the
Institute as the chaos-brewing place in the neighborhood because we employ absolutely no
classification method for storing papers or other media. The chances of finding us? [Raised
eyebrows and puckered lips as first responses to the scarlet-haired question.] Well, the
incidence is just as low as finding a document or device you're looking for in our storage.
Things are not lost; there are just different ways of finding them. A random stroll, a lucky find
– be that on-line or off-line –, or a seductive word of mouth may be the entrance points into
this experiential space, a manifesto for haphazardness, emotional intuitions, subversion of
neural pathways, and non-productive attitudes. A dadaist archive? queried Scarlet Hair.
Ours is definitely not an archive, there's no trace of pyramidal bureaucracy or taxonomy
here, no nation state at its birth. Hence you won't find a reservoir for national or racial
histories in here. Just imagine we changed perception scales, imagine a collective cut-up
project that we, chaos workers, are bringing together without scissors or screwdrivers because
all that gets through that blue door [and that is the only condition and standard] has already
been shaped and fits in here. [Guiding co-worker speaks in a monotonous and plain GPS
voice. Interview continues, but she forgets to mention that behind the blue door, in this very
big box 1. everyone is an authorized user and 2. time rests unemployed.]
K

Lately, several trucks loaded with gray matter have been adding extra hours of induced
chaos to everyone's content. Although it is the Institute's policy to accept paper donations
only from private individuals, it occasionally makes exceptions and takes on leftovers from
nonprofit organizations.

Each time this happens, an extended rite of passage follows so as to slightly delay and
thereby ease the arrival of chaos bits: the most reliable chaos worker, Microexpressionist by
metonymically selected feature, supervises the transfer of boxes at the very beginning of a
long hallway [eyeballs moving left to right, head planted in an incredibly stiff neck]. Then,
some fifty meters away, standing in front of the opened blue door, Puckered Lips welcomes
newcomers into the chaos, his gestures those of a marshaller guiding a plane into a parking
position. But once the gray [?] matter has passed over the threshold, once the last full
suitcase or shoe box with USB sticks has landed, directions are no longer provided.
Everyone's free to grow limbs and choose temporal neighbors.
L

… seated cross-legged at the longest desk ever, Ragged Mane is randomly extracting
photodocuments from the freshest chaos segment with a metallic extension of two of her
fingers [instead of a pince-nez, she's the one to carry a pair of tweezers in a small pocket at
all times]. “Look what I've just grabbed,” and she pushes a sepia photograph in front of
Knitted Eyebrows, whose otherwise deadpan face instantaneously gets stamped this time
with a question mark: “What is it?” “Another capture, of course! Two mustaches, one hat,
three pairs of glasses, some blurred figures in the background, and one most fascinating
detail!” – [… takes out a magnifying glass and points with one of her flashy pink fingers to
the handheld object under the gaze of four eyes on the left side of the photo. Then, Ragged
Mane continues:] “That raised right index finger above a rectangular-shaped object... you see
it?” “You mean [00:00 = insertion of a lengthy time frame = 00:47] could this mustachioed
fellow be holding a touchscreen mobile phone in his left hand?” For several unrecorded
skeptical moments, they interlock their eyes and knit their eyebrows closer together.
Afterward, eyes split again and roll on the surface of the photograph like black-eyed peas on
a kitchen table. “It's all specks and epoch details,” a resigned voice breaks from the chaos
silence, when, the same thought crosses their minds, and Ragged Mane and Knitted
Eyebrows turn the photo over, almost certain to find an answer. [A simultaneous hunch.] In
block letters it most clearly reads: “DOCUMENTING THE FILMING OF
PEACEMAKERS / ANALOGUE PHOTOGRAPHY ON FILM SET / BERN,
SWITZERLAND / 17.05.2008”
X

P.146

P.147

/ meanwhile, the clock-horse has grown really nervous out there – it's drawing smaller and
smaller circles / a spasmodic and repetitive activity causing dislocation / a fine powder
begins to float inside the oubliette in the slowest motion possible / my breathing has already
been hampered, but now my lungs and brain get filled with an asphyxiating smell of old
paper / hanging on my last tentacle-thought, on my tiptoes, refusing to choke and disintegrate
/ NOT READY TO BE RECYCLED / {messiest handwriting}
A Cyrillic cityscape is imagining how one day all the bureaucrats' desks from the largest
country on earth get piled up in a pyramid. “This new shape is deflating the coherence of my
horizon. [the cityscape worries] No matter!” Once the last desk is placed at the very top, the
ground cracks a half-open mouth, a fissure the length of Rxssxx. On the outside it's spotted
with straddled city topographies, inside, it's filled with a vernacular accumulation of anational
dust without a trace of usable pasts.
{violent horizontal strokes over the last two lines, left and right from the hole at the bottom of
the index card; indecipherable}
M

“What's on TV this afternoon?” This plain but beautifully metamorphosed question has just
landed with a bleep on the chaos couch, next to Ragged Mane, who usually loses no chance
to retort [that is, here, to admonish too hard a fall]: “Doucement!” Under the weight of a
short-lived feeling of guilt, {name crossed out} echoes back in a whisper – d – o – u – c – e
– m – e – n – t –, and then, as if after a palatable word tasting, she clicks her tongue and
with it, she searches for a point of clarification: “Doucement is an anagram for documenté –
which one do you actually mean?” [All conversations with {name crossed out} would suffer
unsettling Meaning U-turns because she specialized in letter permutation.]

Y

Gurgling sounds from a not-so-distant corner of the chaos dump make heads simultaneously
rotate in the direction of the TV screen, where a documentary has just started with a drone'seye view over a city of lined-up skyscrapers. Early on, the commentator breaks into unwitty
superlatives and platitudes, while the soundtrack unnecessarily dramatizes a 3D layering of
the city structure. Despite all this, the mood on the couch is patient, and viewers seem to
absorb the vignetted film. “A city like no other, as atypical as Cappadocia,” explains the low
trepid voice from the box, “a city whose peculiarity owes first to the alignment of all its
elements, where street follows street in a parallel fashion like in linear writing. Hence, reading
the city acquires a literal dimension, skyscrapers echo clustered block letters on a line, and
the pedestrian reader gets reduced to the size of a far-sighted microbe.”
[Woodworm laughs]
V

Minutes into the documentary, the micro-drone camera zooms into the silver district/chapter
of the city to show another set of its features: instead of steel and glass, what from afar
appeared to be ordinary skyscrapers turn out to be “300-meter-tall lofty towers of mailboxlike constructs of dried skin, sprayed on top with silver paint for rims, and decorated with
huge love padlocks. A foreboding district for newlyweds?” [nauseating atmosphere] Unable
to answer or to smell, the mosquito-sized drone blinks in the direction of the right page, and it
speedily approaches another windowless urban variation: the vastest area of city towers – the
Wood Drawers District. “Despite its vintage (here and there rundown) aura, the area is an
exquisite, segregated space for library aficionados, designed out of genetically-engineered
trees that grow naturally drawer-shaped with a remarkable capacity for self-(re)generation. In
terms of real proportions, the size of a mailbox- or a drawer-apartment is comparable to that

P.148

P.149

of a shipping container, from the alternative but old housing projects…” bla bla the furniture
bla... [that chaos corner, so remote and so coal black / that whole atmosphere with blurred
echoes beclouds my reasoning / and right now, I'm feeling nauseous and cursed with all the
words in an unabridged dictionary / new deluxe edition, with black covers and golden
characters]
D

In front of the place where, above a modest skyline, every single morning [scholars'] desks
conjoin in the shape of a multi-storied pyramid, there's a sign that reads: right here you can
bend forward, place your hands on your back, press down your spine with your thumbs and
throw up an index card, throw out a reality version, take out a tooth. In fact, take out all that
you need and once you feel relieved, exchange personas as if in an emergency situation.
Then, behind vermillion curtains, replace pronouns at will.
[Might this have been a pipe dream? An intubated wish for character replacement? {Name
crossed out} would whisper C E E H I N N O R T as place name]
R

[“gray – …
Other Color Terms –
argentine, cerise, cerulean, cyan, ocher, perse, puce, taupe, vermillion”]
To be able to name everything and everyone, especially all the shades in a gray zone, and
then to re-name, re-narrate/re-count, and re-photograph all of it. To treat the ensuing
multilayered landscape with/as an infinitive verb and to scoop a place for yourself in the
accordion of surfaces. For instance, take the first shot – you're being stared at, you're under
the distant gaze of three {words crossed out; illegible}. Pale, you might think, how pallid and
lifeless they appear to be, but try to hold their gaze and notice how the interaction grows
uncomfortable through persistence. Blink, if you must. Move your weight from one leg to the
other, and become aware of how unflinching their concentration remains, as if their eyes are
lured into a screen. And as you're trying to draw attention to yourself by making ampler,
pantomimic gestures, your hands touch the dark inner edges of the monitor you're [boxed] in.
Look out and around again and again...

G

Some {Same?} damned creature made only of arms and legs has been leaving a slew of
black dots all over my corridors and staircases, ashes on my handrails, and larger spots of
black liquid in front of my elevator doors on the southern track – my oldest and dearest
vertically mobile installation, the one that has grown only ten floors high. If I were in shape,
attuned and wired to my perception angles and sensors, I could identify beyond precision that
it is a 403 cabal plotting I begin fearing. Lately, it's all been going really awry. Having failed
at the character recognition of this trickster creature, the following facts can be enumerated in
view of overall [damage] re-evaluation, quantification, and intruder excision: emaciating
architectural structure, increasingly deformed spiraling of brown marbled staircases, smudged
finger- and footprints on all floors, soddened and blackened ceilings, alongside thousands of
harrowing fingers and a detection of an insidious and undesirable multiplication of {word
crossed out: white} hands [tbc].
C

Out of the blue, the clock-horse dislocated particles expand in size, circle in all directions like
giant flies around a street lamp, and then in the most predictable fashion, they collide with my
escapist reminiscences multiple times until I lose connection and the landscape above comes
to a [menacing] stillness. [How does it look now? a scarlet-haired question.] I'm blinking, I'm
moving my weight from one leg to the other, before I can attempt a description of the earth
balls that stagnate in the air among translucent tentacles [they're almost gone] and floating
dioramas of miniatures. Proportions have inverted, scraped surfaces have commingled and
my U-shaped. reality. and. vision. are. stammering... I can't find my hands!
...

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-- Ospal ( talk ) 09:27, 19 November 2015 (CET) Here is where the transcript ENDS,
where the black text lines dribble back into the box. For information on document location or
transcription method, kindly contact the editor.

Last
Revision:
28·06·2016

LES
UTOPISTES
and
their
common
logos/et
leurs
logos
communs
DENNIS POHL
EN

In itself this list is just a bag of words that orders the common terms used in the works of
Le Corbusier and Paul Otlet with the help of text comparison. The quantity of similar words
relates to the word-count of the texts, which means that each appearance has a different
weight. Taken this into account, the appearance of the word esprit for instance, is more
significant in Vers une Architecture (127 times) than in Traité de documentation (240
times), although the total amount of appearances is almost two times higher.
Beyond the mere quantified use of a common language, this list follows the intuition that
there is something more to elaborate in the discourse between these two utopians. One
possible reading can be found in The Smart City, an essay that traces their encounter.
FR

Cette liste n'est en elle même qu'un sac de mots qui organisent les termes les plus
communs utilisés dans les travaux de Le Corbusier et Paul Otlet en utilisant un comparateur
de texte. Le nombre de mots similaires rapotés par le comptage automatique des mots du
texte, ceci signifie que chaque occurence a une valeur différente. Prenons l'exemple des
aparitions du mot esprit par exemple sont plus significatives dans Vers une Architecture (127

P.152

P.153

fois) plutot que dans le Traité de documentation (240 fois), et ceci bien que le nombre
d'occurences est pratiquement 2 fois plus élevé.
Au delà de simplement comptabiliser la pratique d'un langage commun, mais cette liste suit
une intuition qu'il y a quelque chose qui mériterait une recherche plus approfondie sur le
discours de ces deux utopistes. Une proposition pour une telle recherche peut être trouvée
dans La Ville Intelligente, un essai qui retrace leur rencontre.
Books taken into consideration/Livres prise en compte:
• Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture, Paris: les éditions G. Crès, 1923. Wordcount: 32733.
• Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique, Bruxelles:
Mundaneum, Palais Mondial, 1934. Word-count: 356854.
• Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, Paris: les éditions G. Crès, 1925. Word-count: 37699.
• Paul Otlet, Monde: essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde, Sentiment du
Monde, Action organisee et Plan du Monde, Bruxelles: Editiones Mundeum 1935.
Word-count: 140209.
acquis

appears 5 times in Vers une 21 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

11 times in
Monde.

activité

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

43 times in Traité de
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

78 times in
Monde.

actuel

appears 9 times in Vers une 27 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

22 times in
Monde.

actuelle

appears 7 times in Vers une 19 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

26 times in
Monde.

actuelles

appears 5 times in Vers une 6 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

6 times in
Monde.

affaires

appears 6 times in Vers une 42 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

30 times in
Urbanisme and

19 times in
Monde.

air

appears 12 times in Vers
une Architecture,

12 times in Traité de
documentation,

14 times in
Urbanisme and

16 times in
Monde.

aise

appears 7 times in Vers une 71 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

12 times in
Monde.

alors

appears 32 times in Vers
une Architecture,

165 times in Traité de 38 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

52 times in
Monde.

angle

appears 5 times in Vers une 18 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

16 times in
Urbanisme and

7 times in
Monde.

années

appears 7 times in Vers une 89 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

42 times in
Monde.

ans

appears 17 times in Vers
une Architecture,

91 times in Traité de
documentation,

16 times in
Urbanisme and

109 times in
Monde.

architecture

appears 199 times in Vers
une Architecture,

51 times in Traité de
documentation,

26 times in
Urbanisme and

11 times in
Monde.

art

appears 44 times in Vers
une Architecture,

370 times in Traité de 6 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

60 times in
Monde.

aspect

appears 5 times in Vers une 45 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

29 times in
Monde.

auto

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

13 times in Traité de
documentation,

12 times in
Urbanisme and

5 times in
Monde.

autrement

appears 6 times in Vers une 15 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

10 times in
Monde.

avant

appears 8 times in Vers une 131 times in Traité de 6 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

45 times in
Monde.

avoir

appears 13 times in Vers
une Architecture,

208 times in Traité de 6 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

72 times in
Monde.

base

appears 8 times in Vers une 119 times in Traité de 6 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

66 times in
Monde.

beauté

appears 14 times in Vers
une Architecture,

14 times in
Urbanisme and

21 times in
Monde.

beaucoup

appears 9 times in Vers une 114 times in Traité de 8 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

23 times in
Monde.

besoin

appears 16 times in Vers
une Architecture,

82 times in Traité de
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

40 times in
Monde.

calcul

appears 19 times in Vers
une Architecture,

15 times in Traité de
documentation,

24 times in
Urbanisme and

21 times in
Monde.

cause

appears 6 times in Vers une 47 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

26 times in
Monde.

cela

appears 16 times in Vers
une Architecture,

16 times in
Urbanisme and

31 times in
Monde.

cellule

appears 7 times in Vers une 9 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

7 times in
Monde.

centre

appears 7 times in Vers une 55 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

50 times in
Urbanisme and

44 times in
Monde.

P.154

34 times in Traité de
documentation,

99 times in Traité de
documentation,

P.155

chapitre

appears 7 times in Vers une 35 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

chacun

appears 6 times in Vers une 151 times in Traité de 6 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

60 times in
Monde.

chemins

appears 9 times in Vers une 18 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

12 times in
Urbanisme and

5 times in
Monde.

chemin

appears 7 times in Vers une 19 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

18 times in
Urbanisme and

9 times in
Monde.

choses

appears 43 times in Vers
une Architecture,

215 times in Traité de 20 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

157 times in
Monde.

chose

appears 34 times in Vers
une Architecture,

110 times in Traité de 12 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

52 times in
Monde.

ciel

appears 8 times in Vers une 13 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

48 times in
Urbanisme and

18 times in
Monde.

cinquante

appears 5 times in Vers une 6 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

5 times in
Monde.

circulation

appears 6 times in Vers une 27 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

44 times in
Urbanisme and

8 times in
Monde.

cité

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

29 times in Traité de
documentation,

34 times in
Urbanisme and

35 times in
Monde.

claire

appears 6 times in Vers une 18 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

6 times in
Monde.

compte

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

96 times in Traité de
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

37 times in
Monde.

construction

appears 50 times in Vers
une Architecture,

24 times in Traité de
documentation,

14 times in
Urbanisme and

8 times in
Monde.

conception

appears 23 times in Vers
une Architecture,

62 times in Traité de
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

64 times in
Monde.

construire

appears 17 times in Vers
une Architecture,

10 times in Traité de
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

9 times in
Monde.

contre

appears 13 times in Vers
une Architecture,

91 times in Traité de
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

79 times in
Monde.

conà

appears 9 times in Vers une 49 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

20 times in
Monde.

12 times in
Urbanisme and

5 times in
Monde.

constructions appears 7 times in Vers une 8 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

9 times in
Monde.

connaissance

appears 5 times in Vers une 76 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

56 times in
Monde.

conditions

appears 5 times in Vers une 111 times in Traité de 8 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

57 times in
Monde.

cours

appears 8 times in Vers une 150 times in Traité de 8 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

65 times in
Monde.

coup

appears 7 times in Vers une 34 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

14 times in
Monde.

crise

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

8 times in Traité de
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

45 times in
Monde.

création

appears 22 times in Vers
une Architecture,

82 times in Traité de
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

48 times in
Monde.

créer

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

57 times in Traité de
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

25 times in
Monde.

crée

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

26 times in Traité de
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

18 times in
Monde.

culture

appears 7 times in Vers une 33 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

68 times in
Monde.

demain

appears 7 times in Vers une 17 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

11 times in
Monde.

dessus

appears 6 times in Vers une 28 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

16 times in
Urbanisme and

21 times in
Monde.

devant

appears 18 times in Vers
une Architecture,

75 times in Traité de
documentation,

12 times in
Urbanisme and

43 times in
Monde.

dire

appears 17 times in Vers
une Architecture,

185 times in Traité de 16 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

72 times in
Monde.

disposition

appears 5 times in Vers une 83 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

doit

appears 13 times in Vers
une Architecture,

domaines

appears 5 times in Vers une 42 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

38 times in
Monde.

donne

appears 8 times in Vers une 148 times in Traité de 12 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

44 times in
Monde.

droite

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

8 times in
Monde.

P.156

6 times in
Urbanisme and

408 times in Traité de 14 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

40 times in Traité de
documentation,

36 times in
Urbanisme and

8 times in
Monde.
134 times in
Monde.

P.157

droits

appears 8 times in Vers une 22 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

droit

appears 6 times in Vers une 106 times in Traité de 36 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

125 times in
Monde.

désordre

appears 7 times in Vers une 9 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

12 times in
Urbanisme and

12 times in
Monde.

effet

appears 7 times in Vers une 78 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

32 times in
Monde.

encore

appears 25 times in Vers
une Architecture,

enfin

appears 5 times in Vers une 46 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

ensemble

appears 16 times in Vers
une Architecture,

329 times in Traité de 14 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

123 times in
Monde.

entre

appears 29 times in Vers
une Architecture,

342 times in Traité de 18 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

246 times in
Monde.

esprit

appears 127 times in Vers
une Architecture,

240 times in Traité de 36 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

150 times in
Monde.

espace

appears 20 times in Vers
une Architecture,

69 times in Traité de
documentation,

16 times in
Urbanisme and

122 times in
Monde.

esprits

appears 6 times in Vers une 44 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

35 times in
Monde.

exemple

appears 5 times in Vers une 143 times in Traité de 12 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

30 times in
Monde.

existence

appears 5 times in Vers une 73 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

75 times in
Monde.

face

appears 15 times in Vers
une Architecture,

11 times in Traité de
documentation,

12 times in
Urbanisme and

18 times in
Monde.

faire

appears 51 times in Vers
une Architecture,

410 times in Traité de 24 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

faites

appears 7 times in Vers une 45 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

faut

appears 46 times in Vers
une Architecture,

285 times in Traité de 54 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

126 times in
Monde.

fer

appears 12 times in Vers
une Architecture,

30 times in Traité de
documentation,

14 times in
Monde.

16 times in
Urbanisme and

197 times in Traité de 22 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and
8 times in
Urbanisme and

6 times in
Urbanisme and

14 times in
Urbanisme and

37 times in
Monde.

106 times in
Monde.
29 times in
Monde.

137 times in
Monde.
12 times in
Monde.

fin

appears 5 times in Vers une 122 times in Traité de 6 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

66 times in
Monde.

fois

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

208 times in Traité de 8 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

77 times in
Monde.

font

appears 24 times in Vers
une Architecture,

93 times in Traité de
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

25 times in
Monde.

fond

appears 5 times in Vers une 67 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

29 times in
Monde.

forme

appears 14 times in Vers
une Architecture,

france

appears 6 times in Vers une 190 times in Traité de 6 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

57 times in
Monde.

grande

appears 40 times in Vers
une Architecture,

202 times in Traité de 82 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

69 times in
Monde.

grand

appears 34 times in Vers
une Architecture,

276 times in Traité de 34 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

89 times in
Monde.

grands

appears 24 times in Vers
une Architecture,

187 times in Traité de 24 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

88 times in
Monde.

grandes

appears 21 times in Vers
une Architecture,

182 times in Traité de 36 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

93 times in
Monde.

grandeur

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

34 times in Traité de
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

19 times in
Monde.

gros

appears 5 times in Vers une 25 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

8 times in
Monde.

guerre

appears 5 times in Vers une 115 times in Traité de 8 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

137 times in
Monde.

géométrie

appears 17 times in Vers
une Architecture,

14 times in Traité de
documentation,

24 times in
Urbanisme and

12 times in
Monde.

hauteur

appears 14 times in Vers
une Architecture,

21 times in Traité de
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

8 times in
Monde.

haute

appears 9 times in Vers une 34 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

13 times in
Monde.

haut

appears 9 times in Vers une 71 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

18 times in
Urbanisme and

24 times in
Monde.

heures

appears 15 times in Vers
une Architecture,

20 times in
Urbanisme and

16 times in
Monde.

P.158

442 times in Traité de 18 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

45 times in Traité de
documentation,

106 times in
Monde.

P.159

heure

appears 15 times in Vers
une Architecture,

histoire

appears 6 times in Vers une 338 times in Traité de 10 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

183 times in
Monde.

homme

appears 74 times in Vers
une Architecture,

189 times in Traité de 66 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

315 times in
Monde.

hommes

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

122 times in Traité de 30 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

144 times in
Monde.

hors

appears 9 times in Vers une 36 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

12 times in
Monde.

humaine

appears 19 times in Vers
une Architecture,

72 times in Traité de
documentation,

14 times in
Urbanisme and

96 times in
Monde.

humain

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

45 times in Traité de
documentation,

16 times in
Urbanisme and

61 times in
Monde.

idées

appears 14 times in Vers
une Architecture,

283 times in Traité de 6 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

80 times in
Monde.

idée

appears 13 times in Vers
une Architecture,

168 times in Traité de 6 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

75 times in
Monde.

immenses

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

22 times in Traité de
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

12 times in
Monde.

immense

appears 8 times in Vers une 62 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

25 times in
Monde.

industrielle

appears 12 times in Vers
une Architecture,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

14 times in
Monde.

industriels

appears 5 times in Vers une 18 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

9 times in
Monde.

jeu

appears 14 times in Vers
une Architecture,

39 times in Traité de
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

29 times in
Monde.

jour

appears 13 times in Vers
une Architecture,

216 times in Traité de 22 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

69 times in
Monde.

lequel

appears 5 times in Vers une 67 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

19 times in
Monde.

libre

appears 7 times in Vers une 48 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

45 times in
Monde.

lieu

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

384 times in Traité de 6 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

89 times in
Monde.

58 times in Traité de
documentation,

7 times in Traité de
documentation,

32 times in
Urbanisme and

28 times in
Monde.

logique

appears 14 times in Vers
une Architecture,

117 times in Traité de 8 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

39 times in
Monde.

loin

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

46 times in Traité de
documentation,

34 times in
Urbanisme and

17 times in
Monde.

louis

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

33 times in Traité de
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

10 times in
Monde.

lumière

appears 45 times in Vers
une Architecture,

77 times in Traité de
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

38 times in
Monde.

machine

appears 17 times in Vers
une Architecture,

119 times in Traité de 20 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

29 times in
Monde.

machines

appears 12 times in Vers
une Architecture,

83 times in Traité de
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

29 times in
Monde.

main

appears 8 times in Vers une 96 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

10 times in
Urbanisme and

15 times in
Monde.

mal

appears 15 times in Vers
une Architecture,

33 times in Traité de
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

26 times in
Monde.

masse

appears 6 times in Vers une 35 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

8 times in
Urbanisme and

52 times in
Monde.

masses

appears 5 times in Vers une 21 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

12 times in
Urbanisme and

19 times in
Monde.

mesure

appears 20 times in Vers
une Architecture,

110 times in Traité de 16 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

46 times in
Monde.

milieu

appears 7 times in Vers une 58 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

20 times in
Urbanisme and

56 times in
Monde.

moderne

appears 31 times in Vers
une Architecture,

79 times in Traité de
documentation,

20 times in
Urbanisme and

35 times in
Monde.

moins

appears 16 times in Vers
une Architecture,

243 times in Traité de 10 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

93 times in
Monde.

moment

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

105 times in Traité de 18 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

36 times in
Monde.

monde

appears 18 times in Vers
une Architecture,

177 times in Traité de 26 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

331 times in
Monde.

montre

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

27 times in Traité de
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

11 times in
Monde.

morale

appears 6 times in Vers une 32 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

35 times in
Monde.

P.160

P.161

moyens

appears 16 times in Vers
une Architecture,

125 times in Traité de 20 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

59 times in
Monde.

moyen

appears 5 times in Vers une 268 times in Traité de 8 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

97 times in
Monde.

mécanique

appears 12 times in Vers
une Architecture,

50 times in Traité de
documentation,

31 times in
Monde.

nature

appears 18 times in Vers
une Architecture,

120 times in Traité de 20 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

166 times in
Monde.

nouveau

appears 39 times in Vers
une Architecture,

98 times in Traité de
documentation,

16 times in
Urbanisme and

43 times in
Monde.

nouvelle

appears 13 times in Vers
une Architecture,

129 times in Traité de 6 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

60 times in
Monde.

nouvelles

appears 6 times in Vers une 180 times in Traité de 6 times in
Architecture,
documentation,
Urbanisme and

65 times in
Monde.

nécessaire

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

80 times in Traité de
documentation,

12 times in
Urbanisme and

43 times in
Monde.

or

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

63 times in Traité de
documentation,

14 times in
Urbanisme and

45 times in
Monde.

ordre

appears 59 times in Vers
une Architecture,

421 times in Traité de 30 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

organes

appears 5 times in Vers une 74 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

21 times in
Monde.

outil

appears 19 times in Vers
une Architecture,

12 times in Traité de
documentation,

6 times in
Urbanisme and

5 times in
Monde.

outillage

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

28 times in Traité de
documentation,

14 times in
Urbanisme and

6 times in
Monde.

paris

appears 20 times in Vers
une Architecture,

192 times in Traité de 60 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

16 times in
Monde.

part

appears 13 times in Vers
une Architecture,

214 times in Traité de 14 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

77 times in
Monde.

partie

appears 11 times in Vers
une Architecture,

222 times in Traité de 10 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

58 times in
Monde.

partout

appears 8 times in Vers une 48 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

12 times in
Urbanisme and

28 times in
Monde.

passé

appears 17 times in Vers
une Architecture,

12 times in
Urbanisme and

49 times in
Monde.

55 times in Traité de
documentation,

16 times in
Urbanisme and

128 times in
Monde.

passion

appears 8 times in Vers une 6 times in Traité de
Architecture,
documentation,

pensée

appears 10 times in Vers
une Architecture,

291 times in Traité de 12 times in
documentation,
Urbanisme and

127 times in
Monde.

perfection

appears 12 times in Vers
une Architecture,

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P.163

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P.165

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Last
Revision:
3·08·2016

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P.167

X=Y
DICK RECKARD

0. INNOVATION OF THE SAME

Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

The PR imagery produced by and around the
Mundaneum (disambiguation: the institution in
Mons) often suggests, through a series of
'samenesses', an essential continuity between
Otlet's endeavour and Internet-related products
and services, in particular Google's. A good
example is a scene from the video "From
industrial heartland to the Internet age",
published by The Mundaneum, 2014 , where the drawers of Mundaneum
(disambiguation: Otlet's Utopia) morph into the servers of one of Google's
data centres.
This approach is not limited to images: a recurring discourse that shapes some of the
exhibitions taking place in the Mundaneum maintains that the dream of the Belgian utopian
has been kept alive in the development of internetworked communications, and currently
finds its spitiual successor in the products and services of Google. Even though there are
many connections and similarities between the two endeavours, one has to acknowledge that
Otlet was an internationalist, a socialist, an utopian, that his projects were not profit oriented,
and most importantly, that he was living in the temporal and cultural context of modernism at
the beginning of the 20th century. The constructed identities and continuities that detach
Otlet and the Mundaneum from a specific historical frame, ignore the different scientific,
social and political milieus involved. It means that these narratives exclude the discording or
disturbing elements that are inevitable when considering such a complex figure in its entirety.
This is not surprising, seeing the parties that are involved in the discourse: these types of
instrumental identities and differences suit the rhetorical tone of Silicon Valley. Newly
launched IT products for example, are often described as groundbreaking, innovative and
different from anything seen before. In other situations, those products could be advertised
exactly the same, as something else that already exists[1]. While novelty and difference
surprise and amaze, sameness reassures and comforts. For example, Google Glass was
marketed as revolutionary and innovative, but when it was attacked for its blatant privacy

issues, some defended it as just a camera and a phone joined together. The samenessdifference duo fulfils a clear function: on the one hand, it suggests that technological
advancements might alter the way we live dramatically, and we should be ready to give up
our old-fashioned ideas about life and culture for the sake of innovation. On the other hand, it
proposes we should not be worried about change, and that society has always evolved
through disruptions, undoubtedly for the better. For each questionable groundbreaking new
invention, there is a previous one with the same ideal, potentially with just as many critics...
Great minds think alike, after all. This sort of a-historical attitude pervades techno-capitalist
milieus, creating a cartoonesque view of the past, punctuated by great men and great
inventions, a sort of technological variant of Carlyle's Great Man Theory. In this view, the
Internet becomes the invention of a few father/genius figures, rather than the result of a long
and complex interaction of diverging efforts and interests of academics, entrepreneurs and
national governments. This instrumental reading of the past is largely consistent with the
theoretical ground on which the Californian Ideology[2] is based, in which the conception of
history is pervaded by various strains of technological determinism (from Marshall McLuhan
to Alvin Toffler[3]) and capitalist individualism (in generic neoliberal terms, up to the fervent
objectivism of Ayn Rand).
The appropriation of Paul Otlet's figure as Google's grandfather is a historical simplification,
and the samenesses in this tale are not without fundament. Many concepts and ideals of
documentation theories have reappeared in cybernetics and information theory, and are
therefore present in the narrative of many IT corporations, as in Mountain View's case. With
the intention of restoring a historical complexity, it might be more interesting to play the
exactly the same game ourselves, rather than try to dispel the advertised continuum of the
Google on paper. Choosing to focus on other types of analogies in the story, we can maybe
contribute a narrative that is more respectful to the complexity of the past, and more telling
about the problems of the present.
What followings are three such comparisons, which focus on three aspects of continuity
between the documentation theories and archival experiments Otlet was involved in, and the
cybernetic theories and practices that Google's capitalist enterprise is an exponent of. The
First one takes a look at the conditions of workers in information infrastructures, who are
fundamental for these systems to work but often forgotten or displaced. Next, an account of
the elements of distribution and control that appear both in the idea of a Reseau Mundaneum
, and in the contemporary functioning of data centres, and the resulting interaction with other
types of infrastructures. Finally, there is a brief analysis of the two approaches to the
'organization of world's knowledge', which examines their regimes of truth and the issues that

P.168

P.169

come with them. Hopefully these three short pieces can provide some additional ingredients
for adulterating the sterile recipe of the Google-Otlet sameness.
A. DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF MECHANICAL TURKS?

In a drawing titled Laboratorium Mundaneum, Paul
Otlet depicted his project as a massive factory, processing
books and other documents into end products, rolled out
by a UDC locomotive. In fact, just like a factory,
Mundaneum was dependent on the bureaucratic and
logistic modes of organization of labour developed for
industrial production. Looking at it and at other written
and drawn sketches, one might ask: who made up the
workforce of these factories?
In his Traité de Documentation, Otlet describes
extensively the thinking machines and tasks of intellectual
work into which the Fordist chain of documentation is
broken down. In the subsection dedicated to the people
who would undertake the work though, the only role
described at length is the Bibliotécaire. In a long chapter
that explains what education the librarian should follow, which characteristics are required,
and so on, he briefly mentions the existence of “Bibliotecaire-adjoints, rédacteurs, copistes,
gens de service”[4]. There seems to be no further description nor depiction of the staff that
would write, distribute and search the millions of index cards in order to keep the archive
running, an impossible task for the Bibliotécaire alone.
A photograph from around 1930, taken in the Palais
Mondial, where we see Paul Otlet together with the rest
of the équipe, gives us a better answer. In this beautiful
group picture, we notice that the workforce that kept the
archival machine running was made up of women, but we
do not know much about them. As in telephone switching
systems or early software development[5], gender
stereotypes and discrimination led to the appointment of
female workers for repetitive tasks that required specific
knowledge and precision. According to the ideal image described in "Traité", all the tasks of
collecting, translating, distributing, should be completely
automatic, seemingly without the necessity of human
intervention. However, the Mundaneum hired dozens of
women to perform these tasks. This human-run version of RC : Il faut déjà au minimum avoir
the system was not considered worth mentioning, as if it
was a temporary in-between phase that should be
overcome as soon as possible, something that was staining the project with its vulgarity.
Notwithstanding the incredible advancement of information technologies and the automation
of innumerable tasks in collectiong, processing and distributing information, we can observe
the same pattern today. All automatic repetitive tasks that technology should be able to do for
us are still, one way or another, relying on human labour. And unlike the industrial worker
who obtained recognition through political movements and struggles, the role of many
cognitive workers is still hidden or under-represented. Computational linguistics, neural
networks, optical character recognition, all amazing machinic operations are still based on
humans performing huge amounts of repetitive intellectual tasks from which software can
learn, or which software can't do with the same efficiency. Automation didn't really free us
from labour, it just shifted the where, when and who of labour.[6]. Mechanical turks, content
verifiers, annotators of all kinds... The software we use requires a multitude of tasks which
are invisible to us, but are still accomplished by humans. Who are they? When possible,
work is outsourced to foreign English-speaking countries with lower wages, like India. In the
western world it follows the usual pattern: female, lower income, ethnic minorities.
An interesting case of heteromated labour are the socalled Scanops[7], a set of Google workers who have a
different type of badge and are isolated in a section of the
Mountain View complex secluded from the rest of the
workers through strict access permissions and fixed time
schedules. Their work consists of scanning the pages of
printed books for the Google Books database, a task that
is still more convenient to do by hand (especially in the
case of rare or fragile books). The workers are mostly
women and ethnic minorities, and there is no mention of
them on the Google Books website or elsewhere; in fact
the whole scanning process is kept secret. Even though
the secrecy that surrounds this type of labour can be
justified by the need to protect trade secrets, it again
conceals the human element in machine work. This is
even more obvious when compared to other types of
human workers in the project, such as designers and
programmers, who are celebrated for their creativity and
ingenuity.
However, here and there, evidence of the workforce shows up in the result of their labour.
Photos of Google Books employee's hands sometimes mistakenly end up in the digital
version of the book online[8].
Whether the tendency to hide the human presence is due to the unfulfilled wish for total
automation, to avoid the bad publicity of low wages and precarious work, or to keep an aura
of mystery around machines, remains unclear, both in the case of Google Books and the

P.170

P.171

Palais Mondial. Still, it is reassuring to know that the products hold traces of the work, that
even with the progressive removal of human signs in
automated processes, the workers' presence never
disappears completely. This presence is proof of the
materiality of information production, and becomes a sign
in a webpage or the OCR scanned
pages of a book, reflect a negligence
to the processes and labor of writing,
editing, design, layout, typesetting, and
eventually publishing, collecting and
[9]
cataloging .

In 2013, while Prime Minister Di Rupo was celebrating the beginning of the second phase
of constructing the Saint Ghislain data centre, a few hundred kilometres away a very similar
situation started to unroll. In the municipality of Eemsmond, in the Dutch province of
Groningen, the local Groningen Sea Ports and NOM development were rumoured to have
plans with another code named company, Saturn, to build a data centre in the small port of
Eemshaven.
A few months later, when it was revealed that Google
was behind Saturn, Harm Post, director of Groningen
Sea Ports, commented: "Ten years ago Eemshaven
became the laughing stock of ports and industrial
development in the Netherlands, a planning failure of the
previous century. And now Google is building a very
large data centre here, which is 'pure advertisement' for
Eemshaven and the data port."[10] Further details on tax
cuts were not disclosed and once finished, the data centre will provide at most 150 jobs in
the region.
Yet another territory fortunately chosen by Google, just like Mons, but what are the selection
criteria? For one thing, data centres need to interact with existing infrastructures and flows of
various type. Technically speaking, there are three prerequisites: being near a substantial
source of electrical power (the finished installation will consume twice as much as the whole
city of Groningen); being near a source of clean water, for the massive cooling demands;
being near Internet infrastructure that can assure adequate connectivity. There is also a
whole set of non-technical elements, that we can sum up as the social, economical and
political climate, which proved favourable both in Mons and Eemshaven.
The push behind constructing new sites in new locations, rather expanding existing ones, is
partly due to the rapid growth of the importance of Software as a service, so-called cloud
computing, which is the rental of computational power from a central provider. With the rise
of the SaaS paradigm the geographical and topological placement of data centres becomes of
strategic importance to achieve lower latencies and more stable service. For this reason,

Google has in the last 10 years been pursuing a policy of end-to-end connection between its
facilities and user interfaces. This includes buying leftover fibre networks[11], entering the
business of underwater sea cables[12] and building new data centres, including the ones in
Mons and Eemshaven.
The spread of data centres around the world, along the main network cables across
continents, represents a new phase in the diagram of the Internet. This should not be
confused with the idea of decentralization that was a cornerstone value in the early stages of
interconnected networks.[13] During the rapid development of the Internet and the Web, the
new tenets of immediacy, unlimited storage and exponential growth led to the centralization
of content in increasingly large server farms. Paradoxically, it is now the growing
centralization of all kind of operations in specific buildings, that is fostering their distribution.
The tension between centralization and distribution and the dependence on neighbouring
infrastructures as the electrical grid is not an exclusive feature of contemporary data storage
and networking models. Again, similarities emerge from the history of the Mundaneum,
illustrating how these issues relate closely to the logistic organization of production first
implemented during the industrial revolution, and theorized within modernism.
Centralization was seen by Otlet as the most efficient way to organize content, especially in
view of international exchange[14] which already caused problems related to space back then:
the Mundaneum archive counted 16 million entries at its peak, occupying around 150
rooms. The cumbersome footprint, and the growing difficulty to find stable locations for it,
concurred to the conviction that the project should be included in the plans of new modernist
cities. In the beginning of the 1930s, when the Mundaneum started to lose the support of the
Belgian government, Otlet thought of a new site for it as part of a proposed Cité Mondiale,
which he tried in different locations with different approaches.
Between various attempts, he participated in the competition for the development of the Left
Bank in Antwerp. The most famous modernist urbanists of the time were invited to plan the
development from scratch. At the time, the left bank was completely vacant. Otlet lobbied for
the insertion of a Mundaneum in the plans, stressing how it would create hundreds of jobs for
the region. He also flattered the Flemish pride by insisting on how people from Antwerp
were more hard working than the ones from Brussels, and how they would finally obtain their
deserved recognition, when their city would be elevated to World City status.[15] He partly
succeeded in his propaganda; aside from his own proposal, developed in collaboration with
Le Corbusier, many other participants included Otlet's Mundaneum as a key facility in their
plans. In these proposals, Otlet's archival infrastructure was shown in interaction with the
existing city flows such as industrial docks, factories, the
railway and the newly constructed stock market.[16]The
modernist utopia of a planned living environment implied
that methods similar to those employed for managing the
flows of coal and electricity could be used for the
organization of culture and knowledge.

P.172
From From Paper Mill to Google
Data Center:
In a sense, data centers are similar to
the capitalist factory system; but

P.173

The Traité de Documentation, published in 1934, includes an extended reflection on a
Universal Network of Documentation, that would coordinate the transfer of knowledge
between different documentation centres such as libraries or the Mundaneum[17]. In fact the
existing Mundaneum would simply be the first node of a wide network bound to expand to
the rest of the world, the Reseau Mundaneum. The nodes of this network are explicitly
described in relation to "post, railways and the press, those three essential organs of modern
life which function unremittingly in order to unite men, cities and nations."[18] In the same
period, in letter exchanges with Patrick Geddes and Otto Neurath, commenting on the
potential of heliographies as a way to distribute knowledge, the three imagine the White Link
, a network to distribute copies throughout a series of Mundaneum nodes[19]. As a result, the
same piece of information would be serially produced and logistically distributed, described
as a sort of moving Mundaneum idea, facilitated by the railway system[20]. No wonder that
future Mundaneums were foreseen to be built next to a train station.
In Otlet's plans for a Reseau Mundaneum we can already detect some of the key
transformations that reappear in today's data centre scenario. First of all, a drive for
centralization, with the accumulation of materials that led to the monumental plans of World
Cities. In parallel, the push for international exchange, resulting in a vision of a distribution
network. Thirdly, the placement of the hypothetic network nodes along strategic intersections
of industrial and logistic infrastructure.
While the plan for Antwerp was in the end rejected in favour of more traditional housing
development, 80 years later the legacy of the relation between existing infrastructural flows
and logistics of documentation storage is highlighted by the data ports plan in Eemshaven.
Since private companies are the privileged actors in these types of projects, the circulation of
information increasingly respond to the same tenets that regulate the trade of coal or
electricity. The very different welcome that traditional politics reserve for Google data centres
is a symptom of a new dimension of power in which information infrastructure plays a vital
role. The celebrations and tax cuts that politicians lavish on these projects cannot be
explained with 150 jobs or economic incentives for a depressed region alone. They also
indicate how party politics is increasingly confined to the periphery of other forms of power
and therefore struggle to assure themselves a strategic positioning.
C. 025.45UDC; 161.225.22; 004.659GOO:004.021PAG.

The Universal Decimal Classification[21] system, developed by Paul Otlet and Henri
Lafontaine on the basis of the Dewey Decimal Classification system is still considered one of
their most important realizations as well as a corner-stone in Otlet's overall vision. Its
adoption, revision and use until today demonstrate a thoughtful and successful approach to
the classification of knowledge.

The UDC differs from Dewey and other bibliographic systems as it has the potential to
exceed the function of ordering alone. The complex notation system could classify phrases
and thoughts in the same way as it would classify a book, going well beyond the sole function
of classification, becoming a real language. One could in fact express whole sentences and
statements in UDC format[22]. The fundamental idea behind it [23]was that books and
documentation could be broken down into their constitutive sentences and boiled down to a
set of universal concepts, regulated by the decimal system. This would allow to express
objective truths in a numerical language, fostering international exchange beyond translation,
making science's work easier by regulating knowledge with numbers. We have to understand
the idea in the time it was originally conceived, a time shaped by positivism and the belief in
the unhindered potential of science to obtain objective universal knowledge. Today,
especially when we take into account the arbitrariness of the decimal structure, it sounds
doubtful, if not preposterous.
However, the linguistic-numeric element of UDC which enables to express fundamental
meanings through numbers, plays a key role in the oeuvre of Paul Otlet. In his work we learn
that numerical knowledge would be the first step towards a science of combining basic
sentences to produce new meaning in a systematic way. When we look at Monde, Otlet's
second publication from 1935, the continuous reference to multiple algebraic formulas that
describe how the world is composed suggests that we could at one point “solve” these
equations and modify the world accordingly.[24] Complementary to the Traité de
Documentation, which described the systematic classification of knowledge, Monde set the
basis for the transformation of this knowledge into new meaning.
Otlet wasn't the first to envision an algebra of thought. It has been a recurring topos in
modern philosophy, under the influence of scientific positivism and in concurrence with the
development of mathematics and physics. Even though one could trace it back to Ramon
Llull and even earlier forms of combinatorics, the first to consistently undertake this scientific
and philosophical challenge was Gottfried Leibniz. The German philosopher and
mathematician, a precursor of the field of symbolic logic, which developed later in the 20th
century, researched a method that reduced statements to minimum terms of meaning. He
investigated a language which “... will be the greatest instrument of reason,” for “when there
are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, and
see who is right”.[25] His inquiry was divided in two phases. The first one, analytic, the
characteristica universalis, was a universal conceptual language to express meanings, of which
we only know that it worked with prime numbers. The second one, synthetic, the calculus
ratiocinator, was the algebra that would allow operations between meanings, of which there is
even less evidence. The idea of calculus was clearly related to the infinitesimal calculus, a
fundamental development that Leibniz conceived in the field of mathematics, and which
Newton concurrently developed and popularized. Even though not much remains of
Leibniz's work on his algebra of thought, it was continued by mathematicians and logicians in
the 20th century. Most famously, and curiously enough around the same time Otlet

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P.175

published Traité and Monde, logician Kurt Godel used the same idea of a translation into
prime numbers to demonstrate his incompleteness theorem.[26] The fact that the characteristica
universalis only made sense in the fields of logics and mathematics is due to the fundamental
problem presented by a mathematical approach to truth beyond logical truth. While this
problem was not yet evident at the time, it would emerge in the duality of language and
categorization, as it did later with Otlet's UDC.
The relation between organizational and linguistic aspects of knowledge is also one of the
open issues at the core of web search, which is, at first sight, less interested in objective
truths. At the beginning of the Web, around the mid '90s, two main approaches to online
search for information emerged: the web directory and web crawling. Some of the first search
engines like Lycos or Yahoo!, started with a combination of the two. The web directory
consisted of the human classification of websites into categories, done by an “editor”; crawling
in the automatic accumulation of material by following links with different rudimentary
techniques to assess the content of a website. With the exponential growth of web content on
the Internet, web directories were soon dropped in favour of the more efficient automatic
crawling, which in turn generated so many results that quality has become of key importance.
Quality in the sense of the assessment of the webpage content in relation to keywords as well
as the sorting of results according to their relevance.
Google's hegemony in the field has mainly been obtained by translating the relevance of a
webpage into a numeric quantity according to a formula, the infamous PageRank algorithm.
This value is calculated depending on the relational importance of the webpage where the
word is placed, based on how many other websites link to that page. The classification part is
long gone, and linguistic meaning is also structured along automated functions. What is left is
reading the network formation in numerical form, capturing human opinions represented by
hyperlinks, i.e. which word links to which webpage, and which webpage is generally more
important. In the same way that UDC systematized documents via a notation format, the
systematization of relational importance in numerical format brings functionality and
efficiency. In this case rather than linguistic the translation is value-based, quantifying network
attention independently from meaning. The interaction with the other infamous Google
algorithm, Adsense, adds an economic value to the PageRank position. The influence and
profit deriving from how high a search result is placed, means that the relevance of a wordwebsite relation in Google search results translates to an actual relevance in reality.
Even though both Otlet and Google say they are tackling the task of organizing knowledge,
we could posit that from an epistemological point of view the approaches that underlie their
respective projects, are opposite. UDC is an example of an analytic approach, which
acquires new knowledge by breaking down existing knowledge into its components, based on
objective truths. Its propositions could be exemplified with the sentences “Logic is a
subdivision of Philosophy” or “PageRank is an algorithm, part of the Google search engine”.
PageRank, on the contrary, is a purely synthetic one, which starts from the form of the
network, in principle devoid of intrinsic meaning or truth, and creates a model of the

network's relational truths. Its propositions could be exemplified with “Wikipedia is of the
utmost relevance” or “The University of District Columbia is the most relevant meaning of
the word 'UDC'”.
We (and Google) can read the model of reality created by the PageRank algorithm (and all
the other algorithms that were added during the years[27]) in two different ways. It can be
considered a device that 'just works' and does not pretend to be true but can give results
which are useful in reality, a view we can call pragmatic, or instead, we can see this model as
a growing and improving construction that aims to coincide with reality, a view we can call
utopian. It's no coincidence that these two views fit the two stereotypical faces of Google, the
idealistic Silicon Valley visionary one, and the cynical corporate capitalist one.
From our perspective, it is of relative importance which of the two sides we believe in. The
key issue remains that such a structure has become so influential that it produces its own
effects on reality, that its algorithmic truths are more and more considered as objective truths.
While the utility and importance of a search engine like Google are out of the question, it is
necessary to be alert about such concentrations of power. Especially if they are only
controlled by a corporation, which, beyond mottoes and utopias, has by definition the single
duty of to make profits and obey its stakeholders.
1. A good account of such phenomenon is described by David Golumbia. http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=221
2. As described in the classic text looking at the ideological ground of Silicon Valley culture. http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theorycalifornianideology-main.html
3. For an account of Toffler's determinism, see http://www.ukm.my/ijit/IJIT%20Vol%201%202012/7wan%20fariza.pdf .
4. Otlet, Paul. Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique. Editiones Mundaneum, 1934: 393-394.
5. http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%
E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D
6. This process has been named “heteromation”, for a more thorough analysis see: Ekbia, Hamid, and Bonnie Nardi.
“Heteromation and Its (dis)contents: The Invisible Division of Labor between Humans and Machines.” First Monday 19, no.
6 (May 23, 2014). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5331
7. The name scanops was first introduce by artist Andrew Norman Wilson when he found out about this category of workers
during his artistic residency at Google in Mountain View. See http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/WorkersGoogleplex.html
.
8. As collected by Krissy Wilson on her http://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com .
9. http://informationobservatory.info/2015/10/27/google-books-fair-use-or-anti-democratic-preemption/#more-279
10. http://www.rtvnoord.nl/nieuws/139016/Keerpunt-in-de-geschiedenis-van-de-Eemshaven .
11. http://www.cnet.com/news/google-wants-dark-fiber/ .
12. http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/google-new-brazil-us-internet-cable .
13. See Baran, Paul. “On Distributed Communications.” Product Page, 1964. http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/
RM3420.html .
14. Pierce, Thomas. Mettre des pierres autour des idées. Paul Otlet, de Cité Mondiale en de modernistische stedenbouw in de jaren
1930. PhD dissertation, KULeuven, 2007: 34.
15. Ibid: 94-95.
16. Ibid: 113-117.
17. Otlet, Paul. Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique. Editiones Mundaneum, 1934.
18. Otlet, Paul. Les Communications MUNDANEUM, Documentatio Universalis, doc nr. 8438
19. Van Acker, Wouter. “Internationalist Utopias of Visual Education: The Graphic and Scenographic Transformation of the
Universal Encyclopaedia in the Work of Paul Otlet, Patrick Geddes, and Otto Neurath.” Perspectives on Science 19, no. 1
(January 19, 2011): 68-69.
20. Ibid: 66.

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P.177

21. The Decimal part in the name means that any records can be further subdivided by tenths, virtually infinitely, according to an
evolving scheme of depth and specialization. For example, 1 is “Philosophy”, 16 is “Logic”, 161 is “Fundamentals of Logic”,
161.2 is “Statements”, 161.22 is “Type of Statements”, 161.225 is “Real and ideal judgements”, 161.225.2 is “Ideal
Judgements” and 161.225.22 is “Statements on equality, similarity and dissimilarity”.
22. “The UDC and FID: A Historical Perspective.” The Library Quarterly 37, no. 3 (July 1, 1967): 268-270.
23. TEMP: described in french by the word depouillement,
24. Otlet, Paul. Monde, essai d’universalisme: connaissance du monde, sentiment du monde, action organisée et plan du monde.
Editiones Mundaneum, 1935: XXI-XXII.
25. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, The Art of Discovery 1685, Wiener: 51.
26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering
27. A fascinating list of all the algorithmic components of Google search is at https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change .

Madame
C/
Mevrouw
C
FEMKE SNELTING

MADAME C.01
EN

When I arrived in Brussels that autumn, I was still very young. I thought that as an au-pair
I would be helping out in the house, but instead I ended up working with the professor on
finishing his book. At the time I arrived, the writing was done but his handwriting was so
hard to decipher that the printer had a difficult time working with the manuscript. It became
my job to correct the typeset proofs but often there were words that neither the printer nor I
could decipher, so we had to ask. And the professor often had no time for us. So I did my
best to make the text as comprehensible as possible.
On the title page of the final proofs from the printer, the professor wrote me:

After five months of work behind the same table, here it is. Now it is your turn to sow the
good seed of documentation, of institution, and of Mundaneum, through the pre-book and the
spoken word[1]
NL

Toen ik die herfst in Brussel arriveerde was ik nog heel jong. Ik dacht dat ik als au-pair in
de huishouding zou helpen, maar in plaats daarvan moest ik de professor helpen met het
afmaken van zijn boek. Toen ik aankwam was het schrijven al afgerond, maar de drukker
worstelde nog met het manuscript omdat het handschrift moeilijk te ontcijferen was. Het
werd mijn taak om de drukproeven te corrigeren. Er waren veel woorden die de drukker en
ik niet konden ontcijferen, dus dan moesten we het navragen. Maar vaak had de professor
geen tijd voor ons. Ik deed dan mijn best om de tekst zo leesbaar mogelijk te maken.
Op de titelpagina van de definitieve drukproef schreef de professor me:

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P.179

Na vijf maanden gewerkt te hebben aan dezelfde tafel is hier het resultaat. Nu is het jouw
beurt om via het boek, het voor-boek, het woord, het goede zaad te zaaien van documentatie,
instituut en Mundaneum.[2]
MADAME C.02
EN

She serves us coffee from a ceramic coffee pot and also a cake bought at the bakery next
door. It's all written in the files she reminds us repeatedly, and tells us about one day in the
sixties, when her husband returned home, telling her excitedly that he discovered the
Mundaneum at Chaussée de Louvain in Brussels. Ever since, he would return to the same
building, making friends with the friends of the Palais Mondial, those dedicated caretakers of
the immense paper heritage.
I haven't been there so often myself, she says. But I do remember there were cats, to keep the
mice away from the paper. And my husband loved cats. So in the eighties, when he was
finally in a position to save the archives, the cats had to be taken care of too." Hij wanted to
write the cats were written into the inventory.
We finish our coffee and she takes us behind a curtain that separates the salon from a small
office. She shows us four green binders that contain the meticulously filed papers of her late
husband pertaining to the Mundaneum. In the third is the Donation act that describes the
transfer of the archives from the Friends of the Palais Mondial to the Centre de Lecture
Public of the French community.
In the inventory, the cats are nowhere to be found.[3]
NL

Ze schenkt ons koffie uit een keramieken koffiepot en serveert gebak dat ze bij de
naburige bakkerij kocht. Herhaaldelijk herinnert ze ons eraan dat 'het allemaal geschreven
staat in de documenten'. Ze vertelt ons dat in de jaren zestig, haar man op een dag
thuiskwam en opgewonden vertelde dat hij het Mundaneum ontdekt had op de Leuvense
Steenweg in Brussel. Sindsdien keerde hij daar regelmatig terug om de vrienden van het
Palais Mondial te ontmoeten: de toegewijde verzorgers van die immense papieren erfenis.
Ik ben er zelf niet zo vaak geweest, zegt ze. Maar ik herinner me dat er katten waren om de
muizen weg te houden van al het papier. En mijn man hield van katten. In de jaren tachtig,
toen hij eindelijk een positie had die hem in staat stelde om de archieven te redden, moest er
ook voor de katten worden gezorgd. Hij wilde de katten opnemen in de inventaris.
We drinken onze koffie op en ze neemt ons mee achter een gordijn dat de salon van een
klein kantoor scheidt. Ze toont ons vier groene mappen met de keurig geordende papieren
van haar voormalige echtgenoot over het Mundaneum. In de derde map bevindt zich de akte

die de overdracht van de archieven beschrijft van de Vrienden van het Palais Mondial aan
het Centre de Lecture Public van de Franse Gemeenschap (CLPCF).
In de inventaris is geen spoor van de katten te vinden.[4]
MADAME C.03
EN

In a margarine box, between thousands of notes, tickets, postcards, letters, all folded to the
size of an index card, we find this:

Paul, leave me the key to mythe house, I forgot mine. Put it on your desk, in the small index
card box.[5]
NL

In een grote margarinedoos, tussen duizenden bonnetjes, aantekeningen, briefkaarten, en
brieven, allemaal gevouwen op maat van een indexkaart, vinden we een bericht:

Paul, laat je de sleutel van mijnhet huis voor mij achter, ik ben de mijne vergeten. Stop hem in
het kleine indexkaartdoosje op je bureau.[6]

P.180

P.181

Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

1. EN
Wilhelmina Coops came from The Netherlands to Brussels in 1932 to learn French. She was instrumental in transforming
Le Traité de Documentation into a printed book.
2. NL
Wilhelmina Coops kwam in 1932 uit Nederland naar Brussel om Frans te leren. Ze hielp het manuscript voor Le Traité de
Documentation omzetten naar een gedrukt boek.
3. EN
The act is dated April 4 1985. Madame Canonne is a librarian, widow of André Canonne († 1990). She is custodian of
the documents relating to the wanderings of The Mundaneum in Brussels.
4. NL
De akte is gedateerd op 4 april 1985. Madame Canonne is bibliothecaresse en weduwe van André Canonne († 1990).
Ze is de bewaarster van documenten die gerelateerd zijn aan de omzwervingen van het Mundaneum in Brussel.
5. EN
Cato van Nederhasselt, second wife of Paul Otlet, collaborated with her husband on many projects. Her family fortune kept
the Mundaneum running after other sources had dried up.
6. NL
Cato van Nederhasselt, de tweede vrouw van Paul Otlet, werkte met haar man aan vele projecten. Nadat alle andere
bronnen waren uitgeput hield haar familiefortuin het Mundaneum draaiende.

A Preemptive
History
of the
Google
Cultural
Institute
GERALDINE JUÁREZ

I. ORGANIZING INFORMATION IS NEVER INNOCENT

Six years ago, Google, an Alphabet company, launched a new project: The Google Art
Project. The official history, the one written by Google and distributed mainly through
tailored press releases and corporate news bits, tells us that it all started as “a 20% project
within Google in 2010 and had its first public showing in 2011. It was 17 museums,
coming together in a very interesting online platform, to allow users to essentially explore art
in a very new and different way."[1] While Google Books faced legal challenges and the
European Commission launched its antitrust case against Google in 2010, the Google Art
Project, not coincidentally, scaled up gradually, resulting in the Google Cultural Institute with
headquarters in Paris, “whose mission is to make the world's culture accessible online.”[2]
The Google Cultural Institute is strictly divided in Art Project, Historical Moments and
World Wonders, roughly corresponding to fine art, world history and material culture.
Technically, the Google Cultural Institute can be described as a database that powers a
repository of high-resolution images of fine art, objects, documents and ephemera, as well as
information about and from their ‘partners’ - the public museums, galleries and cultural
institutions that provide this cultural material - such as 3D tour views and street-view maps.
So far and counting, the Google Cultural Institute hosts 177 digital reproductions of selected
paintings in gigapixel resolution and 320 3D versions of different objects, together with
multiple thematic slide shows curated in collaboration with their partners or by their users.

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P.183

According to their website, in their ‘Lab’ they develop the “new technology to help partners
publish their collections online and reach new audiences, as seen in the Google Art Project,
Historic Moments and World Wonders initiatives.” These services are offered – not by
chance – as a philanthropic service to public institutions that increasingly need to justify their
existence in face of cuts and other managerial demands of the austerity policies in Europe
and elsewhere.
The Google Cultural Institute “would be unlikely, even unthinkable, absent the chronic and
politically induced starvation of publicly funded cultural institutions even throughout the
wealthy countries”[3]. It is important to understand that what Google is really doing is
bankrolling the technical infrastructure and labour needed to turn culture into data. In this
way it can be easily managed and feed all kind of products needed in the neoliberal city to
promote and exploit these cultural ‘assets’, in order to compete with other urban centres in
the global stage, but also, to feed Google’s unstoppable accumulation of information.
The head of the Google Cultural Institute knows there are a lot of questions about their
activities but Alphabet chose to label legitimate critiques as misunderstandings: “This is our
biggest battle, this constant misunderstanding of why the Cultural Institute actually exists.”[4]
The Google Cultural Institute, much like many other cultural endeavours of Google like
Google Books and their Digital Revolution art exhibition, has been subject to a few but
much needed critiques, such as Powered by Google: Widening Access and Tightening
Corporate Control (Schiller & Yeo 2014), an in-depth account of the origins of this cultural
intervention and its role in the resurgence of welfare capitalism, “where people are referred to
corporations rather than states for such services as they receive; where corporate capital
routinely arrogates to itself the right to broker public discourse; and where history and art
remain saturated with the preferences and priorities of elite social classes.”[5]
Known as one, if not the first essay that dissects Google's use of information and the rhetoric
of democratization behind it to reorganize cultural public institutions as a “site of profitmaking”, Schiller & Yeo’s text is fundamental to understand the evolution of the Google
Cultural Institute within the historical context of digital capitalism, where the global
dependency in communication and information technologies is directly linked to the current
crisis of accumulation and where Google's archive fever “evinces a breath-taking cultural and
ideological range.”[6]
II. WHO COLONIZES THE COLONIZERS?

The Google Cultural Institute is a complex subject of interest since it reflects the colonial
impulses embedded in the scientific and economic desires that formed the very collections
which the Google Cultural Institute now mediates and accumulates in its database.

Who colonizes the colonizers? It is a very difficult issue which I have raised before in an
essay dedicated to the Google Cultural Institute, Alfred Russel Wallace and the colonial
impulse behind archive fevers from the 19th but also the 21st century. I have no answer yet.
But a critique of the Google Cultural Institute where their motivations are interpreted as
merely colonialist, would be misleading and counterproductive. It is not their goal to slave and
exploit whole populations and its resources in order to impose a new ideology and civilise
barbarians in the same sense and way that European countries did during the Colonization.
Additionally, it would be unfair and disrespectful to all those who still have to deal with the
endless effects of Colonization, that have exacerbated with the expansion of economic
globalisation.
The conflation of technology and science that has produced the knowledge to create such an
entity as Google and its derivatives, such as the Cultural Institute, together with the scale of
its impact on a society where information technology is the dominant form of technology,
makes technocolonialism a more accurate term to describe Google's cultural interventions
from my perspective.
Although technocolonization shares many traits and elements with the colonial project,
starting with the exploitation of materials needed to produce information and media
technologies – and the related conflicts that this produces –, information technologies still
differ from ships and canons. However, the commercial function of maritime technologies is
the same as the free – as in free trade – services deployed by Google or Facebook’s drones
beaming internet in Africa, although the networked aspect of information technologies is
significantly different at the infrastructure level.
There is no official definition of technocolonialism, but it is important to understand it as a
continuation of the idea of Enlightenment that gave birth to the impulse to collect, organise
and manage information in the 19th century. My use of this term aims to emphasize and
situate contemporary accumulation and management of information and data within a
technoscientific landscape driven by “profit above else” as a “logical extension of the surplus
value accumulated through colonialism and slavery.”[7]
Unlike in colonial times, in contemporary technocolonialism the important narrative is not the
supremacy of a specific human culture. Technological culture is the saviour. It doesn’t matter
if the culture is Muslim, French or Mayan, the goal is to have the best technologies to turn it
into data, rank it, produce content from it and create experiences that can be monetized.
It only makes sense that Google, a company with a mission of to organise the world’s
information for profit, found ideal partners in the very institutions that were previously in
charge of organising the world’s knowledge. But as I pointed out before, it is paradoxical that
the Google Cultural Institute is dedicated to collect information from museums created under
Colonialism in order to elevate a certain culture and way of seeing the world above others.
Today we know and are able to challenge the dominant narratives around cultural heritage,

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P.185

because these institutions have an actual record in history and not only a story produced for
the ‘about’ section of a website, like in the case of the Google Cultural Institute.
“What museums should perhaps do is make visitors aware that this is not the only way of
seeing things. That the museum – the installation, the arrangement, the collection – has a
history, and that it also has an ideological baggage”[8]. But the Google Cultural Institute is
not a museum, it is a database with an interface that enables to browse cultural content.
Unlike the prestigious museums it collaborates with, it lacks a history situated in a specific
cultural discourse. It is about fine art, world wonders and historical moments in a general
sense. The Google Cultural Institute has a clear corporate and philanthropic mission but it
lacks a point of view and a defined position towards the cultural material that it handles. This
is not surprising since Google has always avoided to take a stand, it is all techno-determinism
and the noble mission of organising the world’s information to make the world better. But
“brokering and hoarding information are a dangerous form of techno-colonialism.”[8]
Looking for a cultural narrative beyond the Californian ideology, Alphabet's search engine
found in Paul Otlet and the Mundaneum the perfect cover to insert their philanthropic
services in the history of information science beyond Silicon Valley. After all, they
understand that “ownership over the historical narratives and their material correlates
becomes a tool for demonstrating and realizing economic claims”.[9]
After establishing a data centre in the Belgian city of Mons, home of the Mundaneum
archive center, Google lent its support to "the Mons 2015 adventure, in particular by
working with our longtime partners, the Mundaneum archive. More than a century ago, two
visionary Belgians envisioned the World Wide Web’s architecture of hyperlinks and
indexation of information, not on computers, but on paper cards. Their creation was called
the Mundaneum.”[10]

On the occasion of the 147th birthday of Paul Otlet, a Doodle in the homepage of the
Alphabet spelled the name of its company using the ‘drawers of the Mundaneum’ to form the
words G O O G L E: “Today’s Doodle pays tribute to Paul’s pioneering work on the

Mundaneum. The collection of knowledge stored in the Mundaneum’s drawers are the
foundational work for everything that happens at Google. In early drafts, you can watch the
concept come to life.”[11]
III. GOOGLE CULTURAL HISTORY

The dematerialisation of public collections using infrastructure and services bankrolled by
private actors like the GCI needs to be questioned and analyzed further in the context of
heterotopic institutions, to understand the new forms taken by the endless tension between
knowledge/power at the core of contemporary archivalism, where the architecture of the
interface replaces and acts on behalf of the museum, and the body of the visitor is reduced to
the fingers of a user capable of browsing endless cultural assets.
At a time when cultural institutions should be decolonised instead of googlified, it is vital to
discuss a project such as the Google Cultural Institute and its continuous expansion – which
is inversely proportional to the failure of the governments and the passivity of institutions
seduced by gadgets[12].
However, the dialogue is fragmented between limited academic accounts, corporate press
releases, isolated artistic interventions, specialised conferences and news reports. Femke
Snelting suggests that we must “find the patience to build a relation to these histories in ways
that make sense.” To do so, we need to excavate and assemble a better account of the
history of the Google Cultural Institute. Building upon Schiller & Yeo’s seminal text, the
following timeline is my contribution to this task and an attempt to put together the pieces, by
situating them in a broader economic and political context beyond the official history told by
the Google Cultural Institute. A closer inspection of the events reveals that the escalation of

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P.187

Alphabet's cultural interventions often emerge after a legal challenge against their economic
hegemony in Europe was initiated.
2009
ERIC SCHMIDT VISITS IRAQ

A news report from the Wall Street Journal[13] as well as an AP report on Youtube[14] confirm
the new Google venture in the field of historical collections. The executive chairman of
Alphabet declared: “I can think of no better use of our time and our resources to make the
images and ideas from your civilization, from the very beginning of time, available to a billion
people worldwide.”
A detailed account and reflection of this visit, its background and agenda can be found in
Powered by Google: Widening Access and Tightening Corporate Control. (Schiller & Yeo
2014)
FRANCE REACTS AGAINST GOOGLE BOOKS

In relation to the Google Books dispute in Europe, Reuters reported in 2009 that France's
ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy “pledged hundreds of millions of euros toward a separate
digitization program, saying he would not permit France to be “stripped of our heritage to the
benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is.”[15]

Although the reactionary and nationalistic agenda of Sarkozy should not be celebrated, it is
important to note that the first open attack on Google’s cultural agenda came from the French
government. Four years later, the Google Cultural Institute establishes its headquarters in
Paris.
2010
EUROPEAN COMMISSION LAUNCHES AN ANTITRUST INVESTIGATION AGAINST
GOOGLE.

The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into
allegations that Google Inc. has abused a dominant position in online search, in
violation of European Union rules (Article 102 TFEU). The opening of formal
proceedings follows complaints by search service providers about unfavourable
treatment of their services in Google's unpaid and sponsored search results coupled
with an alleged preferential placement of Google's own services. This initiation of
proceedings does not imply that the Commission has proof of any infringements. It
only signifies that the Commission will conduct an in-depth investigation of the case as
[16]
a matter of priority.
THE GOOGLE ART PROJECT STARTS AS A 20% PROJECT UNDER THE DIRECTION
OF AMIT SOOD.

According to the Guardian[17], and other news reports, Google's cultural project is started by
passionate art “googlers”.
GOOGLE ANNOUNCES ITS PLANS TO BUILD A EUROPEAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE IN
FRANCE

Referring to France as one of the most important centres for culture and technology, Google
CEO Eric Schmidt formally announces the creation of a centre "dedicated to technology,
especially noting the promotion of past, present and future European cultures."[18]
2011
GOOGLE ART PROJECT LAUNCHES IN TATE LONDON.

In February the new ‘product’ is officially presented. The introduction[19] emphasises that it
started as a 20% project, meaning a project that lacked corporate mandate.
According to the “Our Story”[20] section of the Google Cultural Institute, the history of the
Google Art Project starts with the integration of 140,000 assets from the Yad Vashem
World Holocaust Centre, followed by the inclusion of the Nelson Mandela Archives in the
Historical Moments section of the Google Cultural Institute.

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P.189

Later in August, Eric Schmidt declares that education should bring art and science together
just like in “the glory days of the Victorian Era”.[21]
2012
EU DATA AUTHORITIES INITIATE A NEW INVESTIGATION INTO GOOGLE AND
THEIR NEW TERMS OF USE.

At the request of the French authorities, the European Union initiates an investigation against
Google, related to the breach of data privacy due to the new terms of use published by
Google on 1 March 2012.[22]
THE GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE CONTINUES TO DIGITALIZE CULTURAL
‘ASSETS’.

According to the Google Cultural Institute website, 151 partners join the Google Art
Project including France's Musée D’Orsay. The World Wonders section is launched
including partnerships with the likes of UNESCO. By October, the platform is rebranded
and re-launched including over 400+ partners.
2013
GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE HEADQUARTERS OPENS IN PARIS.

On 10 December, the new French headquarters open in 8 rue de Londres. The French
Minister Aurélie Filippetti cancels her attendance as she doesn’t “wish to appear as a
guarantee for an operation that still raises a certain number of questions."[23]
BRITISH TAX AUTHORITIES INITIATE INVESTIGATION INTO GOOGLE'S TAX
SCHEME

HM Customs and Revenue Committee inquiry brands Google's tax operations in the UK
via Ireland as "devious, calculated and, in my view, unethical".[24]
2014
EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE RULES ON THE “RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN”
AGAINST GOOGLE.

The controversial ruling holds search engines responsible for the personal data that it handles
and under European Law the court ruled “that the operator is, in certain circumstances,
obliged to remove links to web pages that are published by third parties and contain
information relating to a person from the list of results displayed following a search made on

the basis of that person’s name. The Court makes it clear that such an obligation may also
exist in a case where that name or information is not erased beforehand or simultaneously
from those web pages, and even, as the case may be, when its publication in itself on those
pages is lawful.”[25]
DIGITAL REVOLUTION AT BARBICAN UK

Google sponsors the exhibition Digital Revolution[26] and commission artworks under the
brand “Dev-art: art made with code.[27]”. The exhibition later tours to the Tekniska Museet in
Stockholm.[28]
GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE'S “THE LAB” OPENS

“Here creative experts and technology come together share ideas and build new ways to
experience art and culture.”[29]
GOOGLE EXPRESSED ITS PLANS TO SUPPORT THE CITY OF MONS, EUROPEAN
CAPITAL OF CULTURE IN 2015.

A press release from Google[30] describes the new partnership with the Belgian city of Mons
as a result of their position as local employer and investor in the city, since one of their two
major data centres in Europe is located there.
2015
EU COMMISSION SENDS STATEMENT OF OBJECTIONS TO GOOGLE.

The European Commission has sent a Statement of Objections to Google alleging the
company has abused its dominant position in the markets for general internet search
services in the European Economic Area (EEA) by systematically favouring its own
[31]
comparison shopping product in its general search results pages.”

Google rejects the accusations as “wrong as a matter of fact, law and economics”.[32]
EUROPEAN COMMISSION STARTS INVESTIGATION INTO ANDROID.

The Commission will assess if, by entering into anticompetitive agreements and/or by
abusing a possible dominant position, Google has illegally hindered the development
and market access of rival mobile operating systems, mobile communication
applications and services in the European Economic Area (EEA). This investigation
is distinct and separate from the Commission investigation into Google's search
[33]
business.
GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE CONTINUES TO EXPAND.

According to the ‘Our Story’ section of the Google Cultural Institute, the Street Art project
now has 10,000 assets. A new extension displays art from the Google Art Project in the
Chrome browser and “art lovers can wear art on their wrists via Android art”. By August,

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the project has more than 850 partners using their tools, 4.7 million assets in its collection
and more than 1500 curated exhibitions.
TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL REVEALS GOOGLE AS SECOND BIGGEST
[34]
CORPORATE LOBBYISTS OPERATING IN BRUSSELS.

ALPHABET INC. IS ESTABLISHED ON OCTOBER 2ND.

“Alphabet Inc. (commonly known as Alphabet) is an American multinational conglomerate
created in 2015 as the parent company of Google and several other companies previously
owned by or tied to Google.”[35]
PAUL OTLET DOODLE AND MUNDANEUM-GOOGLE EXHIBITIONS.

Google creates a doodle for their homepage on the occasion of the 147th birthday of Paul
Otlet[36] and produces the slide shows Towards the Information Age, Mapping Knowledge
and The 100th Anniversary of a Nobel Peace Prize, all hosted by the Google Cultural
Institute.
“The Mundaneum and Google have worked closely together to curate 9 exclusive online
exhibitions for the Google Cultural Institute. The team behind the reopening of the

Mundaneum this year also worked with the Cultural Institute engineers to launch a dedicated
mobile app.”[37]
GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE PARTNERS WITH THE BRITISH MUSEUM.

The British Museum announce a “unique partnership” where over 4,500 assets can be
“seen online in just a few clicks”. In the official press release, the director of the museum,
Neil McGregor, said “The world today has changed, the way we access information has
been revolutionised by digital technology. This enables us to gives the Enlightenment ideal
on which the Museum was founded a new reality. It is now possible to make our collection
accessible, explorable and enjoyable not just for those who physically visit, but to everybody
with a computer or a mobile device. ”[38]
GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE ADDS A PERFORMING ARTS SECTION.

Over 60 performing arts (dance, drama, music, opera) organizations and performers join the
assets collection of the Google Cultural Institute [39]
2016
CODA

The Google Culture Institute has quietly changed the name of its platform to “Google Art &
Culture”. The website has been also restructured, and categories have been simplified into
“Arts”, “History” and “Wonders”. Its partners and projects are placed at the top of their
“Menu”. It is now possible to browse artists and mediums trough time and by color. The site

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P.193

offers a daily digest of art and history, but also cityscapes, galleries and street art views are
only one click away.

An important aspect of this make-over is the way in which it reveals its own instability as a
cultural archive. Before the upgrade, the link http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/assetviewer/text-as-set-cell-0?exhibitId=QQ-RRh0A would take you to "The origins of the
Internet in Europe”, the page dedicated to the Mundaneum and Paul Otlet. Now it takes
you to a 404 error page. No timestamp, no redirect. No archived copy recorded in the
Wayback Machine. The structure of the new link for this "exhibition" still hints at some sort
of beta state: https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/QQ-RRh0A . How
long can we rely on this cultural institute/beta link?
Should the “curator of the world”[40], as Amit Sood is described in media, take some
responsibility over the reliability of the structure in which Google Arts & Culture displays the
cultural material extracted from public institutions and, that unlike Google, need to do so by
mandate? Or should we all just take his word and look away: “I fell into this by mistake.”[41]?

Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

1. Caines, Matthew. “Arts head: Amit Sood, director, Google Cultural Institute” The Guardian. Dec 3, 2013. http://
www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/dec/03/amit sood-google-culturalinstitute-art-project
2. Google Paris. Accessed Dec 22, 2016 http://www.google.se/about/careers/locations/paris/

3. Schiller, Dan & Yeo, Shinjoung. “Powered By Google: Widening Access And Tightening Corporate Control.” (In Aceti, D.
L. (Ed.). Red Art: New Utopias in Data Capitalism: Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 20, No. 1. London: Goldsmiths
University Press. 2014):48
4. Down, Maureen. “The Google Art Heist”. The New York Times. Sept 12, 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/
opinion/sunday/the-google-art-heist.html
5. Schiller, Dan & Shinjoung Yeo. “Powered By Google: Widening Access And Tightening Corporate Control.”, 48
6. Schiller, Dan & Yeo, Shinjoung. “Powered By Google: Widening Access And Tightening Corporate Control.”, 48
7. Davis, Heather & Turpin, Etienne, eds. Art in the Antropocene (London: Open Humanities Press. 2015), 7
8. Bush, Randy. Psg.com On techno-colonialism. (blog) June 13, 2015. Accessed Dec 22, 2015 https://psg.com/ontechnocolonialism.html
9. Starzmann, Maria Theresia. “Cultural Imperialism and Heritage Politics in the Event of Armed Conflict: Prospects for an
‘Activist Archaeology’”. Archeologies. Vol. 4 No. 3 (2008):376
10. Echikson, William. Partnering in Belgium to create a capital of culture (blog) March 20, 2014. Accessed Dec 22, 2015
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.se/2014/03/partnering-in-belgium-to-create-capital.html
11. Google. Mundaneum co-founder Paul Otlet's 147th Birthday (blog) August 23, 2015. Accessed Dec 22, 2015 http://
www.google.com/doodles/mundaneum-co-founder-paul-otlets-147th-birthday
12. eg. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/thelab/#experiments
13. Lavallee, Andrew. “Google CEO: A New Iraq Means Business Opportunities.” Wall Street Journal. Nov 24, 2009 http://
blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/11/24/google-ceo-a-new-iraq-means-business-opportunities/
14. Associated Press. Google Documents Iraqi Museum Treasures (on-line video November 24, 2009) https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqtgtdBvA9k
15. Jarry, Emmanuel. “France's Sarkozy takes on Google in books dispute.” Reuters. December 8, 2009. http://
www.reuters.com/article/us-france-google-sarkozy-idUSTRE5B73E320091208
16. European Commission. Antitrust: Commission probes allegations of antitrust violations by Google (Brussels 2010) http://
europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-10-1624_en.htm
17. Caines, Matthew. “Arts head: Amit Sood, director, Google Cultural Institute” The Guardian. December 3, 2013. http://
www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/dec/03/amit sood google-culturalinstitute-art-project
18. Cyrus, Farivar. "Google to build R&D facility and 'European cultural center' in France.” Deutsche Welle. September 9,
2010. http://www.dw.com/en/google-to-build-rd-facility-and-european-cultural-center-in-france/a-5993560
19. Google Art Project. Art Project V1 - Launch Event at Tate Britain. (on-line video February 1, 2011) https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsynsSWVvnM
20. Google Cultural Institute. Accessed Dec 18, 2015. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/about/partners/
21. Robinson, James. “Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, condemns British education system” The Guardian. August 26, 2011
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-chairman-google-education
22. European Commission. Letter addressed to Google by the Article 29 Group (Brussels 2012) http://ec.europa.eu/justice/
data-protection/article-29/documentation/other-document/files/2012/20121016_letter_to_google_en.pdf
23. Willsher, Kim. “Google Cultural Institute's Paris opening snubbed by French minister.” The Guardian. December 10, 2013
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/google-cultural-institute-france-minister-snub
24. Bowers, Simon & Syal, Rajeev. “MP on Google tax avoidance scheme: 'I think that you do evil'”. The Guardian. May 16,
2013. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/16/google-told-by-mp you-do-do-evil
25. Court of Justice of the European Union. Press-release No 70/14 (Luxembourg, 2014) http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/
docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf
26. Barbican. “Digital Revolution.” Accessed December 15, 2015 https://www.barbican.org.uk/bie/upcoming-digital-revolution
27. Google. “Dev Art”. Accessed December 15, 2015 https://devart.withgoogle.com/
28. Tekniska Museet. “Digital Revolution.” Accessed December 15, 2015 http://www.tekniskamuseet.se/1/5554.html
29. Google Cultural Institute. Accessed December 15, 2015. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/thelab/
30. Echikson,William. Partnering in Belgium to create a capital of culture (blog) March 20, 2014. Accessed Dec 22, 2015
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.se/2014/03/partnering-in-belgium-to-create-capital.html
31. European Commission. Antitrust: Commission sends Statement of Objections to Google on comparison shopping service;
opens separate formal investigation on Android. (Brussels 2015) http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-4780_en.htm
32. Yun Chee, Foo. “Google rejects 'unfounded' EU antitrust charges of market abuse” Reuters. (August 27, 2015) http://
www.reuters.com/article/us-google-eu-antitrust-idUSKCN0QW20F20150827
33. European Commission. Antitrust: Commission sends Statement

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34. Transparency International. Lobby meetings with EU policy-makers dominated by corporate interests (blog) June 24, 2015.
Accessed December 22, 2015. http://www.transparency.org/news/pressrelease/
lobby_meetings_with_eu_policy_makers_dominated_by_corporate_interests
35. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. s.v. “Alphabet Inc,” (accessed Jan 25, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc
.
36. Google. Mundaneum co-founder Paul Otlet's 147th Birthday (blog) August 23, 2015. Accessed Dec 22, 2015 http://
www.google.com/doodles/mundaneum-co-founder-paul-otlets-147th-birthday
37. Google. Mundaneum co-founder Paul Otlet's 147th Birthday
38. The British Museum. The British Museum’s unparalleled world collection at your fingertips. (blog) November 12, 2015.
Accessed December 22, 2015. https://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/news_and_press/press_releases/2015/
with_google.aspx
39. Sood, Amit. Step on stage with the Google Cultural Institute (blog) December 1, 2015. Accessed December 22, 2015.
https://googleblog.blogspot.se/2015/12/step-on-stage-with-google-cultural.html
40. Sam Sundberg “Världsarvet enligt Google”. Svenska Dagbladet. March 27, 2016 http://www.svd.se/varldsarvet-enligtgoogle
41. TED. Amit Sood: Every piece of art you've ever wanted to see up close and searchable. (on-line video February 2016)
https://www.ted.com/talks/amit_sood_every_piece_of_art_you_ve_ever_wanted_to_see_up_close_and_searchable/

Une
histoire
préventive
du
Google
Cultural
Institute
GERALDINE JUÁREZ

I. L'ORGANISATION DE L'INFORMATION N'EST JAMAIS
INNOCENTE

Il y a six ans, Google, une entreprise d'Alphabet a lancé un nouveau projet : le Google Art
Project. L'histoire officielle, celle écrite par Google et distribuée principalement à travers des
communiqués de presse sur mesure et de brèves informations commerciales, nous dit que
tout a commencé « en 2010, avec un projet ou Google intervenait à 20%, qui fut présenté
au public pour la première fois en 2011. Il s'agissait de 17 musées réunis dans une
plateforme en ligne très intéressante afin de permettre aux utilisateurs de découvrir l'art d'une
manière tout à fait nouvelle et différente. »[1] Tandis que Google Books faisait face à des
problèmes d'ordre légal et que la Commission européenne lançait son enquête antitrust
contre Google en 2010, le Google Art Project prenait, non pas par hasard, de l'ampleur.
Cela conduisit à la création du Google Art Institute dont le siège se trouve à Paris et « dont
la mission est de rendre la culture mondiale accessible en ligne ».[2]
Le Google Cultural Institute est clairement divisé en sections : Art Project, Historical
Moments et World Wonders. Cela correspond dans les grandes lignes à beaux-arts, histoire
du monde et matériel culturel. Techniquement, le Google Cultural Institute peut être décrit
comme une base de données qui alimente un dépositaire d'images haute résolution
représentant des objets d'art, des objets, des documents, des éphémères ainsi que
d'informations à propos, et provenant, de leurs « partenaires » - les musées publics, les

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galeries et les institutions culturelles qui offrent ce matériel culturel -des visites en 3D et des
cartes faites à partir de "street view". Pour le moment, le Google Cultural Institute compte
177 reproductions numériques d'une sélection de peintures dans une résolution de l'ordre
des giga pixels et 320 différents objets en 3D ainsi que de multiples diapositives thématiques
choisies en collaboration avec leurs partenaires ou par leurs utilisateurs.
Selon leur site, dans leur « Lab », ils développent une « nouvelle technologie afin d'aider
leurs partenaires à publier leurs collections en ligne et à toucher de nouveaux publics, comme
l'ont fait les initiatives du Google Art Project, Historic Moments et Words Wonders. » Ce
n'est pas un hasard que ces services soient proposés comme une oeuvre philanthropique aux
institutions publiques qui sont de plus en plus amenées à justifier leur existence face aux
réductions budgétaires et aux autres exigences en matière de gestion des politiques
d'austérité en Europe et ailleurs. « Il est peu probable et même impensable que [le Google
Cultural Institute] fasse disparaitre la famine chronique des institutions culturelles de service
public causée par la politique et présente même dans les pays riches »[3]. Il est important de
comprendre que Google est réellement en train de financer l'infrastructure technique et le
travail nécessaire à la transformation de la culture en données. De cette manière, Google
s'assure que la culture peut être facilement gérée et nourrir toute sortes de produits
nécessaires à la ville néolibérale, afin de promouvoir et d'exploiter ces « biens » culturels, et
de soutenir la compétition avec d'autres centres urbains au niveau mondial, mais également
l'instatiable apétit d'informations de Google.
Le dirigeant du Google Cultural Institute est conscient qu'il existe un grand nombre
d'interrogations autour de leurs activités, cependant, Alphabet a choisi d'appeler les critiques
légitimes: des malentendus ; « Notre plus grand combat est ce malentendu permanent sur les
raisons de l'existence du Cultural Institute »[4] Le Google Cultural Institute, comme beaucoup
d'autres efforts culturels de Google, tels que Google Books et leur exposition artistique
Digital Revolution, a été le sujet de quelques critiques bien nécessaires, comme Powered by
Google: Widening Access and Tightening Corporate Control (Schiller & Yeo 2014); un
compte rendu détaillé des origines de cette intervention culturelle et de son rôle dans la
résurgence du capitalisme social: « là où les gens sont renvoyés aux corporations plutôt
qu'aux États pour des services qu'ils reçoivent ; là où le capital des entreprises a l'habitude
de se donner le droit de négocier le discours public ; et où l'histoire et l'art restent saturés par
les préférences et les priorités des classes de l'élite sociale. »[5]
Connu comme l'un, peut-être le seul essai d'analyse de l'utilisation des informations par
Google et de la rhétorique de démocratisation se trouvant en amont pour réorganiser les
institutions publiques culturelles en un « espace de profit », le texte de Schiller & Yeo est
fondamental pour la compréhension de l'évolution du Google Cultural Institute dans le
contexte historique du capitalisme numérique, où la dépendance mondiale aux technologies
de l'information est directement liée à la crise actuelle d'accumulation et, où la fièvre
d'archivage de Google « évince sa portée culturelle et idéologique à couper le souffle ».[6]

II. QUI COLONISE LES COLONS ?

Le Google Cultural Institute est un sujet de débat intéressant puisqu'il reflète les pulsions
colonialistes ancrées dans les désirs scientifiques et économiques qui ont formé ces mêmes
collections que le Google Cultural Institute négocie et accumule dans sa base de données.
Qui colonise les colons ? C'est une problématique très difficile que j'ai soulevée
précédemment dans un essai dédié au Google Cultural Institute, Alfred Russel Wallace et
les pulsions colonialistes derrière les fièvres d'archivage du 19e et du 20e siècles. Je n'ai pas
encore de réponse. Pourtant, une critique du Google Cultural Institute dans laquelle ses
motivations sont interprétées comme simplement colonialistes serait trompeuse et contreproductive. Leur but n'est pas d'asservir et d'exploiter la population tout entière et ses
ressources afin d'imposer une nouvelle idéologie et de civiliser les barbares dans la même
optique que celle des pays européens durant la colonisation. De plus, cela serait injuste et
irrespectueux vis-à-vis de tous ceux qui subissent encore les effets permanents de la
colonisation, exacerbés par l'expansion de la mondialisation économique.
Selon moi, l'assemblage de la technologie et de la science qui a produit le savoir à l'origine
de la création d'entités telles que Google et de ses dérivés, comme le Cultural Institute; ainsi
que la portée de son impact sur une société où la technologie de l'information est la forme de
technologie dominante, font de "technocolonialisme" un terme plus précis pour décrire les
interventions culturelles de Google. Même si la technocolonilisation partage de nombreux
traits et éléments avec le projet colonial, comme l'exploitation des matériaux nécessaires à la
production d'informations et de technologies médiatiques - ainsi que les conflits qui en
découlent - les technologies de l'information sont tout de même différentes des navires et des
canons. Cependant, la fonction commerciale des technologies maritimes est identique aux
services libres - comme dans libre échange - déployés par les drones de Google ou Facebook
qui fournissent internet à l'Afrique, même si la mise en réseau des technologies de
l'information est largement différent en matière d'infrastructure.
Il n'existe pas de définition officielle du technocolonialisme, mais il est important de le
comprendre comme une continuité des idées des Lumières qui a été à l'origine du désir de
rassembler, d'organiser et de gérer les informations au 19e siècle. Mon utilisation de ce
terme a pour objectif de souligner et de situer l'accumulation contemporaine, ainsi que la
gestion de l'information et des données au sein d'un paysage scientifique dirigé par l'idée « du
profit avant tout » comme une « extension logique de la valeur du surplus accumulée à
travers le colonialisme et l'esclavage ».[7]
Contrairement à l'époque coloniale, dans le technocolonialisme contemporain, la narration
n'est pas la suprématie d'une culture humaine spécifique. La culture technologique est le
sauveur. Peu importe que vous soyez musulman, français ou maya, l'objectif est d'obtenir les
meilleures technologies pour transformer la vie en données, les classifier, produire un contenu
à partir de celles-ci et créer des expériences pouvant être monétisées.

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En toute logique, pour Google, une entreprise dont la mission est d'organiser les informations
du monde en vue de générer un profit, les institutions qui étaient auparavant chargées de
l'organisation de la connaissance du monde constituent des partenaires idéaux. Cependant,
comme indiqué plus tôt, l'engagement du Google Cultural Institute à rassembler les
informations des musées créés durant la période coloniale afin d'élever une certaine culture et
une manière supérieure de voir le monde est paradoxal. Aujourd'hui, nous sommes au
courant et nous sommes capables de défier les narrations dominantes autour du patrimoine
culturel, car ces institutions ont un véritable récit de l'histoire qui ne se limite pas à la
production de la section « à propos » d'un site internet, comme celui du Google Cultural
Institute. « Ce que les musées devraient peut-être faire, c'est amener les visiteurs à prendre
conscience que ce n'est pas la seule manière de voir les choses. Que le musée, à savoir
l'installation, la disposition et la collection, possède une histoire et qu'il dispose également
d'un bagage idéologique »[8]. Cependant, le Google Cultural Institute n'est pas un musée,
c'est une base de données disposant d'une interface qui permet de parcourir le contenu
culturel. Contrairement aux prestigieux musées avec lesquels il collabore, il manque d'une
histoire située dans un discours culturel spécifique. Il s'agit d'objets d'art, de merveilles du
monde et de moments historiques au sens large. La mission du Google Cultural Institute est
clairement commerciale et philanthropique, mais celui-ci manque d'un point de vue et d'une
position définie vis-à-vis du matériel culturel qu'il traite. Ce n'est pas surprenant puisque
Google a toujours évité de prendre position, tout est question de technodéterminisme et de la
noble mission d'organiser les informations du monde afin de le rendre meilleur. Cependant,
« la négociation et le rassemblement d'informations sont une forme dangereuse de
technocolonialisme ».[8]
En cherchant une narration culturelle dépassant l'idéologie californienne, le moteur de
recherche d'Alphabet a trouvé dans Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum la couverture parfaite pour
intégrer ses services philanthropiques dans l'histoire de la science de l'information, au-delà de
la Silicon Valley. Après tout, ils comprennent que « la possession des narrations historiques
et de leurs corrélats matériels devient un outil de manifestation et de réalisation des
revendications économiques ».[9]
Après avoir établi un centre de données dans la ville belge de Mons, ville du Mundaneum,
Google a offert son soutien à « l'aventure Mons 2015, en particulier en travaillant avec nos
partenaires de longue date, les archives du Mundaneum. Plus d'un siècle auparavant, deux
visionnaires belges ont imaginé l'architecture du World Wide Web d'hyperliens et

d'indexation de l'information, non pas sur des ordinateurs, mais sur des cartes de papier.
Leur création était appelée Mundaneum. »[10]

À l'occasion du 147e anniversaire de Paul Otlet, un Doodle sur la page d'Alphabet épelait
le nom de son entreprise en utilisant « les tiroirs du Mundaneum » pour former le mot G O
O G L E : « Aujourd'hui, Doodle rend hommage au travail pionnier de Paul sur le
Mundaneum. La collection de connaissances emmagasinées dans les tiroirs du Mundaneum
constituent un travail fondamental pour tout ce qui se fait chez Google. Dès les premiers
essais, vous pouvez voir ce concept prendre vie. »[11]
III. GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE

La dématérialisation des collections publiques à l'aide d'une infrastructure et de services
financés par des acteurs privés, tels que le GCI, doit être questionnée et analysée plus en
profondeur par des institutions hétérotopes pour comprendre les nouvelles formes prises par
une tension infinie entre connaissance/pouvoir au cœur d'un archivage contemporain, où
l'architecture de l'interface remplace et agit au nom du musée et où le visiteur est réduit aux
doigts d'un utilisateur capable de parcourir un nombre infini de biens culturels. À l'époque
où les institutions culturelles devraient être décolonisées plutôt que googlifiées, il est capital
d'aborder la question d'un projet tel que le Google Cultural Institute et son expansion
continue et inversement proportionnelle à l'échec des gouvernements et à la passivité des
institutions séduites par les gadgets[12].
Cependant, le dialogue est fragmenté entre les comptes rendus académiques, les
communiqués de presse, les interventions artistiques isolées, les conférences spécialisées et
les bulletins d'informations. Selon Femke Snelting, nous devons « trouver la patience de
construire une relation à ces théories de manière cohérente ». Pour ce faire, nous devons
approfondir et assembler un meilleur compte rendu de l'histoire du Google Cultural Institute.
Construite à partir du texte phare de Schiller & Yeo, la ligne du temps suivante est ma
contribution à cette tâche et à une tentative d'assembler des morceaux en les situant dans un
contexte politique et économique plus large allant au-delà de l'histoire officielle racontée par

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P.201

le Google Cultural Institute. Une inspection plus minutieuse des événements révèle que
l'escalade des interventions culturelles d'Alphabet se produit généralement après l'apparition
d'un défi juridique pour l'hégémonie économique en Europe.
2009
ERIC SCHMIDT VISITE L'IRAK

Un bulletin d'informations du Wall Street Journal[13] ainsi qu'un rapport de l'AP Youtube[14]
confirment le nouveau projet de Google dans le domaine de collections historiques. Le
président exécutif d'Alphabet déclare : « je ne peux pas imaginer une meilleure manière
d'utiliser notre temps et nos ressources qu'en rendant disponibles les images et les idées de
notre civilisation, depuis son origine, pour un milliard de personnes à travers le monde. »
Un compte rendu détaillé de la réflexion de cette visite, son contexte et son programme se
trouvent dans Powered by Google: Widening Access and Tightening Corporate Control.
(Schiller & Yeo 2014)
LA FRANCE RÉAGIT À L'ENCONTRE DE GOOGLE BOOKS

Concernant le conflit impliquant Google Books en Europe, Reuters a déclaré qu'en 2009,
l'ancien président français, Nicolas Sarkozy « avait promis des centaines de millions d'euros à
un programme de numérisation distinct, disant qu'il ne permettrait pas à la France “d'être

dépouillée de son patrimoine au profit d'une grande entreprise, peu importe si celle-ci était
sympathique, grande ou américaine.” »[15]
Cependant, même si le programme réactionnaire et nationaliste de Nicolas Sarkozy ne doit
pas être félicité, il est important de noter que la première attaque ouverte à l'encontre du
programme culturel de Google est venue du gouvernement français. Quatre ans plus tard, le
Google Cultural Institute établissait son siège à Paris.
2010
LA COMMISSION EUROPÉENNE LANCE UNE ENQUÊTE ANTITRUST À L'ENCONTRE DE
GOOGLE.

La Commission européenne a décidé d'ouvrir une enquête antitrust à partir des
allégations selon lesquelles Google Inc. aurait abusé de sa position dominante de
moteur de recherche, en violation avec le règlement de l'Union européenne (Article
102 TFUE). L'ouverture de procédures formelles fait suite aux plaintes déposées par
des fournisseurs de service de recherche relatives à un traitement défavorable de leurs
services dans les résultats de recherche gratuits et payants de Google, ainsi qu'au
placement préférentiel des propres services de Google. Le lancement des procédures ne
signifie pas que la Commission dispose d'une quelconque preuve d'infraction. Cela
signifie seulement que la Commission va mener une enquête poussée et prioritaire sur
[16]
l'affaire.
LE GOOGLE ART PROJECT A COMMENCÉ COMME PROJET 20 % SOUS LA DIRECTION
D'AMIT SOOD.

D'après The Guardian[17], ainsi que d'autres bulletins d'informations, le projet culturel de
Google a été lancé par des « googleurs » passionnés d'art.
GOOGLE ANNONCE SON PROJET DE CONSTRUCTION D'UN EUROPEAN CULTURAL
CENTER EN FRANCE.

Faisant référence à la France comme à l'un des plus importants centres pour la culture et la
technologie, le PDG de Google, Eric Schmidt, a annoncé officiellement la création d'un
centre « dédié à la technologie, particulièrement en faveur de la promotion des cultures
européennes passées, présentes et futures ».[18]
2011
LE GOOGLE ART PROJECT EST LANCÉ À LA TATE LONDON.

En février, le nouveau « produit » a été officiellement présenté. La présentation[19] souligne
que l'idée a commencé avec un projet 20 %, un projet qui n'émanait donc pas d'un mandat
d'entreprise.

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P.203

D'après la section « Our Story »[20] du Google Cultural Institute, l'histoire du Google Art
Project commence avec l'intégration de 140 000 pièces du Yad Vashem World Holocaust
Centre, suivie de l'intégration des archives de Nelson Mandela dans la section "Historical
Moments" du Google Cultural Institute.
Plus tard au mois d'août, Eric Schmidt déclara que l'éducation devrait rassembler l'art et la
science comme lors des « jours glorieux de l'époque victorienne ».[21]
2012
LES AUTORITÉS DES DONNÉES DE L'UE LANCENT UNE NOUVELLE ENQUÊTE SUR
GOOGLE ET SES NOUVEAUX TERMES D'UTILISATION.

À la demande des autorités françaises, l'Union européenne lance une enquête à l'encontre
de Google concernant une violation des données privées causée par les nouveaux termes
d'utilisation publiés par Google le 1er mars 2012.[22]
LE GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE CONTINUE À NUMÉRISER LES « BIENS »
CULTURELS.

D'après le site du Google Cultural Institute, 151 partenaires ont rejoint le Google Art
Project, y compris le Musée d'Orsay en France. La section World of Wonders est lancée
avec des partenariats comme celui de l'UNESCO. Au mois d'octobre, la plateforme avait
changé d'image et était relancée avec plus de 400 partenaires.
2013
LE SIÈGE DU GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE OUVRE À PARIS.

Le 10 décembre, le nouveau siège français ouvre au numéro 8 rue de Londres. La ministre
française, Aurélie Filippetti, annule sa participation à l'événement, car elle « ne souhaite pas
apparaitre comme une garantie à une opération qui soulève encore un certain nombre de
questions ».[23]
LES AUTORITÉS FISCALES BRITANNIQUES LANCENT UNE ENQUÊTE SUR LE PLAN
FISCAL DE GOOGLE.

L'enquêteur du HM Customs and Revenue Committee estime que les opérations fiscales de
Google au Royaume-Uni réalisées via l'Irlande sont « fourbes, calculées et, selon moi,
contraires à l'éthique ».[24]

2014
CONCERNANT LE « DROIT À L'OUBLI », LA COUR DE JUSTICE DE L'UE STATUE
CONTRE GOOGLE.

La décision controversée tient les moteurs de recherche responsables des données
personnelles qu'ils gèrent. Conformément à la loi européenne, la Cour a statué « que
l'opérateur est, dans certaines circonstances, obligé de retirer des liens vers des sites internet
publiés par un parti tiers et contenant des informations liées à une personne et apparaissant
dans la liste des résultats suite à une recherche basée sur le nom de cette personne. La Cour
établit clairement qu'une telle obligation peut également exister dans un cas où le nom, ou
l'information, n'est pas effacé préalablement de ces pages internet, et même, comme cela peut
être le cas, lorsque leur publication elle-même est légale. »[25]
RÉVOLUTION NUMÉRIQUE AU BARBICAN, ROYAUME-UNI

Google sponsorise l'exposition Digital Revolution[26] et les œuvres commissionnées sous le
nom « Dev-art: art made with code.[27] ». Le Tekniska Museet à Stockholm a ensuite
accueilli l'exposition.[28] « The Lab » du Google Cultural Institute ouvre « Ici, les experts
créatifs et la technologie se rassemblent pour partager des idées et construire de nouvelles
manières de profiter de l'art et de la culture. »[29]
GOOGLE FAIT CONNAITRE SON INTENTION DE SOUTENIR LA VILLE DE MONS,
CAPITALE EUROPÉENNE DE LA CULTURE EN 2015.

Un communiqué de presse de Google[30] décrit le nouveau partenariat avec la ville belge de
Mons comme le résultat de leur position d'employeur local et d'investisseur dans la ville où
se situe l'un de leurs deux principaux centres de données en Europe.
2015
LA COMMISSION DE L'UE ENVOIE UNE COMMUNICATION DES GRIEFS À GOOGLE.

La Commission européenne a envoyé une communication des griefs à Google, déclarant
que :
« l'entreprise avait abusé de sa position dominante sur les marchés des services
généraux de recherches internet dans l'espace économique européen en favorisant
systématiquement son propre produit de comparateur d'achats dans les pages de
[31]
résultats généraux de recherche. »

Google rejette les accusations, les jugeant « erronées d'un point de vue factuel, légal et
économique ».[32]

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P.205

LA COMMISSION EUROPÉENNE COMMENCE À ENQUÊTER SUR ANDROID.

La Commission déterminera si, en concluant des accords anti-compétitifs et/ou en abusant
d'une possible position dominante, Google a :
illégalement entravé le développement et l'accès au marché de systèmes mobiles
d'exploitation, d'applications mobiles de communication et des services de ses rivaux
dans l'espace économique européen. Cette enquête est distincte et séparée du travail
[33]
d'investigation sur le commerce de la recherche de Google.
LE GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE POURSUIT SON EXPANSION.

D'après la section « Our Story » du Google Cultural Institute, le projet Street Art contient à
présent 10 000 pièces. Une nouvelle extension affiche les oeuvres d'art du Google Art
Project dans le navigateur Chrome et « les amateurs d'art peuvent porter une œuvre au
poignet grâce à l'art Android ». Au mois d'août, le projet disposait de 850 partenaires
utilisant ses outils, de 4,7 millions de pièces dans sa collection et de plus de 1 500
expositions organisées.
TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL RÉVÈLE QUE GOOGLE EST LE DEUXIÈME PLUS
[34]
GRAND LOBBYISTE À BRUXELLES.

ALPHABET INC. EST CRÉÉ LE 2 OCTOBRE.

« Alphabet Inc. (connu sous le nom d'Alphabet) est un conglomérat multinational américain
créé en 2015 pour être la société mère de Google et de plusieurs entreprises appartenant
auparavant à Google ou y étant liées. »[35]
LE DOODLE PAUL OTLET ET LES EXPOSITIONS MUNDANEUM-GOOGLE.

Google crée un doodle pour sa page d'accueil à l'occasion du 147e anniversaire de Paul
Otlet[36] et des projections de diapositives Towards the Information Age, Mapping
Knowledge et The 100th Anniversary of a Nobel Peace Prize, toutes organisées par le
Google Cultural Institute.
« Le Mundaneum et Google ont étroitement collaboré pour organiser neuf expositions
en ligne exclusives pour le Google Cultural Institute. Cette année, l'équipe dans les
coulisses de la réouverture du Mundaneum a travaillé avec les ingénieurs du Cultural
[37]
Institute pour lancer une application mobile qui y est consacrée. »
LE GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE S'ASSOCIE AU BRITISH MUSEUM.

Le British Museum annonce un « partenariat unique » à travers lequel plus de 4 500 pièces
pourront être « visionnées en ligne en seulement quelques clics ». Dans le communiqué de
presse officiel, le directeur du musée, Neil McGregor, a déclaré « le monde a changé
aujourd'hui, notre manière d'accéder à l'information a été révolutionnée par la technologie
numérique. Cela permet de donner une nouvelle réalité à l'idéal des Lumières sur lequel le
Museum a été fondé. Il est à présent possible d'accéder à notre collection, d'explorer et de
profiter non seulement pour ceux qui la visitent en personne, mais pour tous ceux qui
disposent d'un ordinateur ou d'un appareil mobile. »[38]
LE GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE AJOUTE LA SECTION PERFORMING ARTS.

Plus de 60 organisations et interprètes d'art du spectacle (danse, théâtre, musique, opéra)
rejoignent la collection Google Cultural Institute[39]
2016

...
Last
Revision:
28·06·2016

1. Caines, Matthew. « Arts head: Amit Sood, director, Google Cultural Institute »The Guardian. 3 décembre 2013. http://
www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/dec/03/amit sood-google-culturalinstitute-art-project
2. Google Paris. Consulté le 22 décembre 2016 http://www.google.se/about/careers/locations/paris/

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P.207

3. Schiller, Dan & Yeo, Shinjoung. « Powered By Google: Widening Access And Tightening Corporate Control. » (In Aceti, D.
L. (Éd.). Red Art: New Utopias in Data Capitalism: Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 20, No. 1. Londres : Goldsmiths
University Press. 2014): 48
4. Down, Maureen. « The Google Art Heist ». The New York Times. 12 septembre 2015 http://
www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/the-google-art-heist.html
5. Schiller, Dan & Shinjoung Yeo. « Powered By Google: Widening Access And Tightening Corporate Control. », 48
6. 6. Schiller, Dan & Yeo, Shinjoung. « Powered By Google: Widening Access And Tightening Corporate Control. », 48
7. Davis, Heather & Turpin, Etienne, eds. Art in the Antropocene (Londres : Open Humanities Press. 2015), 7
8. Bush, Randy. Psg.com On techno-colonialism. (blog) 13 juin 2015. Consulté le 22 décembre 2015 https://psg.com/ontechnocolonialism.html
9. Starzmann, Maria Theresia. « Cultural Imperialism and Heritage Politics in the Event of Armed Conflict: Prospects for an
‘Activist Archaeology’ ». Archeologies. Vol. 4 n° 3 (2008):376
10. Echikson,William. Partnering in Belgium to create a capital of culture (blog) 10 mars 2014. Consulté le 22 décembre 2015
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.se/2014/03/partnering-in-belgium-to-create-capital.html
11. Google. Mundaneum co-founder Paul Otlet's 147th Birthday (blog) 23 août, 2015. Consulté le 22 décembre 2015 http://
www.google.com/doodles/mundaneum-co-founder-paul-otlets-147th-birthday
12. ex. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/thelab/#experiments
13. 13. Lavallee, Andrew. « Google CEO: A New Iraq Means Business Opportunities. » Wall Street Journal. 24 novembre
2009 http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/11/24/google-ceo-a-new-iraq-means-business-opportunities/
14. 14. Associated Press. Google Documents Iraqi Museum Treasures (vidéo en ligne 24 novembre 2009) https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqtgtdBvA9k
15. Jarry, Emmanuel. « France's Sarkozy takes on Google in books dispute. » Reuters. 8 décembre 2009. http://
www.reuters.com/article/us-france-google-sarkozy-idUSTRE5B73E320091208
16. European Commission. Antitrust: Commission probes allegations of antitrust violations by Google (Bruxelles 2010) http://
europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-10-1624_en.htm
17. Caines, Matthew. “Arts head: Amit Sood, director, Google Cultural Institute »The Guardian. 3 décembre 2013. http://
www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/dec/03/amit sood google-culturalinstitute-art-project
18. Cyrus, Farivar. « Google to build R&D facility and 'European cultural center' in France. » Deutsche Welle. 9 septembre
2010. http://www.dw.com/en/google-to-build-rd-facility-and-european-cultural-center-in-france/a-5993560
19. 19. Google Art Project. Art Project V1 - Launch Event at Tate Britain. (vidéo en ligne le 1er février 2011) https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsynsSWVvnM
20. Google Cultural Institute. Consulté le 18 décembre 2015. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/about/partners/
21. Robinson, James. « Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, condemns British education system » The Guardian. 26 août 2011
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-chairman-google-education
22. European Commission. Letter addressed to Google by the Article 29 Group (Bruxelles 2012) http://ec.europa.eu/justice/
data-protection/article-29/documentation/other-document/files/2012/20121016_letter_to_google_en.pdf
23. Willsher, Kim. « Google Cultural Institute's Paris opening snubbed by French minister. » The Guardian. 10 décembre, 2013
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/google-cultural-institute-france-minister-snub
24. 24. Bowers, Simon & Syal, Rajeev. « MP on Google tax avoidance scheme: 'I think that you do evil' ». The Guardian. 16
mai 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/may/16/google-told-by-mp you-do-do-evil
25. Court of Justice of the European Union. Press-release No 70/14 (Luxembourg, 2014) http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/
docs/application/pdf/2014-05/cp140070en.pdf
26. Barbican. « Digital Revolution. » Consulté le 15 décembre 2015 https://www.barbican.org.uk/bie/upcoming-digital-revolution
27. Google. « Dev Art ». Consulté le 15 décembre 2015 https://devart.withgoogle.com/
28. Tekniska Museet. « Digital Revolution. » Consulté le 15 décembre 2015 http://www.tekniskamuseet.se/1/5554.html
29. Google Cultural Institute. Consulté le 15 décembre 2015. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/thelab/
30. Echikson,William. Partnering in Belgium to create a capital of culture (blog) 10 mars 2014. Consulté le 22 décembre 2015
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.se/2014/03/partnering-in-belgium-to-create-capital.html
31. European Commission. Antitrust: Commission sends Statement of Objections to Google on comparison shopping service;
opens separate formal investigation on Android. (Bruxelles 2015) http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-4780_en.htm
32. Yun Chee, Foo. « Google rejects 'unfounded' EU antitrust charges of market abuse » Reuters. (27 août 2015) http://
www.reuters.com/article/us-google-eu-antitrust-idUSKCN0QW20F20150827
33. European Commission. Antitrust: Commission sends Statement

34. Transparency International. Lobby meetings with EU policy-makers dominated by corporate interests (blog) 24 juin 2015.
Consulté le mardi 22 décembre 2015. http://www.transparency.org/news/pressrelease/
lobby_meetings_with_eu_policy_makers_dominated_by_corporate_interests
35. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. s.v. “Alphabet Inc,” (consulté le 25 janvier 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Alphabet_Inc.
36. Google. Mundaneum co-founder Paul Otlet's 147th Birthday (blog) 23 août, 2015. Consulté le 22 décembre 2015 http://
www.google.com/doodles/mundaneum-co-founder-paul-otlets-147th-birthday
37. Google. Mundaneum co-founder Paul Otlet's 147th Birthday
38. The British Museum. The British Museum’s unparalleled world collection at your fingertips. (blog) Novembre 12, 2015.
Consulté le mardi 22 décembre 2015. https://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/news_and_press/press_releases/2015/
with_google.aspx
39. Sood, Amit. Step on stage with the Google Cultural Institute (blog) 1er décembre 2015. Consulté le mardi 22 décembre
2015. https://googleblog.blogspot.se/2015/12/step-on-stage-with-google-cultural.html

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Special:Disambiguation
The following is a list of all disambiguation pages on Mondotheque.
A page is treated as a disambiguation page if it contains the tag __DISAMBIG__ (or an
equivalent alias).
Showing below up to 15 results in range #1 to #15.
View (previous 50 | next 50) (20 | 50 | 100 | 250 | 500)
1. Biblion may refer to:
◦ Biblion (category), a subcategory of the category: Index Traité de
documentation
◦ Biblion (Traité de documentation), term used by Paul
Otlet to define all categories of books and documents in a section of Traité de
documentation
◦ Biblion (unity), the smallest document or intellectual unit
2. Cultural Institute may refer to:
◦ A Cultural Institute (organisation) , such as The
Mundaneum Archive Center in Mons
◦ Cultural Institute (project), a critical interrogation of
cultural institutions in neo-liberal times, developed by amongst others
Geraldine Juárez
◦ The Google Cultural Institute, a project offering
"Technologies that make the world’s culture accessible to anyone, anywhere."
3. L'EVANGELISTE may refer to:
◦ Vint Cerf, so-called 'internet evangelist', or 'father of the internet',
working at LA MÉGA-ENTREPRISE
◦ Jiddu Krishnamurti, priest at the 'Order of the Star', a theosophist
splinter group that Paul Otlet related to
◦ Sir Tim Berners Lee, 'open data evangelist', heading the World Wide
Web consortium (W3C)

4. L'UTOPISTE may refer to:
◦ Paul Otlet, documentalist, universalist, internationalist, indexalist. At
times considered as the 'father of information science', or 'visionary inventor of
the internet on paper'
◦ Le Corbusier, architect, universalist, internationalist. Worked with Paul
Otlet on plans for a City of knowledge
◦ Otto Neurath , philosopher of science, sociologist, political economist.
Hosted a branch of Mundaneum in The Hague
◦ Ted Nelson , technologist, philosopher, sociologist. Coined the terms
hypertext, hypermedia, transclusion, virtuality and intertwingularity
5. LA CAPITALE may refer to:
◦ Brussels, capital of Flanders and Europe
◦ Genève , world civic center
6. LA MANAGER may refer to:
◦ Delphine Jenart, assistant director at the Mundaneum Archive Center
in Mons.
◦ Bill Echikson, former public relations officer at Google, coordinating
communications for the European Union, and for all of Southern, Eastern
Europe, Middle East and Africa. Handled the company’s high profile
antitrust and other policy-related issues in Europe.
7. LA MÉGA-ENTREPRISE may refer to:
◦ Google inc, or Alphabet, sometimes referred to as "Crystal
Computing", "Project02", "Saturn" or "Green Box Computing"
◦ Carnegie Steel Company, supporter of the Mundaneum in Brussels
and the Peace Palace in The Hague
8. LA RÉGION may refer to:
◦ Wallonia (Belgium), or La Wallonie. Former mining area, homebase of former prime minister Elio di Rupo, location of two Google
datacenters and the Mundaneum Archive Center
◦ Groningen (The Netherlands), future location of a Google data
center in Eemshaven
◦ Hamina (Finland), location of a Google data center

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9. LE BIOGRAPHE is used for persons that are instrumental in constructing the
narrative of Paul Otlet. It may refer to:
◦ André Canonne, librarian and director of the Centre de Lecture
publique de la Communauté française (CLPCF). Discovers the
Mundaneum in the 1960s. Publishes a facsimile edition of the Traité de
documentation (1989) and prepares the opening of Espace Mundaneum in
Brussels at Place Rogier (1990)
◦ Warden Boyd Rayward, librarian scientist, discovers the Mundaneum
in the 1970s. Writes the first biography of Paul Otlet in English: The
Universe of Information: the Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and
international Organization (1975)
◦ Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten , comics-writers and
scenographers, discover the Mundaneum in the 1980s. The archivist in the
graphic novel Les Cités Obscures (1983) is modelled on Paul Otlet
◦ Françoise Levie, filmmaker, discovers the Mundaneum in the 1990s.
Author of the fictionalised biography The man who wanted to classify the
world (2002)
◦ Alex Wright, writer and journalist, discovers the Mundaneum in 2003.
Author of Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information
Age (2014)
10. LE DIRECTEUR may refer to:
◦ Harm Post, director of Groningen Sea Ports, future location of a Google
data center
◦ Andrew Carnegie, director of Carnegy Steel Company, sponsor of the
Mundaneum
◦ André Canonne, director of the Centre de Lecture publique de la
Communauté française (CLPCF) and guardian of the Mundaneum. See
also: LE BIOGRAPHE
◦ Jean-Paul Deplus, president of the current Mundaneum association,
but often referred to as LE DIRECTEUR
◦ Amid Sood, director (later 'founder') of the Google Cultural Institute and
Google Art Project
◦ Steve Crossan, director (sometimes 'founder' or 'head') of the Google
Cultural Institute
11. LE POLITICIEN may refer to:
◦ Elio di Rupo, former prime minister of Belgium and mayor of Mons

◦ Henri Lafontaine, Belgium lawyer and statesman, working with Paul
Otlet to realise the Mundaneum
◦ Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France, negotiating deals with
LA MÉGA-ENTREPRISE
12. LE ROI may refer to:
◦ Leopold II, reigned as King of the Belgians from 1865 until 1909.
Exploited Congo as a private colonial venture. Patron of the Mundaneum
project
◦ Albert II, reigned as King of the Belgians from 1993 until his
abdication in 2013. Visited LA MÉGA-ENTREPRISE in 2008
13. Monde may refer to:
◦ Monde (Univers) means world in French and is used in many
drawings and schemes by Paul Otlet. See for example: World + Brain and
Mundaneum
◦ Monde (Publication), Essai d'universalisme. Last book published
by Paul Otlet (1935)
◦ Mondialisation , Term coined by Paul Otlet (1916)
14. Mundaneum may refer to:
◦ Mundaneum (Utopia) , a project designed by Paul Otlet and Henri
Lafontaine
◦ Mundaneum (Archive Centre) , a cultural institution in Mons,
housing the archives of Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine since 1993
15. Urbanisme may refer to:
◦ Urban planning, a technical and political process concerned with the
use of land, protection and use of the environment, public welfare, and the
design of the urban environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure
passing into and out of urban areas such as transportation, communications,
and distribution networks.
◦ Urbanisme (Publication), a book by Le Corbusier (1925).
View (previous 50 | next 50) (20 | 50 | 100 | 250 | 500)

P.212

P.213

Location,
location,
location

From
Paper
Mill to
Google
Data
Center
SHINJOUNG YEO

Every second of every day, billions of people around the world are googling, mapping, liking,
tweeting, reading, writing, watching, communicating, and working over the Internet.
According to Cisco, global Internet traffic will surpass one zettabyte – nearly a trillion
gigabytes! – in 2016, which equates to 667 trillion feature-length films.[1] Internet traffic is
expected to double by 2019[2] as the internet ever increasingly weaves itself into the very
fabric of many people’s daily lives.
Internet search giant Google – since August, 2015 a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.[3] – is one
of the major conduits of our social activities on the Web. It processes over 3.3 billion
searches each and every day, 105 billon searches per month or 1.3 trillion per year,[4] and is
responsible for over 88% Internet search activity around the globe.[5] Predicating its business
on people’s everyday information activity – search – in 2015, Google generated $74.54
billion dollars,[6] equivalent to or more than the GDP of some countries. The vast majority of
Google’s revenue – $ 67.39 billion dollars[7] – from advertising on its various platforms
including Google search, YouTube, AdSense products, Chrome OS, Android etc.; the
company is rapidly expanding its business to other sectors like cloud services, health,
education, self-driving cars, internet of things, life sciences, and the like. Google’s lucrative
internet business does not only generate profits. As Google’s chief economist Hal Varian
states:
…it also generates torrents of data about users’ tastes and habits, data that Google
then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to
improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics.
It’s a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only
[8]
Google’s future but the future of anyone who does business online.

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P.215

Google’s business model is emblematic of the “new economy” which is primarily built around
data and information. The “new economy” – the term popularized in the 1990s during the
first dot-com boom – is often distinguished by the mainstream discourse from the traditional
industrial economy that demands large-scale investment of physical capital and produces
material goods and instead emphasizes the unique nature of information and purports to be
less resource-intensive. Originating in the 1960s, post-industrial theorists asserted the
emergence of the “new” economy, claiming that the increase of highly-skilled information
workers, widespread application of information technologies, along with the decrease of
manual labor, would bring a new mode of production and fundamental changes in
exploitative capitalist social relations.[9]
Has the “new” economy challenged capitalist social relations and transcended the material
world? Google and other Internet companies have been investing heavily in industrial-scale
real estate around the world and continue to build large-scale physical infrastructure in the
way of data centers where the world’s bits and bytes are stored, processed and delivered.
The term “tube” or “cloud” or “weightless” often gives us a façade that our newly marketed
social and cultural activities over the Internet transcend the physical realm and occur in the
vapors of the Internet; far from this perception, however, every bit of information in the “new
economy” is transmitted through and located in physical space, on very real and very large
infrastructure encomapssing existing power structures from phone lines and fiber optics to
data centers to transnatonal underseas telecommunication cables.
There is much boosterism and celebration that the “new economy” holds the keys to
individual freedom, liberty and democratic participation and will free labor from exploitation;
however, the material/physical base that supports the economy and our everyday lives tells a
very different story. My analysis presents an integral piece of the physical infrastructure
behind the “new economy” and the space embedded in that infrastructure in order to
elucidate that the “new economy” does not occur in an abstract place but rather is manifested
in the concrete material world, one deeply embedded in capitalist development which
reproduces structural inequality on a global scale. Specifically, the analysis will focus on
Google’s growing large-scale data center infrastructure that is restructuring and reconfiguring
previously declining industrial cities and towns as new production places within the US and
around the world.
Today, data centers are found in nearly every sector of the economy: financial services,
media, high-tech, education, retail, medical, government etc. The study of the development of
data centers in each of these sectors could be separate projects in and of themselves;
however, for this project, I will only look at Google as a window into the “new” economy, the

company which has led the way in the internet sector in building out and linking up data
centers as it expands its territory of profit.[10]
DATA CENTRES IN CONTEXT

The concepts of “spatial fix” by critical geographer David Harvey[11] and “digital capitalism”
by historian of communication and information Dan Schiller[12] are useful to contextualize and
place the emergence of large-scale data centers within capitalist development. Harvey
illustrates the notion of spatial fix to explicate and situate the geographical dynamics and crisis
tendency of capitalism with over-accumulation and under-consumption. Harvey’s spatial fix
has dual meanings. One meaning is that it is necessary for capital to have a fixed space –
physical infrastructure (transportation, communications, highways, power etc.) as well as a
built environment – in order to facilitate capital’s geographical expansion. The other meaning
is a fix or solution for capitalists’ crisis through geographical expansion and reorganization of
space as capital searches for new markets and temporarily relocates to more profitable space
– new accumulation sites and territories. This temporal spatial fix will lead capital to leave
behind existing physical infrastructure and built environments as it shifts to new temporal
fixed spaces in order to cultivate new markets.
Building on Harvey’s work, Schiller introduced the concept of digital capitalism in response
to the 1970’s crisis of capitalism in which information became that “spatial-temporal fix” or
“pole of growth.”[13] To renew capitalist crisis from the worst economic downturn of the
1970s, a massive amount of information and communication technologies were introduced
across the length and breadth of economic sectors as capitalism shifted to a more informationintensive economy – digital capitalism. Today digital capitalism grips every sector, as it has
expanded and extended beyond information industries and reorganized the entire economy
from manufacturing production to finance to science to education to arts and health and
impacts every iota of people’s social lives.[14] Current growth of large-scale data centers by
Internet companies and their reoccupation of industrial towns needs to be situated within the
context of the development of digital capitalism.
FROM MANUFACTURING FACTORY TO DATA FACTORY

Large-scale data centers – sometimes called “server farms” in an oddly quaint allusion to the
pre-industrial agrarian society – are centralized facilities that primarily contain large numbers
of servers and computer equipment used for data processing, data storage, and high-speed
telecommunications. In a sense, data centers are similar to the capitalist factory system; but
instead of a linear process of input of raw materials to
output of material goods for mass consumption, they input
mass data in order to facilitate and expand the endless
cycle of commodification – an Ouroboros-like machine.
As the factory system enables the production of more

P.216

From X = Y:
In these proposals, Otlet's archival

P.217

goods at a lower cost through automation and control of labor to maximize profit, data centers
have been developed to process large quantities of bits and bytes as fast as possible and at as
low a cost as possible through automation and centralization. The data center is a hyperautomated digital factory system that enables the operation of hundreds of thousands of
servers through centralization in order to conduct business around the clock and around the
globe. Compared to traditional industrial factories that produce material goods and generally
employ entire towns if not cities, large-scale data centers each generally employ fewer than
100 full-time employees – most of these employees are either engineers or security guards.
In a way, data centers are the ultimate automated factory. Moreover, the owner of a
traditional factory needs to acquire/purchase/extract raw materials to produce commodities;
however, much of the raw data for a data center are freely drawn from the labor and
everyday activities of Internet users without a direct cost to the data center. The factory
system is to industrial capitalism what data centers are becoming to digital capitalism.
THE GROWTH OF GOOGLE’S DATA FACTORIES

Today, there is a growing arms race among leading Internet companies – Google, Microsoft,
Amazon, Facebook, IBM – in building out large-scale data centers around the globe.[16]
Among these companies, Google has so far been leading in terms of scale and capital
investment. In 2014, the company spent $11 billion for real estate purchases, production
equipment, and data center construction,[17] compared to Amazon which spent $4.9 billion
and Facebook with $1.8 billion in the same year.[18]
Until 2002, Google rented only one collocation facility in Santa Clara, California to house
about 300 servers.[19] However, by 2003 the company had started to purchase entire
collocation buildings that were cheaply available due to overexpansion during the dot.com
era. Google soon began to design and build its own data centers containing thousands of
custom-built servers as Google expanded its services and global market and responded to
competitive pressures. Initially, Google was highly secretive about its data center locations
and related technologies; a former Google employee called this Google’s “Manhattan
project.” However, in 2012, Google began to open up its data centers. While this seems
like Google’s had a change of heart and wants to be more transparent about their data
centers to the public, it is in reality more about Google’s self-serving public relations
onslaught to show how its cloud infrastructure is superior to Google’s competitors and to
secure future cloud clients.[20]
As of 2016, Google has data centers in 14 locations around the globe – eight in Americas,
two in Asia and four in Europe – with an unknown number of collocated centers – ones in
which space, servers, and infrastructure are shared with other companies – in undisclosed
locations. The sheer size of Google’s data centers is reflected in its server chip consumption.
In all, Google supposedly accounts for 5% of all server chips sold in the world,[21] and it is
even affecting the price of chips as the company is one of biggest chip buyers. Google’s
recent allying with Qualcomm for its new chip has become a threat to Intel – Google has

been the largest customer of the world’s largest chip maker for quite some time.[22] According
to Steven Levy, Google admitted that, “it is the largest computing manufacturer in the world
– making its own servers requires it to build more units every year than the industry giants
HP, Dell, and Lenovo.”[23] Moreover, Google has been amassing cheap “dark fibre” – fibre
optic cables that were laid down during the 1990s dot.com boom by now-defunct telecom
firms betting on increased internet traffic[24] - constructing Google’s fibre optic cables in US
cities,[25] and investing in building massive undersea cables to maintain its dominance and
expand its markets by controlling Internet infrastructure.[26]
With its own customized servers and software, Google is building a massive data center
network infrastructure, delivering its service at unprecedented speeds around the clock and
around the world. According to one report, Google’s global network of data centers, with a
capacity to deliver 1-petabit-per-second bandwidth, is powerful enough to read all of the
scanned books in the Library of Congress in a fraction of a second.[27] New York Times
columnist Pascal Zachary once reported:
…I believe that the physical network is Google’s “secret sauce,” its premier competitive
advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a
super wealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most
valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is
[28]
nothing.

Where then is Google’s secret sauce physically located? Despite its massiveness, Google’s
data center infrastructure and locations have been invisible to millions of everyday Google
users around the globe – users assume that Google is ubiquitous, the largest cloud in the
‘net.’ However, this infrastructure is no longer unnoticed since the infrastructure needed to
support the “new economy” is beginning to occupy and transform our landscapes and
building a new fixed network of global digital production space.
NEW NETWORK OF DIGITAL PRODUCTION SPACE:
RESTRUCTURING INDUSTRIAL CITIES

While Google’s data traffic and exchange extends well beyond geographic boundaries, its
physical plants are fixed in places where digital goods and services are processed and
produced. For the production of material goods, access to cheap labor has long been one of
the primary criteria for companies to select their places of production; but for data centers, a
large quantity of cheap labor is not as important since they require only a small number of
employees. The common characteristics necessary for data center sites have so far been:
good fiber-optic infrastructure; cheap and reliable power sources for cooling and running
servers, geographical diversity for redundancy and speed, cheap land, and locations close to
target markets.[29] Today, if one finds geographical areas in the world with some combination
of these factors, there will likely be data centers there or in the planning stages for the near
future.

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P.219

Given these criteria, there has been an emerging trend of reconfiguration and conversion to
data centers of former industrial sites such as paper mills, printing plants, steel plants, textile
mills, auto plants, aluminum plants and coal plants. In the United States, and in particular rust
belt regions of the upper Northeast, Great Lakes and Midwest regions – previously hubs of
manufacturing industries and heart lands of both industrial capitalism and labor movements –
are turning (or attempting to turn) into hotspots for large-scale data centers for Internet
companies.[30] These cities are the remains of past crises of industrial capitalism as well as of
long labor struggles.
The reasons that former industrial sites in the US and other parts of the world are attractive
for data center conversion is that, starting in the 1970s, many factories had closed or moved
their operations overseas in search of ever-cheaper labor and concomitantly weak or
nonexistent labor laws, leaving behind solid physical plants and industrial infrastructures of
power, water and cooling systems once used to drive industrial machines and production lines
and now perfectly fit for data center development.[31] Especially, finding cheap energy is
crucial for companies like Google since data center energy costs are a major expenditure.
Moreover, many communities surrounding former industrial sites have struggled and become
distressed with increasing poverty, high unemployment and little labor power. Thus, under
the guise of “economic development,” many state and local governments have been eager to
lure data centers by offering lavish subsidies for IT companies. For at least the last five years,
state after state has legislated tax breaks for data centers and about a dozen states have
created customized incentives programs for data center operations.[32] State incentives range
from full or partial exemptions of sales/use taxes on equipment, construction materials, and in
some cases purchases of electricity and backup fuel.[33] This kind of corporate-centric
economic development is far from the construction of democratic cities that prioritize social
needs and collective interests, and reflects the environmental and long-term sustainability of
communities; but rather the goal is to, “create a good business climate and therefore to
optimize conditions for capital accumulation no matter what the consequences for
employment or social and environmental well-being.”[34]
Google’s first large-scale data center site is located in one of these struggling former industrial
towns. In 2006, Google opened its first data center in The Dalles – now nicknamed
Googleville – a town of a little over 15,000 located alongside the Columbia River and
about 80 miles east of Portland, Oregon. It is an ideal site in the sense that it is close to a
major metropolitan corridor (Seattle-Tacoma-Portland) to serve business interests and large
urban population centers; yet, cheap land, little organized labor, and the promise of cheap
electrical power from the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal governmental agency,
as well as a 15-year property tax exemption. In addition, The Dalles had already built a
fiber-optic loop as part of its economic development hoping to attract the IT industry.[35]
Not long ago, the residents of The Dalles and communities up and down the Columbia
River gorge relied on the aluminum industry, an industry which required massive amounts of

– in this case hydroelectric – power. Energy makes up 40 percent of the cost of aluminum
production[36] and was boosted by the war economies of World War II and the Korean war
as aluminum was used for various war products, especially aircraft. However, starting in
1980, aluminum smelter plants began to close and move out of the area, laid off their
workers and left their installed infrastructure behind.
Since then, The Dalles, like other industrial towns, has suffered from high unemployment,
poverty, aging population and budget-strapped schools, etc. Thus, the decision for Google to
build a data center the size of two football fields (68,680-square-foot storage buildings) in
order to take advantage of the preinstalled fiber optic infrastructure, relatively cheap
hydropower from the Dalles Dam, and tax benefits was presented as the new hope
for the
[37]
distressed town and a large employment opportunity for the town’s population.
There was much community excitement that Google’s arrival would mean an economic
revival for the struggling city and a better life for the poor , but no one could discuss about it
at the time of negotiations with Google because local officials involved in negotiations had all
signed nondisclosure agreements (NDAs);[38] they were required not to mention Google in
any way but were instead instructed to refer to the project as “Project 02.”[39] Google insisted
that the information it shared with representatives of The Dalles not be subject to public
records disclosures.[40] While public subsidies were a necessary precondition of building the
data center,[41] there were no transparency or open public debates on alternative visions of
development that reflects collective community interests.
Google’s highly anticipated data center in The Dalles opened in 2006, but it “opened” only
in the sense that it became operational. To this day, Google’s data center site is off-limits to
the community and is well-guarded, including multiple CCTV cameras which survey the
grounds around the clock. Google might boast of its corporate culture as “open” and “nonhierarchical” but this does not extend to the data centers within the community where Google
benefits as it extracts resources. Not only was the building process secretive, but access to the
data center itself is highly restricted. Data centers are well secured with several guards, gates
and checkpoints. Google’s data center has reshaped the landscape into a pseudo-militarized
zone as it is not far off from a top-secret military compound – access denied.
This kind of landscape is reproduced in other parts of the US as well. New data center hubs
have begun to emerge in other rural communities; one of them is in southwestern North
Carolina where the leading tech giants – Google, Facebook, Apple, Disney and American
Express – have built data centers in close proximity to each other. The cluster of data
centers is referred to as the “NC Data Center Corridor,”[42] a neologism used to market the
area.
At one time, the southwestern part of North Carolina had heavy concentration of highly
labor-intensive textiles and furniture industries that exploited the region’s cheap labor supply
and where workers fought long and hard for better working conditions and wages. However,
over the last 25 years, factories have closed and slowly moved out of the area and been

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P.221

relocated to Asia and Latin America.[43] As a result – and mirroring the situation in The
Dalles – the area has suffered a series of layoffs, chronically high unemployment rates and
poverty, but now is being rebranded as a center of the “new economy” geared toward
attracting high-tech industries. For many towns, abandoned manufacturing plants are no
longer an eyesore but rather are becoming major selling points to the IT industry. Rich
Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, stated, “one of the things that’s driving the
competitiveness of our area is the power capacity built for manufacturers in the past 50
years.”[44]
In 2008, Google opened a $600 million data center in Lenoir, NC, a town in Caldwell
County (population 18,228[45]). Lenoir was once known as the furniture capital of the South
but lost 1,120 jobs in 2006.[46] More than 300,000 furniture jobs moved away from the
United States during 2000 as factories relocate to China for cheaper labor and operational
costs.[47] In order to lure Google, Caldwell County and the City of Lenoir gave Google a
100 percent waiver on business property taxes, an 80 percent waiver on real estate property
taxes over the next 30 years,[48] and various other incentives. Former NC Governor Mike
Easley announced that, “this company will provide hundreds of good-paying, knowledgebased jobs that North Carolina’s citizens want;”[49] yet, he addressed neither the cost of
attracting Google for taxpayers – including those laid-off factory workers – nor the
environmental impact of the data center. In 2013, Google expanded its operation in Lenoir
with an additional $600 million investment, and as of 2015, it has 250 employees in its
220-plus acre data center site.[50]
The company continues its crusade of giving “hope” to distressed communities and now
“saving” the environment from the old coal-fueled industrial economy. Google’s latest project
in the US is in Widows Creek, Alabama where the company is converting a coal burning
power plant commissioned in 1952 – which has been polluting the area for years – to its 14
th data center powered by renewable power. Shifting from coal to renewable energy seems to
demonstrate how Google has gone “green” and is being a different kind of corporation that
cares for the environment. However, this is a highly calculated business decision given that
relying on renewable energy is more economical over the long term than coal – which is
more volatile as commodity prices greatly fluctuate.[51] Google is gobbling up renewable
energy deals around the world to procure cheap energy and power its data centers.[52]
However, Google’s “green” public relations also camouflage environmental damages that are
brought by the data center’s enormous power consumption, e-waste from hardware, rare
earth mining and the environmental damage over the entire supply chain.[53]
The trend of reoccupation of industrial sites by data centers is not confined to the US.
Google’s Internet business operates across territories and more than 50% of its revenues
come from outside the US. As Google’s domestic search market share has stabilized at
around 60% share, the company has aggressively moved to build data centers around the
world for its global expansion. One of Google’s most ambitious data center projects outside
the US was in Hamina, Finland where Google converted a paper mill to a data center.

In 2008, Stora Enso, the Finnish paper maker, in which the Finnish Government held 16%
of the company’s shares and controlled 34% of the company, shut down its Summa paper
mill on the site close to the city of Hamina in Southeastern Finland despite workers’
resistance against the closure.[54] The company shed 985 jobs including 485 from the
Summa plant.[55] Shortly after closing the plant, Stora Enso sold the 53 year-old paper mill
site to Google for roughly $52 million which included 410 acres of land and the paper mill
and its infrastructure itself.
Whitewashing the workers’ struggles, the Helsinki Times reported that, “everyone was
excited about Google coming to Finland. The news that the Internet giant had bought the old
Stora Enso mill in Hamina for a data centre was great news for a community stunned by job
losses and a slowing economy.”[56] However, the local elites recognized that jobs created by
Google would not drastically affect the city’s unemployment rate or alleviate the economic
plight for many people in the community, so they justified their decision by arguing that
connecting Google’s logo to the city’s image would result in increased investments in the
area.[57] The facility had roughly 125 full-time employees when Google announced its
Hamina operation’s expansion in 2013.[58] The data center is monitored by Google’s
customary CCTV cameras and motion detectors; even Google staff only have access to the
server halls after passing biometric authentication using iris recognition scanners.[59]
Like Google’s other data centers, Google’s decision to build a data center in Hamina is not
merely because of favorable existing infrastructure or natural resources. The location of
Hamina as its first Nordic data center is vital and strategic in terms of extending Google’s
reach into geographically dispersed markets, speed and management of data traffic. Hamina
is located close to the border with Russia and the area has long been known for good
Internet connectivity via Scandinavian telecommunications giant TeliaSonera, whose services
and international connections run right through the area of Hamina and reach into Russia as
well as to Sweden and Western Europe.[60] Eastern Europe has a growing Internet market
and Russia is one of the few countries where Google does not dominate the search market.
Yandex, Russia’s native language search engine, controls the Russian search market with
over 60% share.[61] By locating its infrastructure in Hamina, Google is establishing its
strategic global digital production beach-head for both the Nordic and Russian markets.
As Google is trying to maintain its global dominance and expand its business, the company
has continued to build out its data center operations on European soil. Besides Finland,
Google has built data centers in Dublin, Ireland, and St. Ghislain and Mons in Belgium,
which respectively had expanded their operations after their initial construction. However,
the stories of each of these data centers is similar: aluminum smelting plant town The Dalles,
Oregon and Lenoir North Carolina in the US, paper mill town Hamina, Finland, coalmining town Ghislain–Mons, Belgium and a warehouse converted data center in Dublin,
Ireland. Each of these were once industrial production sites and/or sites for the extraction of
environmental resources turned into data centers creating temporal production spaces to
accelerate digital capitalism. Google’s latest venture in Europe is in a seaport town of

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P.223

Eemshaven, Netherlands which hosts several power stations as well as the transatlantic fiberoptic cable which links the US and Europe.
To many struggling communities around the world, the building of Google’s large-scale data
centers has been presented by the company and by political elites as an opportunity to
participate in the “new economy” – as well as a veiled threat of being left behind from the
“new economy” – as if this would magically lead to the creation of prosperity and equality. In
reality, these cities and towns are being reorganized and reoccupied for corporate interests,
re-integrated into sites of capital accumulation and re-emerged as new networks of production
for capitalist development.
CONCLUSION

Is the current physical landscape that supports the “new economy” outside of capitalist social
relations? Does the process of the redevelopment of struggling former industrial cites by
building Google data centers under the slogan of participation in the “new economy” really
meet social needs, and express democratic values? The “new economy” is boasted about as if
it is radically different from past industrial capitalist development, the solution to myriad social
problems that hold the potential for growth outside of the capitalist realm; however, the “new
economy” operates deeply within the logic of capitalist development – constant technological
innovation, relocation and reconstruction of new physical production places to link
geographically dispersed markets, reduction of labor costs, removal of obstacles that hinder its
growth and continuous expansion. Google’s purely market-driven data centers illustrate that
the “new economy” built on data and information does not bypass physical infrastructures and
physical places for the production and distribution of digital commodities. Rather, it is firmly
anchored in the physical world and simply establishes new infrastructures on top of existing
industrial ones and a new network of production places to meet the needs of the processes of
digital commodities at the expense of environmental, labor and social well-being.
We celebrate the democratic possibilities of the “networked information economy” providing
for alternative space free from capitalist practices; however, it is vital to recognize that this
“new economy” in which we put our hopes is supported by, built on, and firmly planted in
our material world. The question that we need to ask ourselves is: given that our communities
and physical infrastructures continue to be configured to assist the reproduction of the social
relations of capitalism, how far can our “new economy” deliver on the democracy and social
justice for which we all strive?
Last
Revision:
3·07·2016

1. James Titcomb, “World’s internet traffic to surpass one zettabyte in 2016,” Telegraph, February 4, 2016, http://
www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/02/04/worlds-internet-traffic-to-surpass-one-zettabyte-in-2016/
2. Ibid.

3. Cade Metz, “A new company called Alphabet now owns Google,” Wired, August 10, 2015. http://wired.com/2015/08/
new-company-called-alphabet-owns-google/.
4. Google hasn’t released new data since 2012, but the data extrapolate from based on Google annual growth date. See Danny
Sullivan, “Google Still Doing At Least 1 Trillion Searches Per Year,” Search Engine Land, January 16, 2015, http://
searchengineland.com/google-1-trillion-searches-per-year-212940
5. This is Google’s desktop search engine market as of January 2016. See “Worldwide desktop market share of leading search
engines from January 2010 to January 2016,” Statista, http://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-shareof-search-engines/.
6. “Annual revenue of Alphabet from 2011 to 2015 (in billions of US dollars),” Statista, http://www.statista.com/
statistics/507742/alphabet-annual-global-revenue/.
7. “Advertising revenue of Google from 2001 to 2015 (in billion U.S. dollars),” Statista, http://www.statista.com/
statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/.
8. Seven Levy, “Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability,” Wired, May 22, 2009, http://
www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_googlenomics?currentPage=all.
9. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture In Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Alvin
Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980).
10. The term “territory of profit” is borrowed from Gary Fields’ book titled Territories of Profit: Communications, Capitalist
Development, and the Innovative Enterprises of G. F. Swift and Dell Computer (Stanford University Press, 2003)
11. David Harvey, Spaces of capital: towards a critical geography (New York: Routledge, 2001)
12. Top of FormDan Schiller, Digital capitalism networking the global market system (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999).
13. Dan Schiller, “Power Under Pressure: Digital Capitalism In Crisis,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 924–
941
14. Dan Schiller, “Digital capitalism: stagnation and contention?” Open Democracy, October 13, 2015, https://
www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/dan-schiller/digital-capitalism-stagnation-and-contention.
15. Ibid: 113-117.
16. Jason Hiner, “Why Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are racing to run your data center.” ZDNet, June 4, 2009, http://
www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/why-microsoft-google-and-amazon-are-racing-to-run-your-data-center/19733.
17. Derrick Harris, “Google had its biggest quarter ever for data center spending. Again,” Gigaom, February 4, 2015, https://
gigaom.com/2015/02/04/google-had-its-biggest-quarter-ever-for-data-center-spending-again/.
18. Ibid.
19. Steven Levy, In the plex: how Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives )New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 182.
20. Steven Levy, “Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center,” Wired, October 17 2012, http://
www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-inside-google-data-center/.
21. Cade Metz, “Google’s Hardware Endgame? Making Its Very Own Chips,” Wired, February 12, 2016, http://
www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-hardware-endgame-making-its-very-own-chips/.
22. Ian King and Jack Clark, “Qualcomm's Fledgling Server-Chip Efforts,” Bloomberg Business, February 3, 2016, http://
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-03/google-said-to-endorse-qualcomm-s-fledgling-server-chip-efforts-ik6ud7qg.
23. Levy, In the Plex, 181.
24. In 2013, Wall Street Journal reported that Google controls more than 100,000 miles of routes around the world which was
considered bigger than US-based telecom company Sprint. See Drew FitzGerald and Spencer E. Ante, “Tech Firms Push to
Control Web's Pipes,” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/
SB10001424052702304173704579262361885883936
25. Google is offering its gigabit-speed fiber optic Internet service in 10 US cities. Since Internet service is a precondition of
Google’s myriad Internet businesses, Google’s strategy is to control the pipes rather than relying on telecom firms. See Mike
Wehner, “Google Fiber is succeeding and cable companies are starting to feel the pressure,” Business Insider, April 15, 2015,
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-fiber-is-succeeding-and-cable-companies-are-starting-to-feel-the-pressure-2015-4;
Ethan Baron, “Google Fiber coming to San Francisco first,” San Jose Mercury News, February 26, 2016, http://
www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_29556617/sorry-san-jose-google-fiber-coming-san-francisco.
26. Tim Hornyak, “9 things you didn't know about Google's undersea cable,” Computerworld, July 14, 2015, http://
www.computerworld.com/article/2947841/network-hardware-solutions/9-things-you-didnt-know-about-googles-underseacable.html
27. Jaikumar Vijayan, “Google Gives Glimpse Inside Its Massive Data Center Network,” eWeek, June 18, 2015, http://
www.eweek.com/servers/google-gives-glimpse-inside-its-massive-data-center-network.html
28. Pascal Zachary, “Unsung Heroes Who Move Products Forward,” New York Times, September 30, 2007, http://
www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/technology/30ping.html

P.224

P.225

29. Tomas Freeman, Jones Lang, and Jason Warner, “What’s Important in the Data Center Location Decision,” Spring 2011,
http://www.areadevelopment.com/siteSelection/may2011/data-center-location-decision-factors2011-62626727.shtml
30. “From rust belt to data center green?” Green Data Center News, February 10, 2011, http://www.greendatacenternews.org/
articles/204867/from-rust-belt-to-data-center-green-by-doug-mohney/
31. Rich Miller, “North Carolina Emerges as Data Center Hub,” Data Center Knowledge, November 7, 2010, http://
www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/11/17/north-carolina-emerges-as-data-center-hub/.
32. David Chernicoff, “US tax breaks, state by state,” Datacenter Dynamics, January 6, 2016, http://
www.datacenterdynamics.com/design-build/us-tax-breaks-state-by-state/95428.fullarticle; Case Study: Server Farms,” Good
Job First, http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/corporate-subsidy-watch/server-farms.
33. John Leino, “The role of incentives in Data Center Location Decisions,” Critical Environment Practice, February 28, 2011,
http://www.cbrephoenix.com/wp_eig/?p=68.
34. David, Harvey, Spaces of global capitalism (London: Verso. 2006), 25.
35. Marsha Spellman, “Broadband, and Google, Come to Rural Oregon,” Broadband Properties, December 2005, http://
www.broadbandproperties.com/2005issues/dec05issues/spellman.pdf.
36. Ross Courtney “The Goldendale aluminum plant -- The death of a way of life,” Yakima Herald-Republic,” April 9, 2011,
http://www.yakima-herald.com/stories/2011/4/9/the-goldendale-aluminum-plant-the-death-of-a-way-of-life.
37. Ginger Strand, “Google’s addition to cheap electricity,” Harper Magazine, March 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20080410194348/http://harpers.org/media/
slideshow/annot/2008-03/index.html.

38. Linda Rosencrance, “Top-secret Google data center almost completed,” Computerworld, June 16, 2006, http://
www.computerworld.com/article/2546445/data-center/top-secret-google-data-center-almost-completed.html.
39. Bryon Beck, “Welcome to Googleville America’s newest information superhighway begins On Oregon’s Silicon Prairie,”
Willamette Week, June 4, 2008, http://wweek.com/portland/article-9089-welcome_to_googleville.html.
40. Rich Miller, “Google & Facebook: A Tale of Two Data Centers,” Data Center Knowledge, August 2, 2010, http://
www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/08/10/google-facebook-a-tale-of-two-data-centers/
41. Ibid.
42. Alex Barkinka, “From textiles to tech, the state’s newest crop,” Reese News Lab, April 13, 2011, http://
reesenews.org/2011/04/13/from-textiles-to-tech-the-states-newest-crop/14263/.
43. “Textile & Apparel Overview,” North Carolina in the Global Economy, http://www.ncglobaleconomy.com/textiles/
overview.shtml.
44. Rich Miller, “The Apple-Google Data Center Corridor,” Data Center knowledge, August 4, 2009, http://
www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/08/04/the-apple-google-data-center-corridor/.
45. “2010 Decennial Census from the US Census Bureau,” http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/cf/1.0/en/place/Lenoir city,
North Carolina/POPULATION/DECENNIAL_CNT.
46. North Carolina in the Global Economy. Retrieved from http://www.soc.duke.edu/NC_GlobalEconomy/furniture/
workers.shtml
47. Frank Langfitt, Furniture Work Shifts From N.C. To South China. National Public Radio, December 1, 2009, http://
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121576791&ft=1&f=121637143; Dan Morse, In North Carolina,
Furniture Makers Try to Stay Alive,” Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2004, http://www.wsj.com/articles/
SB107724173388134838; Robert Lacy, “Whither North Carolina Furniture Manufacturing,” Federal Reserve Bank of
Richmond, Working Paper Series, September 2004, https://www.richmondfed.org/~/media/richmondfedorg/publications/
research/working_papers/2004/pdf/wp04-7.pdf
48. Stephen Shankland, “Google gives itself leeway for N.C., data center,” Cnet, December 5, 2008, http://
news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10114349-93.html; Bill Bradley, “Cities Keep Giving Out Money for Server Farms, See
Very Few Jobs in Return,” Next City, August 15, 2013, https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/cities-keep-giving-out-money-forserver-farms-see-few-jobs-in-return.
49. Katherine Noyes, “Google Taps North Carolina for New Datacenter,” E-Commerce Times, January 19, 2007, http://
www.ecommercetimes.com/story/55266.html?wlc=1255976822
50. Getahn Ward, “Google to invest in new Clarksville data center,” Tennessean, December 22, 2015, http://
www.tennessean.com/story/money/real-estate/2015/12/21/google-invest-500m-new-clarksville-data-center/77474046/.
51. Ingrid Burrington, “The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge,” Atlantic, December 16, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/
technology/archive/2015/12/there-are-no-clean-clouds/420744/.
52. Mark Bergen, “After Gates, Google Splurges on Green With Largest Renewable Energy Buy for Server Farms,” Re/code,
December 3, 2015, http://recode.net/2015/12/03/after-gates-google-splurges-on-green-with-largest-renewable-energy-buyfor-server-farms/.

53. Burrington, “The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge.”; Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the media (New
York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2012)
54. “Finnish Paper Industry Uses Court Order to Block Government Protest,” IndustriAll Global Union, http://www.industriallunion.org/archive/icem/finnish-paper-industry-uses-court-order-to-block-government-protest.
55. Terhi Kinnunen and Tarmo Virki, “Stora to cut 985 jobs, close mills despite protests,” Reuter, January 17, 2008, http://
www.reuters.com/article/storaenso-idUSL1732158220080117; “Workers react to threat of closure of paper pulp mills,”
European Foundation, March 3, 2008, http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/articles/workers-react-tothreat-of-closure-of-paper-pulp-mills.
56. David Cord, “Welcome to Finland,” The Helsinki Times, April 9, 2009, http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/helsinkitimes/2009apr/
issue15-95/helsinki_times15-95.pdf.
57. Elina Kervinen, Google is busy turning the old Summa paper mill into a data centre. Helsingin Sanomat International Edition,
October 9, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20120610020753/http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Google+is+busy
+turning+the+old+Summa+paper+mill+into+a+data+centre/1135260141400.
58. “Google invests 450M in expansion of Hamina data centre,” Helsinki Times, November 4, 2013, http://
www.helsinkitimes.fi/business/8255-google-invests-450m-in-expansion-of-hamina-data-centre.html.
59. “Revealed: Google’s new mega data center in Finland,” Pingdon, September 15, 2010, http://
royal.pingdom.com/2010/09/15/googles-mega-data-center-in-finland/
60. Ibid.
61. Shiv Mehta, “What's Google Strategy for the Russian Market?” Investopedia, July 28, 2015, http://www.investopedia.com/
articles/investing/072815/whats-google-strategy-russian-market.asp.

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P.227

House,
City,
World,
Nation,
Globe
NATACHA ROUSSEL

This timeline starts in Brussels and is an attempt to situate some of the events
in the life, death and revival of the Mundaneum in relation to both local and
international events. By connecting several geographic locations at different
scales, this small research provokes cqrrelations in time and space that could help
formulate questions about the ways local events repeatedly mirror and
recompose global situations. Hopefully, it can also help to see which
contextual elements in the first iteration of the Mundaneum were different from
the current situation of our information economy.
The ambitious project of the Mundaneum was imagined by Paul Otlet with support of Henri
La Fontaine at the end of the 19th century. At that time colonialism was at its height,
bringing a steady stream of income to occidental countries which created a sense of security
that made everything seem possible. According to some of the most forward thinking persons
of the time it felt as if the intellectual and material benefits of rational thinking could
universally become the source of all goods. Far from any actual move towards independence,
the first tensions between colonial/commercial powers were starting to manifest themselves.
Already some conflicts erupted, mainly to defend commercial interests such as during the
Fashoda crisis and the Boers war. The sense of strength brought to colonial powers by the
large influx of money was however quickly tempered by World War I that was about to
shake up modern European society.
In this context Henri La Fontaine, energised by Paul Otlet's encompassing view of
classification systems and standards, strongly associates the Mundaneum project with an ideal
of world peace. This was a conscious process of thought; they believed that this universal
archive of all knowledge represented a resource for the promotion of education towards the

development of better social relations. While Otlet and La Fontaine were not directly
concerned with economical and colonial issues, their ideals were nevertheless fed by the
wealth of the epoch. The Mundaneum archives were furthermore established with a clear
intention, and a major effort was done to include documents that referred to often neglected
topics or that could be considered as alternative thinking, such as the well known archives of
the feminist movement in Belgium and information on anarchism and pacifism. In line with
the general dynamism caused by a growing wealth in Europe at the turn of the century, the
Mundaneum project seemed to be always growing in size and ambition. It also clearly
appears that the project was embedded in the international and 'politico-economical' context
of its time and in many aspects linked to a larger movement that engaged civil society towards
a proto-structure of networked society. Via the development of infrastructures for
communication and international regulations, Henri La Fontaine was part of several
international initiatives. For example he launched the 'Bureau International de la paix' as
early as 1907 and a few years after, in 1910, the 'International Union of Associations'.
Overall his interventions helped to root the process of archive collection in a larger network
of associations and regulatory structures. Otlet's view of archives and organisation extended
to all domains and La Fontaine asserted that general peace could be achieved through social
development by the means of education and access to knowledge. Their common view was
nurtured by an acute perception of their epoch, they observed and often contributed to most
of the major experiments that were triggered by the ongoing reflection about the new
organisation modalities of society.
The ever ambitious process of building the Mundaneum
From The Itinerant Archive (print):
archives took place in the context of a growing
Museology merged with the
internationalisation of society, while at the same time the
International Institute of Bibliography
social gap was increasing due to the expansion of
(IIB) which had its offices in the
same building. The ever-expanding
industrial society. Furthermore, the internationalisation of
index card catalog had already been
finances and relations did not only concern industrial
accessible to the public since 1914.
society, it also acted as a motivation to structure social
The project would be later known as
the World Palace or Mundaneum.
and political networks, among others via political
Here, Paul Otlet and Henri La
negotiations and the institution of civil society
Fontaine started to work on their
Encyclopaedia Universalis
organisations. Several broad structures dedicated to the
Mundaneum, an illustrated
regulation of international relations were created
encyclopaedia in the form of a mobile
simultaneous with the worldwide spreading of an
exhibition.
industrial economy. They aimed to formulate a world
view that would be based on international agreements
and communication systems regulated by governments and structured via civil society
organisations, rather than leaving everything to individual and commercial initiatives. Otlet
and La Fontaine spent a large part of their lives attempting to formulate a mondial society.
While La Fontaine clearly supported international networks of civil society organisations,
Otlet, according to Vincent Capdepuy[1], was the first person to use the French term
Mondialisation far ahead of his time, advocating what would become after World War II an
important movement that claimed to work for the development of an international regulatory

P.228

P.229

system. Otlet also mentioned that this 'Mondial' process was directly related to the necessity
of a new repartition and the regulation of natural goods (think: diamonds and gold ...), he
writes:
« Un droit nouveau doit remplacer alors le droit ancien pour préparer et organiser une
nouvelle répartition. La “question sociale” a posé le problème à l’intérieur ; “la question
internationale” pose le même problème à l’extérieur entre peuples. Notre époque a
poursuivi une certaine socialisation de biens. […] Il s’agit, si l’on peut employer cette
expression, de socialiser le droit international, comme on a socialisé le droit privé, et de
[2]
prendre à l’égard des richesses naturelles des mesures de “mondialisation”. » .

The approaches of La Fontaine and Otlet already bear certain differences, as one
(Lafontaine) emphasises an organisation based on local civil society structures which implies
direct participation, while the other (Otlet) focuses more on management and global
organisation managed by a regulatory framework. It is interesting to look at these early
concepts that were participating to a larger movement called 'the first mondialisation', and
understand how they differ from current forms of globalisation which equally involve private
and public instances and various infrastructures.
The project of Otlet and Lafontaine took place in an era of international agreements over
communication networks. It is known and often a subject of fascination that the global project
of the Mundaneum also involved the conception of a technical infrastructure and
communication systems that were conceived in between the two World Wars. Some of them
such as the Mondotheque were imagined as prospective possibilities, but others were already
implemented at the time and formed the basis of an international communication network,
consisting of postal services and telegraph networks. It is less acknowledged that the epoch
was also a time of international agreements between countries, structuring and normalising
international life; some of these structures still form the basis of our actual global economy,
but they are all challenged by private capitalist structures. The existing postal and telegraph
networks covered the entire planet, and agreements that regulated the price of the stamp
allowing for postal services to be used internationally, were recent. They certainly were the
first ones during where international agreements regulated commercial interests to the benefit
of individual communication. Henri Lafontaine directly participated in these processes by
asking for the postal franchise to be waived for the transport of documents between
international libraries, to the benefit of among others the Mundaneum. Lafontaine was also
an important promoter of larger international movements that involved civil society
organisations; he was the main responsible for the 'Union internationale des associations', that
acted as a network of information-sharing, setting up modalities for exchange to the general
benefit of civil society. Furthermore, concerns were raised to rethink social organisation that
was harmed by industrial economy and this issue was addressed in Brussels by the brand
new discipline of sociology. The 'Ecole de Bruxelles'[3] in which Otlet and La Fontaine both
took part was already very early on trying to formulate a legal discourse that could help
address social inequalities, and eventually come up with regulations that could help 'reengineer' social organisation.

The Mundaneum project differentiates itself from contemporary enterprises such as Google,
not only by its intentions, but also by its organisational context as it clearly inscribed itself in
an international regulatory framework that was dedicated to the promotion of local civil
society. How can we understand the similarities and differences between the development of
the Mundaneum project and the current knowledge economy? The timeline below attempts
to re-situate the different events related to the rise and fall of the Mundaneum in order to help
situate the differences between past and contemporary processes.

DATE

EVENT

TYPE

1865

The International Union of telegraph STANDARD
, is set up it is an important element of the
organisation of a mondial communication
network and will further become the

SCALE

WORLD

International Telecommunication
[4]
Union (UTI) that is still active in regulating

and standardizing radio-communication.

1870

Franco-Prussian war.

EVENT

WORLD

1874

The ONU creates the General Postal
[5]
Union and aims to federate international
postal distribution.

STANDARD

WORLD

1875

General Conference on Weights and
Measures in Sèvres, France.

STANDARD

WORLD

1882

Triple Alliance,

EVENT

WORLD

1889

Henri Lafontaine creates La Société Belge EVENT
de l'arbitrage et de la paix.

NATION

1890's

First colonial wars (Fachoda crisis, Boers war EVENT
...).

WORLD

1890

Henri Lafontaine meets Paul Otlet.

PERSON

CITY

1891

Franco-Russian entente', preliminary to
the Triple entente that will be signed in
1907.

EVENT

WORLD

1891

Henri Lafontaine publishes an essay Pour une PUBLICATION NATION
bibliographie de la paix.

P.230

renewed in 1902.

P.231

1893

Otlet and Lafontaine start together the Office ASSOCIATION CITY
International de Bibliologie
Sociologique (OIBS).

1894

Henri Lafontaine is elected senator of the
province of Hainaut and later senator of the
province of Liège-Brabant.

EVENT

NATION

1895 2-4 First Conférence de Bibliographie at
ASSOCIATION CITY
September which it is decided to create the Institut
International de Bibliographie (IIB)
founded by Henri La Fontaine.
WORLD

1900

Congrès bibliographique
international in Paris.

EVENT

1903

Creation of the international Women's
suffrage alliance (IWSA) that will later
become the International Alliance of
Women.

ASSOCIATION WORLD

1904

Entente cordiale

between France and
England which defines their mutual zone of
colonial influence in Africa.

EVENT

WORLD

1905

First Moroccan crisis.

EVENT

WORLD

1907 June Otlet and Lafontaine organise a Central

ASSOCIATION CITY

Office for International Associations
that will become the International Union
of Associations (IUA) at the first
Congrès mondial des associations
internationales in Brussels in May 1910.

1907

Henri Lafontaine is elected president of the
Bureau international de la paix that
he previously initiated.

1908 July Congrès bibliographique
international in Brussels.

PERSON

NATION

EVENT

CITY

ASSOCIATION WORLD
1910 May Official Creation of the International
union of associations (IUA). In 1914,
it federates 230 organizations, a little more
than half of them still exist. The IUA promotes
internationalist aspirations and desire for peace.

ASSOCIATION WORLD

1910
25-27
August

Le Congrès International de
Bibliographie et de Documentation

1911

ASSOCIATION WORLD
More than 600 people and institutions are
listed as IIB members or refer to their methods,
specifically the UDC.

1913

Henri Lafontaine is awarded the Nobel Price EVENT
for Peace.

WORLD

1914

Germany declares war to France and invades
Belgium.

WORLD

1916

PUBLICATION WORLD
Lafontaine publishes The great solution:
magnissima charta while in exile in the United
States.

1919

deals with issues of international cooperation
between non-governmental organizations and
with the structure of universal documentation.

Opening of the Mundaneum or Palais
at the Cinquantenaire park.

EVENT

EVENT

CITY

Mondial

1919 June The Traité de Versailles marks the end EVENT
of World War I and creation of the Societé
28
Des Nations (SDN) that will later become
the United Nations (UN).

WORLD

ASSOCIATION NATION

1924

Creation (within the IIB), of the Central
Classification Commission focusing on
development of the Universal Decimal
Classification (UDC).

1931

The IIB becomes the International
Institute of documentation (IID) and
in 1938 and is named International
Federation of documentation (IDF).

ASSOCIATION WORLD

1934

Publication of Otlet's book Traité de
documentation.

PUBLICATION WORLD

1934

The Mundaneum is closed after a governmental MOVE
decision. A part of the archives are moved to
Rue Fétis 44, Brussels, home of Paul Otlet.

the

1939
Invasion of Poland by Germany, start of World EVENT
September War II.

P.232

HOUSE

WORLD

P.233

1941

MOVE
Some files from the Mundaneum collections
concerning international associations, are
transferred to Germany. They are assumed to
have propaganda value.

WORLD

1944

Death of Paul Otlet. He is buried in Etterbeek EVENT
cemetery.

CITY

1947

The International Telecomunication
Union (UTI) is attached to the UN.

STANDARD

GLOBE

Two separate ITU committees, the

STANDARD

GLOBE

STANDARD

GLOBE

1956

Consultive Committee for
International Telephony (CCIF) and the
Consultive Committee for
International Telegraphy (CCIT) are

joined to form the CCITT, an institute to create
standards, recommendations and models for
telecommunications.

1963

American Standard Code for
Information Interchange (ASCII)

developed.

is

1966

The ARPANET project is initiated.

1974

Telenet,

1986

First meeting of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) , the US-located informal

STANDARD

GLOBE

1992

Creation of The Internet Society, an
American association with international
vocation.

STANDARD

WORLD

1993

Elio Di Rupo organises the transport of the
Mundaneum archives from Brussels to 76 rue
de Nimy in Mons.

MOVE

NATION

2012

Failure of the World Conference on

STANDARD

GLOBE

founded.

ASSOCIATION NATION

the first public version of the Internet STANDARD

WORLD

organization that promotes open standards
along the lines of "rough consensus and running
code".

International Telecommunications

(WCIT) to reach an international agreement
on Internet regulation.

ADDITIONAL TIMELINES

• https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/la-premiere-guerre-mondiale
• http://www.telephonetribute.com/timeline.html
• https://www.reseau-canope.fr/savoirscdi/societe-de-linformation/le-monde-du-livreet-de-la-presse/histoire-du-livre-et-de-la-documentation/biographies/paul-otlet.html
• http://monoskop.org/Otlet
• http://archives.mundaneum.org/fr/historique
REFERENCES
Last
Revision:
28·06·2016

1. https://cybergeo.revues.org/24903%7CVincent Capdepuy, In the prism of the words. Globalization and the philological
argument
2. Paul Otlet, 1916, Les Problèmes internationaux et la Guerre, les conditions et les facteurs de la vie internationale, Genève/
Paris, Kundig/Rousseau, p. 76.
3. http://www.philodroit.be/IMG/pdf/bf_-_le_droit_global_selon_ecole_de_bruxelles_-2014-3.pdf?lang=fr
4. http://www.itu.int/en/Pages/default.aspx
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union

P.234

P.235

The
Smart
City City of
Knowledge
DENNIS POHL

In Paul Otlet's words the Mundaneum is “an idea, an institution, a method, a
material corpus of works and collections, a building, a network.” It became a
lifelong project that he tried to establish together with Henri La Fontaine in
the beginning of the 20th century. The collaboration with Le Corbusier was
limited to the architectural draft of a centre of information, science, and
education, leading to the idea of a “World Civic Center” in Geneva.
Nevertheless the dialectical discourse between both Utopians did not restrict
itself to commissioned design, but reveals the relation between a specific
positivist conception of knowledge and architecture; the system of information
and the spatial distribution according to efficiency principles. A notion that lays
the foundation for what is now called the Smart City.
[1]

FORMULATING THE MUNDANEUM
“We’re on the verge of a historic moment for cities”

[2]

“We are at the beginning of a historic transformation in cities. At a time when the
concerns about urban equity, costs, health and the environment are intensifying,
unprecedented technological change is going to enable cities to be more efficient,
[3]
responsive, flexible and resilient.”

P.236

P.237

In 1927 Le Corbusier participated in the
design competition for the headquarters of
the League of Nations, but his designs were
rejected. It was then that he first met his
later cher ami Paul Otlet. Both were already
familiar with each other’s ideas and writings,
as evidenced by their use of schemes, but
also through the epistemic assumptions that
underlie their world views.

OTLET, SCHEME AND REALITY

CORBUSIER, CURRENT AND IDEAL
TRAFFIC CIRCULATION

Before meeting Le Corbusier, Otlet was
fascinated by the idea of urbanism as a
science, which systematically organizes all
elements of life in infrastructures of flows.
He was convinced to work with Van der
Swaelmen, who had already planned a
world city on the site of Tervuren near
Brussels in 1919.[4]

VAN DER SWAELMEN - TERVUREN, 1916

ends.

For Otlet it was the first time that two
notions from different practices came
together, namely an environment ordered
and structured according to principles of
rationalization and taylorization. On the one
hand, rationalization as an epistemic practice
that reduces all relationships to those of
definable means and ends. On the other
hand, taylorization as the possibility to
analyze and synthesize workflows according
to economic efficiency and productivity.
Nowadays, both principles are used
synonymously: if all modes of production are
reduced to labour, then its efficiency can be
rationally determined through means and

“By improving urban technology, it’s possible to significantly improve the lives of
billions of people around the world. […] we want to supercharge existing efforts in
areas such as housing, energy, transportation and government to solve real problems
[5]
that city-dwellers face every day.”

In the meantime, in 1922, Le Corbusier developed his theoretical model of the Plan Voisin,
which served as a blueprint for a vision of Paris with 3 million inhabitants. In the 1925
publication Urbanisme his main objective is to construct “a theoretically water-tight formula
to arrive at the fundamental principles of modern town planning.”[6] For Le Corbusier
“statistics are merciless things,” because they “show the past and foreshadow the future”[7],
therefore such a formula must be based on the objectivity of diagrams, data and maps.

CORBUSIER - SCHEME FOR THE TRAFFIC
CIRCULATION

P.238

P.239

OTLET'S FORMULA

Moreover, they “give us an exact picture of
our present state and also of former states;
[...] (through statistics) we are enabled to
penetrate the future and make those truths
our own which otherwise we could only
have guessed at.”[8] Based on the analysis of
statistical proofs he concluded that the
ancient city of Paris had to be demolished in
order to be replaced by a new one.
Nevertheless, he didn’t arrive at a concrete
formula but rather at a rough scheme.

A formula that includes every atomic entity
was instead developed by his later friend Otlet as an answer to the question he posed in
Monde, on whether the world can be expressed by a determined unifying entity. This is
Otlet’s dream: a “permanent and complete representation of the entire world,”[9] located in
one place.
Early on Otlet understood the active potential of Architecture and Urbanism as a dispositif, a
strategic apparatus, that places an individual in a specific environment and shapes his
understanding of the world.[10] A world that can be determined by ascertainable facts through
knowledge. He thought of his Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique
as an “architecture of ideas”, a manual to collect and organize the world's knowledge, hand in
hand with contemporary architectural developments. As new modernist forms and use of
materials propagated the abundance of decorative
From A bag but is language nothing
elements, Otlet believed in the possibility of language as
of words:
a model of 'raw data', reducing it to essential information
and unambiguous facts, while removing all inefficient
Tim Berners-Lee: [...] Make a
beautiful website, but first give us the
assets of ambiguity or subjectivity.
“Information, from which has been removed all dross and
foreign elements, will be set out in a quite analytical way.
It will be recorded on separate leaves or cards rather than
being confined in volumes,” which will allow the
standardized annotation of hypertext for the Universal
Decimal Classification (UDC).[11] Furthermore, the
“regulation through architecture and its tendency of a
total urbanism would help towards a better understanding
of the book Traité de documentation and it's right
functional and holistic desiderata.”[12] An abstraction
would enable Otlet to constitute the “equation of
urbanism” as a type of sociology (S): U = u(S), because
according to his definition, urbanism “is an art of

unadulterated data, we want the data.
We want unadulterated data. OK, we
have to ask for raw data now. And
I'm going to ask you to practice that,
OK? Can you say "raw"?
Audience: Raw.
Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say
"data"?
Audience: Data.
TBL: Can you say "now"?
Audience: Now!
TBL: Alright, "raw data now"!
[...]

From La ville intelligente - Ville de la
connaissance:
Étant donné que les nouvelles formes
modernistes et l'utilisation de
matériaux propageaient l'abondance
d'éléments décoratifs, Paul Otlet
croyait en la possibilité du langage
comme modèle de « données brutes »,
le réduisant aux informations
essentielles et aux faits sans ambiguïté,

distributing public space in order to raise general human happiness; urbanization is the result
of all activities which a society employs in order to reach its proposed goal; [and] a material
expression of its organization.”[13] The scientific position, which determines all characteristic
values of a certain region by a systematic classification and observation, was developed by the
Scottish biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes, who Paul Otlet invited to present his
Town Planning Exhibition to an international audience at the 1913 world exhibition in
Gent.[14] What Geddes inevitably takes further is the positivist belief in a totality of science,
which he unfolds from the ideas of Auguste Comte, Frederic Le Play and Elisée Reclus in
order to reach a unified understanding of an urban development in a special context. This
position would allow to represent the complexity of an inhabited environment through data.[15]
THINKING THE MUNDANEUM

The only person that Otlet considered capable of the architectural realization of the
Mundaneum was Le Corbusier, whom he approached for the first time in spring 1928. In
one of the first letters he addressed the need to link “the idea and the building, in all its
symbolic representation. […] Mundaneum opus maximum.” Aside from being a centre of
documentation, information, science and education, the complex should link the Union of
International Associations (UIA), which was founded by La Fontaine and Otlet in 1907,
and the League of Nations. “A material and moral representation of The greatest Society of
the nations (humanity);” an international city located on an extraterritorial area in Geneva.[16]
Despite their different backgrounds, they easily understood each other, since they “did
frequently use similar terms such as plan, analysis, classification, abstraction, standardization
and synthesis, not only to bring conceptual order into their disciplines and knowledge
organization, but also in human action.”[17] Moreover, the appearance of common terms in
their most significant publications is striking. Such as spirit, mankind, elements, work, system
and history, just to name a few. These circumstances led both Utopians to think the
Mundaneum as a system, rather than a singular central type of building; it was meant to
include as many resources in the development process as possible. Because the Mundaneum
is “an idea, an institution, a method, a material corpus of works and collections, a building, a
network,”[18] it had to be conceptualized as an “organic plan with the possibility to expand on
different scales with the multiplication of each part.”[19] The possibility of expansion and an
organic redistribution of elements adapted to new necessities and needs, is what guarantees
the system efficiency, namely by constantly integrating more resources. By designing and
standardizing forms of life up to the smallest element, modernism propagated a new form of
living which would ensure the utmost efficiency. Otlet supported and encouraged Le
Corbusier with his words: “The twentieth century is called upon to build a whole new
civilization. From efficiency to efficiency, from rationalization to rationalization, it must so raise
itself that it reaches total efficiency and rationalization. […] Architecture is one of the best
bases not only of reconstruction (the deforming and skimpy name given to the whole of postwar activities) but of intellectual and social construction to which our era should dare to lay
claim.”[20] Like the Wohnmaschine, in Corbusier’s famous housing project Unité d'habitation,

P.240

P.241

the distribution of elements is shaped according to man's needs. The premise which underlies
this notion is that man's needs and desires can be determined, normalized and standardized
following geometrical models of objectivity.
“making transportation more efficient and lowering the cost of living, reducing energy
[21]
usage and helping government operate more efficiently”
BUILDING THE MUNDANEUM

In the first working phase, from March to September 1928, the plans for the Mundaneum
seemed more a commissioned work than a collaboration. In the 3rd person singular, Otlet
submitted descriptions and organizational schemes which would represent the institutional
structures in a diagrammatic manner. In exchange, Le Corbusier drafted the architectural
plans and detailed descriptions, which led to the publication N° 128 Mundaneum, printed
by International Associations in Brussels.[22] Le Corbusier seemed a little less enthusiastic
about the Mundaneum project than Otlet, mainly because of his scepticism towards the
League of Nations, which he called a “misguided” and “pre-machinist creation.”[23] The
rejection of his proposal for the Palace for the League of Nations in 1927, expressed with
anger in a public announcement, might also play a role. However, the second phase, from
September 1928 to August 1929, was marked by a strong friendship evidenced by the rise
of the international debate after their first publications, letters starting with cher ami and their
agreement to advance the project to the next level by including more stakeholders and
developing the Cité mondiale. This led to the second publication by Paul Otlet, La Cité
mondiale in February 1929, which unexpectedly traumatized the diplomatic environment in
Geneva. Although both tried to organize personal meetings with key stakeholders, the project
didn't find support for its realization, especially after Switzerland had withdrawn its offer of
providing extraterritorial land for Cité mondiale. Instead, Le Corbusier focussed on his Ville
Radieuse concept, which was presented at the 3rd CIAM meeting in Brussels in 1930.[24]
He considered Cité mondiale as “a closed case”, and withdrew himself from the political
environment by considering himself without any political color, “since the groups that gather
around our ideas are, militaristic bourgeois, communists, monarchists, socialists, radicals,
League of Nations and fascists. When all colors are mixed, only white is the result. That
stands for prudence, neutrality, decantation and the human search for truth.”[25]
GOVERNING THE MUNDANEUM

Le Corbusier considered himself and his work “apolitical” or “above politics”.[26] Otlet,
however, was more aware of the political force of his project. “Yet it is important to predict.
To know in order to predict and to predict in order to control, was Comte's positive
philosophy. Prediction doesn't cost a thing, was added by a master of contemporary urbanism
(Le Corbusier).”[27] Lobbying for the Cité mondiale project, That prediction doesn't cost
anything and is “preparing the ways for the coming years”, Le Corbusier wrote to Arthur

Fontaine and Albert Thomas from the International Labor Organization that prediction is
free and “preparing the ways for the coming years”.[28] Free because statistical data is always
available, but he didn't seem to consider that prediction is a form of governing. A similar
premise underlies the present domination of the smart city ideologies, where large amounts of
data are used to predict for the sake of efficiency. Although most of the actors behind these
ideas consider themselves apolitical, the governmental aspect is more than obvious. A form of
control and government, which is not only biopolitical but rather epistemic. The data is not
only used to standardize units for architecture, but also to determine categories of knowledge
that restrict life to the normality of what can be classified. What becomes clear in this
juxtaposition of Le Corbusier's and Paul Otlet's work is that the standardization of
architecture goes hand in hand with an epistemic standardization because it limits what can
be thought, experienced and lived to what is already there. This architecture has to be
considered as an “epistemic object”, which exemplifies the cultural logic of its time.[29] By its
presence it brings the abstract cultural logic underlying its conception into the everyday
experience, and becomes with material, form and function an actor that performs an epistemic
practice on its inhabitants and users. In this case: the conception that everything can be
known, represented and (pre)determined through data.

P.242

P.243

1. Paul Otlet, Monde: essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde, Sentiment du Monde, Action organisee et Plan du Monde
, (Bruxelles: Editiones Mundeum 1935): 448.
2. Steve Lohr, Sidewalk Labs, a Start-Up Created by Google, Has Bold Aims to Improve City Living New, in York Times
11.06.15, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/technology/sidewalk-labs-a-start-up-created-by-google-has-bold-aims-toimprove-city-living.html?_r=0, quoted here is Dan Doctoroff, founder of Google Sidewalk Labs

3. Dan Doctoroff, 10.06.2015, http://www.sidewalkinc.com/relevant
4. Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venezia: Marsilio,
1982): 128; See also: L. Van der Swaelmen, Préliminaires d'art civique (Leynde 1916): 164 – 299.
5. Larry Page, Press release, 10.06.2015, http://www.sidewalkinc.com/
6. Le Corbusier, “A Contemporary City” in The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, (New York: Dover Publications 1987):
164.
7. ibid.: 105 & 126.
8. ibid.: 108.
9. Rayward, W Boyd, “Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868–1944) and Hypertext” in Journal of the American Society for
Information Science, (Volume 45, Issue 4, May 1994): 235.
10. The french term dispositif or translated apparatus, refers to Michel Foucault's description of a merely strategic function, “a
thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms regulatory decisions, laws,
administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as
the unsaid.” This distinction allows to go beyond the mere object, and rather deconstruct all elements involved in the production
conditions and relate them to the distribution of power. See: Michel Foucault, “Confessions of the Flesh (1977) interview”, in
Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Colin Gordon (Ed.), (New York: Pantheon Books 1980): 194 –
200.
11. Bernd Frohmann, “The role of facts in Paul Otlet’s modernist project of documentation”, in European Modernism and the
Information Society, Rayward, W.B. (Ed.), (London: Ashgate Publishers 2008): 79.
12. “La régularisation de l’architecture et sa tendance à l’urbanisme total aident à mieux comprendre le livre et ses propres
desiderata fonctionnels et intégraux.” See: Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation, (Bruxelles: Mundaneum, Palais Mondial,
1934): 329.
13. “L'urbanisme est l'art d'aménager l'espace collectif en vue d'accroîte le bonheur humain général; l'urbanisation est le résulat de
toute l'activité qu'une Société déploie pour arriver au but qu'elle se propose; l'expression matérielle (corporelle) de son
organisation.” ibid.: 205.
14. Thomas Pearce, Mettre des pierres autour des idées, Paul Otlet, de Cité Mondiale en de modernistische stedenbouw in de jaren
1930, (KU Leuven: PhD Thesis 2007): 39.
15. Volker Welter, Biopolis Patrick Geddes and the City of Life. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT 2003).
16. Letter from Paul Otlet to Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Brussels 2nd April 1928. See: Giuliano Gresleri and Dario
Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venezia: Marsilio, 1982): 221-223.
17. W. Boyd Rayward (Ed.), European Modernism and the Information Society. (London: Ashgate Publishers 2008): 129.
18. “Le Mundaneum est une Idée, une Institution, une Méthode, un Corps matériel de traveaux et collections, un Edifice, un
Réseau.” See: Paul Otlet, Monde: essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde, Sentiment du Monde, Action organisee et
Plan du Monde, (Bruxelles: Editiones Mundeum 1935): 448.
19. Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venezia: Marsilio,
1982): 223.
20. Le Corbusier, Radiant City, (New York: The Orion Press 1964): 27.
21. http://www.sidewalkinc.com/
22. Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venezia: Marsilio,
1982): 128
23. ibid.: 232.
24. ibid.: 129.
25. ibid.: 255.
26. Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002): 20.
27. “Savoir, pour prévoir afin de pouvoir, a été la lumineuse formule de Comte. Prévoir ne coûte rien, a ajouté un maître de
l'urbanisme contemporain (Le Corbusier).” See: Paul Otlet, Monde: essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde,
Sentiment du Monde, Action organisee et Plan du Monde, (Bruxelles: Editiones Mundeum 1935): 407.
28. Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venezia: Marsilio,
1982): 241.
29. Considering architecture as an object of knowledge formation, the term “epistemic object” by the German philosopher Günter
Abel, helps bring forth the epistemic characteristic of architecture. Epistemic objects according to Abel are these, on which our
knowledge and empiric curiosity are focused. They are objects that perform an active contribution to what can be thought and
how it can be thought. Moreover because one cannot avoid architecture, it determines our boundaries (of thinking). See:
Günter Abel, Epistemische Objekte – was sind sie und was macht sie so wertvoll?, in: Hingst, Kai-Michael; Liatsi, Maria
(ed.), (Tübingen: Pragmata, 2008).

P.244

P.245

La ville
intelligente
- Ville
de la
connaissance
DENNIS POHL

Selon les mots de Paul Otlet, le Mundaneum est « une idée, une institution,
une méthode, un corpus matériel de travaux et de collections, une construction,
un réseau. » Il est devenu le projet d'une vie qu'il a tenté de mettre sur pied
avec Henri La Fontaine au début du 20e siècle. La collaboration avec Le
Corbusier se limitait au projet architectural d'un centre d'informations, de
science et d'éducation qui conduira à l'idée d'un « World Civic Center », à
Genève. Cependant, le discours dialectique entre les deux utopistes ne s'est
pas limité à une réalisation commissionnée, il a révélé la relation entre une
conception positiviste spécifique de la connaissance et l'architecture ; le
système de l'information et la distribution spatiale d'après des principes
d'efficacité. Une notion qui a apporté la base de ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui
la Ville intelligente.
[1]

FORMULER LE MONDANEUM
[2]

« Nous sommes à l'aube d'un moment historique pour les villes » « Nous sommes à
l'aube d'une transformation historique des villes À une époque où les préoccupations
pour l'égalité urbaine, les coûts, la santé et l'environnement augmentent, un
changement technologique sans précédent va permettre aux villes d'être plus efficaces,
[3]
réactives, flexibles et résistantes. »

P.246

P.247

OTLET, SCHÉMA ET RÉALITÉ

CORBUSIER, CIRCULATION DU TRAFIC
ACTUELLE ET IDÉALE

En 1927, Le Corbusier a participé à une
compétition de design pour le siège de la
Ligue des nations. Cependant, ses
propositions furent rejetées. C'est à ce
moment qu'il a rencontré, pour la première
fois, son cher ami Paul Otlet. Tous deux
connaissaient déjà les idées et les écrits de
l'autre, comme le montre leur utilisation des
plans, mais également les suppositions
épistémiques à la base de leur vues sur le
monde. Avant de rencontrer Le Corbusier,
Paul Otlet était fasciné par l'idée d'un
urbanisme scientifique qui organise
systématiquement tous les éléments de la vie
par des infrastructures de flux. Il avait été
convaincu de travailler avec Van der
Saelmen, qui avait déjà prévu une ville
monde sur le site de Tervuren, près de
Bruxelles, en 1919.[4]

Pour Paul Otlet, c'était la première fois que
deux notions de pratiques différentes se
rassemblaient, à savoir un environnement
ordonné et structuré d'après des principes de
rationalisation et de taylorisme. D'un côté, la
rationalisation: une pratique épistémique qui
réduit toutes les relations à des moyens et
des fins définissables. D'un autre, le
taylorisme: une possibilité d'analyse et de
synthèse des flux de travail fonctionnant
selon les règles de l'efficacité économique et
VAN DER SWAELMEN - TERVUREN, 1916
productive. De nos jours, les deux principes
sont considérés comme des synonymes : si
tous les modes de production sont réduits au
travail, alors l'efficacité peut être rationnellement déterminée à par les moyens et les fins.
« En améliorant la technologie urbaine, il est possible d'améliorer de manière
significative la vie de milliards de gens dans le monde. […] nous voulons encourager
les efforts existants dans des domaines comme l'hébergement, l'énergie, le transport et le
gouvernement afin de résoudre des problèmes réels auxquels les citadins font face au
[5]
quotidien. »

Pendant ce temps, en 1922, Le Corbusier avait développé son modèle théorique du Plan
Voisin qui a servi de projet pour une vision de Paris avec trois millions d'habitants. Dans la
publication de 1925 d'Urbanisme, son objectif principal est la construction « d'un édifice
théoretique rigoureux, à formuler des principes fondamentaux d'urbanisme moderne. »[6] Pour
Le Corbusier, « la statistique est implacable », car « la statistique montre le passé et esquisse
l’avenir »[7], dès lors, une telle formule doit être basée sur l'objectivité des diagrammes, des
données et des cartes.

P.248

P.249

De plus, « la statisique donne la situation
exacte de l’heure présente, mais aussi les
états antérieurs ; [...] (à travers les
statistiques) nous pouvons pénétrer dans
l’avenir et aquérir des certitudes anticipées ».
[8]
À partir de l'analyse des preuves
statistiques, il conclut que la vieille ville de
Paris devait être démolie afin d'être
remplacée par une nouvelle. Cependant, il
n'est pas arrivé à une formule concrète, mais
à un plan approximatif.
CORBUSIER - SCHÉMA POUR UNE
CIRCULATION DU TRAFIC

À la place, une formule comprenant chaque
entité atomique fut développée par son ami
Paul Otlet en réponse à la question qu'il
publia dans Monde pour savoir si le monde
pouvait être exprimé par une entité
unificatrice déterminée. Voici le rêve de
Paul Otlet : une « représentation
permanente et complète du monde entier »[9]
dans un même endroit.

Paul Otlet comprit rapidement le potentiel
actif de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme en
LA FORMULE D'OTLET
tant que dispositif stratégique qui place un
individu dans un environnement spécifique
et façonne sa compréhension du monde.[10]
Un monde qui peut être déterminé par des faits vérifiables à travers la connaissance. Il a
pensé son Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique comme une
« architecture des idées », un manuel pour collecter et organiser la connaissance du monde
en l'association avec les développements architecturaux contemporains.

Étant donné que les nouvelles formes modernistes et
l'utilisation de matériaux propageaient l'abondance
d'éléments décoratifs, Paul Otlet croyait en la possibilité
du langage comme modèle de « données brutes », le
réduisant aux informations essentielles et aux faits sans
ambiguïté, tout en se débarrassant de tous les éléments
inefficaces et subjectifs.

From A bag but is language nothing
of words:
Tim Berners-Lee: [...] Make a
beautiful website, but first give us the
unadulterated data, we want the data.
We want unadulterated data. OK, we
have to ask for raw data now. And
I'm going to ask you to practice that,
OK? Can you say "raw"?

« Des informations, dont tout déchet et élément étrangers
Audience: Raw.
ont été supprimés, seront présentées d'une manière assez
analytique. Elles seront encodées sur différentes feuilles
Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say
"data"?
ou cartes plutôt que confinées dans des volumes, » ce qui
permettra l'annotation standardisée de l'hypertexte pour
Audience: Data.
la classification décimale universelle ( CDU ).[11] De plus,
TBL: Can you say "now"?
la « régulation à travers l'architecture et sa tendance à un
urbanisme total favoriseront une meilleure compréhension Audience: Now!
du livre Traité de documentation ainsi que du désidérata
TBL: Alright, "raw data now"!
fonctionnel et holistique adéquat. »[12] Une abstraction
[...]
permettrait à Paul Otlet de constituer « l'équation de
l'urbanisme » comme un type de sociologie : U = u(S),
car selon sa définition, l'urbanisme « L'urbanisme est l'art
From The Smart City - City of
d'aménager l'espace collectif en vue d'accroître le
Knowledge:
As new modernist forms and use of
bonheur humain général ; l'urbanisation est le résultat de
materials propagated the abundance
toute l'activité qu'une Société déploie pour arriver au but
of decorative elements, Otlet believed
qu'elle se propose ; l'expression matérielle (corporelle)
in the possibility of language as a
model of 'raw data', reducing it to
de son organisation. »[13] La position scientifique qui
essential information and
détermine toutes les valeurs caractéristiques d'une
unambiguous facts, while removing all
certaine région par une classification et une observation
inefficient assets of ambiguity or
subjectivity.
systémiques a été avancée par le biologiste écossais et
planificateur de villes, Patrick Geddes, qui fut invité par
Paul Otlet pour l'exposition universelle de 1913 à Gand
afin de présenter à un public international sa Town Planning Exhibition.[14] Patrick Geddes
allait inévitablement plus loin dans sa croyance positiviste en une totalité de la science, une
croyance qui découle des idées d'Auguste Compte, de Frederic Le Play et d'Elisée Reclus,
pour atteindre une compréhension unifiée du développement urbain dans un contexte
spécifique. Cette position permettrait de représenter à travers des données la complexité d'un
environnement habité.[15]
PENSER LE MUNDANEUM

La seule personne que Paul Otlet estimait capable de réaliser l'architecture du Mundaneum
était Le Corbusier, qu'il approcha pour la première fois au printemps 1928. Dans une de

P.250

P.251

ses premières lettres, il évoqua le besoin de lier « l'idée et la construction, dans toute sa
représentation symbolique. […] Mundaneum opus maximum.” En plus d'être un centre de
documentation, d'informations, de science et d'éducation, le complexe devrait lier l'Union des
associations internationales (UAI), fondée par La Fontaine et Otlet en 1907, et la Ligue
des nations. « Une représentation morale et matérielle de The greatest Society of the nations
(humanité) ; » une ville internationale située dans une zone extraterritoriale à Genève.[16]
Malgré les différents milieux dont ils étaient issus, ils pouvaient facilement se comprendre
puisqu'ils « utilisaient fréquemment des termes similaires comme plan, analyse, classification,
abstraction, standardisation et synthèse, non seulement pour un ordre conceptuel dans leurs
disciplines et l'organisation de leur connaissance, mais également dans l'action humaine. »[17]
De plus, l'apparence des termes dans leurs publications les plus importantes est frappante.
Pour n'en nommer que quelques-uns : esprit, humanité, travail, système et histoire. Ces
circonstances ont conduit les deux utopistes à penser le Mundaneum comme un système
plutôt que comme un type de construction central singulier ; le processus de développement
cherchait à inclure autant de ressources que possible. Puisque « Le Mundaneum est une
Idée, une Institution, une Méthode, un Corps matériel de travaux et collections, un Édifice,
un Réseau. »[18] il devait être conceptualisé comme un « plan organique avec possibilité
d'expansion à différentes échelles grâce à la multiplication de chaque partie. »[19] La
possibilité d'expansion et la redistribution organique des éléments adaptées à de nouvelles
nécessités et besoins garantit l'efficacité du système, à savoir en intégrant plus de ressources
en permanence. En concevant et normalisant des formes de vie, même pour le plus petit
élément, le modernisme a propagé une nouvelle forme de vie qui garantirait l'efficacité
optimale. Paul Otlet a soutenu et encouragé Le Corbusier avec ces mots : « Le vingtième
siècle est appelé à construire une toute nouvelle civilisation. De l'efficacité à l'efficacité, de la
rationalisation à la rationalisation, il doit s'élever et atteindre l'efficacité et la rationalisation
totales. […] L'architecture est l'une des meilleures bases, non seulement de la reconstruction
(le nom étriqué et déformant donné à toutes les activités d'après-guerre), mais à la
construction intellectuelle et sociale à laquelle notre ère devrait oser prétendre. »[20] Comme la
Wohnmaschine, dans le célèbre projet d'habitation du Corbusier, Unité d'habitation, la
distribution des éléments est établie en fonction des besoins de l'homme. Le principe qui sous
tend cette notion est l'idée que les besoins et les désirs de l'homme peuvent être déterminés,
normalisés et standardisés selon des modèles géométriques d'objectivité.
« rendre le transport plus efficace et diminuer le coût de la vie, la consommation
[21]
d'énergie et aider le gouvernement à fonctionner plus efficacement »
CONSTRUIRE LE MUNDANEUM

Dans la première phase de travail, de mars à septembre 1928, les plans du Mundaneum
ressemblaient plus à un travail commissionné qu'à une collaboration. À la troisième personne
du singulier, Paul Otlet a soumis des descriptions et des projets organisationnels qui
représenteraient les structures institutionnelles de manière schématique. En échange, Le
Corbusier a réalisé le brouillon des plans architecturaux et les descriptions détaillées, ce qui

conduisit à la publication du N° 128 Mundaneum, imprimée par Associations
Internationales à Bruxelles.[22] Le Corbusier semblait un peu moins enthousiaste que Paul
Otlet concernant le Mundaneum, principalement à cause de son scepticisme vis-à-vis de la
Ligue des nations dont il disait qu'elle était « fourvoyée » et « une création prémachiniste ».[23]
Le rejet de sa proposition pour le palais de la Ligue des nations en 1927, exprimé avec
colère dans une déclaration publique, jouait peut-être également un rôle. Cependant, la
seconde phase, de septembre 1928 à août 1929, fut marquée par une amitié solide dont
témoigne l'amplification du débat international après leurs premières publications, des lettres
commençant par « cher ami », leur accord concernant l'avancement du projet au prochain
niveau avec l'intégration d'actionnaires et le développement de la Cité mondiale. Cela
conduisit à la seconde publication de Paul Otlet, la Cité mondiale, en février 1929, qui
traumatisa de manière inattendue l'environnement diplomatique de Genève. Même si tous
deux tentèrent d'organiser des entretiens personnels avec des acteurs clés, le projet ne trouva
pas de soutien pour sa réalisation, d'autant moins après le retrait de la proposition de la
Suisse de fournir un territoire extraterritorial pour la Cité mondiale. À la place, Le Corbusier
s'est concentré sur son concept de la Ville Radieuse qui fut présenté lors du 3e CIAM à
Bruxelles, en 1930.[24] Il considérait la Cité mondiale comme « une affaire classée » et s'était
retiré de l'environnement politique en considérant qu'il n'avait aucune couleur politique
« puisque les groupes qui se rassemblent autour de nos idées sont des bourgeois militaristes,
des communistes, des monarchistes, des socialistes, des radicaux, la Ligue des nations et des
fascistes. Lorsque toutes les couleurs sont mélangées, seul le blanc ressort. Il représente la
prudence, la neutralité, la décantation et la recherche humaine de la vérité. »[25]
DIRIGER LE MUNDANEUM

Le Corbusier considérait son travail et lui-même comme étant « apolitiques » ou « au-dessus
de la politique ».[26] Cependant, Paul Otlet était plus conscient de la force politique de ce
projet. « Savoir, pour prévoir afin de pouvoir, a été la lumineuse formule de Comte. Prévoir
ne coûte rien, a ajouté un maitre de l'urbanisme contemporain (Le Corbusier). »[27] En faisant
le lobby du projet de la Cité mondiale, cette prévision ne coûte rien et « prépare les années à
venir », Le Corbusier écrivit à Arthur Fontaine et Albert Thomas depuis l'Organisation
internationale de travail que la prévision était gratuite et « préparait les années à venir ».[28]
Gratuite, car les données statistiques sont toujours disponibles, cependant, il ne semblait pas
considérer la prévision comme une forme de pouvoir. Une prémisse similaire est à l'origine
de la domination actuelle des idéologies de la ville intelligente où de grandes quantités de
données sont utilisées pour prévoir au nom de l'efficacité. Même si la plupart des acteurs
derrière ces idées se considèrent apolitiques, l'aspect gouvernemental est plus qu'évident.
Une forme de contrôle et de gouvernement n'est pas seulement biopolitique, mais plutôt
épistémique. Les données sont non seulement utilisées pour standardiser les unités pour
l'architecture, mais également pour déterminer les catégories de connaissance qui restreignent
la vie à la normalité dans laquelle elle peut être classée. Dans cette juxtaposition du travail de
Le Corbusier et Paul Otlet, il devient clair que la standardisation de l'architecture va de pair

P.252

P.253

avec une standardisation épistémique, car elle limite ce qui peut être pensé, ressenti et vécu à
ce qui existe déjà. Cette architecture doit être considérée comme un « objet épistémique »
qui illustre la logique culturelle de son époque.[29] Par sa présence, elle apporte la logique
culturelle abstraite sous-jacente à sa conception dans l'expérience quotidienne et devient, au
côté de la matière, de la forme et de la fonction, un acteur qui accomplit une pratique
épistémique sur ses habitants et ses usagers. Dans ce cas : la conception selon laquelle tout
peut être connu, représenté et (pré)déterminé à travers les données.

Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

1. Paul Otlet, Monde : essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde, Sentiment du Monde, Action organisée et Plan du
Monde, (Bruxelles : Editiones Mundeum 1935) : 448.

P.254

P.255

2. Steve Lohr, Sidewalk Labs, a Start-Up Created by Google, Has Bold Aims to Improve City Living New, dans le York Times
11/06/15, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/technology/sidewalk-labs-a-start-up-created-by-google-has-bold-aims-toimprove-city-living.html?_r=0, citation de Dan Doctoroff, fondateur de Google Sidewalk Labs
3. Dan Doctoroff, 10/06/2015, http://www.sidewalkinc.com/relevant
4. Giuliano Gresleri et Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale : Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venise : Marsilio,
1982) : 128 ; Voir aussi : L. Van der Swaelmen, Préliminaires d'art civique (Leynde 1916) : 164 - 299.
5. Larry Page, Communiqué de presse, 10/06/2015, http://www.sidewalkinc.com/
6. Le Corbusier, « Une Ville Contemporaine » dans Urbanisme, (Paris : Les Éditions G. Crès & Cie 1924) : 158.
7. ibid. : 115 et 97.
8. ibid. : 100.
9. Rayward, W Boyd, « Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868–1944) and Hypertext » dans le Journal of the American Society
for Information Science, (Volume 45, Numéro 4, mai 1994) : 235.
10. Le terme français « dispositif » fait référence à la description de Michel Foucault d'une fonction simplement stratégique, « un
ensemble réellement hétérogène constitué de discours, d'institutions, de formes architecturales, de décisions régulatrices, de lois,
de mesures administratives, de déclarations scientifiques, philosophiques, morales et de propositions philanthropiques. En
résumé, ce qui est dit comme ce qui ne l'est pas. » La distinction permet d'aller plus loin que le simple objet, et de déconstruire
tous les éléments impliqués dans les conditions de production et de les lier à la distribution des pouvoirs. Voir : Michel Foucault,
« Confessions of the Flesh (1977) interview », dans Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Colin
Gordon (Éd.), (New York : Pantheon Books 1980) : 194 - 200.
11. Bernd Frohmann, « The role of facts in Paul Otlet’s modernist project of documentation », dans European Modernism and the
Information Society, Rayward, W.B. (Éd.), (Londres : Ashgate Publishers 2008) : 79.
12. « La régularisation de l’architecture et sa tendance à l’urbanisme total aident à mieux comprendre le livre et ses propres
désiderata fonctionnels et intégraux. » Voir : Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation, (Bruxelles : Mundaneum, Palais Mondial,
1934) : 329.
13. ibid. : 205.
14. Thomas Pearce, Mettre des pierres autour des idées, Paul Otlet, de Cité Mondiale en de modernistische stedenbouw in de
jaren 1930, (KU Leuven : PhD Thesis 2007) : 39.
15. Volker Welter, Biopolis Patrick Geddes and the City of Life. (Cambridge, Mass : MIT 2003).
16. Lettre de Paul Otlet à Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret, Bruxelles, 2 avril 1928. Voir : Giuliano Gresleri et Dario Matteoni.
La Città Mondiale : Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venise : Marsilio, 1982) : 221-223.
17. W. Boyd Rayward (Éd.), European Modernism and the Information Society. (Londres : Ashgate Publishers 2008) : 129.
18. Voir : Paul Otlet, Monde : essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde, Sentiment du Monde, Action organisée et Plan du
Monde, (Bruxelles : Editiones Mundeum 1935) : 448.
19. Giuliano Gresleri et Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale : Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venise : Marsilio,
1982) : 223.
20. Le Corbusier, Radiant City, (New York : The Orion Press 1964) : 27.
21. http://www.sidewalkinc.com/
22. Giuliano Gresleri et Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale : Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venise : Marsilio,
1982) : 128
23. ibid. : 232.
24. ibid. : 129.
25. ibid. : 255.
26. Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, (Cambridge : MIT Press, 2002) : 20.
27. Voir : Paul Otlet, Monde : essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde, Sentiment du Monde, Action organisée et Plan du
Monde, (Bruxelles : Editiones Mundeum 1935) : 407.
28. Giuliano Gresleri et Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale : Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. (Venise : Marsilio,
1982) : 241.
29. En considérant l'architecture comme un objet de formation du savoir, le terme « objet épistémique » du philosophe Günter Abel
aide à produire la caractéristique épistémique de l'architecture. D'après Günter Abel, les objets épistémiques sont ceux sur
lesquels notre connaissance et notre curiosité empirique sont concentrés. Ce sont des objets ont une contribution active en ce qui
concerne ce qui peut être pensé et la manière dont cela peut être pensé. De plus, puisque personne ne peut éviter l'architecture,
elle détermine nos limites (de pensée). Voir : Günter Abel, Epistemische Objekte – was sind sie und was macht sie so
wertvoll?, dans : Hingst, Kai-Michael; Liatsi, Maria (éd.), (Tübingen : Pragmata, 2008).

The
Itinerant
Archive
The project of the Mundaneum and its many protagonists is undoubtedly
linked to the context of early 19th century Brussels. King Leopold II , in an
attempt to awaken his countries' desire for greatness, let a steady stream of
capital flow into the city from his private colonies in Congo. Located on the
crossroad between France, Germany, The Netherlands and The United
Kingdom, the Belgium capital formed a fertile ground for ambitious institutional
projects with international ambitions, such as the Mundaneum. Its tragic
demise was unfortunately equally at home in Brussels. Already in Otlet's
lifetime, the project fell prey to the dis-interest of its former patrons, not
surprising after World War I had shaken their confidence in the beneficial
outcomes of a global knowledge infrastructure. A complex entanglement of disinterested management and provincial politics sent the numerous boxes and
folders on a long trajectory through Brussels, until they finally slipped out of
the city. It is telling that the Capital of Europe has been unable to hold on to its
pertinent past.

P.256

P.257

This tour is a kind of itinerant monument to the Mundaneum in Brussels. It
takes you along the many temporary locations of the archives, guided by the
words of care-takers, reporters and biographers that have crossed it's path.
Following the increasingly dispersed and dwindling collection through the city
and centuries, you won't come across any material trace of its passage. You
might discover many unknown corners of Brussels though.
1919: MUSÉE INTERNATIONAL

Outre le Répertoire bibliographique universel et un Musée de la presse qui
comptera jusqu’à 200.000 spécimens de journaux du monde entier, on y trouvera
quelque 50 salles, sorte de musée de l’humanité technique et scientifique. Cette
décennie représente l’âge d’or pour le Mundaneum, même si le gros de ses
collections fut constitué entre 1895 et 1914, avant l’existence du Palais Mondial.
L’accroissement des collections ne se fera, par la suite, plus jamais dans les mêmes
[1]
proportions.
En 1920, le Musée international et les institutions créées par Paul Otlet et Henri
La Fontaine occupent une centaine de salles. L’ensemble sera désormais appelé
Palais Mondial ou Mundaneum. Dans les années 1920, Paul Otlet et Henri La
Fontaine mettront également sur pied l’Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum,
[2]
encyclopédie illustrée composée de tableaux sur planches mobiles.

Start at Parc du Cinquantenaire 11,
Brussels in front of the entrance of
what is now Autoworld.

In 1919, significantly delayed by World War I, the Musée international finally opened. The
project had been conceptualised by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine already ten years
earlier and was meant to be a mix between a documentation center, conference venue and
educational display. It occupied the left wing of the magnificent buildings erected in the Parc
Cinquantenaire for the Grand Concours International des Sciences et de l'industrie.
Museology merged with the International Institute of
From House, City, World, Nation,
Bibliography (IIB) which had its offices in the same
Globe:
building. The ever-expanding index card catalog had
The ever ambitious process of
already been accessible to the public since 1914. The
building the Mundaneum archives
took place in the context of a growing
project would be later known as the World Palace or
internationalisation of society, while at
Mundaneum. Here, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine
the same time the social gap was
started to work on their Encyclopaedia Universalis
increasing due to the expansion of
Mundaneum, an illustrated encyclopaedia in the form of a industrial society. Furthermore, the
internationalisation of finances and
mobile exhibition.
relations did not only concern
Walk under
the colonnade
to your
right, and
you will
recognise the
former entrance

industrial society, it also acted as a
motivation to structure social and
political networks, among others via
political negotiations and the
institution of civil society organisations.

of Le Palais Mondial.

Only a few years after its delayed opening, the ambitious project started to lose support from
the Belgium government, who preferred to use the vast exhibition spaces for commercial
activities. In 1922 and 1924, Le Palais Mondial was temporarily closed to make space for
an international rubber fair.

P.258

P.259

1934: MUNDANEUM MOVED TO HOME OF PAUL OTLET

Si dans de telles conditions le Palais Mondial devait définitivement rester fermé, il
semble bien qu’il n’y aurait plus place dans notre Civilisation pour une institution
d’un caractère universel, inspirée de l’idéal indiqué en ces mots à son entrée : Par
la Liberté, l’Égalité et la Fraternité mondiales − dans la Foi, l’Espérance et la
[3]
Charité humaines − vers le Travail, le Progrès et la Paix de tous !
Cato, my wife, has been absolutely devoted to my work. Her savings and jewels
testify to it; her invaded house testify to it; her collaboration testifies to it; her wish
to see it finished after me testifies to it; her modest little fortune has served for the
[4]
constitution of my work and of my thought.

Walk under the Arc de Triumph and exit
the Jubelfeestpark on your left. On
Avenue des Nerviens turn left into
Sint Geertruidestraat. Turn left onto
Kolonel Van Gelestraat and right onto
Rue Louis Hap. Turn left onto
Oudergemselaan and right onto Rue
Fetis 44.

In 1934, the ministry of public works decided to close the Mundaneum in order to make
place for an extension of the Royal Museum of Art and History. An outraged Otlet posted in
front of the closed entrance with his colleagues, but to no avail. The official address of the
Mundaneum was 'temporarily' transferred to the house at Rue Fétis 44 where he lived with
his second wife, Cato Van Nederhasselt.

P.260

P.261

Part of the archives were moved Rue Fétis, but many boxes and most of the card-indexes
remained stored in the Cinquantenaire building. Paul Otlet continued a vigorous program of
lectures and meetings in other places, including at home.

1941: MUNDANEUM IN PARC LÉOPOLD

The upper galleries ... are one big pile of rubbish, one inspector noted in his report.
It is an impossible mess, and high time for this all to be cleared away. The Nazis
evidently struggled to make sense of the curious spectacle before them. The
institute and its goals cannot be clearly defined. It is some sort of ... 'museum for
the whole world,' displayed through the most embarrassing and cheap and
[5]
primitive methods.
Distributed in two large workrooms, in corridors, under stairs, and in attic rooms
and a glass-roofed dissecting theatre at the top of the building, this residue
gradually fell prey to the dust and damp darkness of the building in its lower
regions, and to weather and pigeons admitted through broken panes of glass in the
roof in the upper rooms. On the ground floor of the building was a dimly lit, small,

steeply-raked lecture theatre. On either side of its dais loomed busts of the
[6]
founders.
Derrière les vitres sales, j’aperçus un amoncellement de livres, de liasses de papiers
contenus par des ficelles, des dossiers dressés sur des étagères de fortune. Des
feuilles volantes échappées des cartons s’amoncelaient dans les angles de l’immense
pièce, du papier pelure froissé se mêlait au gravat et à la poussière. Des récipients
de fortune avaient été placés entre les caisses et servaient à récolter l’eau de pluie.
Un pigeon avait réussi à pénétrer à l’intérieur et se cognait inlassablement contre
[7]
l’immense baie vitrée qui fermait le bâtiment.
Annually in this room in the years after Otlet's death until the late 1960's, the
busts garlanded with floral wreaths for the occasion, Otlet and La Fontaine's
colleagues and disciples, Les Amis du Palais Mondial, met in a ceremony of
remembrance. And it was Otlet, theorist and visionary, who held their
imaginations most in beneficial thrall as they continued to work after his death, just
as they had in those last days of his life, among the mouldering, discorded
collections of the Mundaneum, themselves gradually overtaken by age, their
[8]
numbers dwindling.

Exit the Fétisstraat onto Chaussee de
Wavre, turn right and follow into the
Vijverstraat. Turn right on Rue Gray,
cross Jourdan plein into Parc Leopold.
Right at the entrance is the building
of l’Institut d’Anatomie Raoul
Warocqué.

In 1941, the Nazi-Germans occupying Belgium wanted to use the spaces in the Palais du
Cinquantenaire but they were still used to store the collections of the Mundaneum. They
decided to move the archives to Parc Léopold except for a mass of periodicals, which were
simply destroyed. A vast quantity of files related to international associations were assumed to
have propaganda value for the German war effort. This part of the archive was transferred
back to Berlin and apparently re-appeared in the Stanford archives (?) many years later.
They must have been taken there by American soldiers after World War II.
Until the 1970's, the Mundaneum (or what was left of it) remained in the decaying building
in Parc Léopold. Georges Lorphèvre and André Colet continued to carry on the work of the
Mundaneum with the help of a few now elderly Amis du Palais Mondial, members of the
association with the same name that was founded in 1921. It is here that the Belgian
librarian André Canonne, the Australian scholar Warden Boyd Rayward and the Belgian
documentary-maker Françoise Levie came across the Mundaneum archives for the very first
time.

P.262

P.263

2009: OFFICES GOOGLE BELGIUM

A natural affinity exists between Google's modern project of making the world’s
information accessble and the Mundaneum project of two early 20th century
Belgians. Otlet and La Fontaine imagined organizing all the world's information on paper cards. While their dream was discarded, the Internet brought it back to
reality and it's little wonder that many now describe the Mundaneum as the paper
Google. Together, we are showing the way to marry our paper past with our
[9]
digital future.

Exit the park onto Steenweg op
Etterbeek and walk left to number
176-180.

In 2009, Google Belgium opened its offices at the Chaussée d'Etterbeek 180. It is only a
short walk away from the last location that Paul Otlet has been able to work on the
Mundaneum project.
Celebrating the discovery of its "European roots", the company has insisted on the
connection between the project of Paul Otlet, and their own mission to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful. To celebrate the desired
connection to the Forefather of documentation, the building is said to have a Mundaneum
meeting room. In the lobby, you can find a vitrine with one of the drawers filled with UDCindex cards, on loan from the Mundaneum archive center in Mons.

1944: GRAVE OF PAUL OTLET

When I am no more, my documentary instrument (my papers) should be kept
together, and, in order that their links should become more apparent, should be
sorted, fixed in successive order by a consecutive numbering of all the cards (like
[10]
the pages of a book).
Je le répète, mes papiers forment un tout. Chaque partie s’y rattache pour
constituer une oeuvre unique. Mes archives sont un "Mundus Mundaneum", un

P.264

P.265

outil conçu pour la connaissance du monde. Conservez-les; faites pour elles ce que
[11]
moi j’aurais fait. Ne les détruisez pas !

O P T I O N A L : Continue on Chaussée
d'Etterbeek toward Belliardstraat.
Turn left until you reach Rue de
Trèves. Turn right onto Luxemburgplein
and take bus 95 direction Wiener.

Paul Otlet dies in 1944 when he is 76 years old. His grave at the cemetary of Ixelles is
decorated with a globe and the inscription "Il ne fut rien sinon Mundanéen" (He was nothing
if not Mundanéen).
Exit the cemetary and walk toward
Avenue de la Couronne. At the
roundabout, turn left onto
Boondaalsesteenweg. Turn left onto
Boulevard Géneral Jacques and take
tram 25 direction Rogier.

Halfway your tram-journey you pass Square Vergote (Stop: Georges Henri), where Henri
Lafontaine and Mathilde Lhoest used to live. Statesman and Nobel-prize winner Henri
Lafontaine worked closely with Otlet and supported his projects throughout his life.
Get off at the stop Coteaux and follow
Rogierstraat until number 67.

1981: STORAGE AT AVENUE ROGIER 67

C'est à ce moment que le conseil d'administration, pour sauver les activités
(expositions, prêts gratuits, visites, congrès, exposés, etc.) vendit quelques pièces. Il
n'y a donc pas eu de vol de documents, contrairement à ce que certains affirment,
[12]
garantit de Louvroy.
In fact, not one of the thousands of objects contained in the hundred galleries of the
Cinquantenaire has survived into the present, not a single maquette, not a single
telegraph machine, not a single flag, though there are many photographs of the
[13]
exhibition rooms.
Mais je me souviens avoir vu à Bruxelles des meubles d'Otlet dans des caves
inondées. On dit aussi que des pans entiers de collections ont fait le bonheur des
amateurs sur les brocantes. Sans compter que le papier se conserve mal et que des
[14]
dépôts mal surveillés ont pollué des documents aujourd'hui irrécupérables.

This part of the walk takes about 45"
and will take you from the Ixelles
neighbourhood through Sint-Joost to
Schaerbeek; from high to low Brussels.

Continue on Steenweg op Etterbeek,
cross Rue Belliard and continue onto
Jean Reyplein. Take a left onto
Chaussée d'Etterbeek. If you prefer,
you can take a train at Bruxelles

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P.267

Schumann Station to North Station, or
continue following Etterbeekse
steenweg onto Square Marie-Louise.
Continue straight onto
Gutenbergsquare, Rue Bonneels which
becomes Braemtstraat at some point.
Cross Chausséee de Louvain and turn
left onto Oogststraat. Continue onto
Place Houwaert and Dwarsstraat.
Continue onto Chaussée de Haecht and
follow onto Kruidtuinstraat. Take a
slight right onto Rue Verte, turn left
onto Kwatrechtstraat and under the
North Station railroad tracks. Turn
right onto Rue du Progrès.
Rogierstraat is the first street on
your left.

In 1972, we find Les Amis du Mundaneum back at Chaussée de Louvain 969.
Apparently, the City of Brussels has moved the Mundaneum out of Parc Léopold into a
parking garage, 'a building rented by the ministry of Finances', 'in the direction of the SaintJosse-ten-Node station'.[15]. 10 years later, the collection is moved to the back-house of a
building at Avenue Rogier 67.
As a young librarian, Andre Canonne visits the collection at this address until he is in a
position to move the collection elsewhere.

1985: ESPACE MUNDANEUM UNDER PLACE ROGIER

On peut donc croire sauvées les collections du "Mundaneum" et a bon droit
espérer la fin de leur interminable errance. Au moment ou nous écrivons ces lignes,
des travaux d’aménagement d'un "Espace Mundaneum" sont en voie
[16]
d’achèvement au cour de Bruxelles.
L'acte fut signé par le ministre Philippe Monfils, président de l'exécutif. Son
prédécesseur, Philippe Moureaux, n'était pas du même avis. Il avait même acheté
pour 8 millions un immeuble de la rue Saint-Josse pour y installer le musée. Il
fallait en effet sauver les collections, enfouies dans l'arrière-cour d'une maison de
repos de l'avenue Rogier! (...) L'étage moins deux, propriété de la commune de
Saint-Josse, fut cédé par un bail emphytéotique de 30 ans à la Communauté, avec
un loyer de 800.000 F par mois. (...) Mais le Mundaneum est aussi en passe de
devenir une mystérieuse affaire en forme de pyramide. A l'étage moins un, la
commune de Saint-Josse et la société française «Les Pyramides» négocient la
construction d'un Centre de congrès (il remplace celui d'un piano-bar luxueux)
d'ampleur. Le montant de l'investissement est évalué à 150 millions (...) Et puis,
ce musée fantôme n'est pas fermé pour tout le monde. Il ouvre ses portes! Pas pour
y accueillir des visiteurs. On organise des soirées dansantes, des banquets dans la
grande salle. Deux partenaires (dont un traiteur) ont signé des contrats avec
l'ASBL Centre de lecture publique de la communauté française. Contrats
[17]
reconfirmés il y a quinze jours et courant pendant 3 ans encore!
Mais curieusement, les collections sont toujours avenue Rogier, malgré l'achat
d'un local rue Saint-Josse par la Communauté française, et malgré le transfert
officiel (jamais réalisé) au «musée» du niveau - 2 de la place Rogier. Les seules
choses qu'il contient sont les caisses de livres rétrocédées par la Bibliothèque
[18]
Royale qui ne savait qu'en faire.

P.268

P.269

Follow Avenue Rogier. Turn left onto
Brabantstraat until you cross under
the railroad tracks. Place Rogier is
on your right hand, marked by a large
overhead construction of a tilted
white dish.

In 1985, Andre Canonne convinced Les Amis du Palais Mondial to transfer the
responsability for the collection and mission of the association to la Centre de lecture
publique de la Communauté française based in Liege, the organisation that he now has
become the director of. It was agreed that the Mundaneum should stay in Brussels; the
documents mention a future location at the Rue Saint Josse 49, a building apparently
acquired for that purpose by the Communauté française.
Five years later, plans have changed. In 1990, the archives are being moved from their
temporary storage in Avenue Rogier and the Royal Library of Belgium to a new location in
Place Rogier -2. Under the guidance of André Canonne a "Mundaneum space" will be
opened in the center of Brussels, right above the Metro station Rogier. Unfortunately,
Canonne dies just weeks after the move has begun, and the Brussels' Espace Mundaneum
never opens its doors.
In the following three years, the collection remains in the same location but apparently
without much supervision. Journalists report that doors were left unlocked and that Metro
passengers could help themselves to handfuls of documents. The collection has in the mean
time attracted the attention of Elio di Rupo, at that time minister of education at la
Communauté française. It marks the beginning of the end of The Mundaneum as an itinerant
archive in Brussels.

You can end the tour here, or add two optional destinations:

1934: IMPRIMERIE VAN KEERBERGHEN IN RUE PIERS

O P T I O N A L :

(from Place Rogier, 20") Follow
Kruidtuinlaan onto Boulevard Baudouin
and onto Antwerpselaan, down in the
direction of the canal. At the
Sainctelette bridge, cross the canal
and take a slight left into Rue
Adolphe Lavallée. Turn left onto
Piersstraat. Alternatively, at Rogier
you can take a Metro to Ribaucourt
station, and walk from there.

At number 101 we find Imprimerie Van Keerberghen, the printer that produced and
distributed Le Traité de Documentation . In 1934, Otlet did not have enough money to pay
for the full print-run of the book and therefore the edition remained with Van Keerberghen
who would distribute the copies himself through mailorders. The plaque on the door dates
from the period that the Traité was printed. So far we have not been able to confirm whether
this family-business is still in operation.

P.270

P.271

RUE OTLET

O P T I O N A L :

(from Rue Piers, ca. 30") Follow Rue
Piers and turn left into
Merchtemsesteenweg and follow until
Chaussée de Gand, turn left. Turn
right onto Ransfortstraat and cross
Chaussée de Ninove. Turn left to
follow the canal onto Mariemontkaai
and left at Rue de Manchester to cross
the water. Continue onto
Liverpoolstraat, cross Chaussee de
Mons and continue onto Dokter De

Meersmanstraat until you meet Rue
Otlet.

(from Place Rogier, ca. 30") Follow
Boulevard du Jardin Botanique and turn
left onto Adolphe Maxlaan and Place De
Brouckère. Continue onto Anspachlaan,
turn right onto Rue du Marché aux
Poulets. Turn left onto
Visverkopersstraat and continue onto
Rue Van Artevelde. Continue straight
onto Anderlechtschesteenweg, continue
onto Chaussée de Mons. Turn left onto
Otletstraat. Alternatively you can
take tram 51 or 81 to Porte
D'Anderlecht.

Although it seems that this dreary street is named to honor Paul Otlet, it already
mysteriously appears on a map dated 1894 when Otlet was not even 26 years old [19] and
again on a map from 1910, when the Mundaneum had not yet opened it's doors.[20]

P.272

P.273

OUTSIDE BRUSSELS

1998: THE MUNDANEUM RESURRECTED

Bernard Anselme, le nouveau ministre-président de la Communauté française,
négocia le transfert à Mons, au grand dam de politiques bruxellois furieux de voir
cette prestigieuse collection quitter la capitale. (...) Cornaqué par Charles Picqué et
Elio Di Rupo, le transfert à Mons n'a pas mis fin aux ennuis du Mundaneum.
On créa en Hainaut une nouvelle ASBL chargée d'assurer le relais. C'était sans
compter avec l'ASBL Célès, héritage indépendant du CLPCF, évoqué plus haut,
que la Communauté avait fini par dissoudre. Cette association s'est toujours
considérée comme propriétaire des collections, au point de s'opposer régulièrement
à leur exploitation publique. Les faits lui ont donné raison: au début du mois de

mai, le Célès a obtenu du ministère de la Culture que cinquante millions lui soient
[21]
versés en contrepartie du droit de propriété.
The reestablishment of the Mundaneum in Mons as a museum and archive is in
my view a major event in the intellectual life of Belgium. Its opening attracted
[22]
considerable international interest at the time.
Le long des murs, 260 meubles-fichiers témoignaient de la démesure du projet.
Certains tiroirs, ouverts, étaient éclairés de l’intérieur, ce qui leur donnait une
impression de relief, de 3D. Un immense globe terrestre, tournant lentement sur
lui-même, occupait le centre de l’espace. Sous une voie lactée peinte à même le
plafond, les voix de Paul Otlet et d’Henri La Fontaine, interprétés par des
comédiens, s’élevaient au fur et à mesure que l’on s’approchait de tel ou tel
[23]
document.
L’Otletaneum, c’est à dire les archives et papiers personnels ayant appartenu à
Paul Otlet, représentait un fonds important, peu connu, mal répertorié, que l’on
pouvait cependant quantifier à la place qu’il occupait sur les étagères des réserves
situées à l’arrière du musée. Il y avait là 100 à 150 mètres de rayonnages, dont
une partie infime avait fait l’objet d’un classement. Le reste, c’est à dire une
soixantaine de boîtes à bananes‚ était inexploré. Sans compter l’entrepôt de
Cuesmes où le travail de recensement pouvait être estimé, me disait-il, à une
[24]
centaine d’années...
Après des multiples déménagements, un travail laborieux de sauvegarde entamé
par les successeurs, ce patrimoine unique ne finit pas de révéler ses richesses et ses
surprises. Au-delà de cette démarche originale entamée dans un esprit
philanthropique, le centre d’archives propose des collections documentaires à valeur
[25]
historique, ainsi que des archives spécialisées.

In 1993, after some armwrestling between different local fractions of the Parti Socialiste, the
collections of the Mundaneum are moved from Place Rogier to former departement store
L'independance in Mons, 40 kilometres from Brussels and home to Elio Di Rupo. Benoît
Peeters and François Schuiten design a theatrical scenography that includes a gigantic globe
and walls decorated with what is if left of the wooden card catalogs. The center opens in
1998 under the direction of librarian Jean-François Füeg .
In 2015, Mons is elected Capital of Europe with the slogan "Mons, where culture meets
technology". The Mundaneum archive center plays a central role in the media-campaigns
and activities leading up to the festive year. In that same period, the center undergoes a largescale renovation to finally brings the archive facilities up to date. A new reading room is
named after André Canonne, the conference room is called Utopia. The mise-en-scène of
Otlet's messy office is removed, but otherwise the scenography remains largely unchanged.

P.274

P.275

2007: CRYSTAL COMPUTING

Jean-Paul Deplus, échevin (adjoint) à la culture de la ville, affiche ses ambitions.
« Ce lieu est une illustration saisissante de ce que des utopistes visionnaires ont
apporté à la civilisation. Ils ont inventé Google avant la lettre. Non seulement ils
l’ont fait avec les seuls outils dont ils disposaient, c’est-à- dire de l’encre et du

papier, mais leur imagination était si féconde que l’on a retrouvé les dessins et
croquis de ce qui préfigure Internet un siècle plus tard. » Et Jean-Pol Baras
d’ajouter «Et qui vient de s’installer à Mons ? Un “data center” de Google ...
[26]
Drôle de hasard, non ? »
Dans une ambiance où tous les partenaires du «projet Saint-Ghislain» de Google
savouraient en silence la confirmation du jour, les anecdotes sur la discrétion
imposée durant 18 mois n’ont pas manqué. Outre l’utilisation d’un nom de code,
Crystal Computing, qui a valu un jour à Elio Di Rupo d’être interrogé sur
l’éventuelle arrivée d’une cristallerie en Wallonie («J’ai fait diversion comme j’ai
pu !», se souvient-il), un accord de confidentialité liait Google, l’Awex et l’Idea,
notamment. «A plusieurs reprises, on a eu chaud, parce qu’il était prévu qu’au
[27]
moindre couac sur ce point, Google arrêtait tout»
Beaucoup de show, peu d’emplois: Pour son data center belge, le géant des
moteurs de recherche a décroché l’un des plus beaux terrains industriels de
Wallonie. Résultat : à peine 40 emplois directs et pas un euro d’impôts. Reste que
la Région ne voit pas les choses sous cet angle. En janvier, a appris Le Vif/
L’Express, le ministre de l’Economie Jean-Claude Marcourt (PS) a notifié à
Google le refus d’une aide à l’expansion économique de 10 millions d’euros.
Motif : cette aide était conditionnée à la création de 110 emplois directs, loin d’être
atteints. Est-ce la raison pour laquelle aucun ministre wallon n’était présent le 10
avril aux côtés d’Elio Di Rupo ? Au cabinet Marcourt, on assure que les relations
avec l’entreprise américaine sont au beau fixe : « C’est le ministre qui a permis ce
nouvel investissement de Google, en négociant avec son fournisseur d’électricité
[28]
(NDLR : Electrabel) une réduction de son énorme facture.

In 2005, Elio di Rupo succeeds in bringing a company "Crystal Computing" to the region,
code name for Google inc. who plans to build a data-center at Saint Ghislain, a prime
industrial site close to Mons. Promising 'a thousand jobs', the presence of Google becomes a
way for Di Rupo to demonstrate that the Marshall Plan for Wallonia, an attempt to "step up
the efforts taken to put Wallonia back on the track to prosperity" is attaining its goals. The
first data-center opens in 2007 and is followed by a second one opening in 2015. The
direct impact on employment in the region is estimated to be somewhere between 110[29] and
120 jobs.[30]

P.276

P.277

Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

1. Paul Otlet (1868-1944) Fondateur du mouvement bibliogique international Par Jacques Hellemans (Bibliothèque de
l’Université libre de Bruxelles, Premier Attaché)
2. Jacques Hellemans. Paul Otlet (1868-1944) Fondateur du mouvement bibliogique international
3. Paul Otlet. Document II in: Traité de documentation (1934)
4. Paul Otlet. Diary (1938), Quoted in: W. Boyd Rayward. The Universe of Information : The Work of Paul Otlet for
Documentation and International Organisation (1975)
5. Alex Wright. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (2014)
6. Warden Boyd Rayward. Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge (2010)
7. Françoise Levie. L'homme qui voulait classer le monde: Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum (2010)
8. Warden Boyd Rayward. Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge (2010)
9. William Echikson. A flower of computer history blooms in Belgium (2013) http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.be/2013/02/
a-flower-of-computer-history-blooms-in.html
10. Testament Paul Otlet, 1942.01.18*, No. 67, Otletaneum. Quoted in: W. Boyd Rayward. The Universe of Information :
The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation (1975)
11. Paul Otlet cited in Françoise Levie, Filmer Paul Otlet, Cahiers de la documentation – Bladen voor documentatie – 2012/2
12. Le Soir, 27 juillet 1991
13. Warden Boyd Rayward. Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge (2010)
14. Le Soir, 17 juin 1998
15. http://www.reflexcity.net/bruxelles/photo/72ca206b2bf2e1ea73dae1c7380f57e3
16. André Canonne. Introduction to the 1989 facsimile edition of Le Traité de documentation File:TDD ed1989 preface.pdf
17. Le Soir, 24 juillet 1991
18. Le Soir, 27 juillet 1991
19. http://www.reflexcity.net/bruxelles/plans/4-cram-fin-xixe.html
20. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84598749/f1.item.zoom
21. Le Soir, 17 juin 1998
22. Warden Boyd Rayward. Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge (2010)
23. Françoise Levie, Filmer Paul Otlet, Cahiers de la documentation – Bladen voor documentatie – 2012/2
24. Françoise Levie, L'Homme qui voulait classer le monde: Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum, Impressions Nouvelles, Bruxelles,
2006
25. Stéphanie Manfroid, Les réalités d’une aventure documentaire, Cahiers de la documentation – Bladen voor documentatie –
2012/2
26. Jean-Michel Djian, Le Mundaneum, Google de papier, Le Monde Magazine, 19 december 2009
27. Libre Belgique (27 april 2007)
28. Le Vif, April 2013
29. Le Vif, April 2013

30. http://www.rtbf.be/info/regions/detail_google-va-investir-300-millions-a-saint-ghislain?id=7968392

P.278

P.279

Crossreadings

Les
Pyramides
"A pyramid is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to
a single point at the top"
[1]

A slew of pyramids can be found in all of Paul Otlet's drawers. Knowledge
schemes and diagrams, drawings and drafts, designs, prototypes and
architectural plans (including works by Le Corbusier and Maurice Heymans)
employ the pyramid to provide structure, hierarchy, precise path and finally
access to the world's synthesized knowledge. At specific temporal crosssections, these plans were criticized for their proximity to occultism or
monumentalism. Today their rich esoteric symbolism is still readily apparent
and gives reason to search for possible spiritual or mystical underpinnings of
the Mundaneum.
Paul Otlet (1926):
“Une immense pyramide est à construire. Au sommet y travaillent Penseurs,
Sociologues et grands Artistes. Le sommet doit rejoindre la base où s’agitent les
masses, mais la base aussi doit être disposée de manière qu’elle puisse rejoindre le
[2]
sommet.”

P.280

P.281

[3]

[4]

Paul Otlet, Species
Inscription: "Il ne fut rien
sinon Mundanéen"
Mundaneum.
Mundaneum, Mons.
Personal papers of Paul
Otlet (MDN). Fonds
Encyclopaedia Universalis
Mundaneum (EUM),
document No. 8506.

La Pyramide des

Qui scit ubi scientia
Tomb at the grave of Paul
Bibliographies. In: Paul habenti est proximus.
Otlet
Otlet, Traité de
Who knows where
documentation: le livre sur science is, is about to have
le livre, théorie et pratique it. The librarian is helped
(Bruxelles: Editiones
by collaborators:
Mundaneum, 1934),
Bibliotecaire-adjoints,
rédacteurs, copistes, gens
290.
de service.

[5]

[6]

[7]

Design for the
Sketch for La
An axonometric view of Plan of the Mundaneum Perspective of the
Mundaneum, Section and Mondotheque. Paul Otlet, the Mundaneum gives the by M.C. Heymans
Mundaneum by M.C.
facades by Le Corbusier 1935?
effect of an aerial
Heymans
photograph of an
archeological site —
Egyptian, Babylonian,
Assyrian, ancient
American (Mayan and
Aztec) or Peruvian. These
historical reminiscences are
striking. Remember the
important building works
of the Mayas, who were
the zenith of ancient
American civilization.
These well-known ruins
(Uxmal, Chichen-Itza,
Palenque on the Yucatan
peninsula, and Copan in
Guatemala) represent a
“metaphysical architecture”
of special cities of religious
cults and burial grounds,
cities of rulers and priests;
pyramids, cathedrals of the
sun, moon and stars; holy
places of individual gods;
graduating pyramids and
terraced palaces with
architectural objects
conceived in basic

[8]

[9]

[10]

Paul Otlet, Cellula
Mundaneum (1936).
Mundaneum, Mons.
Personal papers of Paul
Otlet (MDN). Fonds
Affiches (AFF).

As soon as all forms of life Sketch for Mundaneum
are categorized, classified World City. Le
and determined,
Corbusier, 1929
individuals will become
numeric "dividuals" in sets,
subsets or classes.

[12]

Atlas Bruxelles –
Urbaneum - Belganeum Mundaneum. Page de
garde du chapitre 991 de
l'Atlas de Bruxelles.

[13]

The universe (which
others call the Library) is
composed of an indefinite
and perhaps infinite
number of triangular
galleries, with vast air
shafts between, surrounded
by very low railings. From
any of the triangles one
can see, interminably, the
upper and lower floors.
The distribution of the
galleries is invariable.

P.282

[11]

The ship wherein Theseus
and the youth of Athens
returned had thirty oars,
and was preserved by the
Athenians down even to
the time of Demetrius
Phalereus, for they took
away the old planks as
they decayed, putting in
new and stronger timber in
their place, insomuch that
this ship became a
standing example among
the philosophers, for the
logical question of things
that grow; one side holding
that the ship remained the
same, and the other
contending that it was not
the same.

P.283

[14]

[15]

Universal Decimal
Classification: hierarchy

World City by Le
Corbusier & Jeanneret

Paul Otlet personal
papers. Picture taken
during a Mondotheque
visit of the Mundaneum
archives, 11 September
2015

The face of the earth

Alimentation. — La base
would be much altered if de notre alimentation
repose en principe sur un
brick architecture were
trépied. 1° Protides
ousted everywhere by
glass architecture. It would (viandes, azotes). 2°
be as if the earth were
Glycides (légumineux,
hydrates de carbone). 3°
adorned with sparkling
jewels and enamels. Such Lipides (graisses). Mais il
glory is unimagmable. We faut encore pour présider
should then have a
au cycle de la vie et en
paradise on earth, and no assurer la régularité, des
need to watch in longing vitamines : c’est à elles
qu’est due la croissance
expectation for the
paradise in heaven.
des jeunes, l’équilibre
nutritif des adultes et une
certaine jeunesse chez les
vieillards.

[16]

[17]

[18]

[19]

Traité de documentation - Inverted pyramid and floor Architectural vision of the Section by Stanislas
La pyramide des
plan by Stanislas Jasinski Mundaneum by M.C.
Jasinski
bibliographies
Heymans

Le Corbusier, Musée
Mondial (1929), FLC,
doc nr. 24510

Le reseau Mundaneum.
From Paul Otlet,
Encylcopaedia Universalis
Mundaneum

[20]

Paul Otlet, Mundaneum.
Documentatio Partes.
MDN, EUM, doc nr.
8506, scan nr.
Mundaneum_A400176

P.284

Les
Pyramides

Metro Place Rogier in
2008

Paul Otlet, Atlas Monde
(1936). MDN, AFF,
scan nr.
Mundaneum_032;
Mundaneum_034;
Mundaneum_036;
Mundaneum_038;
Mundaneum_040;
Mundaneum_042;
Mundaneum_044;
Mundaneum_046;
Mundaneum_049 (sic!)

[21]

The “Sacrarium,” is
See Cross-readings,
Place Rogier, Brussels
something like a temple of Rayward, Warden Boyd around 2005
ethics, philosophy, and
(who translated and
religion. A great globe,
adapted), Mundaneum:
modeled and colored, in a Archives of Knowledge,
scale 1 = 1,000,000 with Urbana-Campaign, Ill. :
the planetarium inside, is Graduate School of
Library and Information
situated in front of the
museum building.
Science, University of
Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 2010.
Original: Charlotte
Dubray et al.,
Mundaneum: Les
Archives de la
Connaissance, Bruxelles:
Les Impressions
Nouvelles, 2008. (p. 37)

Paul Otlet, Le Monde en son ensemble
(1936). Mundaneum, Mons. MDN,
AFF, scan nr.
MUND-00009061_2008_0001_MA

[22]

Place Rogier, Brussels
with sign "Pyramides"

P.285

[23]

Toute la Documentation. Logo
A late sketch from 1937 of the Mundaneum
showing all the complexity
of the pyramid of
documentation. An
evolutionary element
works its way up, and in
the conclusive level one
can read a synthesis:
"Homo Loquens, Homo
Scribens, Societas
Documentalis".

SOURCES
Last
Revision:
1·08·2016

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid
2. Paul Otlet, L’Éducation et les Instituts du Palais Mondial (Mundaneum). Bruxelles: Union des Associations Internationales,
1926, p. 10. ("A great pyramid should be constructed. At the top are to be found Thinkers, Sociologists and great Artists. But
the top must be joined to the base where the masses are found, and the bases must have control of a path to the top.")
3. Wouter Van Acker. "Architectural Metaphors of Knowledge: The Mundaneum Designs of Maurice Heymans, Paul Otlet,
and Le Corbusier." Library Trends 61, no. 2 (2012): 371-396. http://muse.jhu.edu/
4. Photo: Roel de Groof http://www.zita.be/foto/roel-de-groof/allerlei/graf-paul-otlet/
5. Wouter Van Acker, 'Opening the Shrine of the Mundaneum The Positivist Spirit in the Architecture of Le Corbusier and his
Belgian “Idolators,”' in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30, Open, edited
by Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast,Qld: SAHANZ, 2013), vol. 2, p. 792.
6. Wouter Van Acker. "Architectural Metaphors of Knowledge: The Mundaneum Designs of Maurice Heymans, Paul Otlet,
and Le Corbusier." Library Trends 61, no. 2 (2012): 371-396.
7. Wouter Van Acker. "Architectural Metaphors of Knowledge: The Mundaneum Designs of Maurice Heymans, Paul Otlet,
and Le Corbusier." Library Trends 61, no. 2 (2012): 371-396.
8. Wouter Van Acker. "Architectural Metaphors of Knowledge: The Mundaneum Designs of Maurice Heymans, Paul Otlet,
and Le Corbusier." Library Trends 61, no. 2 (2012): 371-396. http://muse.jhu.edu/
9. Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique (Bruxelles: Editiones Mundaneum, 1934), 420.
10. http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr
11. http://www.numeriques.be
12. http://www.numeriques.be

13. Rayward, Warden Boyd, The Universe of Information: the Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and international
Organization, FID Publication 520, Moscow, International Federation for Documentation by the All-Union Institute for
Scientific and Technical Information (Viniti), 1975. (p. 352)
14. The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World
15. Rayward, Warden Boyd (who translated and adapted), Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge, Urbana-Campaign, Ill. :
Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010, p. 35. Original:
Charlotte Dubray et al., Mundaneum: Les Archives de la Connaissance, Bruxelles: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2008.
16. Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique (Bruxelles: Editiones Mundaneum, 1934).
17. Wouter Van Acker, 'Opening the Shrine of the Mundaneum The Positivist Spirit in the Architecture of Le Corbusier and his
Belgian “Idolators,”' in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30, Open, edited
by Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast,Qld: SAHANZ, 2013), vol. 2, p. 804.
18. Wouter Van Acker, 'Opening the Shrine of the Mundaneum The Positivist Spirit in the Architecture of Le Corbusier and his
Belgian “Idolators,”' in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30, Open, edited
by Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast,Qld: SAHANZ, 2013), vol. 2, p. 803.
19. Wouter Van Acker, 'Opening the Shrine of the Mundaneum The Positivist Spirit in the Architecture of Le Corbusier and his
Belgian “Idolators,”' in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30, Open, edited
by Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast,Qld: SAHANZ, 2013), vol. 2, p. 804.
20. From Van Acker, Wouter, “Internationalist Utopias of Visual Education. The Graphic and Scenographic Transformation of
the Universal Encyclopaedia in the Work of Paul Otlet, Patrick Geddes, and Otto Neurath,” in Perspectives on Science,
Vol.19, nr.1, 2011, p. 72. http://staging01.muse.jhu.edu/journals/perspectives_on_science/v019/19.1.van-acker.html
21. https://ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/15431/Rayward_215_WEB.pdf?sequence=2
22. http://www.sonuma.com/archive/la-conservation-des-archives-du-mundaneum
23. Mundaneum Archives, Mons

P.286

P.287

Transclusionism
This page documents some of the contraptions at work in the Mondotheque
wiki. The name "transclusionism" refers to the term "transclusion" coined by
utopian systems humanist Ted Nelson and used in Mediawiki to refer to
inclusion of the same piece of text in between different pages.
HOW TO TRANSCLUDE LABELLED SECTIONS BETWEEN
TEXTS:

To create transclusions between different texts, you need to select a section of text that will
form a connection between the pages, based on a common subject:
• Think of a category that is the common ground for the link. For example if two texts
refer to a similar issue or specific concept (eg. 'rawdata'), formulate it without
spaces or using underscores (eg. 'raw_data', not 'raw data' );
• Edit the two or more pages which you want to link, adding {{RT|rawdata}}

before the text section, and end=rawdata /> at the end (take care of the closing '/>' );
• All text sections in other wiki pages that are marked up through the same common
ground, will be transcluded in the margin of the text.
HOW IT SHOWS UP:

For example, this is how a transclusion from a labelled section of the Xanadu article appears:

From Xanadu:
Every document can contain links of
any type including virtual copies
("transclusions") to any other
document in the system accessible to

its owner.

HOW IT WORKS:

The

code is used by the 'Labeled Section Transclusion' extension, which
looks for the tagged sections in a text, to transclude them into another text based on the
assigned labels.
The {{RT|rawdata}} instead, creates the side links by transcluding the
Template:RT page, substituting the word rawdata in its internal code, in place of
{{{1}}}. This is the commented content of Template:RT:
# Puts the trancluded sections in its own div:

# Searches semantically for all the pages in the
# requested category, puts them in an
array:
{{#ask:
[[Category:{{{1}}}]]|format=array | name=results
}}
# Starts a loop, going from 0 to the amount of pages
# in the array:
{{#loop: looper
| 0
| {{#arraysize: results}}
# If the pagename of the current element of the array
# is the same as the page calling the loop, it will skip
# the page:
| {{#ifeq: {{FULLPAGENAME:
{{#arrayindex: results | {{#var:looper}} }}
}}
|
{{FULLPAGENAME}}
|
|
{{#lst:
# Otherwise it searches through the current page in the
# loop, for all the occurrences of labeled sections:
{{#arrayindex: results | {{#var:looper}} }}
| {{{1}}}
}}
# Adds a link to the current page in loop:
([[{{#arrayindex: results | {{#var:looper}} }}]])
# Adds some space after the page:

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P.289




# End of pagename if statement:
}}
# End of loop:
}}
# Closes div:

# Adds the page to the label category:
[[category:{{{1}}}]]
NECESSAIRE

Currently, on top of MediaWiki and SemanticMediaWiki, the following extensions needed
to be installed for the contraption to work:
• Labeled Section Transclusion to be able to select specific sections of the texts and make
connections between them;
• Parser Functions to be able to operate statements like
if
in the wiki pseudo-language;
• Arrays to create lists of objects, for example as a result of semantic queries;
• Loops to loop between the arrays above;
• Variables as it's needed by some of the above.
Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

Reading
list
Cross-readings. Not a bibliography.
PAUL OTLET
• Paul Otlet, L’afrique aux noirs, Bruxelles: Ferdinand Larcier,
1888.
• Paul Otlet, L’Éducation et les Instituts du Palais Mondial
(Mundaneum). Bruxelles: Union des Associations
Internationales, 1926.
• Paul Otlet, Cité mondiale. Geneva: World civic center:
Mundaneum. Bruxelles: Union des Associations
Internationales, 1929.
• Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation, Bruxelles, Mundaneum,
Palais Mondial, 1934.
• Paul Otlet, Monde: essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du
Monde, Sentiment du Monde, Action organisee et Plan du
Monde, Bruxelles: Editiones Mundeum 1935. See also:
http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/uia/docs/otlet_contents.php
• Paul Otlet, Plan belgique; essai d'un plan général, économique,
social, culturel. Plan d'urbanisation national. Liaison avec le
plan mondial. Conditions. Problèmes. Solutions. Réformes,
Bruxelles: Éditiones Mundaneum, 1935.

RE-READING OTLET

Or, reading the readers that explored and contextualized the work of Otlet in recent times.
• Jacques Gillen, Stéphanie Manfroid, and Raphaèle Cornille
(eds.), Paul Otlet, fondateur du Mundaneum (1868-1944).

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P.291

Architecte du savoir, Artisan de paix, Mons: Éditions Les
Impressions Nouvelles, 2010.
• Françoise Levie, L’homme qui voulait classer le monde. Paul
Otlet et le Mundaneum, Bruxelles: Les Impressions Nouvelles,
2006.
• Warden Boyd Rayward, The Universe of Information: the
Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and international
Organization, FID Publication 520, Moscow: International
Federation for Documentation by the All-Union Institute for
Scientific and Technical Information (Viniti), 1975.
• Warden Boyd Rayward, Universum informastsii Zhizn' i
deiatl' nost' Polia Otle, Trans. R.S. Giliarevesky, Moscow:
VINITI, 1976.
• Warden Boyd Rayward (ed.), International Organization and
Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays of Paul Otlet,
Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990.
• Warden Boyd Rayward, El Universo de la Documentacion: la
obra de Paul Otlet sobra documentacion y organizacion
internacional, Trans. Pilar Arnau Rived, Madrid: Mundanau,
2005.
• Warden Boyd Raywar, "Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet
(1868-1944) and Hypertext." Journal of the American
Society for Information Science (1986-1998) 45, no. 4 (05,
1994): 235-251.
• Warden Boyd Rayward (who translated and adapted),
Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge, Urbana-Campaign, Ill. :
Graduate School of Library and Information Science,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010. Original:
Charlotte Dubray et al., Mundaneum: Les Archives de la
Connaissance, Bruxelles: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2008.
• Wouter Van Acker,[http://staging01.muse.jhu.edu/journals/
perspectives_on_science/v019/19.1.van-acker.html
“Internationalist Utopias of Visual Education. The Graphic
and Scenographic Transformation of the Universal
Encyclopaedia in the Work of Paul Otlet, Patrick Geddes,

and Otto Neurath” in Perspectives on Science, Vol.19, nr.1,
2011, p. 32-80.
• Wouter Van Acker, “Universalism as Utopia. A Historical
Study of the Schemes and Schemas of Paul Otlet
(1868-1944)”, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University
Press, Zelzate, 2011.
• Theater Adhoc, The humor and tragedy of completeness,
2005.

FATHERS OF THE INTERNET

Constructing a posthumous pre-history of contemporary networking technologies.
• Christophe Lejeune, Ce que l’annuaire fait à Internet Sociologie des épreuves documentaires, in Cahiers dela
documentation – Bladen voor documentatie – 2006/3.
• Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, Divining a Digital Future,
Chicago: MIT Press 2011.
• John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics,
Artificial Life, and the New AI, Chicago: MIT Press 2008.
• Charles van den Heuvel Building society, constructing
knowledge, weaving the web, in Boyd Rayward [ed.]
European Modernism and the Information Society, London:
Ashgate Publishers 2008, chapter 7 pp. 127-153.
• Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic
Web, in Scientific American - SCI AMER , vol. 284, no. 5,
pp. 34-43, 2001.
• Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth
of the Information Age, Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Popova, Maria, “The Birth of the Information Age: How Paul
Otlet’s Vision for Cataloging and Connecting Humanity
Shaped Our World”, Brain Pickings, 2014.
• Heuvel, Charles van den, “Building Society, Constructing
Knowledge, Weaving the Web”. in European Modernism and

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P.293

the Information Society – Informing the Present,
Understanding the Past, Aldershot, 2008, pp. 127–153.

CLASSIFYING THE WORLD

The recurring tensions between the world and its systematic representation.
• ShinJoung Yeo, James R. Jacobs, Diversity matters?
Rethinking diversity in libraries, Radical Reference
Countepoise 9 (2) Spring, 2006. p. 5-8.
• Thomas Hapke, Wilhelm Ostwald's Combinatorics as a Link
between In-formation and Form, in Library Trends, Volume
61, Number 2, Fall 2012.
• Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck, Thomas E. Uebel,
Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics.
Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over:
Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical
Expertise. MIT Press, 2010.
• Ronald E. Day, The Modern Invention of Information:
Discourse, History, and Power, Southern Illinois University
Press, 2001.
• Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp Paper Machines: About
Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 The MIT Press
• Eric de Groller A Study of general categories applicable to
classification and coding in documentation; Documentation and
terminology of science; 1962.
• Marlene Manoff, "Theories of the archive from across the
disciplines," in portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 4, No.
1 (2004), pp. 9–25.
• Charles van den Heuvel, W. Boyd Rayward, Facing
Interfaces: Paul Otlet's Visualizations of Data Integration.

Journal of the American society for information science and
technology (2011).

DON'T BE EVIL

Standing on the hands of Internet giants.
• Rene Koenig, Miriam Rasch (eds), Society of the Query
Reader: Reflections on Web Search, Amsterdam: Institute of
Network Cultures, 2014.
• Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Evil Media. Cambridge,
Mass., United States: MIT Press, 2012.
• Steve Levy In The Plex. Simon & Schuster, 2011.
• Dan Schiller, ShinJoung Yeo, Powered By Google: Widening
Access and Tightening Corporate Control in: Red Art: New
Utopias in Data Capitalism, Leonardo Electronic Almanac,
Volume 20 Issue 1 (2015).
• Invisible Committee, Fuck Off Google, 2014.
• Dave Eggers, The Circle. Knopf, 2014.
• Matteo Pasquinelli, Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A
Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the
Common Intellect. In: Konrad Becker, Felix Stalder
(eds), Deep Search, London: Transaction Publishers: 2009.
• Joris van Hoboken, Search Engine Freedom: On the
Implications of the Right to Freedom of Expression for the

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Legal Governance of Web Search Engines. Kluwer Law
International, 2012.
• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and
Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. The MIT Press, 2008.
• Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And
Why We Should Worry). University of California Press.
2011.
• William Miller, Living With Google. In: Journal of Library
Administration Volume 47, Issue 1-2, 2008.
• Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Computer Networks, vol.
30 (1998), pp. 107-117.
• Ken Auletta Googled: The end of the world as we know it.
Penguin Press, 2009.

EMBEDDED HIERARCHIES

How classification systems, and the dream of their universal application actually operate.
• Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation, Bruxelles, Mundaneum,
Palais Mondial, 1934. (for alphabet hierarchy, see page 71)
• Paul Otlet, L’afrique aux noirs, Bruxelles: Ferdinand Larcier,
1888.
• Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, University
Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
• Judge, Anthony, “Union of International Associations – Virtual
Organization – Paul Otlet's 100-year Hypertext
Conundrum?”, 2001.
• Ducheyne, Steffen, “Paul Otlet's Theory of Knowledge and
Linguistic Objectivism”, in Knowledge Organization, no 32,
2005, pp. 110–116.

ARCHITECTURAL VISIONS

Writings on how Otlet's knowledge site was successively imagined and visualized on grand
architectural scales.
• Catherine Courtiau, "La cité internationale 1927-1931," in
Transnational Associations, 5/1987: 255-266.
• Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale:
Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. Venezia: Marsilio,
1982.
• Isabelle Rieusset-Lemarie, "P. Otlet's Mundaneum and the
International Perspective in the History of Documentation and
Information science," in Journal of the American Society for
Information Science (1986-1998)48.4 (Apr 1997):
301-309.
• Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture, Paris: les éditions G.
Crès, 1923.
• Transnational Associations, "Otlet et Le Corbusier" 1927-31,
INGO Development Projects: Quantity or Quality, Issue No:
5, 1987.
• Wouter Van Acker. "Hubris or utopia? Megalomania and
imagination in the work of Paul Otlet," in Cahiers de la
documentation – Bladen voor documentatie – 2012/2,
58-66.
• Wouter Van Acker. "Architectural Metaphors of Knowledge:
The Mundaneum Designs of Maurice Heymans, Paul Otlet,
and Le Corbusier." Library Trends 61, no. 2 (2012):
371-396.
• Van Acker, Wouter, Somsen, Geert, “A Tale of Two World
Capitals – the Internationalisms of Pieter Eijkman and Paul
Otlet”, in Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire/Belgisch
Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis, Vol. 90, nr.4,
2012.
• Wouter Van Acker, "Opening the Shrine of the Mundaneum
The Positivist Spirit in the Architecture of Le Corbusier and his
Belgian “Idolators”, in Proceedings of the Society of

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Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30,
Open, edited by Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold
Coast,Qld: SAHANZ, 2013), vol. 2, 791-805.
• Anthony Vidler, “The Space of History: Modern Museums
from Patrick Geddes to Le Corbusier,” in The Architecture of
the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts, ed.
Michaela Giebelhausen (Manchester; New York: Manchester
University Press, 2003).
• Volker Welter. "Biopolis Patrick Geddes and the City of
Life." Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2003.
• Alfred Willis, “The Exoteric and Esoteric Functions of Le
Corbusier’s Mundaneum,” Modulus/University of Virginia
School of Architecture Review 12, no. 21 (1980).

ZEITGEIST

It includes both century-old sources and more recent ones on the parallel or entangled
movements around the Mundaneum time.
• Hendrik Christian Andersen and Ernest M. Hébrard.
Création d'un Centre mondial de communication. Paris, 1913.
• Julie Carlier, "Moving beyond Boundaries: An Entangled
History of Feminism in Belgium, 1890–1914," Ph.D.
dissertation, Universiteit Gent, 2010. (esp. 439-458.)
• Bambi Ceuppens, Congo made in Flanders?: koloniale
Vlaamse visies op "blank" en "zwart" in Belgisch Congo.
[Gent]: Academia Press, 2004.
• Conseil International des Femmes (International Council of
Women), Office Central de Documentation pour les Questions
Concernant la Femme. Rapport. Bruxelles : Office Central de
Documentation Féminine, 1909.
• Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic pacifism waging war on war in
Europe, 1815-1914. New York: Oxford University Press,
1991.
• Sylvie Fayet-Scribe, "Women Professionals in Documentation
in France during the 1930s," Libraries & the Cultural Record

Vol. 44, No. 2, Women Pioneers in the Information Sciences
Part I, 1900-1950 (2009), pp. 201-219. (translated by
Michael Buckland)
• François Garas, Mes temples. Paris: Michalon, 1907.
• Madeleine Herren, Hintertüren zur Macht: Internationalismus
und modernisierungsorientierte Aussenpolitik in Belgien, der
Schweiz und den USA 1865-1914. München: Oldenbourg,
2000.
• Robert Hoozee and Mary Anne Stevens, Impressionism to
Symbolism: The Belgian Avant-Garde 1880-1900, London:
Royal Academy of Arts, 1994.
• Markus Krajewski, Die Brücke: A German contemporary of
the Institut International de Bibliographie. In: Cahiers de la
documentation / Bladen voor documentatie 66.2 (Juin,
Numéro Spécial 2012), 25–31.
• Daniel Laqua, "Transnational intellectual cooperation, the
League of Nations, and the problem of order," in Journal of
Global History (2011) 6, pp. 223–247.
• Lewis Pyenson and Christophe Verbruggen, "Ego and the
International: The Modernist Circle of George Sarton," Isis,
Vol. 100, No. 1 (March 2009), pp. 60-78.
• Elisée Reclus, Nouvelle géographie universelle; la terre et les
hommes, Paris, Hachette et cie., 1876-94.
• Edouard Schuré, Les grands initiés: esquisse de l'histoire
secrète des religions, 1889.
• Rayward, Warden Boyd (ed.), European Modernism and the
Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the
Past. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2008.
• Van Acker, Wouter, “Internationalist Utopias of Visual
Education. The Graphic and Scenographic Transformation of
the Universal Encyclopaedia in the Work of Paul Otlet,

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Patrick Geddes, and Otto Neurath”, in Perspectives on
Science, Vol.19, nr.1, 2011, p. 32-80.
• Nader Vossoughian, "The Language of the World Museum:
Otto Neurath, Paul Otlet, Le Corbusier", Transnational
Associations 1-2 (January-June 2003), Brussels, pp 82-93.
• Alfred Willis, “The Exoteric and Esoteric Functions of Le
Corbusier’s Mundaneum,” Modulus/University of Virginia
School of Architecture Review 12, no. 21 (1980).
Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

Colophon/
Colofon
• Mondotheque editorial team/redactie team/équipe éditoriale: André Castro,
Sînziana Păltineanu, Dennis Pohl, Dick Reckard, Natacha
Roussel, Femke Snelting, Alexia de Visscher
• Copy-editing/tekstredactie/édition EN: Sophie Burm (Amateur Librarian, The
Smart City - City of Knowledge, X=Y, A Book of the Web), Liz Soltan (An
experimental transcript)
• Translations EN-FR/vertalingen EN-FR/traductions EN-FR: Eva Lena
Vermeersch (Amateur Librarian, A Pre-emptive History of the Google Cultural
Institute, The Smart City - City of Knowledge), Natacha Roussel (LES
UTOPISTES and their common logos, Introduction), Donatella
Portoghese
• Translations EN-NL/vertalingen EN-FR/traductions EN-NL: Femke
Snelting, Peter Westenberg
• Transcriptions/transcripties/transcriptions: Lola Durt, Femke Snelting,
Tom van den Wijngaert
• Design and development/ontwerp en ontwikkeling/graphisme et développement:
Alexia de Visscher, André Castro
• Fonts/lettertypes/polices: NotCourierSans, Cheltenham, Traité facsimile
• Tools/gereedschappen/outils: Semantic Mediawiki, etherpad,
Weasyprint, html5lib, mwclient, phantomjs, gnu make ...
• Source-files/bronbestanden/code source: https://gitlab.com/Mondotheque/
RadiatedBook + http://www.mondotheque.be
• Published by/een publicatie van/publié par: Constant (2016)
• Printed at/druk/imprimé par: Online-Druck.biz
• License/licentie/licence: Texts and images developed by Mondotheque are available
under a Free Art License 1.3 (C) Copyleft Attitude, 2007. You may copy,
distribute and modify them according to the terms of the Free Art License: http://
artlibre.org Texts and images by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine are in the Public
Domain. Other materials copyright by the authors/Teksten en afbeeldingen
ontwikkeld door Mondotheque zijn beschikbaar onder een Free Art License 1.3 (C)
Copyleft Attitude, 2007. U kunt ze dus kopiëren, verspreiden en wijzigen volgens de
voorwaarden van de Free Art License: http://artlibre.org Teksten en beelden van
Paul Otlet en Henri Lafontaine zijn in het publieke domein. Andere materialen:
auteursrecht bij de auteurs/Les textes et images développées par Mondotheque sont

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disponibles sous licence Art Libre 1.3 (C) Copyleft Attitude 2007. Vous pouvez
les copier, distribuer et modifier selon les termes de la Licence Art Libre: http://
artlibre.org Les textes et les images de Paul Otlet et Henri Lafontaine sont dans le
domaine public. Les autres matériaux sont assujettis aux droits d'auteur choisis par
les auteurs.
• ISBN: 9789081145954
Thank you/bedankt/merci: the contributors/de auteurs/les contributeurs, Yves Bernard,
Michel Cleempoel, Raphaèle Cornille, Jan Gerber, Marc d'Hoore, Églantine Lebacq,
Nicolas Malevé, Stéphanie Manfroid, Robert M. Ochshorn, An Mertens, Dries Moreels,
Sylvia Van Peteghem, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing.
Mondotheque is supported by/wordt ondersteund door/est soutenu par: De Vlaamse
GemeenschapsCommissie, Akademie Schloss Solitude.
Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

> I am less interested in the critical practice of reflection, of
> showing once-again that the emperor has no clothes, than in finding a
> way to *diffract* critical inquiry in order to make difference
> patterns in a more worldly way.^[1](#ebceffee)^

The techno-galactic software survival guide that you are holding right
now was collectively produced as an outcome of the Techno-Galactic
Software Observatory. This guide proposes several ways to achieve
critical distance from the seemingly endless software systems that
surround us. It offers practical and fantastical tools for the tactical
(mis)use of software, empowering/enabling users to resist embedded
paradigms and assumptions. It is a collection of methods for approaching
software, experiencing its myths and realities, its risks and benefits.

With the rise of online services, the use of software has increasingly
been knitted into the production of software, even while the rhetoric,
rights, and procedures continue to suggest that use and production
constitute separate realms. This knitting together and its corresponding
disavowal have an effect on the way software is used and produced, and
radically alters its operative role in society. The shifts ripple across
galaxies, through social structures, working conditions and personal
relations, resulting in a profusion of apparatuses aspiring to be
seamless while optimizing and monetizing individual and collective flows
of information in line with the interests of a handful of actors. The
diffusion of software services affects the personal, in the form of
intensified identity shaping and self-management. It also affects the
public, as more and more libraries, universities and public
infrastructures as well as the management of public life rely on
\"solutions\" provided by private companies. Centralizing data flows in
the clouds, services blur the last traces of the thin line that
separates bio- from necro-politics.

Given how fast these changes resonate and reproduce, there is a growing
urgency to engage in a critique of software that goes beyond taking a
distance, and that deals with the fact that we are inevitably already
entangled. How can we interact, intervene, respond and think with
software? What approaches can allow us to recognize the agency of
different actors, their ways of functioning and their politics? What
methods of observation enable critical inquiry and affirmative discord?
What techniques can we apply to resurface software where it has melted
into the infrastructure and into the everyday? How can we remember that
software is always at work, especially where it is designed to disappear
into the background?

We adopted the term of observation for a number of reasons. We regard
observation as a way to approach software, as one way to organize
engagement with its implications. Observation, and the enabling of
observation through intensive data-centric feedback mechanisms, is part
of the cybernetic principles that underpin present day software
production. Our aim was to scrutinize this methodology in its many
manifestations, including in \"observatories\" \-- high cost
infrastructures \[testing infrastructures?CITECLOSE23310 of observation
troubled by colonial, imperial traditions and their problematic
divisions of nature and culture \-- with the hope of opening up
questions about who gets to observe software (and how) and who is being
observed by software (and with what impact)? It is a question of power,
one that we answer, at least in part, with critical play.

We adopted the term techno-galactic to match the advertised capability
of \"scaling up to the universe\" that comes in contemporary paradigms
of computation, and to address different scales of software communities
and related political economies that involve and require observation.

Drawing on theories of software and computation developed in academia
and elsewhere, we grounded our methods in hands-on exercises and
experiments that you now can try at home. This Guide to Techno-Galactic
Software Observation offers methods developed in and inspired by the
context of software production, hacker culture, software studies,
computer science research, Free Software communities, privacy activism,
and artistic practice. It invites you to experiment with ways to stay
with the trouble of software.

The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory
----------------------------------------

In the summer of 2017, around thirty people gathered in Brussels to
explore practices of proximate critique with and of software in the
context of a worksession entitled \"Techno-Galactic Software
Observatory\".^[2](#bcaacdcf)^ The worksession called for
software-curious people of all kinds to ask questions about software.
The intuition behind such a call was that different types of engagement
requires a heterogeneous group of participants with different levels of
expertise, skill and background. During three sessions of two days,
participants collectively inspected the space-time of computation and
probed the universe of hardware-software separations through excursions,
exercises and conversations. They tried out various perspectives and
methods to look at the larger picture of software as a concept, as a
practice, and as a set of techniques.

The first two days of The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory included
visits to the Musée de l\'Informatique Pionnière en
Belgique^[3](#aaceaeff)^ in Namur and the Computermuseum
KULeuven^[4](#afbebabd)^. In the surroundings of these collections of
historical 'numerical artefacts', we started viewing software in a
long-term context. It offered us the occasion to reflect on the
conditions of its appearance, and allowed us to take on current-day
questions from a genealogical perspective. What is software? How did it
appear as a concept, in what industrial and governmental circumstances?
What happens to the material conditions of its production (minerals,
factory labor, hardware) when it evaporates into a cloud?

The second two days we focused on the space-time dimension of IT
development. The way computer programs and operating systems are
manufactured changed tremendously through time, and so did its
production times and places. From military labs via the mega-corporation
cubicles to the open-space freelancer utopia, what ruptures and
continuities can be traced in the production, deployment, maintenance
and destruction of software? From time-sharing to user-space partitions
and containerization, what separations were and are at work? Where and
when is software made today?

The Walk-in Clinic
------------------

The last two days at the Techno-galactic software observatory were
dedicated to observation and its consequences. The development of
software encompasses a series of practices whose evocative names are
increasingly familiar: feedback, report, probe, audit, inspect, scan,
diagnose, explore, test \... What are the systems of knowledge and power
within which these activities take place, and what other types of
observation are possible? As a practical set for our investigations, we
set up a walk-in clinic on the 25th floor of the World Trade Center,
where users and developers could arrive with software-questions of all
kinds.

> Do you suffer from the disappearance of your software into the cloud,
> feel oppressed by unequal user privilege, or experience the torment of
> software-ransom of any sort? Bring your devices and interfaces to the
> World Trade Center! With the help of a clear and in-depth session, at
> the Techno-Galactic Walk-In Clinic we guarantee immediate results. The
> Walk-In Clinic provides free hands-on observations to software curious
> people of all kinds. A wide range of professional and amateur
> practitioners will provide you with
> Software-as-a-Critique-as-a-Service on the spot. Available services
> range from immediate interface critique, collaborative code
> inspection, data dowsing, various forms of network analyses,
> unusability testing, identification of unknown viruses, risk
> assessment, opening of black-boxes and more. Free software
> observations provided. Last intake at 16:45.\
> (invitation to the Walk-In Clinic, June 2017)

On the following pages: Software as a Critique as a Service (SaaCaaS)
Directory and intake forms for Software Curious People (SCP).

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/masterlist\_twosides\_NEU.pdf]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/scprecord\_FINAL.pdf]{.tmp}
[]{#owqzmtdk .anchor}

Techno-Galactic Software Observation Essentials

=

**WARNING**

The survival techniques described in the following guide are to be used
at your own risk in case of emergency regarding software curiosity. The
publisher will not accept any responsability in case of damages caused
by misuse, misundestanding of instruction or lack of curiosity. By
trying the action exposed in the guide, you accept the responsability of
loosing data or altering hardware, including hard disks, usb key, cloud
storage, screens by throwing them on the floor, or even when falling on
the floor with your laptop by tangling your feet in an entanglement of
cables. No harm has been done to human, animal, computers or plants
while creating the guide. No firearms or any kind of weapon is needed in
order to survive software.\
Just a little bit of patience.

**Software observation survival stresses**

**Physical fitness plays a great part of software observation. Be fit or
CTRL-Quit.**

When trying to observe software you might experience stresses as such :

*Anxiety*Sleep deprivation *Forgetting about eating*Loss of time
tracking

**Can you cope with software ? You have to.**

> our methods for observation, like mapping, come with their luggage.

[Close encounters]{.grouping} []{#njm5zwm4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.visit)
Encounter several collections of historical hardware
back-to-back]{.method .descriptor} [How]{.how .empty .descriptor}

This can be done by identifying one or more computer museums and visit
them with little time in-between. Visiting a friend with a large
basement and lots of left-over computer equipment can help. Seeing and
possibly touching hardware from different contexts
(state-administration, business, research, \...), periods of time,
cultural contexts (California, Germany, French-speaking Belgium) and
price ranges allows you to sense the interactions between hardware and
software development.

[Note: It\'s a perfect way to hear people speak about the objects and
their contexts, how they worked or not and how objects are linked one
with another. It also shows the economic and cultural aspects of
softwares.]{.note .descriptor} [WARNING: **DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR
MUTILATE**]{.warning .descriptor} [Example: Spaghetti Suitcase]{.example
.descriptor}

At one point during the demonstration of a Bull computer, the guide
revealed the system\'s \"software\" \-- a suitcase sized module with
dozens of patch cords. She made the comment that the term \"spaghetti
code\" (a derogatory expression about early code usign many \"GOTO\"
statments) had its origin in this physical arrangement of code as
patchings.

Preserving old hardware in order to observe physical manifestation of
software. See software here : we did experienced the incredible
possibility of actually touching software.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/wednesday/IMG\_20170607\_113634\_585.jpg]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/resizes/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMG\_1163.JPG?m=1496916927]{.tmp}
[Example: Playing with the binary. Bull cards. Happy operator! Punch
card plays.]{.example .descriptor}

\"The highlight of the collection is to revive a real punch card
workshop of the 1960s.\"

[Example: Collection de la Maison des Écritures d\'Informatique & Bible,
Maredsous]{.example .descriptor}

The particularity of the collection lies in the fact that it\'s the
conservation of multiple stages of life of a software since its initial
computerization until today. The idea of introducing informatics into
the work of working with/on the Bible (versions in Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
and French) dates back to 1971, via punch card recordings and their
memorization on magnetic tape. Then came the step of analyzing texts
using computers.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/resizes/Preparing-the-Techno-galactic-Software-Observatory/DSC05019.JPG?m=1490635726]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.jean.heuns]{.tmp}
[]{#mguzmza4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.jean.heuns)
Interview people about their histories with software]{.method
.descriptor} [What: Observe personnal narratives around software
history. Retrace the path of relation to software, how it changed during
the years and what are the human access memories that surrounds it. To
look at software through personal relations and emotions.]{.what
.descriptor} [How: Interviews are a good way to do it. Informal
conversations also.]{.how .descriptor}

Jean Heuns has been collecting servers, calculators, softwares, magnetic
tapes hard disks for xxx years. Found an agreement for them to be
displayed in the department hallways. Department of Computer sciences -
Kul Leuven.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3350.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3361.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3356.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3343.JPG]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#odfkotky .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.samequestion)
Ask several people from different fields and age-groups the same
question: \"***What is software?***\"]{.method .descriptor} [Remember:
The answers to this question will vary depending on who is asking it to
who.]{.remember .descriptor} [What: By paying close attention to the
answers, and possibly logging them, observations on the ambiguous place
and nature of software can be made.]{.what .descriptor}
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

Jean Huens (system administrator at the department of Computer Science,
KULeuven): \"*It is difficult to answer the question \'what is
software\', but I know what is good software*\"

Thomas Cnudde (hardware designer at ESAT - COSIC, Computer Security and
Industrial Cryptography, KULeuven): \"*Software is a list of sequential
instructions! Hardware for me is made of silicon, software a sequence of
bits in a file. But naturally I am biased: I\'m a hardware designer so I
like to consider it as unique and special*\".

Amal Mahious (Director of NAM-IP, Namur): \"*This, you have to ask the
specialists.*\"

` {.verbatim}
*what is software?
--the unix filesystem says: it's a file----what is a file?
----in the filesystem, if you ask xxd:
------ it's a set of hexadecimal bytes
-------what is hexadecimal bytes?
------ -b it's a set of binary 01s
----if you ask objdump
-------it's a set of instructions
--side channel researching also says:
----it's a set of instructions
--the computer glossary says:
----it's a computer's programs, plus the procedure for their use http://etherbox.local/home/pi/video/A_Computer_Glossary.webm#t=02:26
------ a computer's programs is a set of instrutions for performing computer operations
`

[Remember: To answer the question \"*what is software*\" depends on the
situation, goal, time, and other contextual influences.]{.remember
.descriptor} [TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.everyonescp]{.tmp}
[]{#mzcxodix .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.devmem) FMEM
and /DEV/MEM]{.method .descriptor} [What: Different ways of exploring
your memory (RAM). Because in unix everything is a file, you can access
your memory as if it were a file.]{.what .descriptor} [Urgency: To try
and observe the operational level of software, getting closer to the
workings, the instruction-being of an executable/executing file, the way
it is when it is loaded into memory rather than when it sits in the
harddisk]{.urgency .descriptor} [Remember: In Unix-like operating
systems, a device file or special file is an interface for a device
driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. In
the early days you could fully access your memory via the memory device
(`/dev/mem`) but over time the access was more and more restricted in
order to avoid malicious processes to directly access the kernel memory.
The kernel option CONFIG\_STRICT\_DEVMEM was introduced in kernel
version 2.6 and upper (2.6.36--2.6.39, 3.0--3.8, 3.8+HEAD). So you\'ll
need to use the Linux kernel module fmem: this module creates
`/dev/fmem` device, that can be used for accessing physical memory
without the limits of /dev/mem (1MB/1GB, depending on
distribution).]{.remember .descriptor}

`/dev/mem` tools to explore processes stored in the memory

ps ax | grep process
cd /proc/numberoftheprocess
cat maps

\--\> check what it is using

The proc filesystem is a pseudo-filesystem which provides an interface
to kernel data structures. It is commonly mounted at `/proc`. Most of it
is read-only, but some files allow kernel variables to be changed.

dump to a file\--\>change something in the file\--\>dump new to a
file\--\>diff oldfile newfile

\"where am i?\"

to find read/write memory addresses of a certain process\
`awk -F "-| " '$3 ~ /rw/ { print $1 " " $2}' /proc/PID/maps`{.bash}

take the range and drop it to hexdump

sudo dd if=/dev/mem bs=1 skip=$(( 16#b7526000 - 1 )) \
count=$(( 16#b7528000 - 16#7b7526000 + 1)) | hexdump -C

Besides opening the memory dump with an hex editor you can also try and
explore it with other tools or devices. You can open it as a raw image,
you can play it as a sound or perhaps send it directly to your
frame-buffer device (`/dev/fb0`).

[WARNING: Although your memory may look like/sound like/read like
gibberish, it may contain sensitive information about you and your
computer!]{.warning .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/Screenshot\_from\_2017-06-07\_164407.png]{.tmp}
[TODO: BOX: Forensic and debuggung tools can be used to explore and
problematize the layers of abstraction of computing.]{.tmp} [TODO:
RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.monopsychism]{.tmp}
[]{#m2mwogri .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.monopsychism)
Pan/Monopsychism]{.method .descriptor} [What: Reading and writing
sectors of memory from/to different computers]{.what .descriptor} [How:
Shell commands and fmem kernel module]{.how .descriptor} [Urgency:
Memory, even when it is volatile, is a trace of the processes happening
in your computer in the form of saved information, and is therefore more
similar to a file than to a process. Challenging the file/process
divide, sharing memory with others will allow a more intimate relation
with your and other\'s computers.]{.urgency .descriptor} [About:
Monopsychism is the philosophical/theological doctrine according to
which there exists but one intellect/soul, shared by all beings.]{.about
.descriptor} [TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.devmem]{.tmp} [Note: The
parallel allocation and observation of the same memory sector in two
different computers is in a sense the opposite process of machine
virtualization, where the localization of multiple virtual machines in
one physical comptuers can only happen by rigidly separating the memory
sectors dedicated to the different virtual machines.]{.note .descriptor}
[WARNING: THIS METHOD HAS NOT BEEN TESTED, IT CAN PROBABLY DAMAGE YOUR
RAM MEMORY AND/OR COMPUTER]{.warning .descriptor}

First start the fmem kernel module in both computers:

`sudo sh fmem/run.sh`{.bash}

Then load part of your computer memory into the other computer via dd
and ssh:

`dd if=/dev/fmem bs=1 skip=1000000 count=1000 | ssh user@othercomputer dd of=/dev/fmem`{.bash}

Or viceversa, load part of another computer\'s memory into yours:

`ssh user@othercomputer dd if=/dev/fmem bs=1 skip=1000000 count=1000 | dd of=/dev/fmem`{.bash}

Or even, exchange memory between two other computers:

`ssh user@firstcomputer dd if=/dev/fmem bs=1 skip=1000000 count=1000 | ssh user@secondcomputer dd of=/dev/fmem`{.bash}

` {.quaverbatim}
pan/monopsychism:
(aquinas famously opposed averroes..who's philosophy can be interpreted as monopsychist)

shared memory

copying the same memory to different computers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_%28computer_programming%29

it could cut through the memory like a worm

or it could go through the memory of different computers one after the other and take and leave something there
`

[Temporality]{.grouping} []{#ndawnmy5 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.fountain)
Fountain refreshment]{.method .descriptor} [What: Augmenting a piece of
standardised office equipment designed to dispense water to perform a
decorative function.]{.what .descriptor} [How: Rearranging space as
conditioning observations (WTC vs. Museum vs. University vs. Startup
Office vs. Shifting Walls that became Water Fountains)]{.how
.descriptor} [Who: Gaining access to standardised water dispensing
equipment turned out to be more difficult than expected as such
equipment is typically licensed / rented rather than purchased outright.
Acquiring a unit that could be modified required access to secondary
markets of second hand office equiment in order to purchase a disused
model.]{.who .descriptor} [Urgency: EU-OSHA (European Agency for Safety
and Health at Work) Directive 2003/10/EC noise places describes the
minimum health and safety requirements regarding the exposure of workers
to the risks arising from physical agents (noise). However no current
European guidelines exist on the potential benefitial uses of tactially
designed additive noise systems.]{.urgency .descriptor}

The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory -- Comfortable silence, one way
mirrors

A drinking fountain and screens of one-way mirrors as part of the work
session \"*The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory*\" organised by
Constant.

For the past 100 years the western ideal of a corporate landscape has
been has been moving like a pendulum, oscillating between grids of
cubicles and organic, open landscapes, in a near to perfect 25-year
rhythm. These days the changes in office organisation is supplemented by
sound design, in corporate settings mostly to create comfortable
silence. Increase the sound and the space becomes more intimate, the
person on the table next to you can not immediately hear what you are
saying. It seems that actual silence in public and corporate spaces has
not been sought after since the start of the 20th century. Actual
silence is not at the moment considered comfortable. One of the visible
symptoms of our desire to take the edge off the silence is to be
observed through the appearance of fountains in public space. The
fountains purpose being to give off neutral sound, like white noise
without the negative connotations. However as a sound engineer\'s
definition of noise is unwanted sound that all depends on ones personal
relation to the sound of dripping water.

This means that there needs to be a consistent inoffensiveness to create
comfortable silence.

In corporate architecture the arrival of glass buildings were originally
seen as a symbol of transparency, especially loved by governmental
buildings. Yet the reflectiveness of this shiny surface once combined
with strong light -- known as the treason of the glass -- was only
completely embraced at the invention of one-way-mirror foil. And it was
the corporate business-world that would come to be known for their
reflective glass skyscrapers. As the foil reacts to light, it appears
transparent to someone standing in the dark, while leaving the side with
the most light with an opaque surface. Using this foil as room dividers
in a room with a changing light, what is hidden or visible will vary
throughout the day. So will the need for comfortable silence. Disclaimer
:\
Similar to the last 100 years of western office organisation,\
this fountain only has two modes:\
on or off

If it is on it also offers two options\
cold water and hot water

This fountain has been tampered with and has not in any way been
approved by a proffesional fountain cleaner. I do urge you to consider
this before you take the decision to drink from the fountain.

Should you chose to drink from the fountain, then I urge you to write
your name on your cup, in the designated area, for a customised
experience of my care for you.

I do want you to be comfortable.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/mia/mia6.gif]{.tmp} [SHOW
IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/mia/FullSizeRender%2811%29.jpg]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/mia/IMG\_5695.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/mia/IMG\_5698.JPG]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mtk5yjbl .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.silvio) Create
\"nannyware\": Software that observes and addresses the user]{.method
.descriptor} [What]{.what .empty .descriptor}

Nannyware is software meant to protect users while limiting their space
of activity. It is software that passive-aggressively suggests or
enforces some kind of discipline. In other words, create a form of
parental control extended to adults by means of user experience / user
interfaces.

Nannyware is a form of Content-control software: software designed to
restrict or control the content a reader is authorised to access,
especially when utilised to restrict material delivered over the
Internet via the Web, e-mail, or other means. Content-control software
determines what content will be available or be blocked.

[How]{.how .empty .descriptor}

> \[\...RestrictionsCITECLOSE23310 can be applied at various levels: a
> government can attempt to apply them nationwide (see Internet
> censorship), or they can, for example, be applied by an ISP to its
> clients, by an employer to its personnel, by a school to its students,
> by a library to its visitors, by a parent to a child\'s computer, or
> by an individual user to his or her own computer.^[5](#fcefedaf)^

[Who]{.who .empty .descriptor}

> Unlike filtering, accountability software simply reports on Internet
> usage. No blocking occurs. In setting it up, you decide who will
> receive the detailed report of the computer's usage. Web sites that
> are deemed inappropriate, based on the options you've chosen, will be
> red-flagged. Because monitoring software is of value only "after the
> fact", we do not recommend this as a solution for families with
> children. However, it can be an effective aid in personal
> accountability for adults. There are several available products out
> there.^[6](#bffbbeaf)^

[Urgency]{.urgency .empty .descriptor}

> As with all new lifestyle technologies that come along, in the
> beginning there is also some chaos until their impact can be assessed
> and rules put in place to bring order and respect to their
> implementation and use in society. When the automobile first came into
> being there was much confusion regarding who had the right of way, the
> horse or the car. There were no paved roads, speed limits, stop signs,
> or any other traffic rules. Many lives were lost and much property was
> destroyed as a result. Over time, government and society developed
> written and unwritten rules as to the proper use of the
> car.^[7](#bbfcbcfa)^

[WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor}

> Disadvantages of explicit proxy deployment include a user\'s ability
> to alter an individual client configuration and bypass the proxy. To
> counter this, you can configure the firewall to allow client traffic
> to proceed only through the proxy. Note that this type of firewall
> blocking may result in some applications not working
> properly.^[8](#ededebde)^

[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

> The main problem here is that the settings that are required are
> different from person to person. For example, I use workrave with a 25
> second micropause every two and a half minute, and a 10 minute
> restbreak every 20 minutes. I need these frequent breaks, because I\'m
> recovering from RSI. And as I recover, I change the settings to fewer
> breaks. If you have never had any problem at all (using the computer,
> that is), then you may want much fewer breaks, say 10 seconds
> micropause every 10 minutes, and a 5 minute restbreak every hour. It
> is very hard to give proper guidelines here. My best advice is to play
> around and see what works for you. Which settings \"feel right\".
> Basically, that\'s how Workrave\'s defaults evolve.^[9](#cfbbbfdd)^

[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Content-control software\](
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2008/05/03/nannyware.jpg )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[A \"nudge\" from your music player
\](http://img.wonderhowto.com/img/10/25/63533437022064/0/disable-high-volume-warning-when-using-headphones-your-samsung-galaxy-s4.w654.jpg)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Emphasis on the body\]
(http://classicallytrained.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/take-a-break.jpg)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[ \"Slack is trying to be my friend but it\'s more
like a slightly insensitive and slightly bossy acquaintance.\"
\@briecode \] (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuZLgV4XgAAYexX.jpg)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Slack is trying to be my friend but it\'s more like
a slightly insensitive and slightly bossy acquaintance.\]
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuZLgV4XgAAYexX.jpg)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE
HERE:
!\[\](https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi0.wp.com%2Fatherbeg.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F06%2FWorkrave-Restbreak-Shoulder.png&f=1)]{.tmp}

Facebook is working on an app to stop you from drunk-posting \"Yann
LeCun, who overseas the lab, told Wired magazine that the program would
be like someone asking you, \'Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you
sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?\'\"

[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[This Terminal Dashboard Reminds You to Take a Break
When You\'re Lost Deep Inside the Command
Line\](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s\--\_of0PoM2\--/c\_fit,fl\_progressive,q\_80,w\_636/eegvqork0qizokwrlemz.png)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](http://waterlog.gd/images/homescreen.png)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
!\[\](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6oKTduWcAEruIE.jpg:large)]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#yzuwmdq4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.scrollresistance)
Useless scroll against productivity]{.method .descriptor} []{#m2vjndu3
.anchor} [[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.time)
Investigating how humans and machines negotiate the experience of
time]{.method .descriptor} [What]{.what .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE
HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/Screenshot\_from\_2017-06-10\_172547.png]{.tmp}
[How: python script]{.how .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty
.descriptor}

` {.verbatim}
# ends of time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Exact moment of the epoch:
03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038

## commands

local UNIX time of this machine
%XBASHCODE: date +%s

UNIX time + 1
%BASHCODE: echo $((`date +%s` +1 ))

## goodbye unix time

while :
do
sleep 1
figlet $((2147483647 - `date +%s`))
done

# Sundial Time Protocol Group tweaks

printf 'Current Time in Millennium Unix Time: '
printf $((2147483647 - `date +%s`))
echo
sleep 2
echo $((`cat ends-of-times/idletime` + 2)) > ends-of-times/idletime
idletime=`cat ends-of-times/idletime`
echo
figlet "Thank you for having donated 2 seconds to our ${idletime} seconds of collective SSH pause "
echo
echo

http://observatory.constantvzw.org/etherdump/ends-of-time.html
`

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} [Languaging]{.grouping} []{#nmi5mgjm .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.quine)
Quine]{.method .descriptor} [What: A program whose function consists of
displaying its own code. Also known as \"self-replicating
program\"]{.what .descriptor} [Why: Quines show the tension between
\"software as language\" and \"software as operation\".]{.why
.descriptor} [How: By running a quine you will get your code back. You
may do a step forward and wonder about functionality and aesthetics,
uselessness and performativity, data and code.]{.how .descriptor}
[Example: A quine (Python). When executed it outputs the same text as
the source:]{.example .descriptor}

` {.sourceCode .python}
s = 's = %r\nprint(s%%s)'
print(s%s)
`

[Example: A oneline unibash/etherpad quine, created during relearn
2017:]{.example .descriptor}

` {.quaverbatim}
wget -qO- http://192.168.73.188:9001/p/quine/export/txt | curl -F "file=@-;type=text/plain" http://192.168.73.188:9001/p/quine/import
`

[WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor}

The encounter with quines may deeply affect you. You may want to write
one and get lost in trying to make an ever shorter and more elegant one.
You may also take quines as point of departure or limit-ideas for
exploring software dualisms.

\"A quine is without why. It prints because it prints. It pays no
attention to itself, nor does it asks whether anyone sees it.\" \"Aquine
is aquine is aquine. \" Aquine is not a quine This is not aquine

[Remember: Although seemingly absolutely useless, quines can be used as
exploits.]{.remember .descriptor}

Exploring boundaries/tensions

databases treat their content as data (database punctualization) some
exploits manage to include operations in a database

[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.monopsychism]{.tmp}
[]{#zwu0ogu0 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.glossary)
Glossaries as an exercise]{.method .descriptor} [What: Use the technique
of psychanalytic listening to compile (gather, collect, bring together)
a list of key words for understanding software.]{.what .descriptor}
[How: Create a shared document that participants can add words to as
their importance emerges.To do pyschoanalytic listening, let your
attention float freely, hovering evenly, over a conversation or a text
until something catches its ear. Write down what your ear/eye catches.
When working in a collective context invite others to participate in
this project and describe the practice to them. Each individual may move
in and out of this mode of listening according to their interest and
desire and may add as many words to the list as they want. Use this list
to create an index of software observation.]{.how .descriptor} [When:
This is best done in a bounded context. In the case of the
Techno-Galactic Observatory, our bounded contexts includes the six day
work session and the pages and process of this publication.]{.when
.descriptor} [Who: The so-inclined within the group]{.who .descriptor}
[Urgency: Creating and troubling categories]{.urgency .descriptor}
[Note: Do not remove someone else\'s word from the glossary during the
accumulation phase. If an editing and cutting phase is desired this
should be done after the collection through collective consensus.]{.note
.descriptor} [WARNING: This method is not exclusive to and was not
developed for software observation. It may lead to awareness of
unconscious processes and to shifts in structures of feeling and
relation.]{.warning .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

` {.verbatim}
Agile
Code
Colonial
Command Line
Communication
Connectivity
Emotional
Galaxies
Green
Guide
Kernel
Imperial
Issues
Machine
Mantra
Memory
Museum
Observation
ProductionPower
Programmers
Progress
Relational
Red
Scripting
Scrum
Software
Survival
Technology
Test
Warning
WhiteBoard
Yoga
`

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mja0m2i5 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.validation)
Adding qualifiers]{.method .descriptor} [Remember: \"\[V\]alues are
properties of things and states of affairs that we care about and strive
to attain\...vlaues expressed in technical systems are a function of
their uses as well as their features and designs.\" Values at Play in
Digital Games, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum]{.remember
.descriptor} [What: Bringing a moral, ethical, or otherwise
evaluative/adjectival/validating lens.]{.what .descriptor} [How:
Adjectives create subcategories. They narrow the focus by naming more
specifically the imagined object at hand and by implicitly excluding all
objects that do not meet the criteria of the qualifier. The more
adjectives that are added, the easier it becomes to answer the question
what is software. Or so it seems. Consider what happens if you add the
words good, bad, bourgeois, queer, stable, or expensive to software. Now
make a list of adjectives and try it for yourself. Level two of this
exercise consists of observing a software application and deducing from
this the values of the individuals, companies, and societies that
produced it.]{.how .descriptor} [Note: A qualifier may narrow down
definitions to undesirable degrees.]{.note .descriptor} [WARNING: This
exercise may be more effective at identifying normative and ideological
assumptions at play in the making, distributing, using, and maintaining
of software than at producing a concise definition.]{.warning
.descriptor} [Example: \"This morning, Jan had difficulties to answer
the question \"what is software\", but he said that he could answer the
question \"what is good software\". What is good software?]{.example
.descriptor} [TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mmmwmje2 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.softwarethrough)
Searching \"software\" through software]{.method .descriptor} [What: A
quick way to sense the ambiguity of the term \'software\', is to go
through the manual files on your hard drive and observe in which cases
is the term used.]{.what .descriptor} [How: command-line oneliner]{.how
.descriptor} [Why: Software is a polymorphic term that take different
meanings and comes with different assumptions for the different agents
involved in its production, usage and all other forms of encounter and
subjection. From the situated point of view of the software present on
your machine, when and why does software call itself as such?]{.why
.descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

so software exists only outside your computer? only in general terms?
checking for the word software in all man pages:

grep -nr software /usr/local/man
!!!!

software appears only in terms of license:

This program is free software
This software is copyright (c)

we don\'t run software. we still run programs.\
nevertheless software is everywhere

[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.samequestion]{.tmp}
[]{#ndhkmwey .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.everyonescp)
Persist in calling everyone a Software Curious Person]{.method
.descriptor} [What: Persistance in naming is a method for changing a
person\'s relationship to software by (sometimes forcibly) call everyone
a Software Curious Person.]{.what .descriptor} [How: Insisting on
curiosity as a relation, rather than for example \'fear\' or
\'admiration\' might help cut down the barriers between different types
of expertise and allows multiple stakeholders feel entitled to ask
questions, to engage, to investigate and to observe.]{.how .descriptor}
[Urgency: Software is too important to not be curious about.
Observations could benefit from recognising different forms of
knowledge. It seems important to engage with software through multiple
interests, not only by means of technical expertise.]{.urgency
.descriptor} [Example: This method was used to address each of the
visitors at the Techno-Galactic Walk-in Clinic.]{.example .descriptor}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} [Healing]{.grouping} []{#mmu1mgy0 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.relational)
Setup a Relational software observatory consultancy (RSOC)]{.method
.descriptor} [Remember]{.remember .empty .descriptor}

- Collectivise research around hacking to save time.
- Self-articulate software needs as your own Operating (system)
perspective.
- Change the lens by looking to software through a time perspective.

[What: By paying a visit to our ethnomethodology interview practice
you'll learn to observe software from different angles / perspectives.
Our practionners passion is to make the \"what is the relation to
software\" discussion into a service.]{.what .descriptor} [How: Reading
the signs. Considering the everchanging nature of software development
and use and its vast impact on globalized societies, it is necessary to
recognize some of the issues of how software is (often) either
passively-perceived or actively-observed, without an articulation of the
relations. We offer a method to read the signs of the relational aspect
of software observance. It\'s a crucial aspect of our guide. It will
give you another view on software that will shape your ability to
survive any kind of software disaster.]{.how .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE
HERE: !\[Reading the signs. From: John \"Lofty\" Wiseman, SAS Survival
Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Anywhere\](
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/index.php/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMAG1319
)]{.tmp} [WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: have a
advertising blob for the RSOC with a smiling doctor welcoming
image]{.tmp} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

What follows is an example of a possible diagnostic questionnaire.

Sample Questionnaire
--------------------

**What to expect** You will obtain a cartography of software users
profiles. It will help you to shape your own relation to software. You
will be able to construct your own taxonomy and classifcation of
software users that is needed in order to find a means of rescue in case
of a software catastrophy.

- SKILLS\
- What kind of user would you say that you are?
- What is your most frequently used type of software?
- How often do you install/experiment/learn new software?



- History
- What is your first recollection of software use?
- How often do / when did you last purchase software or pay for a
software service?



- Ethics
- What is the software feature you care about the most?
- Do you use any free software?
- if yes than
- do you remember your first attempt at using this software
service? Do you still use it? If not why?



- Do you pay for media distribution/streaming services?
- Do you remember your first attempt at using free software and how
did that make you feel?
- Have you used any of these software services : facebook, dating app
(grindr, tinder, etc.), twitter, instagram or equivalent.



- Can you talk about your favorite apps or webtools that you use
regularly?
- What is most popular software your friends use?



- SKILL
- Would you say that you are a specilised user?



- Have you ever used the command line?
- Do you know about scripting?
- Have you ever edited an HTML page? A CSS file? A PHP file? A
configuration file?
- Can you talk about your most technical encounter with your computer
/ telephone?



- ECONOMY\
- How do you pay for your software use?
- Please elaborate (for example, do you buy the software? /
contribute in kind / deliver services or support)
- What is the last software that you paid for using?
- What online services are you currently paying for?
- Is someone paying for your use of service?



- Personal
- What stories do you have concerning contracts and administration in
relation to your software, Internet or computer?
- How does software help you shape your relations with other people?
- From which countries does your softwares come from / reside? How do
you feel about that?
- Have you ever read a terms of software service, what about one that
is not targeting the American market?

Sample questionnaire results
----------------------------

Possible/anticipated user profiles
----------------------------------

### \...meAsHardwareOwnerSoftwareUSER:

\"I did not own a computer personally until very very late as I did not
enjoy gaming as a kid or had interest in spending much time behind PC
beyond work (and work computer). My first was hence I think in 2005 and
it was a SGI workstation that was the computer of the year 2000 (cost
10.000USD) and I got it for around 300USD. Proprietary drivers for
unified graphics+RAM were never released, so it remained a software
dead-end in gorgeous blue curved chassis
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/pics/vwdocs.jpg\"

### \...meAsSoftwareCONSUMER:

\"I payed/purchased software only twice in my life (totalling less then
25eur), as I could access most commercial software as widely pirated in
Balkans and later had more passion for FLOSS anyway, this made me relate
to software as material to exchange and work it, rather than commodity
goods I could or not afford.\"

### \...meAsSoftwareINVESTOR:

\"I did it as both of those apps were niche products in early beta (one
was Jeeper Elvis, real-time-non-linear-video-editor for BeOS) that
failed to reach market, but I think I would likely do it again and only
in that mode (supporting the bleeding edge and off-stream work), but
maybe with more than 25eur.\"

### \...meAsSoftwareUserOfOS:

\"I would spend most of 80s ignoring computers, 90ties figuring out
software from high-end to low-end, starting with OSF/DecAlpha and SunOS,
than IRIX and MacOS, finally Win 95/98 SE, that permanently pushed me
into niches (of montly LINUX distro install fests, or even QNX/Solaris
experiments and finally BeOS use).\"

### \...meAsSoftwareWEBSURFER:

\"I got used to websurfing in more than 15 windows on UNIX systems and
never got used to less than that ever since, furthermore with addition
of more browser options this number only multiplied (always wondered if
my first system was Windows 3.11 - would I be a more focused person and
how would that form my relations to browser windows\>tabs).\"

### \...meAsSoftwareUserOfPropertarySoftware:

\"I signed one NDA contract in person on the paper and with ink on a
rainy day while stopping of at trainstaion in north Germany for the
software that was later to be pulled out of market due to problematic
licencing agreement (intuitivly I knew it was wrong) - it had too much
unprofessional pixeleted edges in its graphics.

### \...meAsSoftwareUserOfDatingWebsites:

\"I got one feature request implemented by a prominent dating website
(to search profiles by language they speak), however I was never
publicly acknowledged (though I tried to make use of it few times), that
made our relations feel a bit exploitative and underappreciated. \"

### \...meAsSoftwareUserTryingToGoPRO:

\"my only two attempts to get into the software company failed as they
insisted on full time commitments. Later I found out ones were
intimidated in interview and other gave it to a person that negotiated
to work part time with friend! My relation to professionalism is likely
equally complex and pervert as one to the software.\"

Case study : W. W.
------------------

\...ww.AsExperiencedAdventerousUSER - experiments with software every
two days as she uses FLOSS and Gnu/Linux, cares the most for maliabity
of the software - as a result she has big expectations of flexibility
even in software category which is quite conventional and stability
focused like file-hosting.

\...ww.AsAnInevstorInSoftware - paid compiled version of FLOSS audio
software 5 years ago as she is supportive of economy and work around
production, maintainance and support, but she also used closed
hardware/software where she had to agree on licences she finds unfair,
but then she was hacking it in order to use it as an expert - when she
had time.

\...ww.AsCommunicationSoftwareUSER - she is not using commercial social
networks, so she is very concious of information transfers and time
relations, but has no strong media/format/design focus.

Q: What is your first recollection of software use?\
A: ms dos in 1990 at school \_ i was 15 or 16. oh no 12. Basic in 1986.

Q: What are the emotions related to this use?\
A: fun. i\'m good at this. empowering

Q: How often do / when did you last purchase software or pay for a
software service?\
A: I paid for ardour five years ago. I paid the developper directly. For
the compiled version. I paid for the service. I pay for my website and
email service at domaine public.

Q: What kind of user would you say you are?\
A: An experienced user drawing out the line. I don\'t behave.

Q: Is there a link between this and your issue?\
A: Even if it\'s been F/LOSS there is a lot of decision power in my
package.

Q: What is your most frequently used type of software?\
A: Web browser. email. firefox & thunderbird

Q: How often do you install/experiment/learn new software?\
A: Every two days. I reinstall all the time. my old lts system died.
stop being supported last april. It was linux mint something.

Q: Do you know about scripting?\
A: I do automating scripts for any operation i have to doi several times
like format conversion.

Q: Can you talk about your most technical encounter with your computer /
telephone?\
A: I\'ve tried to root it. but i didn\'t succeed.

Q: How much time do you wish to spend on such activities like hacking,
rooting your device?\
A: hours. you should take your time

Q: Did you ever sign licence agreement you were not agree with? How does
that affect you?\
A: This is the first thing your when you have a phone. it\'s obey or
die.

Q: What is the software feature you care for the most?\
A: malleability. different ways to approach a problem, a challenge, an
issue.

Q: Do you use any free software?\
A: yes. there maybe are some proprietary drivers.

Q: Do you remember your first attempt at using free software and how did
that make you feel?\
A: Yes i installed my dual boot in \... 10 years ago. scared and
powerful.

Q: Do you use one of this software service: facebook, dating app (grindr
of sort), twitter, instagram or equivalent?\
A: Google, gmail that\'s it

Q: Can you talk about your favorite apps or webtools that you use
regularly?\
A: Music player. vanilla music and f-droid. browser. I pay attention to
clearing my history, no cookies. I also have iceweasel. Https by
default. Even though i have nothing to hide.

Q: What stories around contracts and administration in relation to your
software internet or computer?\
A: Nothing comes to my mind. i\'m not allowed to do, to install on
phone. When it\'s an old phone, there is nothing left that is working
you have to do it.

Q: How does software help you shape your relations with other people?\
A: It\'s a hard question. if it\'s communication software of course
it\'s it\'s nature to be related to other people.there is an expectency
of immediate reply, of information transfer\...It\'s troubling your
relation with people in certain situations.

Q: From which countries does your softwares live / is coming from? How
do you feel about that?\
A: i think i chose the netherlands as a miror. you are hoping to reflect
well in this miror.

Q: Have you ever read a terms of software service; one that is not
targeting the American market?\
A: i have read them. no.

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mta1ntzm .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.agile.yoga)
Agile Sun Salutation]{.method .descriptor} [Remember]{.remember .empty
.descriptor}

> Agile software development describes a set of values and principles
> for software development under which requirements and solutions evolve
> through the collaborative effort of self-organizing cross-functional
> teams. It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early
> delivery, and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and
> flexible response to change. These principles support the definition
> and continuing evolution of many software development
> methods.^[10](#dbabcece)^

[What: You will be observing yourself]{.what .descriptor} [How]{.how
.empty .descriptor}

> Scrum is a framework for managing software development. It is designed
> for teams of three to nine developers who break their work into
> actions that can be completed within fixed duration cycles (called
> \"sprints\"), track progress and re-plan in daily 15-minute stand-up
> meetings, and collaborate to deliver workable software every sprint.
> Approaches to coordinating the work of multiple scrum teams in larger
> organizations include Large-Scale Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
> and Scrum of Scrums, among others.^[11](#eefcbaac)^

[When: Anywhere where it\'s possible to lie on the floor]{.when
.descriptor} [Who]{.who .empty .descriptor}

> Self-organization and motivation are important, as are interactions
> like co-location and pair programming. It is better to have a good
> team of developers who communicate and collaborate well, rather than a
> team of experts each operating in isolation. Communication is a
> fundamental concept.^[12](#fbaeffab)^

[Urgency: Using Agile software development methods to develop a new path
into your professional and personal life towards creativity, focus and
health.]{.urgency .descriptor} [WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor}

> The agile movement is in some ways a bit like a teenager: very
> self-conscious, checking constantly its appearance in a mirror,
> accepting few criticisms, only interested in being with its peers,
> rejecting en bloc all wisdom from the past, just because it is from
> the past, adopting fads and new jargon, at times cocky and arrogant.
> But I have no doubts that it will mature further, become more open to
> the outside world, more reflective, and also therefore more
> effective.^[13](#edabeeaf)^

[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE:
https://mfr.osf.io/render?url=https://osf.io/ufdvb/?action=download%26direct%26mode=render&initialWidth=450&childId=mfrIframe]{.tmp}

Hello and welcome to the presentation of the agile yoga methodology. I
am Allegra, and today I\'m going to be your personal guide to YOGA, an
acronym for why organize? Go agile! I\'ll be part of your team today and
we\'ll do a few exercises together as an introduction to a new path into
your professional and personal life towards creativity, focus and
health.

A few months ago, I was stressed, overwhelmed with my work, feeling
alone, inadequate, but since I started practicing agile yoga, I feel
more productive. I have many clients as an agile yoga coach, and I\'ve
seen new creative business opportunities coming to me as a software
developer.

For this first experience with the agile yoga method and before we do
physical exercises together, I would like to invite you to close your
eyes. Make yourself comfortable, lying on the floor, or sitting with
your back on the wall. Close your eyes, relax. Get comfortable. Feel the
weight of your body on the floor or on the wall. Relax.

Leave your troubles at the door. Right now, you are not procrastinating,
you are having a meeting at the \,
a professional building dedicated to business, you are meeting yourself,
you are your own business partner, you are one. You are building your
future.

You are in a room standing with your team, a group of lean programmers.
You are watching a white board together. You are starting your day, a
very productive day as you are preparing to run a sprint together. Now
you turn towards each other, making a scrum with your team, you breathe
together, slowly, inhaling and exhaling together, slowly, feeling the
air in and out of your body. Now you all turn towards the sun to prepare
to do your ASSanas, the agile Sun Salutations or ASS with the team
dedicated ASS Master. She\'s guiding you. You start with Namaskar, the
Salute. your palms joined together, in prayer pose. you all reflect on
the first principle of the agile manifesto. your highest priority is to
satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable
software.

Next pose, is Ardha Chandrasana or (Half Moon Pose). With a deep
inhalation, you raise both arms above your head and tilt slightly
backward arching your back. you welcome changing requirements, even late
in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer\'s
competitive advantage. then you all do Padangusthasana (Hand to Foot
Pose). With a deep exhalation, you bend forward and touch the mat, both
palms in line with your feet, forehead touching your knees. you deliver
working software frequently.

Surya Darshan (Sun Sight Pose). With a deep inhalation, you take your
right leg away from your body, in a big backward step. Both your hands
are firmly planted on your mat, your left foot between your hands. you
work daily throughout the project, business people and developers
together. now, you\'re flowing into Purvottanasana (Inclined Plane) with
a deep inhalation by taking your right leg away from your body, in a big
backward step. Both your hands are firmly planted on your mat, your left
foot between your hands. you build projects around motivated
individuals. you give them the environment and support they need, and
you trust them to get the job done.

You\'re in Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog Pose). With a deep
exhalation, you shove your hips and butt up towards the ceiling, forming
an upward arch. Your arms are straight and aligned with your head. The
most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and
within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Then, Sashtang Dandawat (Forehead, Chest, Knee to Floor Pose). With a
deep exhalation, you lower your body down till your forehead, chest,
knees, hands and feet are touching the mat, your butt tilted up. Working
software is the primary measure of progress.

Next is Bhujangasana (Cobra Pose). With a deep inhalation, you slowly
snake forward till your head is up, your back arched concave, as much as
possible. Agile processes promote sustainable development. You are all
maintaining a constant pace indefinitely, sponsors, developers, and
users together.

Now back into Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog Pose).
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances
agility.

And then again to Surya Darshan (Sun Sight Pose). Simplicity\--the art
of maximizing the amount of work not done\--is essential. Then to
Padangusthasana (Hand to Foot Pose). The best architectures,
requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

You all do again Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon Pose). At regular
intervals, you as the team reflect on how to become more effective, then
tune and adjust your behavior accordingly. you end our ASSanas session
with a salute to honor your agile yoga practices. you have just had a
productive scrum meeting. now i invite you to open your eyes, move your
body around a bit, from the feet up to the head and back again.

Stand up on your feet and let\'s do a scrum together if you\'re ok being
touched on the arms by someone else. if not, you can do it on your own.
so put your hands on the shoulder of the SCP around you. now we\'re
joined together, let\'s look at the screen together as we inhale and
exhale. syncing our body together to the rythms of our own internal
software, modulating our oxygen level intake requirements to the oxygen
availability of our service facilities.

Now, let\'s do together a couple of exercise to protect and strengthen
our wrists. as programmers, as internauts, as entrepreneurs, they are a
very crucial parts of the body to protect. in order to be able to type,
to swipe, to shake hands vigourously, we need them in good health. So
bring to hands towards each other in a prayer pose, around a book, a
brick. You can do it without but I\'m using my extreme programming book
- embrace change - for that. So press the palms together firmly, press
the pad of your fingers together. do that while breathing in and out
twice.

Now let\'s expand our arms towards us, in the air, face and fingers
facing down. like we\'re typing. make your shoulders round. let\'s
breath while visualizing in our heads the first agile mantra :
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Now let\'s bring back the arms next to the body and raise them again.
And let\'s move our hands towards the ceiling this time. Strenghtening
our back. In our head, the second mantra. Working software over
comprehensive documentation. now let\'s bring back the hands in the
standing position. Then again the first movement while visualizing the
third mantra : Customer collaboration over contract negotiation and then
the second movement thinking about the fourth and last mantra :
Responding to change over following a plan and of course we continue
breathing. Now to finish this session, let\'s do a sprint together in
the corridor !

[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/guide/agileyoga/8-Poses-Yoga-Your-Desk.contours.png
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/guide/agileyoga/gayolab-office-chair-for-yoga.contours.png
)]{.tmp} [TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mdu0mmji .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.blobservation)
Hand reading]{.method .descriptor} [How: Visit the Future Blobservation
Booth to have your fortunes read and derive life insight from the wisdom
of software.]{.how .descriptor} [What: Put your hand in the reading
booth and get your line read.]{.what .descriptor} [Why: The hand which
holds your mouse everyday hides many secrets.]{.why .descriptor}
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

` {.verbatim .wrap}
* sample reading timeline:

* 15:00 a test user, all tests clear and systems are online a user who said goodbye to us another user a user who thought it'd be silly to say thank you to the machine but thank you very much another kind user who said thank you yet another kind user another user, no feeback a nice user who found the reading process relieving yet another kind user a scared user! took the hand out but ended up trusting the system. "so cool thanks guys" another user a young user! this is a funny computer
* 15:35 another nice user
* 15:40 another nice user
* 15:47 happy user (laughing)
* 15:51 user complaining about her fortune, saying it's not true. Found the reading process creepy but eased up quickly
* 15:59 another nice user: http://etherbox.local:9001/p/SCP.sedyst.md
* 16:06 a polite user
* 16:08 a friendly playful user (stephanie)
* 16:12 a very giggly user (wendy)
* 16:14 a playful user - found the reading process erotic - DEFRAGMENTING? NO! Thanks Blobservation http://etherbox.local:9001/p/SCP.loup.md
* 16:19 a curious user
* 16:27 a friendly user but oh no, we had a glitch and computer crashed. But we still delivered the fortune. We got a thank you anyway
* 16:40 a nice user, the printer jammed but it was sorted out quickly *16:42 another nice user
* 16:50 nice user (joak)
* 16:52 yet another nice user (jogi)
* 16:55 happy user! (peter w)
* 16:57 more happy user (pierre h)
* 16:58 another happy user
* 17:00 super happy user (peggy)
* 17:02 more happy user
`

[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

> Software time is not the same as human time. Computers will run for AS
> LONG AS THEY WILL BE ABLE TO, provided sufficient power is available.
> You, as a human, don\'t have the luxury of being always connected to
> the power grid and this have to rely on your INTERNAL BATTERY. Be
> aware of your power cycles and set yourself to POWER-SAVING MODE
> whenever possible.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/resizes/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMAG1407.jpg?m=1497344230]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#yznjodq3 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.dirty) Bug
reporting for sharing observations]{.method .descriptor} [What: Etherpad
had stopped working but it was unclear why. Where does etherpad
\'live\'?]{.what .descriptor} [How: Started by looking around the pi\'s
filesystem by reading /var/log/syslog in /opt/etherpad and in a
subdirectory named var/ there was dirty.db, and dirty it was.]{.how
.descriptor} [When: Monday morning]{.when .descriptor} [Urgency:
Software (etherpad) not working and the Walk-in Clinic was about to
start.]{.urgency .descriptor} [Note:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.inventory.jogi]{.note
.descriptor}

from jogi\@mur.at to \[Observatory\] When dirty.db get\'s dirty

Dear all,

as promised yesterday, here my little report regarding the broken
etherpad.

\ \#\#\# When dirty.db get\'s dirty

When I got to WTC on Monday morning the etherpad on etherbox.local was
disfunct. Later someone said that in fact etherpad had stopped working
the evening before, but it was unclear why. So I started looking around
the pi\'s filesystem to find out what was wrong. Took me a while to find
the relevant lines in /var/log/syslog but it became clear that there was
a problem with the database. Which database? Where does etherpad
\'live\'? I found it in /opt/etherpad and in a subdirectory named var/
there it was: dirty.db, and dirty it was.

A first look at the file revealed no apparent problem. The last lines
looked like this:

`{"key":"sessionstorage:Ddy0gw7okwbkv5BzkR1DuSLCV_IA5_jQ","val":{"cookie ":{"path":"/","_expires":null,"originalMaxAge":null,"httpOnly":true,"secure":false}}} {"key":"sessionstorage:AU1cffgcTf_q6BV9aIdAvES2YyXM7Gm1","val":{"cookie ":{"path":"/","_expires":null,"originalMaxAge":null,"httpOnly":true,"secure":false}}} {"key":"sessionstorage:_H5SdUlDvQ3XCuPaZEXQ5lx0K6aAEJ9m","val":{"cookie ":{"path":"/","_expires":null,"originalMaxAge":null,"httpOnly":true,"se cure":false}}}`

What I did not see at the time was that there were some (AFAIR something
around 150) binary zeroes at the end of the file. I used tail for the
first look and that tool silently ignored the zeroes at the end of the
file. It was Martino who suggested using different tools (xxd in that
case) and that showed the cause of the problem. The file looked
something like this:

00013730: 6f6b 6965 223a 7b22 7061 7468 223a 222f okie":{"path":"/
00013740: 222c 225f 6578 7069 7265 7322 3a6e 756c ","_expires":nul
00013750: 6c2c 226f 7269 6769 6e61 6c4d 6178 4167 l,"originalMaxAg
00013760: 6522 3a6e 756c 6c2c 2268 7474 704f 6e6c e":null,"httpOnl
00013770: 7922 3a74 7275 652c 2273 6563 7572 6522 y":true,"secure"
00013780: 3a66 616c 7365 7d7d 7d0a 0000 0000 0000 :false}}}.......
00013790: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................

So Anita, Martino and I stuck our heads together to come up with a
solution. Our first attempt to fix the problem went something like this:

dd if=dirty.db of=dirty.db.clean bs=1 count=793080162

which means: write the first 793080162 blocks of size 1 byte to a new
file. After half an hour or so I checked on the size of the new file and
saw that some 10% of the copying had been done. No way this would get
done in time for the walk-in-clinic. Back to the drawing board.

Using a text editor was no real option btw since even vim has a hard
time with binary zeroes and the file was really big. But there was
hexedit! Martino installed it and copied dirty.db onto his computer.
After some getting used to the various commands to navigate in hexedit
the unwanted zeroes were gone in an instant. The end of the file looked
like this now:

00013730: 6f6b 6965 223a 7b22 7061 7468 223a 222f okie":{"path":"/
00013740: 222c 225f 6578 7069 7265 7322 3a6e 756c ","_expires":nul
00013750: 6c2c 226f 7269 6769 6e61 6c4d 6178 4167 l,"originalMaxAg
00013760: 6522 3a6e 756c 6c2c 2268 7474 704f 6e6c e":null,"httpOnl
00013770: 7922 3a74 7275 652c 2273 6563 7572 6522 y":true,"secure"
00013780: 3a66 616c 7365 7d7d 7d0a :false}}}.

Martino asked about the trailing \'.\' character and I checked a
different copy of the file. No \'.\' there, so that had to go too. My
biggest mistake in a long time! The \'.\' we were seeing in Martino\'s
copy of the file was in fact a \'\' (0a)! We did not realize that,
copied the file back to etherbox.local and waited for etherpad to resume
it\'s work. But no luck there, for obvious reasons.

We ended up making backups of dirty.db in various stages of deformation
and Martino started a brandnew pad so we could use pads for the walk-
in-clinic. The processing tool chain has been disabled btw. We did not
want to mess up any of the already generated .pdf, .html and .md files.

We still don\'t know why exactly etherpad stopped working sometime
Sunday evening or how the zeroes got into the file dirty.db. Anita
thought that she caused the error when she adjusted time on
etherbox.local, but the logfile does not reflect that. The last clean
entry in /var/log/syslog regarding nodejs/etherpad is recorded with a
timestamp of something along the line of \'Jun 10 10:17\'. Some minutes
later, around \'Jun 10 10:27\' the first error appears. These timestamps
reflect the etherbox\'s understanding of time btw, not \'real time\'.

It might be that the file just got too big for etherpad to handle it.
The size of the repaired dirty.db file was already 757MB. That could btw
explain why etherpad was working somewhat slugishly after some days.
There is still a chance that the time adjustment had an unwanted side
effect, but so far there is no obvious reason for what had happened.
\ \-- J.Hofmüller

http://thesix.mur.at/

[]{#ytu5y2qy .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.detournement)
Interface Détournement]{.method .descriptor} [Embodiment / body
techniques]{.grouping} []{#y2q4zju5 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.occupational)
Comportments of software (softwear)]{.method .descriptor}
[Remember]{.remember .empty .descriptor}

> The analysis of common sense, as opposed to the exercise of it, must
> then begin by redrawing this erased distinction between the mere
> matter-of-fact apprehension of reality\--or whatever it is you want to
> call what we apprehend merely and matter-of-factly\--and
> down-to-earth, colloquial wisdom, judgements, and assessments of it.

[What: Observe and catalog the common gestures, common comportments, and
common sense(s) surrounding software.]{.what .descriptor} [How: This can
be done through observation of yourself or others. Separate the
apprehended and matter of fact from the meanings, actions, reactions,
judgements, and assessments that the apprehension occasions. Step 1:
Begin by assembling a list of questions such as: When you see a software
application icon what are you most likely to do? When a software
application you are using presents you with a user agreement what are
you most likely to do? When a software applciation does something that
frustrates you what are you most likely to do? When a software
application you are using crashes what are you most likely to do? Step
2: Write down your responses and the responses of any subjects you are
observing. Step 3: For each question, think up three other possible
responses. Write these down. Step 4: (this step is only for the very
curious) Try the other possible responses out the next time you
encounter each of the given scenarios.]{.how .descriptor} [Note: The
common senses and comportments of software are of course informed and
conditioned by those of hardware and so perhaps this is more accurately
a method for articulating comportments of computing.]{.note .descriptor}
[WARNING: Software wears on both individual and collective bodies and
selves. Software may harm your physical and emotional health and that of
your society both by design and by accident.]{.warning .descriptor}
[TODO: RELATES TO Agile Sun Salutation, Natasha Schull\'s Addicted by
Design]{.tmp} [Flow-regulation, logistics, seamlessness]{.grouping}
[]{#mwrhm2y4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.continuousintegration)
Continuous integration]{.method .descriptor} [What: Continuous
integration is a sophisticated form of responsibility management: it is
the fascia of services. Continous integration picks up after all other
services and identifies what needs to happen so that they can work in
concert. Continuous integration is a way of observing the evolution of
(micro)services through cybernetic (micro)management.]{.what
.descriptor} [How: Continuous integration keeps track of changes to all
services and allows everyone to observe if they still can work together
after all the moving parts are fitted together.]{.how .descriptor}
[When: Continuous integration comes to prominence in a world of
distributed systems where there are many parts being organized
simultaneously. Continuous integration is a form of observation that
helps (micro)services maintain a false sense of independence and
decentralization while constantly subjecting them to centralized
feedback.]{.when .descriptor} [Who: Continuous integration assumes that
all services will submit themselves to the feedback loops of continuous
integration. This could be a democratic process or not.]{.who
.descriptor} [Urgency: Continuous integration reconfigures divisions of
labor in the shadows of automation. How can we surface and question its
doings and undoings?]{.urgency .descriptor} [WARNING: When each service
does one thing well, the service makers tend to assume everybody else is
doing the things they do not want to do.]{.warning .descriptor}

At TGSO continuous integration was introduced as a service that responds
to integration hell when putting together a number of TGSO services for
a walk-in software clinic. Due to demand, the continuous integration
service was extended to do \"service discovery\" and \"load balancing\"
once the walk-in clinic was in operation.

Continuous integration worked by visiting the different services of the
walk-in clinic to check for updates, test the functionality and think
through implications of integration with other services. If the pieces
didn\'t fit, continuous integration delivered error messages and
solution options.

When we noticed that software curious persons visiting the walk-in
clinic may have troubles finding the different services, and that some
services may be overloaded with software curious persons, continuous
integration was extended. We automated service registration using
colored tape and provided a lookup registry for software curious
persons.

http://gallery.constantvzw.org/index.php/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMAG1404

Load balancing meant that software curious persons were forwarded to
services that had capacity. If all other services were full, the load
balancer defaulted to sending the software curious person to the [Agile
Sun
Salutation](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.agile.yoga)
service.

[WARNING: At TGSO the bundling of different functionalities into the
continuous integration service broke the \"do one thing well\"
principle, but saved the day (we register this as technical debt for the
next iteration of the walk-in clinic).]{.warning .descriptor} [Remember:
Continous integration may be the string that holds your current software
galaxy together.]{.remember .descriptor}

\"More technically, I am interested in how things bounce around in
computer systems. I am not sure if these two things are relted, but I
hope continuous integration will help me.\"

[]{#zdixmgrm .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.pipeline) make
make do]{.method .descriptor} [What: Makefile as a method for
quick/collective assemblages + observing amalgamates/pipelines]{.what
.descriptor} [Note: Note:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/etherdump/makefile.raw.html]{.note
.descriptor}

etherpad-\>md-\>pdf-\>anything pipeline. makefile as a method for
quick/collective assemblages + observing amalgamates/pipelines CHRISTOPH

[]{#zweymtni .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.ssogy)
Flowcharts (Flow of the chart -- chart of the flow on demand!)]{.method
.descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE:
!\[\]( http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/ibm-ruler.jpg
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/burroughs-ruler.jpg
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/rectangle.png )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/curly\_rec.png
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/curly\_rec-2.png
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/flag.png )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/trapec.png )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Claude Shannon Information Diagram Blanked: Silvio
Lorusso\](
http://silviolorusso.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/shannon\_comm\_channel.gif
)]{.tmp} [TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp}
[Beingontheside/inthemiddle/behind]{.grouping} []{#ywfin2e4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.somethinginthemiddlemaybe)
Something in the Middle Maybe (SitMM)]{.method .descriptor} [What: The
network traffic gets observed. There are different sniffing software out
there which differ in granularity and how far the user can taylor the
different functionality. SitMM builds on one of these tools called
[scapy](http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/).]{.what .descriptor}
[How: SitMM takes a closer look at the network traffic coming from/going
to a software curious person\'s device. The software curious person
using SitMM may ask to filter the traffic based on application or device
of interest.]{.how .descriptor} [Who]{.who .empty .descriptor}

The software curious person gets to observe their own traffic. Ideally,
observing ones own network traffic should be available to anyone, but
using such software can be deemed illegal under different jurisdictions.

For example, in the US wiretap law limit packet-sniffing to parties
owning the network that is being sniffed or the availability of consent
from one of the communicating parties. Section 18 U.S. Code § 2511 (2)
(a) (i) says:

> It shall not be unlawful \... to intercept \... while engaged in any
> activity which is a necessary incident to the rendition of his service
> or to the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that
> service

See here for a
[paper](http://spot.colorado.edu/%7Esicker/publications/issues.pdf) on
the topic. Google went on a big legal spree to defend their right to
capture unencrypted wireless traffic with google street view cars. The
courts were concerned about wiretapping and infringements on the privacy
of users, and not with the leveraging of private and public WiFi
infrastructure for the gain of a for profit company. The case raises
hard questions about the state, ownership claims and material reality of
WiFi signals. So, while WiFi sniffing is common and the tools like SitMM
are widely available, it is not always possible for software curious
persons to use them legally or to neatly filter out \"their traffic\"
from that of \"others\".

[When: SitMM can be used any time a software curious person feels the
weight of the (invisible) networks.]{.when .descriptor} [Why: SitMM is
intended to be a tool that gives artists, designers and educators an
easy to use custom WiFi router to work with networks and explore the
aspects of our daily communications that are exposed when we use WiFi.
The goal is to use the output to encourage open discussions about how we
use our devices online.]{.why .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty
.descriptor}

Snippets of a Something In The Middle, Maybe - Report

` {.verbatim}
UDP 192.168.42.32:53649 -> 8.8.8.8:53
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
TCP/HTTP 17.253.53.208:80 GET http://captive.apple.com/mDQArB9orEii/Xmql6oYqtUtn/f6xY5snMJcW8/CEm0Ioc1d0d8/9OdEOfkBOY4y.html
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
UDP 192.168.42.32:63872 -> 8.8.8.8:53
UDP 192.168.42.32:61346 -> 8.8.8.8:53
...
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443

##################################################
Destination Address: 17.253.53.208
Destination Name: nlams2-vip-bx-008.aaplimg.com

Port: Connection Count
80: 6

##################################################
Destination Address: 17.134.127.79
Destination Name: unknown

Port: Connection Count
443: 2
##################################################
Destination Address: 17.248.145.76
Destination Name: unknown

Port: Connection Count
443: 16
`

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#ntlimgqy .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.whatisitliketobeanelevator)
What is it like to be AN ELEVATOR?]{.method .descriptor} [What:
Understanding software systems by becoming them]{.what .descriptor}
[TODO: extend this text \.... how to observe software in the world
around you. How to observe an everyday software experience and translate
this into a flowchart )]{.tmp} [How: Creating a flowchart to incarnate a
software system you use everyday]{.how .descriptor} [WARNING: Uninformed
members of the public may panic when confronted with a software
performance in a closed space.]{.warning .descriptor} [Example: What is
it like to be an elevator?]{.example .descriptor}

` {.verbatim}

what
is
it
like
to be
an
elevator?

"from 25th floor to 1st floor"

light on button light of 25th floor
check current floor
if current floor is 25th floor
no
if current floor is ...
go one floor up
... smaller than 25th floor
go one floor down
... bigger than 25th floor
stop elevator
turn button light off of 25th floor
turn door light on
open door of elevator
play sound opening sequence
yes
start
user pressed button of 25th floor
close door of elevator
if door is closed
user pressed 1st floor button
start timer for door closing
if timer is running more than three seconds
yes
yes
light on button
go one floor down
no
if current floor is 1st floor
update floor indicator
check current floor
stop elevator
no
yes
light off button
turn door light on
open door of elevator
play sound opening sequence
end
update floor indicator
`

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/joseph/flowchart.pdf]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#ndg2zte4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.sidechannel)
Side Channel Analysis]{.method .descriptor} [Urgency: Side Channel
attacks are possible by disregarding the abstraction of software into
pure logic: the physical effects of the running of the software become
backdoors to observe its functioning, both threatening the control of
processes and the re-affirming the materiality of software.]{.urgency
.descriptor} [WARNING: **engineers are good guys!**]{.warning
.descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE:
https://www.tek.com/sites/default/files/media/image/119-4146-00%20Near%20Field%20Probe%20Set.png.jpg]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/index.php/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3377]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} [Collections / collecting]{.grouping}
[]{#njmzmjm1 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.bestiary)
Compiling a bestiary of software logos]{.method .descriptor} [What:
Since the early days of GNU-linux and cemented through the ubiquitous
O\'Reilly publications, the visual culture of software relies heavily on
animal representations. But what kinds of animals, and to what
effect?]{.what .descriptor} [How]{.how .empty .descriptor}

Compile a collection of logos and note the metaphors for observation: \*
stethoscope \* magnifying glass \* long neck (giraffe)

[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

` {.verbatim}
% http://animals.oreilly.com/browse/
% [check Testing the testbed pads for examples]
% [something on bestiaries]
`

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#njm5zwm4 .anchor} []{#mmy2zgrl .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.testingtestbed)
Testing the testbed: testing software with observatory ambitions
(SWOA)]{.method .descriptor} [WARNING: this method may make more sense
if you first take a look at the [Something in the Middle Maybe
(SitMM)](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.sitmm) which is
an instance of a SWOA]{.warning .descriptor} [How: The interwebs hosts
many projects that aim to produce software for observing software, (from
now on Software With Observatory Ambitions (SWOA)). A comparative
methodology can be produced by testing different SWOA to observe
software of interest. Example: use different sniffing software to
observe wireless networks, e.g., wireshark vs tcpdump vs SitMM.
Comparing SWOA reveals what is seen as worthy of observation (e.g., what
protocols, what space, which devices), the granularity of the
observation (e.g., how is the observation captured, in what detail), the
logo and conceptual framework of choice etc. This type of observation
may be turned into a service (See also: Something in the Middle Maybe
(SitMM)).]{.how .descriptor} [When: Ideally, SWOA can be used everywhere
and in every situation. In reality, institutions, laws and
administrators like to limit the use of SWOA on infrastructures to
people who are also administering these networks. Hence, we are
presented with the situation that the use of SWOA is condoned when it is
down by researchers and pen testers (e.g., they were hired) and shunned
when done by others (often subject to name calling as hackers or
attackers).]{.when .descriptor} [What: Deep philosophical moment: most
software has a recursive observatory ambition (it wants to be observed
in its execution, output etc.). Debuggers, logs, dashboards are all
instances of software with observatory ambitions and can not be
separated from software itself. Continuous integration is the act of
folding the whole software development process into one big feedback
loop. So, what separates SWOA from software itself? Is it the intention
of observing software with a critical, agonistic or adversarial
perspective vs one focused on productivity and efficiency that
distinguishes SWOA from software? What makes SWOA a critical practice
over other forms of sotware observation. If our methodology is testing
SWOA, then is it a meta critique of critique?]{.what .descriptor} [Who:
If you can run multiple SWOAs, you can do it. The question is: will
people like it if you turn your gaze on their SWOA based methods of
observation? Once again we find that observation can surface power
asymmetries and lead to defensiveness or desires to escape the
observation in the case of the observed, and a instinct to try to
conceal that observation is taking place.]{.who .descriptor} [Urgency:
If observation is a form of critical engagement in that it surfaces the
workings of software that are invisible to many, it follows that people
would develop software to observe (SWOAs). Testing SWOAs puts this form
of critical observation to test with the desire to understand how what
is made transparent through each SWOA also makes things invisible and
reconfigures power.]{.urgency .descriptor} [Note: Good SWOA software
usually uses an animal as a logo.:D]{.note .descriptor} [WARNING: Many
of the SWOA projects we looked at are promises more than running
software/available code. Much of it is likely to turn into obsolete
gradware, making testing difficult.]{.warning .descriptor} [TODO:
RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.bestiary]{.tmp} [TODO:
RELATES TO http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.sitmm]{.tmp}
[]{#mmmzmmrh .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.reader)
Prepare a reader to think theory with software]{.method .descriptor}
[What: Compile a collection of texts about software.]{.what .descriptor}
[How: Choose texts from different realms. Software observations are
mostly done in the realm of the technological and the pragmatic. Also
the ecology of texts around software includes first and foremost
manuals, technical documentation and academic papers by software
engineers and these all \'live\' in different realms. More recently, the
field of software studies opened up additional perspectives fuelled by
cultural studies and sometimes filosophy. By compiling a reader \...
ways of speaking/writing about. Proximity.]{.how .descriptor}
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

` {.verbatim .wrap}
Pull some quotes from the reader, for example from the chapter: Observation and its consequences

Lilly Irani, Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship, 2015 http://sci-hub.bz/10.1177/0162243915578486

Kara Pernice (Nielsen Norman Group), Talking with Participants During a Usability Test, January 26, 2014, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/talking-to-users/

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive. 2004 http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/pdf/vol13_2_06.pdf

Alexander R. Galloway, The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism, Critical Inquiry. 2013, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Galloway,%20Poverty%20of%20Philosophy.pdf
Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips, Allen M. Wolk, How to Build a Working Digital Computer. Hayden Book Company, 1968. https://archive.org/details/howtobuildaworkingdigitalcomputer_jun67

Matthew Fuller, "It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word", Nettime, 5 Sep 2000. https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/xpDrXE_VQeeuDDpc5RrywyTJwbzD8eatYGHKmyT2A_HnIHKb

Barbara P. Aichinger, DDR Memory Errors Caused by Row Hammer. 2015 www.memcon.com/pdfs/proceedings2015/SAT104_FuturePlus.pdf

Fangfei Liu, Yuval Yarom, Qian Ge, Gernot Heiser, Ruby B. Lee. Last-Level Cache Side-Channel Attacks are Practical. 2015 http://palms.ee.princeton.edu/system/files/SP_vfinal.pdf
`

[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.samequestion]{.tmp}
[]{#ytjmmmni .anchor}

Colophon

The Guide to techno-galactic software observing was compiled by Carlin
Wing, Martino Morandi, Peggy Pierrot, Anita, Christoph Haag, Michael
Murtaugh, Femke Snelting

License: Free Art License

Support:

Sources:

Constant, February 2018

::: {.footnotes}
1. [[[Haraway]{.fname}, [Donna]{.gname}, [Galison]{.fname},
[Peter]{.gname} and [Stump]{.fname}, [David J]{.gname}: [Modest
Witness: Feminist Diffractions in Science Studies]{.title},
[Stanford University Press]{.publisher}, [1996]{.date}.
]{.collection} [-\>](#eeffecbe)]{#ebceffee}
2. [Worksessions are intensive transdisciplinary moments, organised
twice a year by Constant. They aim to provide conditions for
participants with different experiences and capabilities to

Constant
The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation
2018


::: {.toc}
[Introduction](#mtljymuz) [Encounter several collections of historical
hardware back-to-back](#njm5zwm4) [Interview people about their
histories with software](#mguzmza4) [Ask several people from different
fields and age-groups the same question: \"***What is
software?***\"](#odfkotky) [FMEM and /DEV/MEM](#mzcxodix)
[Pan/Monopsychism](#m2mwogri) [Fountain refreshment](#ndawnmy5) [Create
\"nannyware\": Software that observes and addresses the user](#mtk5yjbl)
[Useless scroll against productivity](#yzuwmdq4) [Investigating how
humans and machines negotiate the experience of time](#m2vjndu3)
[Quine](#nmi5mgjm) [Glossaries as an exercise](#zwu0ogu0) [Adding
qualifiers](#mja0m2i5) [Searching \"software\" through
software](#mmmwmje2) [Persist in calling everyone a Software Curious
Person](#ndhkmwey) [Setup a Relational software observatory consultancy
(RSOC)](#mmu1mgy0) [Agile Sun Salutation](#mta1ntzm) [Hand
reading](#mdu0mmji) [Bug reporting for sharing observations](#yznjodq3)
[Interface Détournement](#ytu5y2qy) [Comportments of software
(softwear)](#y2q4zju5) [Continuous integration](#mwrhm2y4) [make make
do](#zdixmgrm) [Flowcharts (Flow of the chart -- chart of the flow on
demand!)](#zweymtni) [Something in the Middle Maybe (SitMM)](#ywfin2e4)
[What is it like to be AN ELEVATOR?](#ntlimgqy) [Side Channel
Analysis](#ndg2zte4) [Compiling a bestiary of software logos](#njmzmjm1)
[Encounter several collections of historical hardware
back-to-back](#njm5zwm4) [Testing the testbed: testing software with
observatory ambitions (SWOA)](#mmy2zgrl) [Prepare a reader to think
theory with software](#mmmzmmrh)
:::

[]{#mtljymuz .anchor}

A guide to techno-galactic software observation

> I am less interested in the critical practice of reflection, of
> showing once-again that the emperor has no clothes, than in finding a
> way to *diffract* critical inquiry in order to make difference
> patterns in a more worldly way.^[1](#ebceffee)^

The techno-galactic software survival guide that you are holding right
now was collectively produced as an outcome of the Techno-Galactic
Software Observatory. This guide proposes several ways to achieve
critical distance from the seemingly endless software systems that
surround us. It offers practical and fantastical tools for the tactical
(mis)use of software, empowering/enabling users to resist embedded
paradigms and assumptions. It is a collection of methods for approaching
software, experiencing its myths and realities, its risks and benefits.

With the rise of online services, the use of software has increasingly
been knitted into the production of software, even while the rhetoric,
rights, and procedures continue to suggest that use and production
constitute separate realms. This knitting together and its corresponding
disavowal have an effect on the way software is used and produced, and
radically alters its operative role in society. The shifts ripple across
galaxies, through social structures, working conditions and personal
relations, resulting in a profusion of apparatuses aspiring to be
seamless while optimizing and monetizing individual and collective flows
of information in line with the interests of a handful of actors. The
diffusion of software services affects the personal, in the form of
intensified identity shaping and self-management. It also affects the
public, as more and more libraries, universities and public
infrastructures as well as the management of public life rely on
\"solutions\" provided by private companies. Centralizing data flows in
the clouds, services blur the last traces of the thin line that
separates bio- from necro-politics.

Given how fast these changes resonate and reproduce, there is a growing
urgency to engage in a critique of software that goes beyond taking a
distance, and that deals with the fact that we are inevitably already
entangled. How can we interact, intervene, respond and think with
software? What approaches can allow us to recognize the agency of
different actors, their ways of functioning and their politics? What
methods of observation enable critical inquiry and affirmative discord?
What techniques can we apply to resurface software where it has melted
into the infrastructure and into the everyday? How can we remember that
software is always at work, especially where it is designed to disappear
into the background?

We adopted the term of observation for a number of reasons. We regard
observation as a way to approach software, as one way to organize
engagement with its implications. Observation, and the enabling of
observation through intensive data-centric feedback mechanisms, is part
of the cybernetic principles that underpin present day software
production. Our aim was to scrutinize this methodology in its many
manifestations, including in \"observatories\" \-- high cost
infrastructures \[testing infrastructures?CITECLOSE23310 of observation
troubled by colonial, imperial traditions and their problematic
divisions of nature and culture \-- with the hope of opening up
questions about who gets to observe software (and how) and who is being
observed by software (and with what impact)? It is a question of power,
one that we answer, at least in part, with critical play.

We adopted the term techno-galactic to match the advertised capability
of \"scaling up to the universe\" that comes in contemporary paradigms
of computation, and to address different scales of software communities
and related political economies that involve and require observation.

Drawing on theories of software and computation developed in academia
and elsewhere, we grounded our methods in hands-on exercises and
experiments that you now can try at home. This Guide to Techno-Galactic
Software Observation offers methods developed in and inspired by the
context of software production, hacker culture, software studies,
computer science research, Free Software communities, privacy activism,
and artistic practice. It invites you to experiment with ways to stay
with the trouble of software.

The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory
----------------------------------------

In the summer of 2017, around thirty people gathered in Brussels to
explore practices of proximate critique with and of software in the
context of a worksession entitled \"Techno-Galactic Software
Observatory\".^[2](#bcaacdcf)^ The worksession called for
software-curious people of all kinds to ask questions about software.
The intuition behind such a call was that different types of engagement
requires a heterogeneous group of participants with different levels of
expertise, skill and background. During three sessions of two days,
participants collectively inspected the space-time of computation and
probed the universe of hardware-software separations through excursions,
exercises and conversations. They tried out various perspectives and
methods to look at the larger picture of software as a concept, as a
practice, and as a set of techniques.

The first two days of The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory included
visits to the Musée de l\'Informatique Pionnière en
Belgique^[3](#aaceaeff)^ in Namur and the Computermuseum
KULeuven^[4](#afbebabd)^. In the surroundings of these collections of
historical 'numerical artefacts', we started viewing software in a
long-term context. It offered us the occasion to reflect on the
conditions of its appearance, and allowed us to take on current-day
questions from a genealogical perspective. What is software? How did it
appear as a concept, in what industrial and governmental circumstances?
What happens to the material conditions of its production (minerals,
factory labor, hardware) when it evaporates into a cloud?

The second two days we focused on the space-time dimension of IT
development. The way computer programs and operating systems are
manufactured changed tremendously through time, and so did its
production times and places. From military labs via the mega-corporation
cubicles to the open-space freelancer utopia, what ruptures and
continuities can be traced in the production, deployment, maintenance
and destruction of software? From time-sharing to user-space partitions
and containerization, what separations were and are at work? Where and
when is software made today?

The Walk-in Clinic
------------------

The last two days at the Techno-galactic software observatory were
dedicated to observation and its consequences. The development of
software encompasses a series of practices whose evocative names are
increasingly familiar: feedback, report, probe, audit, inspect, scan,
diagnose, explore, test \... What are the systems of knowledge and power
within which these activities take place, and what other types of
observation are possible? As a practical set for our investigations, we
set up a walk-in clinic on the 25th floor of the World Trade Center,
where users and developers could arrive with software-questions of all
kinds.

> Do you suffer from the disappearance of your software into the cloud,
> feel oppressed by unequal user privilege, or experience the torment of
> software-ransom of any sort? Bring your devices and interfaces to the
> World Trade Center! With the help of a clear and in-depth session, at
> the Techno-Galactic Walk-In Clinic we guarantee immediate results. The
> Walk-In Clinic provides free hands-on observations to software curious
> people of all kinds. A wide range of professional and amateur
> practitioners will provide you with
> Software-as-a-Critique-as-a-Service on the spot. Available services
> range from immediate interface critique, collaborative code
> inspection, data dowsing, various forms of network analyses,
> unusability testing, identification of unknown viruses, risk
> assessment, opening of black-boxes and more. Free software
> observations provided. Last intake at 16:45.\
> (invitation to the Walk-In Clinic, June 2017)

On the following pages: Software as a Critique as a Service (SaaCaaS)
Directory and intake forms for Software Curious People (SCP).

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/masterlist\_twosides\_NEU.pdf]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/scprecord\_FINAL.pdf]{.tmp}
[]{#owqzmtdk .anchor}

Techno-Galactic Software Observation Essentials

=

**WARNING**

The survival techniques described in the following guide are to be used
at your own risk in case of emergency regarding software curiosity. The
publisher will not accept any responsability in case of damages caused
by misuse, misundestanding of instruction or lack of curiosity. By
trying the action exposed in the guide, you accept the responsability of
loosing data or altering hardware, including hard disks, usb key, cloud
storage, screens by throwing them on the floor, or even when falling on
the floor with your laptop by tangling your feet in an entanglement of
cables. No harm has been done to human, animal, computers or plants
while creating the guide. No firearms or any kind of weapon is needed in
order to survive software.\
Just a little bit of patience.

**Software observation survival stresses**

**Physical fitness plays a great part of software observation. Be fit or
CTRL-Quit.**

When trying to observe software you might experience stresses as such :

*Anxiety*Sleep deprivation *Forgetting about eating*Loss of time
tracking

**Can you cope with software ? You have to.**

> our methods for observation, like mapping, come with their luggage.

[Close encounters]{.grouping} []{#njm5zwm4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.visit)
Encounter several collections of historical hardware
back-to-back]{.method .descriptor} [How]{.how .empty .descriptor}

This can be done by identifying one or more computer museums and visit
them with little time in-between. Visiting a friend with a large
basement and lots of left-over computer equipment can help. Seeing and
possibly touching hardware from different contexts
(state-administration, business, research, \...), periods of time,
cultural contexts (California, Germany, French-speaking Belgium) and
price ranges allows you to sense the interactions between hardware and
software development.

[Note: It\'s a perfect way to hear people speak about the objects and
their contexts, how they worked or not and how objects are linked one
with another. It also shows the economic and cultural aspects of
softwares.]{.note .descriptor} [WARNING: **DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR
MUTILATE**]{.warning .descriptor} [Example: Spaghetti Suitcase]{.example
.descriptor}

At one point during the demonstration of a Bull computer, the guide
revealed the system\'s \"software\" \-- a suitcase sized module with
dozens of patch cords. She made the comment that the term \"spaghetti
code\" (a derogatory expression about early code usign many \"GOTO\"
statments) had its origin in this physical arrangement of code as
patchings.

Preserving old hardware in order to observe physical manifestation of
software. See software here : we did experienced the incredible
possibility of actually touching software.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/wednesday/IMG\_20170607\_113634\_585.jpg]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/resizes/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMG\_1163.JPG?m=1496916927]{.tmp}
[Example: Playing with the binary. Bull cards. Happy operator! Punch
card plays.]{.example .descriptor}

\"The highlight of the collection is to revive a real punch card
workshop of the 1960s.\"

[Example: Collection de la Maison des Écritures d\'Informatique & Bible,
Maredsous]{.example .descriptor}

The particularity of the collection lies in the fact that it\'s the
conservation of multiple stages of life of a software since its initial
computerization until today. The idea of introducing informatics into
the work of working with/on the Bible (versions in Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
and French) dates back to 1971, via punch card recordings and their
memorization on magnetic tape. Then came the step of analyzing texts
using computers.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/resizes/Preparing-the-Techno-galactic-Software-Observatory/DSC05019.JPG?m=1490635726]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.jean.heuns]{.tmp}
[]{#mguzmza4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.jean.heuns)
Interview people about their histories with software]{.method
.descriptor} [What: Observe personnal narratives around software
history. Retrace the path of relation to software, how it changed during
the years and what are the human access memories that surrounds it. To
look at software through personal relations and emotions.]{.what
.descriptor} [How: Interviews are a good way to do it. Informal
conversations also.]{.how .descriptor}

Jean Heuns has been collecting servers, calculators, softwares, magnetic
tapes hard disks for xxx years. Found an agreement for them to be
displayed in the department hallways. Department of Computer sciences -
Kul Leuven.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3350.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3361.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3356.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/albums/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3343.JPG]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#odfkotky .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.samequestion)
Ask several people from different fields and age-groups the same
question: \"***What is software?***\"]{.method .descriptor} [Remember:
The answers to this question will vary depending on who is asking it to
who.]{.remember .descriptor} [What: By paying close attention to the
answers, and possibly logging them, observations on the ambiguous place
and nature of software can be made.]{.what .descriptor}
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

Jean Huens (system administrator at the department of Computer Science,
KULeuven): \"*It is difficult to answer the question \'what is
software\', but I know what is good software*\"

Thomas Cnudde (hardware designer at ESAT - COSIC, Computer Security and
Industrial Cryptography, KULeuven): \"*Software is a list of sequential
instructions! Hardware for me is made of silicon, software a sequence of
bits in a file. But naturally I am biased: I\'m a hardware designer so I
like to consider it as unique and special*\".

Amal Mahious (Director of NAM-IP, Namur): \"*This, you have to ask the
specialists.*\"

` {.verbatim}
*what is software?
--the unix filesystem says: it's a file----what is a file?
----in the filesystem, if you ask xxd:
------ it's a set of hexadecimal bytes
-------what is hexadecimal bytes?
------ -b it's a set of binary 01s
----if you ask objdump
-------it's a set of instructions
--side channel researching also says:
----it's a set of instructions
--the computer glossary says:
----it's a computer's programs, plus the procedure for their use http://etherbox.local/home/pi/video/A_Computer_Glossary.webm#t=02:26
------ a computer's programs is a set of instrutions for performing computer operations
`

[Remember: To answer the question \"*what is software*\" depends on the
situation, goal, time, and other contextual influences.]{.remember
.descriptor} [TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.everyonescp]{.tmp}
[]{#mzcxodix .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.devmem) FMEM
and /DEV/MEM]{.method .descriptor} [What: Different ways of exploring
your memory (RAM). Because in unix everything is a file, you can access
your memory as if it were a file.]{.what .descriptor} [Urgency: To try
and observe the operational level of software, getting closer to the
workings, the instruction-being of an executable/executing file, the way
it is when it is loaded into memory rather than when it sits in the
harddisk]{.urgency .descriptor} [Remember: In Unix-like operating
systems, a device file or special file is an interface for a device
driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. In
the early days you could fully access your memory via the memory device
(`/dev/mem`) but over time the access was more and more restricted in
order to avoid malicious processes to directly access the kernel memory.
The kernel option CONFIG\_STRICT\_DEVMEM was introduced in kernel
version 2.6 and upper (2.6.36--2.6.39, 3.0--3.8, 3.8+HEAD). So you\'ll
need to use the Linux kernel module fmem: this module creates
`/dev/fmem` device, that can be used for accessing physical memory
without the limits of /dev/mem (1MB/1GB, depending on
distribution).]{.remember .descriptor}

`/dev/mem` tools to explore processes stored in the memory

ps ax | grep process
cd /proc/numberoftheprocess
cat maps

\--\> check what it is using

The proc filesystem is a pseudo-filesystem which provides an interface
to kernel data structures. It is commonly mounted at `/proc`. Most of it
is read-only, but some files allow kernel variables to be changed.

dump to a file\--\>change something in the file\--\>dump new to a
file\--\>diff oldfile newfile

\"where am i?\"

to find read/write memory addresses of a certain process\
`awk -F "-| " '$3 ~ /rw/ { print $1 " " $2}' /proc/PID/maps`{.bash}

take the range and drop it to hexdump

sudo dd if=/dev/mem bs=1 skip=$(( 16#b7526000 - 1 )) \
count=$(( 16#b7528000 - 16#7b7526000 + 1)) | hexdump -C

Besides opening the memory dump with an hex editor you can also try and
explore it with other tools or devices. You can open it as a raw image,
you can play it as a sound or perhaps send it directly to your
frame-buffer device (`/dev/fb0`).

[WARNING: Although your memory may look like/sound like/read like
gibberish, it may contain sensitive information about you and your
computer!]{.warning .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/Screenshot\_from\_2017-06-07\_164407.png]{.tmp}
[TODO: BOX: Forensic and debuggung tools can be used to explore and
problematize the layers of abstraction of computing.]{.tmp} [TODO:
RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.monopsychism]{.tmp}
[]{#m2mwogri .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.monopsychism)
Pan/Monopsychism]{.method .descriptor} [What: Reading and writing
sectors of memory from/to different computers]{.what .descriptor} [How:
Shell commands and fmem kernel module]{.how .descriptor} [Urgency:
Memory, even when it is volatile, is a trace of the processes happening
in your computer in the form of saved information, and is therefore more
similar to a file than to a process. Challenging the file/process
divide, sharing memory with others will allow a more intimate relation
with your and other\'s computers.]{.urgency .descriptor} [About:
Monopsychism is the philosophical/theological doctrine according to
which there exists but one intellect/soul, shared by all beings.]{.about
.descriptor} [TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.devmem]{.tmp} [Note: The
parallel allocation and observation of the same memory sector in two
different computers is in a sense the opposite process of machine
virtualization, where the localization of multiple virtual machines in
one physical comptuers can only happen by rigidly separating the memory
sectors dedicated to the different virtual machines.]{.note .descriptor}
[WARNING: THIS METHOD HAS NOT BEEN TESTED, IT CAN PROBABLY DAMAGE YOUR
RAM MEMORY AND/OR COMPUTER]{.warning .descriptor}

First start the fmem kernel module in both computers:

`sudo sh fmem/run.sh`{.bash}

Then load part of your computer memory into the other computer via dd
and ssh:

`dd if=/dev/fmem bs=1 skip=1000000 count=1000 | ssh user@othercomputer dd of=/dev/fmem`{.bash}

Or viceversa, load part of another computer\'s memory into yours:

`ssh user@othercomputer dd if=/dev/fmem bs=1 skip=1000000 count=1000 | dd of=/dev/fmem`{.bash}

Or even, exchange memory between two other computers:

`ssh user@firstcomputer dd if=/dev/fmem bs=1 skip=1000000 count=1000 | ssh user@secondcomputer dd of=/dev/fmem`{.bash}

` {.quaverbatim}
pan/monopsychism:
(aquinas famously opposed averroes..who's philosophy can be interpreted as monopsychist)

shared memory

copying the same memory to different computers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_%28computer_programming%29

it could cut through the memory like a worm

or it could go through the memory of different computers one after the other and take and leave something there
`

[Temporality]{.grouping} []{#ndawnmy5 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.fountain)
Fountain refreshment]{.method .descriptor} [What: Augmenting a piece of
standardised office equipment designed to dispense water to perform a
decorative function.]{.what .descriptor} [How: Rearranging space as
conditioning observations (WTC vs. Museum vs. University vs. Startup
Office vs. Shifting Walls that became Water Fountains)]{.how
.descriptor} [Who: Gaining access to standardised water dispensing
equipment turned out to be more difficult than expected as such
equipment is typically licensed / rented rather than purchased outright.
Acquiring a unit that could be modified required access to secondary
markets of second hand office equiment in order to purchase a disused
model.]{.who .descriptor} [Urgency: EU-OSHA (European Agency for Safety
and Health at Work) Directive 2003/10/EC noise places describes the
minimum health and safety requirements regarding the exposure of workers
to the risks arising from physical agents (noise). However no current
European guidelines exist on the potential benefitial uses of tactially
designed additive noise systems.]{.urgency .descriptor}

The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory -- Comfortable silence, one way
mirrors

A drinking fountain and screens of one-way mirrors as part of the work
session \"*The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory*\" organised by
Constant.

For the past 100 years the western ideal of a corporate landscape has
been has been moving like a pendulum, oscillating between grids of
cubicles and organic, open landscapes, in a near to perfect 25-year
rhythm. These days the changes in office organisation is supplemented by
sound design, in corporate settings mostly to create comfortable
silence. Increase the sound and the space becomes more intimate, the
person on the table next to you can not immediately hear what you are
saying. It seems that actual silence in public and corporate spaces has
not been sought after since the start of the 20th century. Actual
silence is not at the moment considered comfortable. One of the visible
symptoms of our desire to take the edge off the silence is to be
observed through the appearance of fountains in public space. The
fountains purpose being to give off neutral sound, like white noise
without the negative connotations. However as a sound engineer\'s
definition of noise is unwanted sound that all depends on ones personal
relation to the sound of dripping water.

This means that there needs to be a consistent inoffensiveness to create
comfortable silence.

In corporate architecture the arrival of glass buildings were originally
seen as a symbol of transparency, especially loved by governmental
buildings. Yet the reflectiveness of this shiny surface once combined
with strong light -- known as the treason of the glass -- was only
completely embraced at the invention of one-way-mirror foil. And it was
the corporate business-world that would come to be known for their
reflective glass skyscrapers. As the foil reacts to light, it appears
transparent to someone standing in the dark, while leaving the side with
the most light with an opaque surface. Using this foil as room dividers
in a room with a changing light, what is hidden or visible will vary
throughout the day. So will the need for comfortable silence. Disclaimer
:\
Similar to the last 100 years of western office organisation,\
this fountain only has two modes:\
on or off

If it is on it also offers two options\
cold water and hot water

This fountain has been tampered with and has not in any way been
approved by a proffesional fountain cleaner. I do urge you to consider
this before you take the decision to drink from the fountain.

Should you chose to drink from the fountain, then I urge you to write
your name on your cup, in the designated area, for a customised
experience of my care for you.

I do want you to be comfortable.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/mia/mia6.gif]{.tmp} [SHOW
IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/mia/FullSizeRender%2811%29.jpg]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/mia/IMG\_5695.JPG]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/mia/IMG\_5698.JPG]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mtk5yjbl .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.silvio) Create
\"nannyware\": Software that observes and addresses the user]{.method
.descriptor} [What]{.what .empty .descriptor}

Nannyware is software meant to protect users while limiting their space
of activity. It is software that passive-aggressively suggests or
enforces some kind of discipline. In other words, create a form of
parental control extended to adults by means of user experience / user
interfaces.

Nannyware is a form of Content-control software: software designed to
restrict or control the content a reader is authorised to access,
especially when utilised to restrict material delivered over the
Internet via the Web, e-mail, or other means. Content-control software
determines what content will be available or be blocked.

[How]{.how .empty .descriptor}

> \[\...RestrictionsCITECLOSE23310 can be applied at various levels: a
> government can attempt to apply them nationwide (see Internet
> censorship), or they can, for example, be applied by an ISP to its
> clients, by an employer to its personnel, by a school to its students,
> by a library to its visitors, by a parent to a child\'s computer, or
> by an individual user to his or her own computer.^[5](#fcefedaf)^

[Who]{.who .empty .descriptor}

> Unlike filtering, accountability software simply reports on Internet
> usage. No blocking occurs. In setting it up, you decide who will
> receive the detailed report of the computer's usage. Web sites that
> are deemed inappropriate, based on the options you've chosen, will be
> red-flagged. Because monitoring software is of value only "after the
> fact", we do not recommend this as a solution for families with
> children. However, it can be an effective aid in personal
> accountability for adults. There are several available products out
> there.^[6](#bffbbeaf)^

[Urgency]{.urgency .empty .descriptor}

> As with all new lifestyle technologies that come along, in the
> beginning there is also some chaos until their impact can be assessed
> and rules put in place to bring order and respect to their
> implementation and use in society. When the automobile first came into
> being there was much confusion regarding who had the right of way, the
> horse or the car. There were no paved roads, speed limits, stop signs,
> or any other traffic rules. Many lives were lost and much property was
> destroyed as a result. Over time, government and society developed
> written and unwritten rules as to the proper use of the
> car.^[7](#bbfcbcfa)^

[WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor}

> Disadvantages of explicit proxy deployment include a user\'s ability
> to alter an individual client configuration and bypass the proxy. To
> counter this, you can configure the firewall to allow client traffic
> to proceed only through the proxy. Note that this type of firewall
> blocking may result in some applications not working
> properly.^[8](#ededebde)^

[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

> The main problem here is that the settings that are required are
> different from person to person. For example, I use workrave with a 25
> second micropause every two and a half minute, and a 10 minute
> restbreak every 20 minutes. I need these frequent breaks, because I\'m
> recovering from RSI. And as I recover, I change the settings to fewer
> breaks. If you have never had any problem at all (using the computer,
> that is), then you may want much fewer breaks, say 10 seconds
> micropause every 10 minutes, and a 5 minute restbreak every hour. It
> is very hard to give proper guidelines here. My best advice is to play
> around and see what works for you. Which settings \"feel right\".
> Basically, that\'s how Workrave\'s defaults evolve.^[9](#cfbbbfdd)^

[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Content-control software\](
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2008/05/03/nannyware.jpg )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[A \"nudge\" from your music player
\](http://img.wonderhowto.com/img/10/25/63533437022064/0/disable-high-volume-warning-when-using-headphones-your-samsung-galaxy-s4.w654.jpg)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Emphasis on the body\]
(http://classicallytrained.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/take-a-break.jpg)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[ \"Slack is trying to be my friend but it\'s more
like a slightly insensitive and slightly bossy acquaintance.\"
\@briecode \] (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuZLgV4XgAAYexX.jpg)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Slack is trying to be my friend but it\'s more like
a slightly insensitive and slightly bossy acquaintance.\]
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuZLgV4XgAAYexX.jpg)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE
HERE:
!\[\](https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi0.wp.com%2Fatherbeg.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F06%2FWorkrave-Restbreak-Shoulder.png&f=1)]{.tmp}

Facebook is working on an app to stop you from drunk-posting \"Yann
LeCun, who overseas the lab, told Wired magazine that the program would
be like someone asking you, \'Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you
sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?\'\"

[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[This Terminal Dashboard Reminds You to Take a Break
When You\'re Lost Deep Inside the Command
Line\](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s\--\_of0PoM2\--/c\_fit,fl\_progressive,q\_80,w\_636/eegvqork0qizokwrlemz.png)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](http://waterlog.gd/images/homescreen.png)]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
!\[\](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6oKTduWcAEruIE.jpg:large)]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#yzuwmdq4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.scrollresistance)
Useless scroll against productivity]{.method .descriptor} []{#m2vjndu3
.anchor} [[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.time)
Investigating how humans and machines negotiate the experience of
time]{.method .descriptor} [What]{.what .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE
HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/Screenshot\_from\_2017-06-10\_172547.png]{.tmp}
[How: python script]{.how .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty
.descriptor}

` {.verbatim}
# ends of time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Exact moment of the epoch:
03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038

## commands

local UNIX time of this machine
%XBASHCODE: date +%s

UNIX time + 1
%BASHCODE: echo $((`date +%s` +1 ))

## goodbye unix time

while :
do
sleep 1
figlet $((2147483647 - `date +%s`))
done

# Sundial Time Protocol Group tweaks

printf 'Current Time in Millennium Unix Time: '
printf $((2147483647 - `date +%s`))
echo
sleep 2
echo $((`cat ends-of-times/idletime` + 2)) > ends-of-times/idletime
idletime=`cat ends-of-times/idletime`
echo
figlet "Thank you for having donated 2 seconds to our ${idletime} seconds of collective SSH pause "
echo
echo

http://observatory.constantvzw.org/etherdump/ends-of-time.html
`

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} [Languaging]{.grouping} []{#nmi5mgjm .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.quine)
Quine]{.method .descriptor} [What: A program whose function consists of
displaying its own code. Also known as \"self-replicating
program\"]{.what .descriptor} [Why: Quines show the tension between
\"software as language\" and \"software as operation\".]{.why
.descriptor} [How: By running a quine you will get your code back. You
may do a step forward and wonder about functionality and aesthetics,
uselessness and performativity, data and code.]{.how .descriptor}
[Example: A quine (Python). When executed it outputs the same text as
the source:]{.example .descriptor}

` {.sourceCode .python}
s = 's = %r\nprint(s%%s)'
print(s%s)
`

[Example: A oneline unibash/etherpad quine, created during relearn
2017:]{.example .descriptor}

` {.quaverbatim}
wget -qO- http://192.168.73.188:9001/p/quine/export/txt | curl -F "file=@-;type=text/plain" http://192.168.73.188:9001/p/quine/import
`

[WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor}

The encounter with quines may deeply affect you. You may want to write
one and get lost in trying to make an ever shorter and more elegant one.
You may also take quines as point of departure or limit-ideas for
exploring software dualisms.

\"A quine is without why. It prints because it prints. It pays no
attention to itself, nor does it asks whether anyone sees it.\" \"Aquine
is aquine is aquine. \" Aquine is not a quine This is not aquine

[Remember: Although seemingly absolutely useless, quines can be used as
exploits.]{.remember .descriptor}

Exploring boundaries/tensions

databases treat their content as data (database punctualization) some
exploits manage to include operations in a database

[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.monopsychism]{.tmp}
[]{#zwu0ogu0 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.glossary)
Glossaries as an exercise]{.method .descriptor} [What: Use the technique
of psychanalytic listening to compile (gather, collect, bring together)
a list of key words for understanding software.]{.what .descriptor}
[How: Create a shared document that participants can add words to as
their importance emerges.To do pyschoanalytic listening, let your
attention float freely, hovering evenly, over a conversation or a text
until something catches its ear. Write down what your ear/eye catches.
When working in a collective context invite others to participate in
this project and describe the practice to them. Each individual may move
in and out of this mode of listening according to their interest and
desire and may add as many words to the list as they want. Use this list
to create an index of software observation.]{.how .descriptor} [When:
This is best done in a bounded context. In the case of the
Techno-Galactic Observatory, our bounded contexts includes the six day
work session and the pages and process of this publication.]{.when
.descriptor} [Who: The so-inclined within the group]{.who .descriptor}
[Urgency: Creating and troubling categories]{.urgency .descriptor}
[Note: Do not remove someone else\'s word from the glossary during the
accumulation phase. If an editing and cutting phase is desired this
should be done after the collection through collective consensus.]{.note
.descriptor} [WARNING: This method is not exclusive to and was not
developed for software observation. It may lead to awareness of
unconscious processes and to shifts in structures of feeling and
relation.]{.warning .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

` {.verbatim}
Agile
Code
Colonial
Command Line
Communication
Connectivity
Emotional
Galaxies
Green
Guide
Kernel
Imperial
Issues
Machine
Mantra
Memory
Museum
Observation
ProductionPower
Programmers
Progress
Relational
Red
Scripting
Scrum
Software
Survival
Technology
Test
Warning
WhiteBoard
Yoga
`

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mja0m2i5 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.validation)
Adding qualifiers]{.method .descriptor} [Remember: \"\[V\]alues are
properties of things and states of affairs that we care about and strive
to attain\...vlaues expressed in technical systems are a function of
their uses as well as their features and designs.\" Values at Play in
Digital Games, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum]{.remember
.descriptor} [What: Bringing a moral, ethical, or otherwise
evaluative/adjectival/validating lens.]{.what .descriptor} [How:
Adjectives create subcategories. They narrow the focus by naming more
specifically the imagined object at hand and by implicitly excluding all
objects that do not meet the criteria of the qualifier. The more
adjectives that are added, the easier it becomes to answer the question
what is software. Or so it seems. Consider what happens if you add the
words good, bad, bourgeois, queer, stable, or expensive to software. Now
make a list of adjectives and try it for yourself. Level two of this
exercise consists of observing a software application and deducing from
this the values of the individuals, companies, and societies that
produced it.]{.how .descriptor} [Note: A qualifier may narrow down
definitions to undesirable degrees.]{.note .descriptor} [WARNING: This
exercise may be more effective at identifying normative and ideological
assumptions at play in the making, distributing, using, and maintaining
of software than at producing a concise definition.]{.warning
.descriptor} [Example: \"This morning, Jan had difficulties to answer
the question \"what is software\", but he said that he could answer the
question \"what is good software\". What is good software?]{.example
.descriptor} [TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mmmwmje2 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.softwarethrough)
Searching \"software\" through software]{.method .descriptor} [What: A
quick way to sense the ambiguity of the term \'software\', is to go
through the manual files on your hard drive and observe in which cases
is the term used.]{.what .descriptor} [How: command-line oneliner]{.how
.descriptor} [Why: Software is a polymorphic term that take different
meanings and comes with different assumptions for the different agents
involved in its production, usage and all other forms of encounter and
subjection. From the situated point of view of the software present on
your machine, when and why does software call itself as such?]{.why
.descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

so software exists only outside your computer? only in general terms?
checking for the word software in all man pages:

grep -nr software /usr/local/man
!!!!

software appears only in terms of license:

This program is free software
This software is copyright (c)

we don\'t run software. we still run programs.\
nevertheless software is everywhere

[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.samequestion]{.tmp}
[]{#ndhkmwey .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.everyonescp)
Persist in calling everyone a Software Curious Person]{.method
.descriptor} [What: Persistance in naming is a method for changing a
person\'s relationship to software by (sometimes forcibly) call everyone
a Software Curious Person.]{.what .descriptor} [How: Insisting on
curiosity as a relation, rather than for example \'fear\' or
\'admiration\' might help cut down the barriers between different types
of expertise and allows multiple stakeholders feel entitled to ask
questions, to engage, to investigate and to observe.]{.how .descriptor}
[Urgency: Software is too important to not be curious about.
Observations could benefit from recognising different forms of
knowledge. It seems important to engage with software through multiple
interests, not only by means of technical expertise.]{.urgency
.descriptor} [Example: This method was used to address each of the
visitors at the Techno-Galactic Walk-in Clinic.]{.example .descriptor}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} [Healing]{.grouping} []{#mmu1mgy0 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.relational)
Setup a Relational software observatory consultancy (RSOC)]{.method
.descriptor} [Remember]{.remember .empty .descriptor}

- Collectivise research around hacking to save time.
- Self-articulate software needs as your own Operating (system)
perspective.
- Change the lens by looking to software through a time perspective.

[What: By paying a visit to our ethnomethodology interview practice
you'll learn to observe software from different angles / perspectives.
Our practionners passion is to make the \"what is the relation to
software\" discussion into a service.]{.what .descriptor} [How: Reading
the signs. Considering the everchanging nature of software development
and use and its vast impact on globalized societies, it is necessary to
recognize some of the issues of how software is (often) either
passively-perceived or actively-observed, without an articulation of the
relations. We offer a method to read the signs of the relational aspect
of software observance. It\'s a crucial aspect of our guide. It will
give you another view on software that will shape your ability to
survive any kind of software disaster.]{.how .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE
HERE: !\[Reading the signs. From: John \"Lofty\" Wiseman, SAS Survival
Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Anywhere\](
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/index.php/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMAG1319
)]{.tmp} [WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: have a
advertising blob for the RSOC with a smiling doctor welcoming
image]{.tmp} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

What follows is an example of a possible diagnostic questionnaire.

Sample Questionnaire
--------------------

**What to expect** You will obtain a cartography of software users
profiles. It will help you to shape your own relation to software. You
will be able to construct your own taxonomy and classifcation of
software users that is needed in order to find a means of rescue in case
of a software catastrophy.

- SKILLS\
- What kind of user would you say that you are?
- What is your most frequently used type of software?
- How often do you install/experiment/learn new software?



- History
- What is your first recollection of software use?
- How often do / when did you last purchase software or pay for a
software service?



- Ethics
- What is the software feature you care about the most?
- Do you use any free software?
- if yes than
- do you remember your first attempt at using this software
service? Do you still use it? If not why?



- Do you pay for media distribution/streaming services?
- Do you remember your first attempt at using free software and how
did that make you feel?
- Have you used any of these software services : facebook, dating app
(grindr, tinder, etc.), twitter, instagram or equivalent.



- Can you talk about your favorite apps or webtools that you use
regularly?
- What is most popular software your friends use?



- SKILL
- Would you say that you are a specilised user?



- Have you ever used the command line?
- Do you know about scripting?
- Have you ever edited an HTML page? A CSS file? A PHP file? A
configuration file?
- Can you talk about your most technical encounter with your computer
/ telephone?



- ECONOMY\
- How do you pay for your software use?
- Please elaborate (for example, do you buy the software? /
contribute in kind / deliver services or support)
- What is the last software that you paid for using?
- What online services are you currently paying for?
- Is someone paying for your use of service?



- Personal
- What stories do you have concerning contracts and administration in
relation to your software, Internet or computer?
- How does software help you shape your relations with other people?
- From which countries does your softwares come from / reside? How do
you feel about that?
- Have you ever read a terms of software service, what about one that
is not targeting the American market?

Sample questionnaire results
----------------------------

Possible/anticipated user profiles
----------------------------------

### \...meAsHardwareOwnerSoftwareUSER:

\"I did not own a computer personally until very very late as I did not
enjoy gaming as a kid or had interest in spending much time behind PC
beyond work (and work computer). My first was hence I think in 2005 and
it was a SGI workstation that was the computer of the year 2000 (cost
10.000USD) and I got it for around 300USD. Proprietary drivers for
unified graphics+RAM were never released, so it remained a software
dead-end in gorgeous blue curved chassis
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/pics/vwdocs.jpg\"

### \...meAsSoftwareCONSUMER:

\"I payed/purchased software only twice in my life (totalling less then
25eur), as I could access most commercial software as widely pirated in
Balkans and later had more passion for FLOSS anyway, this made me relate
to software as material to exchange and work it, rather than commodity
goods I could or not afford.\"

### \...meAsSoftwareINVESTOR:

\"I did it as both of those apps were niche products in early beta (one
was Jeeper Elvis, real-time-non-linear-video-editor for BeOS) that
failed to reach market, but I think I would likely do it again and only
in that mode (supporting the bleeding edge and off-stream work), but
maybe with more than 25eur.\"

### \...meAsSoftwareUserOfOS:

\"I would spend most of 80s ignoring computers, 90ties figuring out
software from high-end to low-end, starting with OSF/DecAlpha and SunOS,
than IRIX and MacOS, finally Win 95/98 SE, that permanently pushed me
into niches (of montly LINUX distro install fests, or even QNX/Solaris
experiments and finally BeOS use).\"

### \...meAsSoftwareWEBSURFER:

\"I got used to websurfing in more than 15 windows on UNIX systems and
never got used to less than that ever since, furthermore with addition
of more browser options this number only multiplied (always wondered if
my first system was Windows 3.11 - would I be a more focused person and
how would that form my relations to browser windows\>tabs).\"

### \...meAsSoftwareUserOfPropertarySoftware:

\"I signed one NDA contract in person on the paper and with ink on a
rainy day while stopping of at trainstaion in north Germany for the
software that was later to be pulled out of market due to problematic
licencing agreement (intuitivly I knew it was wrong) - it had too much
unprofessional pixeleted edges in its graphics.

### \...meAsSoftwareUserOfDatingWebsites:

\"I got one feature request implemented by a prominent dating website
(to search profiles by language they speak), however I was never
publicly acknowledged (though I tried to make use of it few times), that
made our relations feel a bit exploitative and underappreciated. \"

### \...meAsSoftwareUserTryingToGoPRO:

\"my only two attempts to get into the software company failed as they
insisted on full time commitments. Later I found out ones were
intimidated in interview and other gave it to a person that negotiated
to work part time with friend! My relation to professionalism is likely
equally complex and pervert as one to the software.\"

Case study : W. W.
------------------

\...ww.AsExperiencedAdventerousUSER - experiments with software every
two days as she uses FLOSS and Gnu/Linux, cares the most for maliabity
of the software - as a result she has big expectations of flexibility
even in software category which is quite conventional and stability
focused like file-hosting.

\...ww.AsAnInevstorInSoftware - paid compiled version of FLOSS audio
software 5 years ago as she is supportive of economy and work around
production, maintainance and support, but she also used closed
hardware/software where she had to agree on licences she finds unfair,
but then she was hacking it in order to use it as an expert - when she
had time.

\...ww.AsCommunicationSoftwareUSER - she is not using commercial social
networks, so she is very concious of information transfers and time
relations, but has no strong media/format/design focus.

Q: What is your first recollection of software use?\
A: ms dos in 1990 at school \_ i was 15 or 16. oh no 12. Basic in 1986.

Q: What are the emotions related to this use?\
A: fun. i\'m good at this. empowering

Q: How often do / when did you last purchase software or pay for a
software service?\
A: I paid for ardour five years ago. I paid the developper directly. For
the compiled version. I paid for the service. I pay for my website and
email service at domaine public.

Q: What kind of user would you say you are?\
A: An experienced user drawing out the line. I don\'t behave.

Q: Is there a link between this and your issue?\
A: Even if it\'s been F/LOSS there is a lot of decision power in my
package.

Q: What is your most frequently used type of software?\
A: Web browser. email. firefox & thunderbird

Q: How often do you install/experiment/learn new software?\
A: Every two days. I reinstall all the time. my old lts system died.
stop being supported last april. It was linux mint something.

Q: Do you know about scripting?\
A: I do automating scripts for any operation i have to doi several times
like format conversion.

Q: Can you talk about your most technical encounter with your computer /
telephone?\
A: I\'ve tried to root it. but i didn\'t succeed.

Q: How much time do you wish to spend on such activities like hacking,
rooting your device?\
A: hours. you should take your time

Q: Did you ever sign licence agreement you were not agree with? How does
that affect you?\
A: This is the first thing your when you have a phone. it\'s obey or
die.

Q: What is the software feature you care for the most?\
A: malleability. different ways to approach a problem, a challenge, an
issue.

Q: Do you use any free software?\
A: yes. there maybe are some proprietary drivers.

Q: Do you remember your first attempt at using free software and how did
that make you feel?\
A: Yes i installed my dual boot in \... 10 years ago. scared and
powerful.

Q: Do you use one of this software service: facebook, dating app (grindr
of sort), twitter, instagram or equivalent?\
A: Google, gmail that\'s it

Q: Can you talk about your favorite apps or webtools that you use
regularly?\
A: Music player. vanilla music and f-droid. browser. I pay attention to
clearing my history, no cookies. I also have iceweasel. Https by
default. Even though i have nothing to hide.

Q: What stories around contracts and administration in relation to your
software internet or computer?\
A: Nothing comes to my mind. i\'m not allowed to do, to install on
phone. When it\'s an old phone, there is nothing left that is working
you have to do it.

Q: How does software help you shape your relations with other people?\
A: It\'s a hard question. if it\'s communication software of course
it\'s it\'s nature to be related to other people.there is an expectency
of immediate reply, of information transfer\...It\'s troubling your
relation with people in certain situations.

Q: From which countries does your softwares live / is coming from? How
do you feel about that?\
A: i think i chose the netherlands as a miror. you are hoping to reflect
well in this miror.

Q: Have you ever read a terms of software service; one that is not
targeting the American market?\
A: i have read them. no.

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mta1ntzm .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.agile.yoga)
Agile Sun Salutation]{.method .descriptor} [Remember]{.remember .empty
.descriptor}

> Agile software development describes a set of values and principles
> for software development under which requirements and solutions evolve
> through the collaborative effort of self-organizing cross-functional
> teams. It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early
> delivery, and continuous improvement, and it encourages rapid and
> flexible response to change. These principles support the definition
> and continuing evolution of many software development
> methods.^[10](#dbabcece)^

[What: You will be observing yourself]{.what .descriptor} [How]{.how
.empty .descriptor}

> Scrum is a framework for managing software development. It is designed
> for teams of three to nine developers who break their work into
> actions that can be completed within fixed duration cycles (called
> \"sprints\"), track progress and re-plan in daily 15-minute stand-up
> meetings, and collaborate to deliver workable software every sprint.
> Approaches to coordinating the work of multiple scrum teams in larger
> organizations include Large-Scale Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
> and Scrum of Scrums, among others.^[11](#eefcbaac)^

[When: Anywhere where it\'s possible to lie on the floor]{.when
.descriptor} [Who]{.who .empty .descriptor}

> Self-organization and motivation are important, as are interactions
> like co-location and pair programming. It is better to have a good
> team of developers who communicate and collaborate well, rather than a
> team of experts each operating in isolation. Communication is a
> fundamental concept.^[12](#fbaeffab)^

[Urgency: Using Agile software development methods to develop a new path
into your professional and personal life towards creativity, focus and
health.]{.urgency .descriptor} [WARNING]{.warning .empty .descriptor}

> The agile movement is in some ways a bit like a teenager: very
> self-conscious, checking constantly its appearance in a mirror,
> accepting few criticisms, only interested in being with its peers,
> rejecting en bloc all wisdom from the past, just because it is from
> the past, adopting fads and new jargon, at times cocky and arrogant.
> But I have no doubts that it will mature further, become more open to
> the outside world, more reflective, and also therefore more
> effective.^[13](#edabeeaf)^

[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE:
https://mfr.osf.io/render?url=https://osf.io/ufdvb/?action=download%26direct%26mode=render&initialWidth=450&childId=mfrIframe]{.tmp}

Hello and welcome to the presentation of the agile yoga methodology. I
am Allegra, and today I\'m going to be your personal guide to YOGA, an
acronym for why organize? Go agile! I\'ll be part of your team today and
we\'ll do a few exercises together as an introduction to a new path into
your professional and personal life towards creativity, focus and
health.

A few months ago, I was stressed, overwhelmed with my work, feeling
alone, inadequate, but since I started practicing agile yoga, I feel
more productive. I have many clients as an agile yoga coach, and I\'ve
seen new creative business opportunities coming to me as a software
developer.

For this first experience with the agile yoga method and before we do
physical exercises together, I would like to invite you to close your
eyes. Make yourself comfortable, lying on the floor, or sitting with
your back on the wall. Close your eyes, relax. Get comfortable. Feel the
weight of your body on the floor or on the wall. Relax.

Leave your troubles at the door. Right now, you are not procrastinating,
you are having a meeting at the \,
a professional building dedicated to business, you are meeting yourself,
you are your own business partner, you are one. You are building your
future.

You are in a room standing with your team, a group of lean programmers.
You are watching a white board together. You are starting your day, a
very productive day as you are preparing to run a sprint together. Now
you turn towards each other, making a scrum with your team, you breathe
together, slowly, inhaling and exhaling together, slowly, feeling the
air in and out of your body. Now you all turn towards the sun to prepare
to do your ASSanas, the agile Sun Salutations or ASS with the team
dedicated ASS Master. She\'s guiding you. You start with Namaskar, the
Salute. your palms joined together, in prayer pose. you all reflect on
the first principle of the agile manifesto. your highest priority is to
satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable
software.

Next pose, is Ardha Chandrasana or (Half Moon Pose). With a deep
inhalation, you raise both arms above your head and tilt slightly
backward arching your back. you welcome changing requirements, even late
in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer\'s
competitive advantage. then you all do Padangusthasana (Hand to Foot
Pose). With a deep exhalation, you bend forward and touch the mat, both
palms in line with your feet, forehead touching your knees. you deliver
working software frequently.

Surya Darshan (Sun Sight Pose). With a deep inhalation, you take your
right leg away from your body, in a big backward step. Both your hands
are firmly planted on your mat, your left foot between your hands. you
work daily throughout the project, business people and developers
together. now, you\'re flowing into Purvottanasana (Inclined Plane) with
a deep inhalation by taking your right leg away from your body, in a big
backward step. Both your hands are firmly planted on your mat, your left
foot between your hands. you build projects around motivated
individuals. you give them the environment and support they need, and
you trust them to get the job done.

You\'re in Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog Pose). With a deep
exhalation, you shove your hips and butt up towards the ceiling, forming
an upward arch. Your arms are straight and aligned with your head. The
most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and
within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Then, Sashtang Dandawat (Forehead, Chest, Knee to Floor Pose). With a
deep exhalation, you lower your body down till your forehead, chest,
knees, hands and feet are touching the mat, your butt tilted up. Working
software is the primary measure of progress.

Next is Bhujangasana (Cobra Pose). With a deep inhalation, you slowly
snake forward till your head is up, your back arched concave, as much as
possible. Agile processes promote sustainable development. You are all
maintaining a constant pace indefinitely, sponsors, developers, and
users together.

Now back into Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog Pose).
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances
agility.

And then again to Surya Darshan (Sun Sight Pose). Simplicity\--the art
of maximizing the amount of work not done\--is essential. Then to
Padangusthasana (Hand to Foot Pose). The best architectures,
requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

You all do again Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon Pose). At regular
intervals, you as the team reflect on how to become more effective, then
tune and adjust your behavior accordingly. you end our ASSanas session
with a salute to honor your agile yoga practices. you have just had a
productive scrum meeting. now i invite you to open your eyes, move your
body around a bit, from the feet up to the head and back again.

Stand up on your feet and let\'s do a scrum together if you\'re ok being
touched on the arms by someone else. if not, you can do it on your own.
so put your hands on the shoulder of the SCP around you. now we\'re
joined together, let\'s look at the screen together as we inhale and
exhale. syncing our body together to the rythms of our own internal
software, modulating our oxygen level intake requirements to the oxygen
availability of our service facilities.

Now, let\'s do together a couple of exercise to protect and strengthen
our wrists. as programmers, as internauts, as entrepreneurs, they are a
very crucial parts of the body to protect. in order to be able to type,
to swipe, to shake hands vigourously, we need them in good health. So
bring to hands towards each other in a prayer pose, around a book, a
brick. You can do it without but I\'m using my extreme programming book
- embrace change - for that. So press the palms together firmly, press
the pad of your fingers together. do that while breathing in and out
twice.

Now let\'s expand our arms towards us, in the air, face and fingers
facing down. like we\'re typing. make your shoulders round. let\'s
breath while visualizing in our heads the first agile mantra :
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Now let\'s bring back the arms next to the body and raise them again.
And let\'s move our hands towards the ceiling this time. Strenghtening
our back. In our head, the second mantra. Working software over
comprehensive documentation. now let\'s bring back the hands in the
standing position. Then again the first movement while visualizing the
third mantra : Customer collaboration over contract negotiation and then
the second movement thinking about the fourth and last mantra :
Responding to change over following a plan and of course we continue
breathing. Now to finish this session, let\'s do a sprint together in
the corridor !

[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/guide/agileyoga/8-Poses-Yoga-Your-Desk.contours.png
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/guide/agileyoga/gayolab-office-chair-for-yoga.contours.png
)]{.tmp} [TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#mdu0mmji .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.blobservation)
Hand reading]{.method .descriptor} [How: Visit the Future Blobservation
Booth to have your fortunes read and derive life insight from the wisdom
of software.]{.how .descriptor} [What: Put your hand in the reading
booth and get your line read.]{.what .descriptor} [Why: The hand which
holds your mouse everyday hides many secrets.]{.why .descriptor}
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

` {.verbatim .wrap}
* sample reading timeline:

* 15:00 a test user, all tests clear and systems are online a user who said goodbye to us another user a user who thought it'd be silly to say thank you to the machine but thank you very much another kind user who said thank you yet another kind user another user, no feeback a nice user who found the reading process relieving yet another kind user a scared user! took the hand out but ended up trusting the system. "so cool thanks guys" another user a young user! this is a funny computer
* 15:35 another nice user
* 15:40 another nice user
* 15:47 happy user (laughing)
* 15:51 user complaining about her fortune, saying it's not true. Found the reading process creepy but eased up quickly
* 15:59 another nice user: http://etherbox.local:9001/p/SCP.sedyst.md
* 16:06 a polite user
* 16:08 a friendly playful user (stephanie)
* 16:12 a very giggly user (wendy)
* 16:14 a playful user - found the reading process erotic - DEFRAGMENTING? NO! Thanks Blobservation http://etherbox.local:9001/p/SCP.loup.md
* 16:19 a curious user
* 16:27 a friendly user but oh no, we had a glitch and computer crashed. But we still delivered the fortune. We got a thank you anyway
* 16:40 a nice user, the printer jammed but it was sorted out quickly *16:42 another nice user
* 16:50 nice user (joak)
* 16:52 yet another nice user (jogi)
* 16:55 happy user! (peter w)
* 16:57 more happy user (pierre h)
* 16:58 another happy user
* 17:00 super happy user (peggy)
* 17:02 more happy user
`

[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

> Software time is not the same as human time. Computers will run for AS
> LONG AS THEY WILL BE ABLE TO, provided sufficient power is available.
> You, as a human, don\'t have the luxury of being always connected to
> the power grid and this have to rely on your INTERNAL BATTERY. Be
> aware of your power cycles and set yourself to POWER-SAVING MODE
> whenever possible.

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/var/resizes/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMAG1407.jpg?m=1497344230]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#yznjodq3 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.dirty) Bug
reporting for sharing observations]{.method .descriptor} [What: Etherpad
had stopped working but it was unclear why. Where does etherpad
\'live\'?]{.what .descriptor} [How: Started by looking around the pi\'s
filesystem by reading /var/log/syslog in /opt/etherpad and in a
subdirectory named var/ there was dirty.db, and dirty it was.]{.how
.descriptor} [When: Monday morning]{.when .descriptor} [Urgency:
Software (etherpad) not working and the Walk-in Clinic was about to
start.]{.urgency .descriptor} [Note:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.inventory.jogi]{.note
.descriptor}

from jogi\@mur.at to \[Observatory\] When dirty.db get\'s dirty

Dear all,

as promised yesterday, here my little report regarding the broken
etherpad.

\ \#\#\# When dirty.db get\'s dirty

When I got to WTC on Monday morning the etherpad on etherbox.local was
disfunct. Later someone said that in fact etherpad had stopped working
the evening before, but it was unclear why. So I started looking around
the pi\'s filesystem to find out what was wrong. Took me a while to find
the relevant lines in /var/log/syslog but it became clear that there was
a problem with the database. Which database? Where does etherpad
\'live\'? I found it in /opt/etherpad and in a subdirectory named var/
there it was: dirty.db, and dirty it was.

A first look at the file revealed no apparent problem. The last lines
looked like this:

`{"key":"sessionstorage:Ddy0gw7okwbkv5BzkR1DuSLCV_IA5_jQ","val":{"cookie ":{"path":"/","_expires":null,"originalMaxAge":null,"httpOnly":true,"secure":false}}} {"key":"sessionstorage:AU1cffgcTf_q6BV9aIdAvES2YyXM7Gm1","val":{"cookie ":{"path":"/","_expires":null,"originalMaxAge":null,"httpOnly":true,"secure":false}}} {"key":"sessionstorage:_H5SdUlDvQ3XCuPaZEXQ5lx0K6aAEJ9m","val":{"cookie ":{"path":"/","_expires":null,"originalMaxAge":null,"httpOnly":true,"se cure":false}}}`

What I did not see at the time was that there were some (AFAIR something
around 150) binary zeroes at the end of the file. I used tail for the
first look and that tool silently ignored the zeroes at the end of the
file. It was Martino who suggested using different tools (xxd in that
case) and that showed the cause of the problem. The file looked
something like this:

00013730: 6f6b 6965 223a 7b22 7061 7468 223a 222f okie":{"path":"/
00013740: 222c 225f 6578 7069 7265 7322 3a6e 756c ","_expires":nul
00013750: 6c2c 226f 7269 6769 6e61 6c4d 6178 4167 l,"originalMaxAg
00013760: 6522 3a6e 756c 6c2c 2268 7474 704f 6e6c e":null,"httpOnl
00013770: 7922 3a74 7275 652c 2273 6563 7572 6522 y":true,"secure"
00013780: 3a66 616c 7365 7d7d 7d0a 0000 0000 0000 :false}}}.......
00013790: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................

So Anita, Martino and I stuck our heads together to come up with a
solution. Our first attempt to fix the problem went something like this:

dd if=dirty.db of=dirty.db.clean bs=1 count=793080162

which means: write the first 793080162 blocks of size 1 byte to a new
file. After half an hour or so I checked on the size of the new file and
saw that some 10% of the copying had been done. No way this would get
done in time for the walk-in-clinic. Back to the drawing board.

Using a text editor was no real option btw since even vim has a hard
time with binary zeroes and the file was really big. But there was
hexedit! Martino installed it and copied dirty.db onto his computer.
After some getting used to the various commands to navigate in hexedit
the unwanted zeroes were gone in an instant. The end of the file looked
like this now:

00013730: 6f6b 6965 223a 7b22 7061 7468 223a 222f okie":{"path":"/
00013740: 222c 225f 6578 7069 7265 7322 3a6e 756c ","_expires":nul
00013750: 6c2c 226f 7269 6769 6e61 6c4d 6178 4167 l,"originalMaxAg
00013760: 6522 3a6e 756c 6c2c 2268 7474 704f 6e6c e":null,"httpOnl
00013770: 7922 3a74 7275 652c 2273 6563 7572 6522 y":true,"secure"
00013780: 3a66 616c 7365 7d7d 7d0a :false}}}.

Martino asked about the trailing \'.\' character and I checked a
different copy of the file. No \'.\' there, so that had to go too. My
biggest mistake in a long time! The \'.\' we were seeing in Martino\'s
copy of the file was in fact a \'\' (0a)! We did not realize that,
copied the file back to etherbox.local and waited for etherpad to resume
it\'s work. But no luck there, for obvious reasons.

We ended up making backups of dirty.db in various stages of deformation
and Martino started a brandnew pad so we could use pads for the walk-
in-clinic. The processing tool chain has been disabled btw. We did not
want to mess up any of the already generated .pdf, .html and .md files.

We still don\'t know why exactly etherpad stopped working sometime
Sunday evening or how the zeroes got into the file dirty.db. Anita
thought that she caused the error when she adjusted time on
etherbox.local, but the logfile does not reflect that. The last clean
entry in /var/log/syslog regarding nodejs/etherpad is recorded with a
timestamp of something along the line of \'Jun 10 10:17\'. Some minutes
later, around \'Jun 10 10:27\' the first error appears. These timestamps
reflect the etherbox\'s understanding of time btw, not \'real time\'.

It might be that the file just got too big for etherpad to handle it.
The size of the repaired dirty.db file was already 757MB. That could btw
explain why etherpad was working somewhat slugishly after some days.
There is still a chance that the time adjustment had an unwanted side
effect, but so far there is no obvious reason for what had happened.
\ \-- J.Hofmüller

http://thesix.mur.at/

[]{#ytu5y2qy .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.detournement)
Interface Détournement]{.method .descriptor} [Embodiment / body
techniques]{.grouping} []{#y2q4zju5 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.occupational)
Comportments of software (softwear)]{.method .descriptor}
[Remember]{.remember .empty .descriptor}

> The analysis of common sense, as opposed to the exercise of it, must
> then begin by redrawing this erased distinction between the mere
> matter-of-fact apprehension of reality\--or whatever it is you want to
> call what we apprehend merely and matter-of-factly\--and
> down-to-earth, colloquial wisdom, judgements, and assessments of it.

[What: Observe and catalog the common gestures, common comportments, and
common sense(s) surrounding software.]{.what .descriptor} [How: This can
be done through observation of yourself or others. Separate the
apprehended and matter of fact from the meanings, actions, reactions,
judgements, and assessments that the apprehension occasions. Step 1:
Begin by assembling a list of questions such as: When you see a software
application icon what are you most likely to do? When a software
application you are using presents you with a user agreement what are
you most likely to do? When a software applciation does something that
frustrates you what are you most likely to do? When a software
application you are using crashes what are you most likely to do? Step
2: Write down your responses and the responses of any subjects you are
observing. Step 3: For each question, think up three other possible
responses. Write these down. Step 4: (this step is only for the very
curious) Try the other possible responses out the next time you
encounter each of the given scenarios.]{.how .descriptor} [Note: The
common senses and comportments of software are of course informed and
conditioned by those of hardware and so perhaps this is more accurately
a method for articulating comportments of computing.]{.note .descriptor}
[WARNING: Software wears on both individual and collective bodies and
selves. Software may harm your physical and emotional health and that of
your society both by design and by accident.]{.warning .descriptor}
[TODO: RELATES TO Agile Sun Salutation, Natasha Schull\'s Addicted by
Design]{.tmp} [Flow-regulation, logistics, seamlessness]{.grouping}
[]{#mwrhm2y4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.continuousintegration)
Continuous integration]{.method .descriptor} [What: Continuous
integration is a sophisticated form of responsibility management: it is
the fascia of services. Continous integration picks up after all other
services and identifies what needs to happen so that they can work in
concert. Continuous integration is a way of observing the evolution of
(micro)services through cybernetic (micro)management.]{.what
.descriptor} [How: Continuous integration keeps track of changes to all
services and allows everyone to observe if they still can work together
after all the moving parts are fitted together.]{.how .descriptor}
[When: Continuous integration comes to prominence in a world of
distributed systems where there are many parts being organized
simultaneously. Continuous integration is a form of observation that
helps (micro)services maintain a false sense of independence and
decentralization while constantly subjecting them to centralized
feedback.]{.when .descriptor} [Who: Continuous integration assumes that
all services will submit themselves to the feedback loops of continuous
integration. This could be a democratic process or not.]{.who
.descriptor} [Urgency: Continuous integration reconfigures divisions of
labor in the shadows of automation. How can we surface and question its
doings and undoings?]{.urgency .descriptor} [WARNING: When each service
does one thing well, the service makers tend to assume everybody else is
doing the things they do not want to do.]{.warning .descriptor}

At TGSO continuous integration was introduced as a service that responds
to integration hell when putting together a number of TGSO services for
a walk-in software clinic. Due to demand, the continuous integration
service was extended to do \"service discovery\" and \"load balancing\"
once the walk-in clinic was in operation.

Continuous integration worked by visiting the different services of the
walk-in clinic to check for updates, test the functionality and think
through implications of integration with other services. If the pieces
didn\'t fit, continuous integration delivered error messages and
solution options.

When we noticed that software curious persons visiting the walk-in
clinic may have troubles finding the different services, and that some
services may be overloaded with software curious persons, continuous
integration was extended. We automated service registration using
colored tape and provided a lookup registry for software curious
persons.

http://gallery.constantvzw.org/index.php/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/IMAG1404

Load balancing meant that software curious persons were forwarded to
services that had capacity. If all other services were full, the load
balancer defaulted to sending the software curious person to the [Agile
Sun
Salutation](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.agile.yoga)
service.

[WARNING: At TGSO the bundling of different functionalities into the
continuous integration service broke the \"do one thing well\"
principle, but saved the day (we register this as technical debt for the
next iteration of the walk-in clinic).]{.warning .descriptor} [Remember:
Continous integration may be the string that holds your current software
galaxy together.]{.remember .descriptor}

\"More technically, I am interested in how things bounce around in
computer systems. I am not sure if these two things are relted, but I
hope continuous integration will help me.\"

[]{#zdixmgrm .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.pipeline) make
make do]{.method .descriptor} [What: Makefile as a method for
quick/collective assemblages + observing amalgamates/pipelines]{.what
.descriptor} [Note: Note:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/etherdump/makefile.raw.html]{.note
.descriptor}

etherpad-\>md-\>pdf-\>anything pipeline. makefile as a method for
quick/collective assemblages + observing amalgamates/pipelines CHRISTOPH

[]{#zweymtni .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.ssogy)
Flowcharts (Flow of the chart -- chart of the flow on demand!)]{.method
.descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE:
!\[\]( http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/ibm-ruler.jpg
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/burroughs-ruler.jpg
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/rectangle.png )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/curly\_rec.png
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/curly\_rec-2.png
)]{.tmp} [SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/flag.png )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[\](
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/images/symbols/trapec.png )]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE: !\[Claude Shannon Information Diagram Blanked: Silvio
Lorusso\](
http://silviolorusso.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/shannon\_comm\_channel.gif
)]{.tmp} [TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp}
[Beingontheside/inthemiddle/behind]{.grouping} []{#ywfin2e4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.somethinginthemiddlemaybe)
Something in the Middle Maybe (SitMM)]{.method .descriptor} [What: The
network traffic gets observed. There are different sniffing software out
there which differ in granularity and how far the user can taylor the
different functionality. SitMM builds on one of these tools called
[scapy](http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/).]{.what .descriptor}
[How: SitMM takes a closer look at the network traffic coming from/going
to a software curious person\'s device. The software curious person
using SitMM may ask to filter the traffic based on application or device
of interest.]{.how .descriptor} [Who]{.who .empty .descriptor}

The software curious person gets to observe their own traffic. Ideally,
observing ones own network traffic should be available to anyone, but
using such software can be deemed illegal under different jurisdictions.

For example, in the US wiretap law limit packet-sniffing to parties
owning the network that is being sniffed or the availability of consent
from one of the communicating parties. Section 18 U.S. Code § 2511 (2)
(a) (i) says:

> It shall not be unlawful \... to intercept \... while engaged in any
> activity which is a necessary incident to the rendition of his service
> or to the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that
> service

See here for a
[paper](http://spot.colorado.edu/%7Esicker/publications/issues.pdf) on
the topic. Google went on a big legal spree to defend their right to
capture unencrypted wireless traffic with google street view cars. The
courts were concerned about wiretapping and infringements on the privacy
of users, and not with the leveraging of private and public WiFi
infrastructure for the gain of a for profit company. The case raises
hard questions about the state, ownership claims and material reality of
WiFi signals. So, while WiFi sniffing is common and the tools like SitMM
are widely available, it is not always possible for software curious
persons to use them legally or to neatly filter out \"their traffic\"
from that of \"others\".

[When: SitMM can be used any time a software curious person feels the
weight of the (invisible) networks.]{.when .descriptor} [Why: SitMM is
intended to be a tool that gives artists, designers and educators an
easy to use custom WiFi router to work with networks and explore the
aspects of our daily communications that are exposed when we use WiFi.
The goal is to use the output to encourage open discussions about how we
use our devices online.]{.why .descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty
.descriptor}

Snippets of a Something In The Middle, Maybe - Report

` {.verbatim}
UDP 192.168.42.32:53649 -> 8.8.8.8:53
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
TCP/HTTP 17.253.53.208:80 GET http://captive.apple.com/mDQArB9orEii/Xmql6oYqtUtn/f6xY5snMJcW8/CEm0Ioc1d0d8/9OdEOfkBOY4y.html
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
TCP 192.168.42.32:49250 -> 17.253.53.208:80
UDP 192.168.42.32:63872 -> 8.8.8.8:53
UDP 192.168.42.32:61346 -> 8.8.8.8:53
...
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443
TCP 192.168.42.32:49260 -> 17.134.127.97:443

##################################################
Destination Address: 17.253.53.208
Destination Name: nlams2-vip-bx-008.aaplimg.com

Port: Connection Count
80: 6

##################################################
Destination Address: 17.134.127.79
Destination Name: unknown

Port: Connection Count
443: 2
##################################################
Destination Address: 17.248.145.76
Destination Name: unknown

Port: Connection Count
443: 16
`

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#ntlimgqy .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.whatisitliketobeanelevator)
What is it like to be AN ELEVATOR?]{.method .descriptor} [What:
Understanding software systems by becoming them]{.what .descriptor}
[TODO: extend this text \.... how to observe software in the world
around you. How to observe an everyday software experience and translate
this into a flowchart )]{.tmp} [How: Creating a flowchart to incarnate a
software system you use everyday]{.how .descriptor} [WARNING: Uninformed
members of the public may panic when confronted with a software
performance in a closed space.]{.warning .descriptor} [Example: What is
it like to be an elevator?]{.example .descriptor}

` {.verbatim}

what
is
it
like
to be
an
elevator?

from 25th floor to 1st floor

light on button light of 25th floor
check current floor
if current floor is 25th floor
no
if current floor is ...
go one floor up
... smaller than 25th floor
go one floor down
... bigger than 25th floor
stop elevator
turn button light off of 25th floor
turn door light on
open door of elevator
play sound opening sequence
yes
start
user pressed button of 25th floor
close door of elevator
if door is closed
user pressed 1st floor button
start timer for door closing
if timer is running more than three seconds
yes
yes
light on button
go one floor down
no
if current floor is 1st floor
update floor indicator
check current floor
stop elevator
no
yes
light off button
turn door light on
open door of elevator
play sound opening sequence
end
update floor indicator
`

[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/joseph/flowchart.pdf]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#ndg2zte4 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.sidechannel)
Side Channel Analysis]{.method .descriptor} [Urgency: Side Channel
attacks are possible by disregarding the abstraction of software into
pure logic: the physical effects of the running of the software become
backdoors to observe its functioning, both threatening the control of
processes and the re-affirming the materiality of software.]{.urgency
.descriptor} [WARNING: **engineers are good guys!**]{.warning
.descriptor} [Example]{.example .empty .descriptor} [SHOW IMAGE HERE:
https://www.tek.com/sites/default/files/media/image/119-4146-00%20Near%20Field%20Probe%20Set.png.jpg]{.tmp}
[SHOW IMAGE HERE:
http://gallery.constantvzw.org/index.php/Techno-Galactic-Software-Observatory/PWFU3377]{.tmp}
[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} [Collections / collecting]{.grouping}
[]{#njmzmjm1 .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.bestiary)
Compiling a bestiary of software logos]{.method .descriptor} [What:
Since the early days of GNU-linux and cemented through the ubiquitous
O\'Reilly publications, the visual culture of software relies heavily on
animal representations. But what kinds of animals, and to what
effect?]{.what .descriptor} [How]{.how .empty .descriptor}

Compile a collection of logos and note the metaphors for observation: \*
stethoscope \* magnifying glass \* long neck (giraffe)

[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

` {.verbatim}
% http://animals.oreilly.com/browse/
% [check Testing the testbed pads for examples]
% [something on bestiaries]
`

[TODO: RELATES TO]{.tmp} []{#njm5zwm4 .anchor} []{#mmy2zgrl .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.testingtestbed)
Testing the testbed: testing software with observatory ambitions
(SWOA)]{.method .descriptor} [WARNING: this method may make more sense
if you first take a look at the [Something in the Middle Maybe
(SitMM)](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.sitmm) which is
an instance of a SWOA]{.warning .descriptor} [How: The interwebs hosts
many projects that aim to produce software for observing software, (from
now on Software With Observatory Ambitions (SWOA)). A comparative
methodology can be produced by testing different SWOA to observe
software of interest. Example: use different sniffing software to
observe wireless networks, e.g., wireshark vs tcpdump vs SitMM.
Comparing SWOA reveals what is seen as worthy of observation (e.g., what
protocols, what space, which devices), the granularity of the
observation (e.g., how is the observation captured, in what detail), the
logo and conceptual framework of choice etc. This type of observation
may be turned into a service (See also: Something in the Middle Maybe
(SitMM)).]{.how .descriptor} [When: Ideally, SWOA can be used everywhere
and in every situation. In reality, institutions, laws and
administrators like to limit the use of SWOA on infrastructures to
people who are also administering these networks. Hence, we are
presented with the situation that the use of SWOA is condoned when it is
down by researchers and pen testers (e.g., they were hired) and shunned
when done by others (often subject to name calling as hackers or
attackers).]{.when .descriptor} [What: Deep philosophical moment: most
software has a recursive observatory ambition (it wants to be observed
in its execution, output etc.). Debuggers, logs, dashboards are all
instances of software with observatory ambitions and can not be
separated from software itself. Continuous integration is the act of
folding the whole software development process into one big feedback
loop. So, what separates SWOA from software itself? Is it the intention
of observing software with a critical, agonistic or adversarial
perspective vs one focused on productivity and efficiency that
distinguishes SWOA from software? What makes SWOA a critical practice
over other forms of sotware observation. If our methodology is testing
SWOA, then is it a meta critique of critique?]{.what .descriptor} [Who:
If you can run multiple SWOAs, you can do it. The question is: will
people like it if you turn your gaze on their SWOA based methods of
observation? Once again we find that observation can surface power
asymmetries and lead to defensiveness or desires to escape the
observation in the case of the observed, and a instinct to try to
conceal that observation is taking place.]{.who .descriptor} [Urgency:
If observation is a form of critical engagement in that it surfaces the
workings of software that are invisible to many, it follows that people
would develop software to observe (SWOAs). Testing SWOAs puts this form
of critical observation to test with the desire to understand how what
is made transparent through each SWOA also makes things invisible and
reconfigures power.]{.urgency .descriptor} [Note: Good SWOA software
usually uses an animal as a logo.:D]{.note .descriptor} [WARNING: Many
of the SWOA projects we looked at are promises more than running
software/available code. Much of it is likely to turn into obsolete
gradware, making testing difficult.]{.warning .descriptor} [TODO:
RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.bestiary]{.tmp} [TODO:
RELATES TO http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.sitmm]{.tmp}
[]{#mmmzmmrh .anchor}
[[Method:](http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.reader)
Prepare a reader to think theory with software]{.method .descriptor}
[What: Compile a collection of texts about software.]{.what .descriptor}
[How: Choose texts from different realms. Software observations are
mostly done in the realm of the technological and the pragmatic. Also
the ecology of texts around software includes first and foremost
manuals, technical documentation and academic papers by software
engineers and these all \'live\' in different realms. More recently, the
field of software studies opened up additional perspectives fuelled by
cultural studies and sometimes filosophy. By compiling a reader \...
ways of speaking/writing about. Proximity.]{.how .descriptor}
[Example]{.example .empty .descriptor}

` {.verbatim .wrap}
Pull some quotes from the reader, for example from the chapter: Observation and its consequences

Lilly Irani, Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship, 2015 http://sci-hub.bz/10.1177/0162243915578486

Kara Pernice (Nielsen Norman Group), Talking with Participants During a Usability Test, January 26, 2014, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/talking-to-users/

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive. 2004 http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/pdf/vol13_2_06.pdf

Alexander R. Galloway, The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism, Critical Inquiry. 2013, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Galloway,%20Poverty%20of%20Philosophy.pdf
Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips, Allen M. Wolk, How to Build a Working Digital Computer. Hayden Book Company, 1968. https://archive.org/details/howtobuildaworkingdigitalcomputer_jun67

Matthew Fuller, "It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word", Nettime, 5 Sep 2000. https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/xpDrXE_VQeeuDDpc5RrywyTJwbzD8eatYGHKmyT2A_HnIHKb

Barbara P. Aichinger, DDR Memory Errors Caused by Row Hammer. 2015 www.memcon.com/pdfs/proceedings2015/SAT104_FuturePlus.pdf

Fangfei Liu, Yuval Yarom, Qian Ge, Gernot Heiser, Ruby B. Lee. Last-Level Cache Side-Channel Attacks are Practical. 2015 http://palms.ee.princeton.edu/system/files/SP_vfinal.pdf
`

[TODO: RELATES TO
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/observatory.guide.samequestion]{.tmp}
[]{#ytjmmmni .anchor}

Colophon

The Guide to techno-galactic software observing was compiled by Carlin
Wing, Martino Morandi, Peggy Pierrot, Anita, Christoph Haag, Michael
Murtaugh, Femke Snelting

License: Free Art License

Support:

Sources:

Constant, February 2018

::: {.footnotes}
1. [[[Haraway]{.fname}, [Donna]{.gname}, [Galison]{.fname},
[Peter]{.gname} and [Stump]{.fname}, [David J]{.gname}: [Modest
Witness: Feminist Diffractions in Science Studies]{.title},
[Stanford University Press]{.publisher}, [1996]{.date}.
]{.collection} [-\>](#eeffecbe)]{#ebceffee}
2. [Worksessions are intensive transdisciplinary moments, organised
twice a year by Constant. They aim to provide conditions for
participants with different experiences and capabilities to
temporarily link their practice and to develop ideas, prototypes and
research projects together. For the worksessions, primarily Free,
Libre and Open Source software is used and material that is
available under ??? [-\>](#fcdcaacb)]{#bcaacdcf}
3. [http://www.nam-ip.be [-\>](#ffeaecaa)]{#aaceaeff}
4. [http://www.etwie.be/database/actor/computermuseum-ku-leuven
[-\>](#dbabebfa)]{#afbebabd}
5. [[contributors]{.fname}, [Wikipedia]{.gname}: [Content-control
software --- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia]{.title},
[2018]{.date}. [-\>](#fadefecf)]{#fcefedaf}
6. [[UrbanMinistry.org]{.fname}, [TechMission]{.gname}:
[SafeFamilies.org \| Accountability Software: Encyclopedia of Urban
Ministry]{.title}, [2018]{.date}. [-\>](#faebbffb)]{#bffbbeaf}
7. [[Content Watch Holdings]{.fname}, [Inc]{.gname}: [Protecting Your
Family]{.title}, [2018]{.date}. [-\>](#afcbcfbb)]{#bbfcbcfa}
8. [[websense.com]{.fname}, []{.gname}: [Explicit and transparent proxy
deployments]{.title}, [2012]{.date}. [-\>](#edbedede)]{#ededebde}
9. [[workrave.org]{.fname}, []{.gname}: [Frequently Asked
Questions]{.title}, [2018]{.date}. [-\>](#ddfbbbfc)]{#cfbbbfdd}
10. [[contributors]{.fname}, [Wikipedia]{.gname}: [Agile software
development --- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia]{.title},
[2018]{.date}. [-\>](#ececbabd)]{#dbabcece}
11. [[contributors]{.fname}, [Wikipedia]{.gname}: [Scrum (software
development) --- Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia]{.title},
[2018]{.date}. [-\>](#caabcfee)]{#eefcbaac}
12. [[contributors]{.fname}, [Wikipedia]{.gname}: [The Manifesto for
Agile Software Development]{.title}, [2018]{.date}.
[-\>](#baffeabf)]{#fbaeffab}
13. [[Kruchten]{.fname}, [Philippe]{.gname}: [Agile's Teenage
Crisis?]{.title}, [2011]{.date}. [-\>](#faeebade)]{#edabeeaf}
:::

Custodians
In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub
2015


:::::::::::::::::: contact:
[little.prince@custodians.online](mailto:little.prince@custodians.online)

# In solidarity with [Library Genesis](http://libgen.io) and [Sci-Hub](http
://sci-hub.io)

In Antoine de Saint Exupéry's tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who
accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The
Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day.
Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week. "It is of some use to my
volcanoes, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them," he says, "but
you are of no use to the stars that you own".

There are many businessmen who own knowledge today. Consider Elsevier, the
largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin1 stands in sharp contrast
to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for
adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic
material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard,
the richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot
afford them any longer. Robert Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library,
says "We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other
researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy
back the results of our labour at outrageous prices."2 For all the work
supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers, particularly the
peer review that grounds their legitimacy, journal articles are priced such
that they prohibit access to science to many academics - and all non-academics
- across the world, and render it a token of privilege.3

Elsevier has recently filed a copyright infringement suit in New York against
Science Hub and Library Genesis claiming millions of dollars in damages.4 This
has come as a big blow, not just to the administrators of the websites but
also to thousands of researchers around the world for whom these sites are the
only viable source of academic materials. The social media, mailing lists and
IRC channels have been filled with their distress messages, desperately
seeking articles and publications.

Even as the New York District Court was delivering its injunction, news came
of the entire editorial board of highly-esteemed journal Lingua handing in
their collective resignation, citing as their reason the refusal by Elsevier
to go open access and give up on the high fees it charges to authors and their
academic institutions. As we write these lines, a petition is doing the rounds
demanding that Taylor & Francis doesn't shut down Ashgate5, a formerly
independent humanities publisher that it acquired earlier in 2015. It is
threatened to go the way of other small publishers that are being rolled over
by the growing monopoly and concentration in the publishing market. These are
just some of the signs that the system is broken. It devalues us, authors,
editors and readers alike. It parasites on our labor, it thwarts our service
to the public, it denies us access6.

We have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with
no economic barrier to access and at a much lower cost to society. But closed
access’s monopoly over academic publishing, its spectacular profits and its
central role in the allocation of academic prestige trump the public interest.
Commercial publishers effectively impede open access, criminalize us,
prosecute our heroes and heroines, and destroy our libraries, again and again.
Before Science Hub and Library Genesis there was Library.nu or Gigapedia;
before Gigapedia there was textz.com; before textz.com there was little; and
before there was little there was nothing. That's what they want: to reduce
most of us back to nothing. And they have the full support of the courts and
law to do exactly that.7

In Elsevier's case against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, the judge said:
"simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website,
disserves the public interest"8. Alexandra Elbakyan's original plea put the
stakes much higher: "If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force
them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the
public does not have the right to knowledge."

We demonstrate daily, and on a massive scale, that the system is broken. We
share our writing secretly behind the backs of our publishers, circumvent
paywalls to access articles and publications, digitize and upload books to
libraries. This is the other side of 37% profit margins: our knowledge commons
grows in the fault lines of a broken system. We are all custodians of
knowledge, custodians of the same infrastructures that we depend on for
producing knowledge, custodians of our fertile but fragile commons. To be a
custodian is, de facto, to download, to share, to read, to write, to review,
to edit, to digitize, to archive, to maintain libraries, to make them
accessible. It is to be of use to, not to make property of, our knowledge
commons.

More than seven years ago Aaron Swartz, who spared no risk in standing up for
what we here urge you to stand up for too, wrote: "We need to take
information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the
world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the
archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to
download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need
to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we'll
not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll
make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?"9

We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the
very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil
disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names behind
this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us. The
anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced
across the internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being
dogs, humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise
our voices.

Share this letter - read it in public - leave it in the printer. Share your
writing - digitize a book - upload your files. Don't let our knowledge be
crushed. Care for the libraries - care for the metadata - care for the backup.
Water the flowers - clean the volcanoes.

30 November 2015

Dusan Barok, Josephine Berry, Bodo Balazs, Sean Dockray, Kenneth Goldsmith,
Anthony Iles, Lawrence Liang, Sebastian Luetgert, Pauline van Mourik Broekman,
Marcell Mars, spideralex, Tomislav Medak, Dubravka Sekulic, Femke Snelting...

* * *

1. Lariviere, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon. “[The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502)” PLoS ONE 10, no. 6 (June 10, 2015): e0127502. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.,
“[The Obscene Profits of Commercial Scholarly
Publishers.](http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-
scholarly-publishers/)” svpow.com. Accessed November 30, 2015.  ↩

2. Sample, Ian. “[Harvard University Says It Can’t Afford Journal Publishers’ Prices.](http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices)” The Guardian, April 24, 2012, sec. Science. theguardian.com.  ↩
3. “[Academic Paywalls Mean Publish and Perish - Al Jazeera English.](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/20121017558785551.html)” Accessed November 30, 2015. aljazeera.com.  ↩
4. “[Sci-Hub Tears Down Academia’s ‘Illegal’ Copyright Paywalls.](https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-tears-down-academias-illegal-copyright-paywalls-150627/)” TorrentFreak. Accessed November 30, 2015. torrentfreak.com.  ↩
5. “[Save Ashgate Publishing.](https://www.change.org/p/save-ashgate-publishing)” Change.org. Accessed November 30, 2015. change.org.  ↩
6. “[The Cost of Knowledge.](http://thecostofknowledge.com/)” Accessed November 30, 2015. thecostofknowledge.com.  ↩
7. In fact, with the TPP and TTIP being rushed through the legislative process, no domain registrar, ISP provider, host or human rights organization will be able to prevent copyright industries and courts from criminalizing and shutting down websites "expeditiously".  ↩
8. “[Court Orders Shutdown of Libgen, Bookfi and Sci-Hub.](https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-shutdown-of-libgen-bookfi-and-sci-hub-151102/)” TorrentFreak. Accessed November 30, 2015. torrentfreak.com.  ↩
9. “[Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt)” Internet Archive. Accessed November 30, 2015. archive.org.  ↩

Dean, Dockray, Ludovico, Broekman, Thoburn & Vilensky
Materialities of Independent Publishing: A Conversation with AAAAARG, Chto Delat?, I Cite, Mute, and Neural
2013


Materialities Of Independent Publishing: A
Conversation With Aaaaarg, Chto Delat?,
I Cite, Mute, And Neural
Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Pauline van
Mourik Broekman, Nicholas Thoburn, and Dmitry Vilensky
Abstract This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political
media, focusing on the diverse materialities of independent publishing associated with
the new media environment. The conversation concentrates on the publishing projects
with which the participants are involved: the online archive and conversation platform
AAAAARG, the print and digital publications of artist and activist group Chto Delat?,
the blog I Cite, and the hybrid print/digital magazines Mute and Neural. Approaching
independent media as sites of political and aesthetic intervention, association, and
experimentation, the conversation ranges across a number of themes, including: the
technical structures of new media publishing; financial constraints in independent
publishing; independence and institutions; the sensory properties of paper and the
book; the politics of writing; design and the aesthetics of publishing; the relation
between social media and communicative capitalism; publishing as art; publishing as
self-education; and post-digital print.
Keywords independent publishing, art publishing, activist publishing, digital
archive, blog, magazine, newspaper

BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND ACT
Nicholas Thoburn (NT) In one way or another all of you have an investment
in publishing as a political practice, where publishing might be understood
loosely as a political ‘gesture’ located ‘between the realm of discourse and the
material act’.1 And in large measure, this takes the path of critical intervention
in the form of the media with which you work - newspaper, blog, magazine,
and digital archive. That is, media come forward in your publishing practice
and writing as complex sets of materials, capacities, and effects, and as sites
of political intervention and critical reflection.
The aim of this conversation is to concentrate on these materials,
capacities, and effects of independent media (a term, ‘independent media’,
that I use advisedly, given its somewhat pre-digital associations and a
nagging feeling that it lacks purchase on the complexity of convergent media
environments). I’m keen as much as possible to keep each of your specific
DOI:10.3898/NEWF.78.08.2013

Materialities Of Independent Publishing 157

1. Nat Muller
and Alessandro
Ludovico, ‘Of
Process and
Gestures: A
Publishing Act’, in
Alessandro Ludovico
and Natt Muller
(eds) The Mag.net
Reader 3, London,
OpenMute, p6.

publishing projects at the forefront of the conversation, to convey a strong
sense of their ‘materialities’: the technical and aesthetic forms and materials
they mobilise; what strategies of authorship, editorship, or collectivity
they employ; how they relate to publics, laws, media paradigms, financial
structures; how they model or represent their media form, and so on. To start
us off, I would like to invite each of you to introduce your publishing project
with a few sentences: its aims, the mediums it uses, where it’s located, when
established - that kind of thing.

2. Jodi Dean,
Publicity’s Secret:
How Technoculture
Capitalizes on
Democracy, London,
Cornell University
Press, 2002.

3. Alessandro
Ludovico, Post-Digital
Print: The Mutation
of Publishing Since
1894, Eindhoven,
Onomatopee, 2012.

Jodi Dean (JD) I started my blog, I Cite, in January 2005. It’s on the Typepad
platform. I pay about 20 dollars a year for some extra features.
I first started the blog so that I could ‘talk’ to people in a format that was
not an academic article or an email. Or maybe it’s better to say that I was
looking for a medium in which to write, where what I was writing was not
immediately constrained by the form of an academic piece, written alone,
appearing once and late, if at all, or by the form of an email which is generally
of a message sent to specific people, who may or may not appreciate being
hailed or spammed every time something occurs to me.
There was another reason for starting the blog, though. I had already
begun formulating my critique of communicative capitalism (in the book
Publicity’s Secret and in a couple of articles).2 I was critical of the way that
participatory media entraps people into a media mentality, a 24/7 mindset
of reaching an audience and competing with the mainstream press. I thought
that if my critique is going to be worth anything, I better have more firsthand
experience, from the very belly of the beast.
Alessandro Ludovico (AL) I’m the editor in chief of Neural, a printed and
online magazine established in 1993 in Bari (Italy) dealing with new media
art, electronic music and hacktivism. It’s a publication which beyond being
committed to its topics, always experimented with publishing in various ways.
Furthermore, I’m one of the founders (together with Simon Worthington of
Mute and a few others) of Mag.net, electronic cultural publishers, a network
of magazines related to new media art whose slogan is: ‘collaboration is
better than competition’. Finally, I’m finishing a book called Post-Digital
Print, about the historical and contemporary relationship between offline
and online publishing.3
Sean Dockray (SD) About five years ago, I wrote this description:
AAAARG is a conversation platform - at different times it performs as a school, or
a reading group, or a journal.
AAAARG was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside
of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building,
158

New Formations

imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new
architectures between them.
More straightforwardly, the project is a website where people share texts:
usually PDFs, anything from a couple of inspiring pages to a book or a
collection of essays. The people who use the site tend to be writers, artists,
organizers, activists, curators, architects, librarians, publishers, designers,
philosophers, teachers, or students themselves. Although the texts are most
often in the domain of critical or political theory, there are also technical
documents, legal decisions, works of fiction, government declarations, poetry
collections and so on. There is no moderation.
It’s hard to imagine it now as anything other than it is - which is really
a library, and not a school, a reading group, or a journal! Still, AAAARG
supports quite a few self-organised reading groups, it spawned a sister project
called The Public School, and now produces a small online publication,
‘Contents’. It’s used by many people in many ways, and even when that use is
‘finished,’ the texts remain available on the site for others to use as a shared
resource.
Dmitry Vilensky (DV) The workgroup Chto Delat? (What Is to Be Done?) has
been publishing a newspaper, of the same name, since 2003. The newspaper
was edited by myself and David Riff (2003-2008) in collaboration with the
workgroup Chto Delat?, and since 2008 is mostly edited by me in collaboration
with other members of the group.
The newspaper is bilingual (Russian and English), and appears on
an irregular basis (roughly 4-5 times a year). It varies between 16 and 24
pages (A3). Its editions (1,000-9,000 copies) are distributed for free at
different cultural events, exhibitions, social forums, political gatherings,
and universities, but it has no fixed network of distribution. At the moment,
with an on-line audience much bigger than that for the paper version of the
newspaper, we concentrate more on newspapers as part of the exhibition and
contextualisation of our work - a continuation of art by other means.
Each newspaper addresses a theme or problem central to the search for
new political subjectivities, and their impact on art, activism, philosophy, and
cultural theory. So far, the rubrics and sections of the paper have followed a
free format, depending on theme at hand. There are no exhibition reviews.
The focus is on the local Russian situation, which the newspaper tries to link
to a broader international context. Contributors include artists, art theorists,
philosophers, activists, and writers from Russia, Western Europe and the
United States.
It is also important to focus on the role of publication as translation
device, something that is really important in the Russian situation – to
introduce different voices and languages and also to have a voice in different
international debates from a local perspective.
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 159

Pauline van Mourik Broekman (PvMB) After so many years - we’ve been at it

4. See Pauline van
Mourik Broekman
(2011) ‘Mute’s
100% Cut by
ACE - A Personal
Consideration of
Mute’s Defunding’,
http://www.
metamute.org/en/
mute_100_per_cent_
cut_by_ace

5. Régis Debray,
‘Socialism: A LifeCycle’, New Left
Review 46 (2007):
5-28.

for 17! - I seem to find it harder and harder to figure out what ‘Mute’ is. But
sticking to the basic narrative for the moment, it formed as an artist-initiated
publication engaging with the question of what new technologies (read:
the internet and convergent media) meant for artistic production; asking
whether, or to what degree, the internet’s promise of a radically democratised
space, where a range of gate-keepers might be challenged, would upset the
‘art system’ as was (and sadly, still is). Since that founding moment in 1994,
when Mute appeared appropriating the format of the Financial Times, as
producers we have gradually been forced to engage much more seriously
- and materially - with the realities of Publishing with a capital ‘P’. Having
tried out six different physical formats in an attempt to create a sustainable
niche for Mute’s critical content - which meanwhile moved far beyond its
founding questions - our production apparatus now finds itself strangely
distended across a variety of geographic, institutional, professional and social
spaces, ranging from the German Leuphana University (with whom we have
recently started an intensive collaboration), to a series of active email lists,
to a small office in London’s Soho. It will be interesting to see what effect
this enforced virtualisation, which is predominantly a response to losing our
core funding from Arts Council England, will have on the project overall.4
Our fantastic and long-serving editorial board are thankfully along for the
ride. These are: Josephine Berry Slater, Omar El-Khairy, Matthew Hyland,
Anthony Iles, Demetra Kotouza, Hari Kunzru, Stefan Szczelkun, Mira Mattar
and Benedict Seymour.
WRITING POLITICS
NT Many thanks for your introductory words; I’m very pleased - they set
us off in intriguing and promising directions. I’m struck by the different
capacities and aims that you’ve highlighted in your publishing projects.
Moving now to focus on their specific features and media forms, I’d like us
to consider first the question of political writing, which comes across most
apparently in the descriptions from Jodi and Dmitry of I Cite and Chto
Delat?. This conversation aims to move beyond a narrow focus on textual
communication, and we will do so soon, but writing is clearly a key component
of the materialities of publishing. Political writing published more or less
independently of corporate media institutions has been a central aspect of
the history of radical cultures. Régis Debray recently identified what he calls
the ‘genetic helix’ of socialism as the book, the newspaper, and the school/
party.5 He argues, not uniquely, that in our era of the screen and the image,
this nexus collapses, taking radical politics with it - it’s a gloomy prognosis.
  Jodi and Dmitry, whether or not you have some sympathy for Debray’s
diagnosis, I think it is true to say that political writing still holds for you some
kind of political power, albeit that the conjunction of writing and radicalism
160

New Formations

has become most complicated. Dmitry, you talk of the themes of Chto Delat?
newspapers contributing to a ‘search for new political subjectivities’. Can you
discuss any specific examples of that practice - however tentative or precarious
they may be - from the concrete experience of publishing Chto Delat? Also, I’m
interested in the name of your group, ‘What Is to Be Done?’ What effect does a
name with such strong associations to the Russian revolutionary tradition have
in Russia - or indeed the US and elsewhere - today? I’m reminded of course
that it is in Lenin’s pamphlet of that title that he sets out his understanding
of the party newspaper as ‘collective organiser’ - not only in its distribution
and consumption, but in its production also. How do you relate to that model
of the political press?
  And Jodi, with regard to your comment about I Cite enabling a different
mode of ‘talk’ or ‘writing’ to that of academic writing or email, is there
a political dimension to this? Put another way, you have been exploring
the theme of ‘communism’ in your blog, but does this link up with the
communicative form of blog talk at all - or are blogs always and only in the
‘belly of the beast’?
JD Is there a political dimension to I Cite’s enabling a different mode of
‘talk’ or ‘writing’? This is hard. My first answer is no. That is, the fact of
blogging, that there are blogs and bloggers, is not in itself any more politically
significant than the fact that there is television, radio, film, and newspapers.
But saying this immediately suggests the opposite and I need to answer yes.
Just as with any medium, blogs have political effects. Much of my academic
writing is about the ways that networked communication supports and furthers
communicative capitalism, helping reformat democratic ideals into means for
the intensification of capitalism - and hence inequality. Media democracy, mass
participation in personal media, is the political form of neoliberal capitalism.
Many participate, a few profit thereby. The fact that I talk about communism
on my blog is either politically insignificant or significant in a horrible way.
As with the activity of any one blog or blogger, it exemplifies and furthers
the hold of capitalism as it renders political activity into individual acts of
participation. Politics becomes nothing but the individual’s contribution to
the flow of circulating media.
Well, this is a pretty unpleasant way for me to think about what I do on
I Cite, why I have kept track of the extremes of finance capital for over five
years, why I blog about Žižek’s writing, why I’ve undertaken readings of
Lenin, etc. And lately, since the Egyptian revolution, the mass protests in
Greece and Spain, and the movement around Occupy Wall Street in the
US, I’ve been wondering if I’ve been insufficiently dialectical or have overplayed the negative. What this amazing outpouring of revolutionary energy
has made me see is the collective dimension of blogs and social media. The
co-production of a left communicative common, that stretches across media
and is constituted through photos and videos uploaded from the occupations,
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 161

massive reposting, forwarding, tweeting, and lots of blog commentary, and
that includes mainstream journalistic outlets like the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and
the New York Times, this new left communicative common seems, for now at
any rate, to have an urgency and intensity irreducible to any one of its nodes.
It persists as the flow between them and the way that this flow is creating
something like its own media storm or front (I’m thinking in part here of
some of the cool visualisations of October 15 on Twitter - the modelling of
the number of tweets regarding demonstrations in Rome looks like some kind
of mountain or solar flare). I like thinking of I Cite as one of the thousands
of elements contributing to this left communicative common.
DV When I talk about a ‘search for new political subjectivities’ I mean, first
of all, that we see our main task as an educational process - to research certain
issues and try to open up the process of research to larger audiences who
could start to undertake their own investigations. Formally, we are located
in the art world, but we are trying to escape from the professional art public
and address the issues that we deal with to audiences outside of the art world.
We also have a very clear political identification embodied in the name of
our collective. The question of ‘What is to be done?’ is clearly marked by
the history of leftist struggle and thinking. The name of our group is an
actualisation of the history of the workers’ movement and revolutionary
theory in Russia. The name in itself is a gesture of actualisation of the past. I
was very glad when the last Documenta decided to choose the same title for
their leitmotif on education, so that now a rather broad public would know
that this question comes from a novel written by the Russian nineteenth
century writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and directly refers to the first socialist
workers’ self-organisation cells in Russia, which Lenin later actualised in his
famous 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? Chto Delat? also sees itself as a
self-organizing collective structure that works through reflections on, and
redefinitions of, the political engagement of art in society.
To be engaged means for us that we practice art as a production of
knowledge, as a political and economic issue - and not a solitary contemplation
of the sublime or entertainment for the ruling class. It means to be involved
with all the complexities of contemporary social and political life and make
a claim that we, with all our efforts, are able to influence and change this
condition for the better. Whatever one means by ‘better’, we have an historical
responsibility to make the world more free, human and to fight alienation.
To openly display one’s leftism in the Russian historical moment of 2003
was not only a challenge in the sense of an artistic gesture; it also meant
adopting a dissident civic stance. For my generation, this was a kind of return
to Soviet times, when any honest artist was incapable of having anything to
do with official culture. In the same way, for us the contemporary Russian art
establishment had become a grotesque likeness of late-Soviet official culture,
to which it was necessary to oppose other values. So this was not a particularly
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New Formations

unique experience for us: we simply returned to our dissident youth. Yet at
the same time, in the 2000s, we had more opportunities to realise ourselves,
and we saw ourselves as part of an overall movement. Immediately after us,
other new civic initiatives arose with which it was interesting to cooperate:
among them, the Pyotr Alexeev Resistance Movement (2004), the Institute
for Collective Action (2004), the Vpered Socialist Movement (2005), and the
Russian Social Forum (2005). It was they who became our main reference
group: we still draw our political legitimacy from our relationships with them
and with a number of newer initiatives that have clearly arisen under our
influence.
At the same time, having positioned our project as international, we began
discovering new themes and areas of struggle: the theory of the multitude,
immaterial labour, social forums, the movement of movements, urban
studies, research into everyday life, etc. We also encountered past thinkers
(such as Cornelius Castoriadis and Henri Lefebvre) who were largely absent
from Russian intellectual discourse, as well as newer figures that were much
discussed at that time (such as Negri, Virno, and Rancière). There was a
strong sense of discovery, and this always gives one a particular energy. We
consciously strove to take the position of Russian cultural leftists who were
open-minded and focused on involvement in international cultural activist
networks, and we have been successful in realizing this aim.
MAGAZINE PLATFORM
NT I was a little concerned that starting a conversation about the ‘materialities’
of publishing with a question about writing and text might lead us in the wrong
direction, but as is clear from Jodi’s and Dmitry’s comments, writing is of
course a material practice with its own technological and publishing forms,
cognitive and affective patterns, temporal structures, and subjectifying powers.
With regard to the materialities of digital publishing, your description, Jodi,
of a ‘media storm’ emerging from the Occupy movement is very suggestive
of the way media flows can aggregate into a kind of quasi-autonomous entity,
taking on a life of its own that has agential effects as it draws participants up
into the event. In the past that might have been the function of a manifesto
or slogan, but with social media, as you suggest, the contributing parts to
this agential aggregate become many and various, including particular blogs,
still and moving image files, analytic frameworks, slogans or memes (‘We
are the 99%’), but also more abstract forms such as densities of reposting
and forwarding, and, in that wonderful ‘VersuS’ social media visualisation
you mention, cartographies of data flow. Here a multiplicity of social media
communications, each with their particular communicative function on the
day, are converted into a strange kind of collective, intensive entity, a digital
‘solar flare’ as you put it.6 Its creators, ‘Art is Open Source’, have made
some intriguing comment about how this intensive mapping might be used
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 163

6. Art Is Open
Source, ‘VersuS
- Rome, October
15th, the Riots on
Social Networks’,
http://www.
artisopensource.
net/2011/10/16/
versus-rome-october15th-the-riots-onsocial-networks/

7. See http://
upload.wikimedia.
org/wikipedia/
commons/2/24/
Chartist_
meeting%2C_
Kennington_
Common.jpg

tactically in real time and, subsequently, as a means of rethinking the nature
and representational forms of collective action - it would be interesting in this
regard to compare the representational effects of this Twitter visualisation with
the photograph of the 1848 ‘monster meeting’ of the Chartists in Kennington
Common, said to be the first photograph of a crowd.7
But returning to your own publishing projects, I’m keen to hear more from
Pauline and Sean about the technical and organizational structure of Mute
and AAAAARG. Pauline, as Mute has developed from a printed magazine to
the current ‘distended’ arrangement of different platforms and institutions,
has it been accompanied by changes in the way the editorial group have
characterised or imagined Mute as a project? And can you comment more on
how Mute’s publishing platforms and institutional structures are organised? I
would be interested to hear too if you see Mute as having any kind of agential
effects or quasi-autonomy, along the lines mentioned above - are there ways
in which the magazine itself serves to draw certain relations between people,
things, and events?
PvMB Reading across these questions I would say that, in Mute’s case, a
decisive role has been played by the persistently auto-didactic nature of the
project; also the way we tend to see-saw between extreme stubbornness and
extreme pragmatism. Overall, our desire has been, simply, to produce the
editorial content that feels culturally, socially, politically ‘necessary’ in the
present day (and of course this is historically and even personally contingent;
a fundamentally embodied thing), and to find and develop the forms in
which to do that. These forms range from textual and visual styles and idioms
(artistic, experimental, academic, journalistic), the physical carriers for them,
and then the software systems and infrastructures for which these are also
converted and adapted. It bears re-stating that these need to be ones we are
able to access, work with; and that grant us the largest possible audience for
our work.
If you mix this ‘simple’ premise with the cultural and economic context
in which we found ourselves in the UK, then you have to account for its
interaction with a whole raft of phenomena, ranging from the dot com
boom and yBa cultures of the ’90s; the New Labour era (with its Creative
Industries and Regeneration-centric funding programmes); the increasing
corporatisation of mainstream cultural institutions and media; the explosion
of cheap, digital tools and platforms; the evolution of anti-capitalist struggles
and modes of activism; state incursion into/control over all areas of the
social body; discourses around self-organisation; the financial crisis; and so
on and so forth. In this context, which was one of easy credit and relatively
generous state funding for culture, Mute for a long time did manage to eek
out a place for its activity, adapting its working model and organisational
economy in a spirit of - as I said - radical pragmatism. The complex material
and organisational form that has resulted from this (which, to some people’s
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New Formations

surprise, includes things like consultancy services in ‘digital strategy’ aimed
at the cultural sector, next to broadly leftist cultural critique) may indeed
have some kind of agential power, but it is really very hard to say what it is,
particularly since we resist systematic analysis of, and ‘singularising’ into,
homogenous categories of ‘audience’ or ‘client base’.
Listening to other small, independent publications analyse their
developmental process (like I recently did with, to name one example, the
journal Collapse), I think there are certain processes at play which recur in
many different settings.8 For me the most interesting and important of these
is the way that a journal or magazine can act as a kind of connection engine
with ‘strangers’, due to its function as a space of recognition, affinity, or
attractive otherness (with this I mean that it’s not just about recognising and
being semi-narcissistically drawn to an image of oneself, one’s own subjectivity
and proclivities; but the manner readers are drawn to ‘alien’ ideas that are
nonetheless compelling, troubling, or intriguing - hence drawing them
into the reader - and potentially even contributor - circle of that journal). If
there’s quite an intense editorial process at the ‘centre’ of the journal - like
there is, and has always been, with Mute - then this connection-engine draws
people in, propels people out, in a continual, dynamic process, which, due
to its intensity, very effectively blurs the lines of ‘professionalism’, friendship,
editorial, social, political praxis.
For fear of being too waffley or recherché about this, I’d say this was - if
any - the type of agential power Mute also had, and that this becomes heavily
internationalised by dint of its situation on the Internet. In terms of how
Editors then conjure that, each one would probably do it differently - some
seeing it more like a traditional (print) journal, some getting quite swallowed
up by discourses around openness/distributedness/community-participation.
Aspects of that characterisation have probably also changed over time, in the
sense that, circa 2006/7, we might have held onto a more strictly autonomous
figure for our project, which is something I don’t think even the most hopeful
are able to do now – given our partnerships with an ‘incubator’ project in
a university (Leuphana), or our state funding for a commercially oriented
publishing-technology project (Progressive Publishing System / PPS).9 Having
said all that, the minute any kind of direct or indirect manipulation of
content started to occur, our editors would cease to be interested, so whatever
institutional affiliations we might be open to now that we would not have been
several years ago, it remains a delicate balance.
ARCHIVE SCAFFOLDING
NT Sean, you talk very evocatively of AAAAARG as a generative ‘scaffolding’
between institutions. Can you say more about this? Does this image of
scaffolding relate to discourses of media ‘independence’ or ‘institutional
critique’? And if scaffolding is the more abstract aspect of AAAAARG - its
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 165

8. http://www.
afterall.org/online/
publicationsuniaayp; http://
urbanomic.com/
index.php

9. http://www.
metamute.org/
services/r-d/
progressivepublishing-system

governing image - can you talk concretely about how specific aspects of the
AAAAARG platform function to further (and perhaps also obstruct) the
scaffolding? It would be interesting to hear too if this manner of existence
runs into any difficulties - do some institutions object to having scaffolding
constructed amidst them?
SD The image of scaffolding was simply a way of describing an orientation
with respect to institutions that was neither inside nor outside, dependent
nor independent, reformist or oppositional, etc. At the time, the institutions
I meant were specifically Universities, which seemed to have absorbed theory
into closed seminar rooms, academic formalities, and rarefied publishing
worlds. Especially after the momentum of the anti-globalisation movement
ran into the aftermath of September 11, criticality had more or less retreated,
exhausted within the well-managed circuits of the academy. ‘Scaffolding’ was
meant to allude to both networked communication media and to prefigurative,
improvisational quasi-institutions. It suggested the possibility of the office
worker who shuts her door and climbs out the window.
How did AAAAARG actually function with respect to this image? For
one, it circulated scans of books and essays outside of their normal paths
(trajectories governed by geographic distribution, price, contracts, etc.) so
that they became available for people that previously didn’t have access.
People eventually began to ask others for scans or copies of particular texts,
and when those scans were uploaded they stayed available on the site. When
a reading group uploaded a few texts as a way to distribute them among
members, those texts also stayed available. Everything stayed available. The
concept of ‘Issues’ provided a way for people to make subjective groupings
of texts, from ‘anti-austerity encampment movements’ to ‘DEPOSITORY TO
POST THE WRITTEN WORKS OF AMERICAN SOCIALISM. NO SOCIAL
SCIENCES PLEASE.’ These groupings could be shared so that anyone might
add a text into an Issue, an act of collective bibliography-making. The idea
was that AAAAARG would be an infinite resource, mobilised (and nurtured)
by reading groups, social movements, fringe scholars, temporary projects,
students, and so on.
My history is too general to be accurate and what I’m about to write is too
specific to be true, but I’ll continue anyway: due in part to the seductiveness of
The Coming Insurrection as well as the wave of student occupations beginning in
2009 (many accompanied by emphatic communiqués with a theoretical force
and refusal to make demands) it felt as though a plug had been pulled. Or
maybe that’s just my impression. But the chain of events - from the revolution
in Tunisia to Occupy Everything, but also the ongoing haemorrhaging of
social wealth into the financial industry - has certainly re-oriented political
discourse and one’s sense of what is possible.
As regards your earlier question, I’ve never felt as though AAAARG has had
any agential power because it’s never really been an agent. It didn’t speak or
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New Formations

make demands; it’s usually been more of a site of potential or vision of what’s
coming (for better or worse) than a vehicle for making change. Compared
to publishing bodies, it certainly never produced anything new or original,
rather it actively explored and exploited the affordances of asynchronous,
networked communication. But all of this is rather commonplace for what’s
called ‘piracy,’ isn’t it?
Anyway, yes, some entities did object to the site - AAAARG was ultimately
taken down by the publisher Macmillan over certain texts, including Beyond
Capital.
NT AAAAARG’s name has varied somewhat over time. Can you comment
on this? Does its variability relate at all to the structure and functionality of
the web?
SD When people say or write the name they have done it in all kinds of
different ways, adding (or subtracting) As, Rs, Gs, and sometimes Hs. It’s had
different names over time, usually adding on As as the site has had to keep
moving. Since this perpetual change seems to be part of the nature of the
project, my convention has been to be deliberately inconsistent with the name.
I think one part of what you’re referring to about the web is the way in
which data moves from place to place in two ways - one is that it is copied
between directories or computers; and the other is that the addressing is
changed. Although it seems fairly stable at this point, over time it changes
significantly with things slipping in and out of view. We rely on search engines
and the diligence of website administrators to maintain a semblance of stability
(through 301 redirects, for example) but the reality is quite the opposite. I’m
interested in how things (files or simply concepts) circulate within this system,
making use of both visibility and invisibility. Another related dimension would
be the ease of citation, the ways in which both official (executed internally) and
unofficial (accomplished from the outside) copies of entire sites are produced
and eventually confront one another. I’ve heard of people who have backed
up the entirety of AAAAARG, some of whom even initiate new library projects
(such as Henry Warwick’s Alexandria project). The inevitable consequence
of all of this seems to be that the library manifests itself in new places and in
new ways over time - sometimes with additional As, but not always.
EXPERIMENTING WITH MEDIA FORM
NT The expression ‘independent media’ may still have some tactical use to
characterise a publishing space and practice in distinction from commercial
media, but it’s clear from what Pauline and Sean say here that Mute and
AAAAARG have moved a long way from the analytic frameworks of media
‘independence’ as some kind of autonomous or liberated media space. We
might characterise these projects more as ‘topological’ media forms: neither
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 167

inside nor outside institutions, but emergent from the interaction of diverse
platforms, political conjunctures, contributors, readers, concepts, and
financial or legal structures. Media projects in this image of topology would be
immanent to those diverse material relations, not delimited and autonomous
bodies carved out from them. (Not, of course, that this kind of distributed
and mutable structure in itself guarantees progressive political effects.)
I’d like to continue with this discussion of media form and consider in
more detail some specific instances of experimentation with publishing
practice. It seems to me that it is significant that most of you have a relation
to art practice. The work that Humanities researchers and political activists
generate with poststructuralist or Marxist theory should necessarily be selfcritical of its textual and media form, but it frequently fails to be so. Whereas
reflexive approaches would seem to be less easily avoided in art practice, at
least once it engages with the same body of theory - shoot me down if that’s
naive! In any case, I would venture that experimentation in publishing form
has a central place in the media projects we’re discussing. Alessandro, you
make that point, above, that Neural has ‘always experimented with publishing
in various ways’. Can you describe particular examples? It would be very
interesting to hear from you about Neural in this regard, but also about your
art projects ‘Amazon Noir’ and ‘Face to Facebook’.
AL Neural started surrounded by the thrills of the rising global ‘telematic’
networks in 1993, reflecting an interest in intertwining culture and technology
with publishing (either cyberpunk science fiction, internet artworks, or hacker
technologies and practices) in both print and digital media. So, printing a
magazine about digital art and culture in that historical moment meant to
be surrounded by stimuli that pushed beyond the usual structural design
forms and conceptual paradigms of publishing. After almost two decades we
can recognise also that that time was the beginning of the most important
mutation of publishing, through its new networked, screen-based and real
time dimensions. And the printed page started also to have a different role
in the late 2000s, but this role is still to be extensively defined.
At that time, in the mid-1990s, Neural tried to experiment with publishing
through different perspectives. First, aesthetically: the page numbering was
strictly in binary numbers, just zeros and ones, even if the printer started to
complain that this was driving him crazy. But also sensorially: we referred
to optical art, publishing large ‘optical’ artworks in the centrefold; and we
published ‘stereograms’ apparently rude black and white images, that when
viewed from a different angle revealed a three-dimensional picture, tricking
the readers’ eyes and drawing them into a new visual dimension for a while.
And finally, politically: in issue #18 we published a hacktivist fake, a double
page of fake stickers created by the Italian hacker laboratories’ network.
These fake stickers sarcastically simulated the real ones that are mandatory
on any book or CD/DVD sold in Italy, because of the strict law supporting the
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New Formations

national Authors’ and Musicians’ Society (SIAE). On the ones we published the
‘Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited’ sentence was replaced by: ‘Suggested
Duplication on any Media’.
As another example, in issue #30 we delivered ‘Notepad’ to all our
subscribers - an artwork by the S.W.A.M.P. duo. It was an apparently ordinary
yellow legal pad, but each ruled line, when magnified, reveals itself to be
‘microprinted’ text enumerating the full names, dates, and locations of each
Iraqi civilian death on record over the first three years of the Iraq War. And
in issue #40 we’ve printed and will distribute in the same way a leaflet of
the Newstweek project (a device which hijacks online major news websites,
changing them while you’re accessing internet on a wireless network) that at
first glance seems to be a classic telco corporate leaflet ad. All these examples
try to expand the printed page to an active role that transcends its usual mode
of private reading.
With these and other experiments in publishing, we’ve tried to avoid the
ephemerality that is the norm in ‘augmented’ content, where it exists just for
the spectacular sake of it. Placing a shortcut to a video through a QR code
can be effective if the connection between the printed resource and the online
content is not going to disappear soon, otherwise the printed information
will remain but the augmentation will be lost. And instead of augmenting the
experience in terms of entertainment, I’m much more in favour of triggering
specific actions (like supporting the online processes) and changes (like
taking responsibility for activating new online processes) through the same
smartphone-based technologies.
Another feature of our experimentation concerns the archive. The printing
and distribution of paper content has become an intrinsic and passive form of
archiving, when this content is preserved somewhere by magazine consumers,
in contrast to the potential disposability of online content which can simply
disappear at any minute if the system administrator doesn’t secure enough
copies. This is why I’ve tried to develop both theoretically and practically the
concept of the ‘distributed archive’, a structure where people personally take
the responsibility to preserve and share printed content. There are already
plenty of ‘archipelagos’ of previously submerged archives that would emerge,
if collectively and digitally indexed, and shared with those who need to access
them. I’m trying to apply this to Neural itself in the ‘Neural Archive’ project,
an online database with all the data about the publications received by Neural
during the years, which should be part of a larger network of small institutions,
whose final goal would be to test and then formulate a viable model to easily
build and share these kind of databases.
Turning to my projects outside of Neural, these social and commercial
aspects of the relation between the materiality of the printed page and the
manipulability of its digital embodiment were foregrounded in Amazon Noir,
an artwork which I developed with Paolo Cirio and Ubermorgen.10 This
work explored the boundaries of copyrighting text, examining the intrinsic
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 169

10. http://amazonnoir.com/

technological paradox of protecting a digital text from unauthorised copying,
especially when dealing with the monstrous amount of copyrighted content
buyable from Amazon.com. Amazon features a powerful and attractive
marketing tool called ‘Search Inside the Book’ which allows potential
customers to search the entire text of a book; Amazon Noir merely exploited
this mechanism by stretching it to its own logical conclusion. The software
script we used obtained the entire text and then automatically saved it as a
PDF file: once we had established the first sentence of the text, the software
then used the last words of this sentence as a search term for retrieving the
first words of the next sentence. By reiterating this process (a total of 2,000
to 3,000 queries for an average book) and automatically reconstructing the
fragments, the software ended up collecting the entire text. In order to better
visualise the process, we created an installation: two overhead projectors,
displaying the project’s logo and a diagram of the internal workings of our
software, as well as a medical incubator containing one of the ‘stolen’ (and
digitally reprinted) books. The book we chose to ‘steal’ was (of course) Steal
This Book, the American 1970s counterculture classic by the activist Abbie
Hoffman. In a sense, we literally ‘re-incarnated’ the book in a new, mutated
physical form. But we also put up a warning sign near the incubator:
The book inside the incubator is the physical embodiment of a complex Amazon.com
hacking action. It has been obtained exploiting the Amazon ‘Search Inside The Book’
tool. Take care because it’s an illegitimate and premature son born from the relationship
between Amazon and Copyright. It’s illegitimate because it’s an unauthorized print of a
copyright-protected book. And it’s premature because the gestation of this relationship’s
outcome is far from being mature.
We asked ourselves: what’s the difference between digitally scanning the text
of a book we already own, and obtaining it through Amazon Noir? In strictly
conceptual terms, there is no difference at all, other then the amount of time
we spent on the project. We wished to set up our own Amazon, definitively
circumventing the confusion of endless purchase-inducing stimuli. So we
stole the hidden and disjointed connections between the sentences of a text,
to reveal them for our own amusement and edification; we stole the digital
implementation of synaptic connections between memories (both human and
electronic) created by a giant online retailer in order to amuse and seduce us
into compulsive consumption; we were thieves of memory (in a McLuhanian
sense), stealing for the right to remember, the right to independently and
freely construct our own physical memory.
Finally, in Face to Facebook (developed again with Paolo Cirio and part of
the ‘Hacking Monopolism’ trilogy together with Amazon Noir and Google
Will Eat Itself) we ‘stole’ 1 million Facebook profiles’ public data, filtering
them through their profile pictures with face-recognition software, and then
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New Formations

posted all the filtered data on a custom-made dating website, sorted by their
facial expression characteristics.11 In the installation we produced, we glued
more than 1,700 profile pictures on white-painted square wood panels,
and projected also the software diagram and an introductory video. Here
the ‘printed’ part deals more with materializing ‘stolen’ personal online
information. The ‘profile pictures’ treated as public data by Facebook, and
scraped with a script by Paolo and me, once properly printed are a terrific
proof of our online fragility and at the same time of how ‘printing’ is becoming
a contemporary form of ‘validation’. In fact we decided to print them on the
type of photographic paper once used for passport pictures (the ‘silk’ finish).
The amazing effect of all these faces together was completely different when
visualised in a video (‘overwhelming’ when zooming in and out), printed with
ink-jet printers (‘a huge amount of recognisable faces’), and on its proper
‘validating’ medium, photographic paper (giving the instant impression that
‘all those people are real’). What does it mean when the picture (with your
face) with which you choose to represent yourself in the potential arena of
700 Millions Facebook users is printed, re-contextualised, and exhibited
somewhere else, with absolutely no user control? Probably, it reinforces the
concept that print still has a strong role in giving information a specific status,
because more than five centuries of the social use of print have developed a
powerful instinctive attitude towards it.
POST-DIGITAL PRINT AND THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK
NT What you say here Alessandro about Neural’s concern to ‘expand the
printed page’ is very suggestive of the possibilities of print in new media
environments. Could you comment more on this theme by telling us how
you understand ‘post-digital print’, the topic of your current book project?
AL Post-Digital Print: the Mutation of Publishing since 1894 is the outcome
of quite extensive research that I carried out at the Willem De Kooning
Academy as guest researcher in the Communication Design program run by
Florian Cramer. The concept behind it is to understand both historically and
strategically the new role of print in the 2010s, dealing with the prophets
of its death and its digital competitors, but also its history as something of a
perfect medium, the oldest still in use and the protagonist of countless media
experiments, not to mention its possible evolution and further mutations. The
concept of post-digital print can be better explained through a description of
a few of its chapters. In the first chapter, I analyze ten different moments in
history when the death of paper was announced (before the digital); of course,
it never happened, proving that perhaps even current pronouncements
will prove to be mistaken (by the way, the first one I’ve found dates back to
1894, which explains the subtitle). In the second chapter I’ve tried to track
a history of how avant-garde and underground movements have used print
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 171

11. http://www.faceto-facebook.net/

tactically or strategically, reflecting or anticipating its evolutions. In the third
chapter I go deeper in analyzing the ‘mutation’ of paper in recent years, and
what ‘material paper represents in immaterial times’. And the sixth chapter
addresses the basis on which print can survive as an infrastructure and a
medium for sharing content and experience, and also as a way of generating
collective practice and alliances. Beyond this book, I’m continuing to research
the relationship between print and online in various forms, especially artistic
ones. Personally, I think this relationship will be one of the pivotal media
arenas of change (and so of new potential territories for experimentation
and innovation) in the coming years.

12. Theodor
W. Adorno,
‘Bibliographical
Musings’ in Notes
to Literature Volume
2, Shierry Weber
Nicholsen (trans),
Rolf Tiedemann
(ed), New York,
Columbia University
Press, 1992, p20.
13. Stéphane
Mallarmé, ‘The
Book: A Spiritual
Instrument’,
Bradford Cook
(trans), in Hazard
Adams (ed), Critical
Theory Since Plato,
New York, Harcourt
Brace, 1971, p691.

NT Taking a lead from some of these points, I’d like to turn to the material
forms of the book and the archive. Sensory form has historically played a key
role in constituting the body, experience, and metaphors of the book and the
archive. For both Adorno and Mallarmé, the physical and sensory properties of
the book are key to its promise, which lies to a large degree in its existence as
a kind of ‘monad’. For Adorno, the book is ‘something self-contained, lasting,
hermetic - something that absorbs the reader and closes the lid over him, as it
were, the way the cover of the book closes on the text’.12 And for Mallarmé, ‘The
foldings of a book, in comparison with the large-sized, open newspaper, have
an almost religious significance. But an even greater significance lies in their
thickness when they are piled together; for then they form a tomb in miniature
for our souls’.13 I find these to be very appealing characterisations of the book,
but today they come with a sense of nostalgia, and the strong emphasis they
place on the material form and physical characteristics of the printed book
appears to leave little room for a digital future of this medium. Sean, I want
to ask you two related questions on this theme. What happens to the sensory
properties of paper in AAAAARG - are they lost, reconfigured, replaced with
other sensory experiences? And what happens to the book in AAAAARG, once
it is digitised and becomes less a self-enclosed and autonomous object than, as
you put it, part of an ‘infinite resource’?
SD It is a romantic way of thinking about books - and a way that I also find
appealing - but of course it’s a characterisation that comes after the fact
of the book; it’s a way that Adorno, Mallarmé, and others have described
and generalised their own experiences with these objects. I see no reason
why future readers’ experiences with various forms of digital publishing
won’t cohere into something similar, feelings of attachment, enclosure,
impenetrability, and so on.
AAAARG is stuck in between both worlds. So many of the files on the site
are images of paper (usually taken with a scanner, but occasionally a camera)
packaged in a PDF. You can see it in the underlines, binding gradients,
folds, stains, and tears; and you can often, but not always, see the labour and
technology involved in making the transformation from physical to digital.
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So one’s experience is often to be perhaps more aware of the paper that is
not there. Of course, there are other files which have completely divorced
themselves from any sense of the paper, whether because they are texts that
are native to the digital - or because of a particularly virtuosic scanning job.
There are problems with the nostalgia for books - a nostalgia that I am
most certainly stricken with. We can’t take the book object out of the political
economy of the book, and our attempts to recreate ‘the book’ in the digital will
very likely also import legal and economic structures that ought to be radically
reformulated or overthrown. In this context, as in others, there seem to be
a few ways that this is playing out, simultaneously: one is the replication of
existing territories and power structures by extending them into the digital;
another, in the spirit of the California Ideology, would be that attempt to use
the digital as a leading edge in reshaping the public, of subsuming it into
the market; and a third could be trying to make the best of this situation,
with access to tools and each other, in order to build new structures that are
more connected to those contesting the established and emerging forces of
control.
And what’s more, it seems like the physical book itself is becoming
something else - material is recombined and re-published and re-packaged
from the web, such that we now have many more books being published each
year than ever before - perhaps not as self-enclosed as it was for Adorno. I
don’t want to make equivalences between the digital and physical book - there
are very real physiological and psychical differences between holding ink on
paper versus holding a manufactured hard drive, coursing with radio waves
and emitting some frequency of light - but I think the break is really staggered
and imperfect. We’ll never really lose the book and the digital isn’t confined
to pixels on a screen.
WHATEVER BLOGGING
NT Turning to social media, I want to ask Jodi to comment more on the
technical structures of the blog. In Blog Theory you propose an intriguing
concept of ‘whatever blogging’ to describe the association of blogs with the
decline of symbolic efficiency, as expressions are severed from their content
and converted into quantitative values and graphic representations of
communication flow.14 The more we communicate, it seems, the more what is
communicated tends toward abstraction, and the evacuation of consequence
save for the perpetuation of communication. Can you describe the technical
features and affective qualities of this process, how the field of ‘whatever
blogging’ is constituted? And how might we oppose these tendencies? Can
we reaffirm writing as deliberation and meaning? Are there any ways to make
progressive use of the ‘whatever’ field?
JD The basic features of blogs include posts (which are time-stamped,
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 173

14. Jodi Dean, Blog
Theory: Feedback and
Capture in the Circuits
of Drive, Cambridge,
Polity Press, 2010.

permalinked, and archived), comments, and links. These features aren’t
necessarily separate insofar as posts have permalinks and can themselves
be comments; for example, that a specific blog has disabled its comment
feature doesn’t preclude the possibility of a discussion arising about that blog
elsewhere. Two further features of blogs arise from their settings: hits (that
is, viewers, visitors) and a kind of generic legibility, or, what we might call
the blog form (the standard visual features associated with but not exclusive
to popular platforms like Blogger and Typepad). I bring up the latter point
since so much of online content is now time-stamped, permalinked, and
archived, yet we would not call it a blog (the New York Times website has blogs
but these are sub-features of the site, not the site itself). All these features
enable certain kinds of quantification: bloggers can know how many hits we
get on a given day (even minute by minute), we can track which posts get
the most hits, which sites send us the most visitors, who has linked to us or
re-blogged our content, how popular we are compared to other blogs, etc.
Now, this quantification is interesting because it accentuates the way that,
regardless of its content, any post, comment, or link is a contribution; it is an
addition to a communicative field. Half the visitors to my blog could be rightwing bad guys looking for examples of left-wing lunacy - but each visitor counts
the same. Likewise, quantitatively speaking, there is no difference between
comments that are spam, from trolls, or seriously thoughtful engagements.
Each comment counts the same (as in post A got 25 comments; post B didn’t
get any). Each post counts the same (an assumption repeated in surveys of
bloggers - we are asked how many times we post a day). Most bloggers who
blog for pay are paid on the basis of the two numbers: how many posts and
how many comments per post. Whether the content is inane or profound is
irrelevant.
The standardisation and quantification of blogging induce a kind of
contradictory sensibility in some bloggers. On the one hand, our opinion
counts. We are commenting on matters of significance (at least to someone
- see, look, people are reading what we write! We can prove it; we’ve got the
numbers!). Without this promise or lure of someone, somewhere, hearing
our voice, reading our words, registering that we think, opine, and feel,
there wouldn’t be blogging (or any writing for another). On the other hand,
knowing that our blog is one among hundreds of millions, that we have very
few readers, and we can prove it - look, only 100 hits today and that was to
the kitty picture - provides a cover of anonymity, the feeling that one could
write absolutely anything and it would be okay, that we are free to express
what we want without repercussion. So bloggers (and obviously I don’t have
in mind celebrity bloggers or old-school ‘A-list bloggers’) persist in this
affective interzone of unique importance and liberated anonymity. It’s like
we can expose what we want without having to deal with any consequences
- exposure without exposure. Thus, a few years ago there were all sorts of
stories about people losing their jobs because of what they wrote on their
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New Formations

blogs. Incidentally, the same phenomenon occurs in other social media - the
repercussions of indiscrimination that made their way to Facebook.
The overall field of social media, then, relies on this double sense of
exposing without being exposed, of being unique but indistinguishable. What
registers is the addition to the communicative field, the contribution, not the
content, not the meaning. Word clouds are great examples here - they are
graphic representations of word frequency. They can say how many times a
word is used, but not the context or purpose or intent or connotation of its
use. So a preacher could use the word ‘God’ as many times as the profaner;
the only difference is that the latter also uses the words ‘damn it.’
Can this field where whatever is said counts the same as any other thing
that is said be used progressively? Not really; I mean only in a very limited
way. Sure, there are spam operations and ways to try to manipulate search
engine results. But if you think about it, most critical work relies on a level of
meaning. Satire, irony, comedy, deconstruction, détournement all invoke a
prior meaningful setting into which they intervene. Rather than ‘progressive
use of the whatever field’ I would urge a more direct and decisive assertion of
collective political will, something that cuts through the bland whateverness
without commitments to recognise that this is nothing but the maintenance
of the malleable inhabitants of capitalism when what is really needed is the
discipline of communist collectives.
NEWSPAPER AS PEDAGOGY AND MONUMENT
NT Dmitry, the Chto Delat? group produces work across a range of media film, radio, performance, installation, website, blog - but the media form of
the ‘newspaper’ has an especially significant place for you: Chto Delat? began
its collective work through the production of a newspaper and has continued
to produce newspapers as a key part of its exhibitions and interventions.
Many will argue that the newspaper is now a redundant or ‘retro’ media form,
given the superior distributive and interactive capacities of digital media.
But such assessments fail to appreciate the complex form and functionality
of the newspaper, which is not merely a means of information distribution.
It is noteworthy in this regard that the Occupy movement (which has been a
constant throughout this conversation) has been producing regular printed
newspapers from the precarious sites of occupation, when an exclusive focus
on new media might have been more practical.
So, I would like to ask you some questions about the appeal of the media
form of the newspaper. First, Chto Delat?’s emphasis on self-education is
influenced by Paulo Freire, but on this theme of the newspaper it is the
pedagogical practice of Jean Oury and Félix Guattari that comes to my mind.
For Oury and Guattari (building on work by Célestin Freinet on ‘institutional
pedagogy’) the collectively produced publication works as a therapeutic ‘third
object’, a mediator to draw out, problematise, and transversalise social and
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 175

15. Gary Genosko,
Félix Guattari: A
Critical Introduction,
Cambridge, Pluto
Press, 2009;
Genosko, ‘Busted:
Félix Guattari
and the Grande
Encyclopédie des
Homosexualités’,
Rhizomes 11/12
(2005/6), http://
www.rhizomes.net/
issue11/genosko.
html ; François
Dosse, Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari:
Intersecting Lives, D.
Glassman (trans),
New York, Columbia
University Press,
2010.

16. Christina
Kiaer, Imagine
No Possessions:
The Socialist
Objects of Russian
Constructivism,
London, The
MIT Press, 2005;
Nicholas Thoburn,
‘Communist Objects
and the Values of
Printed Matter’,
Social Text 28, 2
(2010): 1-30.
17. Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari,
What Is Philosophy?
G. Burchell and H.
Tomlinson (trans),
London, Verso,
1994, pp167-8,
pp176-7.

libidinal relations among groups, be they psychiatric associations or political
collectives. Gary Genosko has published some fascinating work on this aspect
of Guattari’s praxis, and it comes across clearly in the Dosse biography of
Deleuze and Guattari.15 With this question of group pedagogy in mind, what is
the role of the newspaper in the self-organisation and self-education practice
of Chto Delat?
DV The interrelations between all forms of our activity is very important, Chto
Delat? is conceived as an integral composition: we do research on a film project
and some materials of this research get published in the newspaper and in
our on-line journal (which is on-line extension of the newspaper); we start to
work on the publication and its outcomes inspire work on a new installation;
we plan an action and build a collaboration with new actors and it triggers a
new publication and so on. But in general, the newspaper is used as a medium
of contextualisation and communication with the broader community, and as
an interventionist pressure on mainstream cultural production.
I did not know about Guattari’s ideas here, but I totally agree. Yes, for us
the newspaper is also a ‘third object’ which carries a therapeutic function when it is printed despite all the impossibilities of making it happen, after all
the struggle around content, finance, and so on, the collective gets a mirror
which confirms its own fragile and crisis-ridden existence.
NT If we turn to the more physical and formal qualities, does the existence of
the newspaper as an ‘object’ have any value or significance to you? Chto Delat?
has made enticing engagements with the Constructivist project - you talk of
‘actualising’ Constructivism in new circumstances. To that end, I wonder if the
newspaper may be a way of actualising the Constructivist theme of the object
as ‘comrade’, as Rodchenko put it, where the revolution is the liberation of the
human and the object, what Arvatov called the ‘intensive expressiveness’ of
matter?16 Another way of thinking this theme of the newspaper as a political
object is through what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘monument’, a compound
of matter and sensation that ‘stands up by itself ’, independent of its creator,
as a product of the event and a projection into the future:
the monument is not something commemorating a past, it is a bloc of
present sensations that owe their preservation only to themselves and that
provide the event with the compound that celebrates it. The monument’s
action is not memory but fabulation … [I]t confides to the ear of the future
the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed
suffering of men and women, their recreated protestations, their constantly
resumed struggle.17
DV Yes, the materiality (the ‘weight’) of newspaper is really important.
You should carry it for distribution, pass it from hand to hand, there is an
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New Formations

important pressure of piles of newspapers stocked in the exhibition halls as takeaway artifacts (really monumental), or used as a wallpaper for installations.
We love these qualities, and the way they organise a routine communication
inside the group: ‘Hi there! Do you have newspapers to distribute at the rally
tomorrow? How many? Should we post a new batch?’ At a more subjective
level, I love to get the freshly printed newspaper in my hands; yes, it is a drug,
particularly in my case, when all the processes of production come through
my hands - first the idea, then editorial communication, lay-out, graphics,
finance, and then print.
PRINT/ONLINE
NT On this theme, I want to ask Pauline if you can comment on the place
of printed paper in the history and future of Mute? I have in mind your
experiments with paper stock, the way paper interfaces with digital publishing
platforms (or fails to), the pleasures, pains, and constraints of producing a
printed product in the digital environment.
PvMB All this talk of newspapers is making me very nostalgic. It was the
first print format that we experimented with, and I agree it’s one of the most
powerful - both in terms of the historical resonances it can provoke, and
in terms of what you can practically do with it (which includes distributing
editorial to many people for quite low costs, being experimental with lay-out,
type, images; and yes, working through this ‘third object’, with all that that
might imply). The Scottish free-circulation newspaper, Variant, is testimony to
this, having hung onto the format much more doggedly than Mute did, and
continuing to go strong, in spite of all the difficult conditions for production
that all of us face.18 There again, where Variant has shown the potential power
and longevity of freely distributed critical content (which they also archive fully
on the web), the rise and rise of free newspapers - wherein editorial functions
as nothing more than a hook for advertising, targeted at different ‘segments’
of the market – shouldn’t be forgotten either, since this might represent the
dominant function this media form presently holds.
I shouldn’t take too much time talking about the specifics here, but the
shelf-display-and-sale model of distribution which Mute chose for its printed
matter - on the eve of the assault this suffered from free online editorial
- landed us in some kind of Catch-22 which, nearly two decades later, we
still can’t quite figure the exit to. Important coordinates here are: the costs
involved in developing high quality editorial (research, commissioning,
layout, proofing, printing; but also the maintenance of an organisation with
- apart from staff - reliable systems for admin, finance, legal, a constitutional
apparatus); the low returns you get on ‘specialist’ editorial via shelf-sales
(particularly if you can’t afford sustained Marketing/Distribution, and the
offline distribution infrastructure itself starts to crumble under the weight of
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 177

18. Since this
conversation took
place, Variant has lost
its Creative Scotland
funding and has
(temporarily, one
hopes) suspended
publication. See
http://www.variant.
org.uk/publication

online behemoths like Amazon); and then finally the lure to publish online,
borne of promises of a global audience and the transcendence of a lot of
those difficulties.
Mute’s original newspaper format constituted an art-like gesture: it
encapsulated many things we wanted to speak about, but in ‘mute’, visual,
encoded form - epitomised by the flesh tones of the FT-style newspaper,
which insisted on the corporeal substrate of the digital revolution, as well as
its intimate relationship to speculation and investment finance (a condition,
we sought to infer, that it shared with all prior communications and
infrastructural revolutions). Thereafter, our experiments with paper were an
engagement with the ‘Catch-22’ described above, whose negative effects we
nevertheless perceived as mere obstacles to be negotiated, as we continued
hopefully, stubbornly, to project a global community of readers we might
connect with and solidarities we might forge - as everyone does, I guess.
We didn’t want to change our editorial to suit the market, so instead focused
on the small degrees of freedom and change afforded to us by its carrier,
i.e. the varying magazine formats at our disposal (quarterly/biannual, small/
large, full colour/mono, lush/ziney). In retrospect, we may have overplayed
the part played by desire in reading and purchasing habits (in the sense that
we thought we could sway potential purchasers to support Mute by plying
them with ever more ‘appealing’ objects). Be that as it may, it did push us
to mine this liminal zone between paper and pixel that Sean evokes so well
- particularly, I’d say, in the late ’90s/early 2000s, when questions over the
relationship between the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ raged to nigh obsessional levels,
and magazines’ visual languages also grappled with their representation, or
integration.
Where we stand now, things are supposed to have stabilised somewhat.
The medial and conceptual hyper experimentation triggered by projected
‘digital futures’ has notionally died down, as mature social media and digital
publishing platforms are incorporated into our everyday lives, and the
behaviours associated with them normalised (the finger flicks associated with
the mobile or tablet touch screen, for example). Somewhere along the line you
asked about ePublishing. Well, things are very much up in the air on this front
currently, as independent publishers test the parameters and possibilities of
ePublishing while struggling to maintain commercial sustainability. Indeed, I
think the independent ePublishing situation, exciting though it undoubtedly
is, actually proves that this whole narrative of normalisation and integration
is a complete fiction; that, if there is any kind of ‘monument’ under collective
construction right now, it is one built under the sign of panic and distraction.
This conversation took place by email over the course of a few months from October
2011. Sponsorship was generously provided by CRESC (Centre for Research on SocioCultural Change), http://www.cresc.ac.uk/

178

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Dekker & Barok
Copying as a Way to Start Something New A Conversation with Dusan Barok about Monoskop
2017


COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
A Conversation with Dusan Barok about Monoskop

Annet Dekker

Dusan Barok is an artist, writer, and cultural activist involved
in critical practice in the fields of software, art, and theory. After founding and organizing the online culture portal
Koridor in Slovakia from 1999–2002, in 2003 he co-founded
the BURUNDI media lab where he organized the Translab
evening series. A year later, the first ideas about building an
online platform for texts and media started to emerge and
Monoskop became a reality. More than a decade later, Barok
is well-known as the main editor of Monoskop. In 2016, he
began a PhD research project at the University of Amsterdam. His project, titled Database for the Documentation of
Contemporary Art, investigates art databases as discursive
platforms that provide context for artworks. In an extended
email exchange, we discuss the possibilities and restraints
of an online ‘archive’.
ANNET DEKKER

You started Monoskop in 2004, already some time ago. What
does the name mean?
DUSAN BAROK

‘Monoskop’ is the Slovak equivalent of the English ‘monoscope’, which means an electric tube used in analogue TV
broadcasting to produce images of test cards, station logotypes, error messages but also for calibrating cameras. Monoscopes were automatized television announcers designed to
speak to both live and machine audiences about the status
of a channel, broadcasting purely phatic messages.
AD
Can you explain why you wanted to do the project and how it
developed to what it is now? In other words, what were your
main aims and have they changed? If so, in which direction
and what caused these changes?
DB

I began Monoskop as one of the strands of the BURUNDI
media lab in Bratislava. Originally, it was designed as a wiki
website for documenting media art and culture in the eastern part of Europe, whose backbone consisted of city entries
composed of links to separate pages about various events,

212

LOST AND LIVING (IN) ARCHIVES

initiatives, and individuals. In the early days it was modelled
on Wikipedia (which had been running for two years when
Monoskop started) and contained biographies and descriptions of events from a kind of neutral point of view. Over
the years, the geographic and thematic boundaries have
gradually expanded to embrace the arts and humanities in
their widest sense, focusing primarily on lesser-known
1
phenomena.1 Perhaps the biggest change is the ongoing
See for example
shift from mapping people, events, and places towards
https://monoskop.org/
Features. Accessed
synthesizing discourses.
28 May 2016.
A turning point occurred during my studies at the
Piet Zwart Institute, in the Networked Media programme
from 2010–2012, which combined art, design, software,
and theory with support in the philosophy of open source
and prototyping. While there, I was researching aspects of
the networked condition and how it transforms knowledge,
sociality and economics: I wrote research papers on leaking
as a technique of knowledge production, a critique of the
social graph, and on the libertarian values embedded in the
design of digital currencies. I was ready for more practice.
When Aymeric Mansoux, one of the tutors, encouraged me
to develop my then side-project Monoskop into a graduation
work, the timing was good.
The website got its own domain, a redesign, and most
crucially, the Monoskop wiki was restructured from its
2
focus on media art and culture towards the much wider
https://monoskop.org/
embrace
of the arts and humanities. It turned to a media
Symposium. Accessed
28 May 2016.
library of sorts. The graduation work also consisted of
a symposium about personal collecting and media ar3
chiving,2 which saw its loose follow-ups on media aeshttps://monoskop.org/
thetics (in Bergen)3 and on knowledge classification and
The_Extensions_of_
Many. Accessed
archives (in Mons)4 last year.
28 May 2016.

AD

https://monoskop.org/
Ideographies_of_
Knowledge. Accessed
28 May 2016.

Did you have a background in library studies, or have
you taken their ideas/methods of systemization and categorization (meta data)? If not, what are your methods
and how did you develop them?

213

COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW

4

been an interesting process, clearly showing the influence
of a changing back-end system. Are you interested in the
idea of sharing and circulating texts as a new way not just
of accessing and distributing but perhaps also of production—and publishing? I’m thinking how Aaaaarg started as
a way to share and exchange ideas about a text. In what
way do you think Monoskop plays (or could play) with these
kinds of mechanisms? Do you think it brings out a new
potential in publishing?

DB

Besides the standard literature in information science (I
have a degree in information technologies), I read some
works of documentation scientists Paul Otlet and Suzanne
Briet, historians such as W. Boyd Rayward and Ronald E.
Day, as well as translated writings of Michel Pêcheux and
other French discourse analysts of the 1960s and 1970s.
This interest was triggered in late 2014 by the confluence
of Femke’s Mondotheque project and an invitation to be an
artist-in-residence in Mons in Belgium at the Mundaneum,
home to Paul Otlet’s recently restored archive.
This led me to identify three tropes of organizing and
navigating written records, which has guided my thinking
about libraries and research ever since: class, reference,
and index. Classification entails tree-like structuring, such
as faceting the meanings of words and expressions, and
developing classification systems for libraries. Referencing
stands for citations, hyperlinking and bibliographies. Indexing ranges from the listing of occurrences of selected terms
to an ‘absolute’ index of all terms, enabling full-text search.
With this in mind, I have done a number of experiments.
There is an index of selected persons and terms from
5
across the Monoskop wiki and Log.5 There is a growing
https://monoskop.org/
list of wiki entries with bibliographies and institutional
Index. Accessed
28 May 2016.
infrastructures of fields and theories in the humanities.6
There is a lexicon aggregating entries from some ten
6
dictionaries of the humanities into a single page with
https://monoskop.org/
hyperlinks to each full entry (unpublished). There is an
Humanities. Accessed
28 May 2016.
alternative interface to the Monoskop Log, in which entries are navigated solely through a tag cloud acting as
a multidimensional filter (unpublished). There is a reader
containing some fifty books whose mutual references are
turned into hyperlinks, and whose main interface consists
of terms specific to each text, generated through tf-idf algorithm (unpublished). And so on.

DB

The publishing market frames the publication as a singular
body of work, autonomous from other titles on offer, and
subjects it to the rules of the market—with a price tag and
copyright notice attached. But for scholars and artists, these
are rarely an issue. Most academic work is subsidized from
public sources in the first place, and many would prefer to
give their work away for free since openness attracts more
citations. Why they opt to submit to the market is for quality
editing and an increase of their own symbolic value in direct
proportion to the ranking of their publishing house. This
is not dissimilar from the music industry. And indeed, for
many the goal is to compose chants that would gain popularity across academia and get their place in the popular
imagination.
On the other hand, besides providing access, digital
libraries are also fit to provide context by treating publications as a corpus of texts that can be accessed through an
unlimited number of interfaces designed with an understanding of the functionality of databases and an openness
to the imagination of the community of users. This can
be done by creating layers of classification, interlinking
bodies of texts through references, creating alternative
indexes of persons, things and terms, making full-text
search possible, making visual search possible—across
the whole of corpus as well as its parts, and so on. Isn’t
this what makes a difference? To be sure, websites such
as Aaaaarg and Monoskop have explored only the tip of

AD

Indeed, looking at the archive in many alternative ways has

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LOST AND LIVING (IN) ARCHIVES

215

COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW

the iceberg of possibilities. There is much more to tinker
and hack around.

within a given text and within a discourse in which it is
embedded. What is specific to digital text, however, is that
we can search it in milliseconds. Full-text search is enabled
by the index—search engines operate thanks to bots that
assign each expression a unique address and store it in a
database. In this respect, the index usually found at the
end of a printed book is something that has been automated
with the arrival of machine search.
In other words, even though knowledge in the age of the
internet is still being shaped by the departmentalization of
academia and its related procedures and rituals of discourse
production, and its modes of expression are centred around
the verbal rhetoric, the flattening effects of the index really
transformed the ways in which we come to ‘know’ things.
To ‘write’ a ‘book’ in this context is to produce a searchable
database instead.

AD

It is interesting that whilst the accessibility and search potential has radically changed, the content, a book or any other
text, is still a particular kind of thing with its own characteristics and forms. Whereas the process of writing texts seems
hard to change, would you be interested in creating more
alliances between texts to bring out new bibliographies? In
this sense, starting to produce new texts, by including other
texts and documents, like emails, visuals, audio, CD-ROMs,
or even un-published texts or manuscripts?
DB

Currently Monoskop is compiling more and more ‘source’
bibliographies, containing digital versions of actual texts
they refer to. This has been very much in focus in the past
two or three years and Monoskop is now home to hundreds
of bibliographies of twentieth-century artists, writers, groups,
and movements as well as of various theories and human7
ities disciplines.7 As the next step I would like to move
See for example
on to enabling full-text search within each such biblioghttps://monoskop.
org/Foucault,
raphy. This will make more apparent that the ‘source’
https://monoskop.
bibliography
is a form of anthology, a corpus of texts
org/Lissitzky,
https://monoskop.
representing a discourse. Another issue is to activate
org/Humanities.
cross-references
within texts—to turn page numbers in
All accessed
28 May 2016.
bibliographic citations inside texts into hyperlinks leading
to other texts.
This is to experiment further with the specificity of digital text. Which is different both to oral speech and printed
books. These can be described as three distinct yet mutually
encapsulated domains. Orality emphasizes the sequence
and narrative of an argument, in which words themselves
are imagined as constituting meaning. Specific to writing,
on the other hand, is referring to the written record; texts
are brought together by way of references, which in turn
create context, also called discourse. Statements are ‘fixed’
to paper and meaning is constituted by their contexts—both

216

LOST AND LIVING (IN) ARCHIVES

AD

So, perhaps we finally have come to ‘the death of the author’,
at least in so far as that automated mechanisms are becoming active agents in the (re)creation process. To return to
Monoskop in its current form, what choices do you make
regarding the content of the repositories, are there things
you don’t want to collect, or wish you could but have not
been able to?
DB

In a sense, I turned to a wiki and started Monoskop as
a way to keep track of my reading and browsing. It is a
by-product of a succession of my interests, obsessions, and
digressions. That it is publicly accessible is a consequence
of the fact that paper notebooks, text files kept offline and
private wikis proved to be inadequate at the moment when I
needed to quickly find notes from reading some text earlier.
It is not perfect, but it solved the issue of immediate access
and retrieval. Plus there is a bonus of having the body of
my past ten or twelve years of reading mutually interlinked
and searchable. An interesting outcome is that these ‘notes’
are public—one is motivated to formulate and frame them

217

COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW

as to be readable and useful for others as well. A similar
difference is between writing an entry in a personal diary
and writing a blog post. That is also why the autonomy
of technical infrastructure is so important here. Posting
research notes on Facebook may increase one’s visibility
among peers, but the ‘terms of service’ say explicitly that
anything can be deleted by administrators at any time,
without any reason. I ‘collect’ things that I wish to be able
to return to, to remember, or to recollect easily.
AD

Can you describe the process, how do you get the books,
already digitized, or do you do a lot yourself? In other words,
could you describe the (technical) process and organizational aspects of the project?
DB

In the beginning, I spent a lot of time exploring other digital
libraries which served as sources for most of the entries on
Log (Gigapedia, Libgen, Aaaaarg, Bibliotik, Scribd, Issuu,
Karagarga, Google filetype:pdf). Later I started corresponding with a number of people from around the world (NYC,
Rotterdam, Buenos Aires, Boulder, Berlin, Ploiesti, etc.) who
contribute scans and links to scans on an irregular basis.
Out-of-print and open-access titles often come directly from
authors and publishers. Many artists’ books and magazines
were scraped or downloaded through URL manipulation
from online collections of museums, archives and libraries.
Needless to say, my offline archive is much bigger than
what is on Monoskop. I tend to put online the files I prefer
not to lose. The web is the best backup solution I have
found so far.
The Monoskop wiki is open for everyone to edit; any user
can upload their own works or scans and many do. Many of
those who spent more time working on the website ended up
being my friends. And many of my friends ended up having
an account as well :). For everyone else, there is no record
kept about what one downloaded, what one read and for
how long... we don’t care, we don’t track.

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AD

In what way has the larger (free) publishing context changed
your project, there are currently several free texts sharing
initiatives around (some already before you started like Textz.
com or Aaaaarg), how do you collaborate, or distinguish
from each other?
DB

It should not be an overstatement to say that while in the
previous decade Monoskop was shaped primarily by the
‘media culture’ milieu which it intended to document, the
branching out of its repository of highlighted publications
Monoskop Log in 2009, and the broadening of its focus to
also include the whole of the twentieth and twenty-first
century situates it more firmly in the context of online
archives, and especially digital libraries.
I only got to know others in this milieu later. I approached
Sean Dockray in 2010, Marcell Mars approached me the
following year, and then in 2013 he introduced me to Kenneth Goldsmith. We are in steady contact, especially through
public events hosted by various cultural centres and galleries.
The first large one was held at Ljubljana’s hackerspace Kiberpipa in 2012. Later came the conferences and workshops
organized by Kuda at a youth centre in Novi Sad (2013), by
the Institute of Network Cultures at WORM, Rotterdam (2014),
WKV and Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2014),
Mama & Nova Gallery in Zagreb (2015), ECC at Mundaneum,
Mons (2015), and most recently by the Media Department
8
of the University of Malmo (2016).8
For more information see,
The leitmotif of all these events was the digital library
https://monoskop.org/
Digital_libraries#
and their atmosphere can be described as the spirit of
Workshops_and_
early
hacker culture that eventually left the walls of a
conferences.
Accessed 28 May 2016.
computer lab. Only rarely there have been professional
librarians, archivists, and publishers among the speakers, even though the voices represented were quite diverse.
To name just the more frequent participants... Marcell
and Tom Medak (Memory of the World) advocate universal
access to knowledge informed by the positions of the Yugoslav

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COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW

Marxist school Praxis; Sean’s work is critical of the militarization and commercialization of the university (in the
context of which Aaaaarg will always come as secondary, as
an extension of The Public School in Los Angeles); Kenneth
aims to revive the literary avant-garde while standing on the
shoulders of his heroes documented on UbuWeb; Sebastian
Lütgert and Jan Berger are the most serious software developers among us, while their projects such as Textz.com and
Pad.ma should be read against critical theory and Situationist cinema; Femke Snelting has initiated the collaborative
research-publication Mondotheque about the legacy of the
early twentieth century Brussels-born information scientist
Paul Otlet, triggered by the attempt of Google to rebrand him
as the father of the internet.
I have been trying to identify implications of the digital-networked textuality for knowledge production, including humanities research, while speaking from the position
of a cultural worker who spent his formative years in the
former Eastern Bloc, experiencing freedom as that of unprecedented access to information via the internet following
the fall of Berlin Wall. In this respect, Monoskop is a way
to bring into ‘archival consciousness’ what the East had
missed out during the Cold War. And also more generally,
what the non-West had missed out in the polarized world,
and vice versa, what was invisible in the formal Western
cultural canons.
There have been several attempts to develop new projects,
and the collaborative efforts have materialized in shared
infrastructure and introductions of new features in respective platforms, such as PDF reader and full-text search on
Aaaaarg. Marcell and Tom along with their collaborators have
been steadily developing the Memory of the World library and
Sebastian resuscitated Textz.com. Besides that, there are
overlaps in titles hosted in each library, and Monoskop bibliographies extensively link to scans on Libgen and Aaaaarg,
while artists’ profiles on the website link to audio and video
recordings on UbuWeb.

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AD

It is interesting to hear that there weren’t any archivist or
professional librarians involved (yet), what is your position
towards these professional and institutional entities and
persons?
DB

As the recent example of Sci-Hub showed, in the age of
digital networks, for many researchers libraries are primarily free proxies to corporate repositories of academic
9
journals.9 Their other emerging role is that of a digital
For more information see,
repository of works in the public domain (the role piowww.sciencemag.org/
news/2016/04/whosneered in the United States by Project Gutenberg and
downloading-piratedInternet Archive). There have been too many attempts
papers-everyone.
Accessed 28 May 2016.
to transpose librarians’ techniques from the paperbound
world into the digital domain. Yet, as I said before, there
is much more to explore. Perhaps the most exciting inventive approaches can be found in the field of classics, for
example in the Perseus Digital Library & Catalog and the
Homer Multitext Project. Perseus combines digital editions
of ancient literary works with multiple lexical tools in a way
that even a non-professional can check and verify a disputable translation of a quote. Something that is hard to
imagine being possible in print.
AD

I think it is interesting to see how Monoskop and other
repositories like it have gained different constituencies
globally, for one you can see the kind of shift in the texts
being put up. From the start you tried to bring in a strong
‘eastern European voice’, nevertheless at the moment the
content of the repository reflects a very western perspective on critical theory, what are your future goals. And do
you think it would be possible to include other voices? For
example, have you ever considered the possibility of users
uploading and editing texts themselves?
DB

The site certainly started with the primary focus on east-central European media art and culture, which I considered

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COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW

myself to be part of in the early 2000s. I was naive enough
to attempt to make a book on the theme between 2008–2010.
During that period I came to notice the ambivalence of the
notion of medium in an art-historical and technological
sense (thanks to Florian Cramer). My understanding of
media art was that it is an art specific to its medium, very
much in Greenbergian terms, extended to the more recent
‘developments’, which were supposed to range from neo-geometrical painting through video art to net art.
At the same time, I implicitly understood art in the sense
of ‘expanded arts’, as employed by the Fluxus in the early
1960s—objects as well as events that go beyond the (academic) separation between the arts to include music, film,
poetry, dance, design, publishing, etc., which in turn made
me also consider such phenomena as experimental film,
electro-acoustic music and concrete poetry.
Add to it the geopolitically unstable notion of East-Central
Europe and the striking lack of research in this area and
all you end up with is a headache. It took me a while to
realize that there’s no point even attempting to write a coherent narrative of the history of media-specific expanded
arts of East-Central Europe of the past hundred years. I
ended up with a wiki page outlining the supposed mile10
stones along with a bibliography.10
https://monoskop.
For this strand, the wiki served as the main notebook,
org/CEE. Accessed
28 May 2016. And
leaving behind hundreds of wiki entries. The Log was
https://monoskop.
more or less a ‘log’ of my research path and the presence
org/Central_and_
Eastern_Europe_
of ‘western’ theory is to a certain extent a by-product of
Bibliography.
my search for a methodology and theoretical references.
Accessed 28 May 2016.
As an indirect outcome, a new wiki section was
launched recently. Instead of writing a history of mediaspecific ‘expanded arts’ in one corner of the world, it takes
a somewhat different approach. Not a sequential text, not
even an anthology, it is an online single-page annotated
index, a ‘meta-encyclopaedia’ of art movements and styles,
intended to offer an expansion of the art-historical canonical
prioritization of the western painterly-sculptural tradition

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11

https://monoskop.
org/Art. Accessed
28 May 2016.

to also include other artists and movements around the
world.11
AD

Can you say something about the longevity of the project?
You briefly mentioned before that the web was your best
backup solution. Yet, it is of course known that websites
and databases require a lot of maintenance, so what will
happen to the type of files that you offer? More and more
voices are saying that, for example, the PDF format is all
but stable. How do you deal with such challenges?
DB

Surely, in the realm of bits, nothing is designed to last
forever. Uncritical adoption of Flash had turned out to be
perhaps the worst tragedy so far. But while there certainly
were more sane alternatives if one was OK with renouncing its emblematic visual effects and aesthetics that went
with it, with PDF it is harder. There are EPUBs, but scholarly publications are simply unthinkable without page
numbers that are not supported in this format. Another
challenge the EPUB faces is from artists' books and other
design- and layout-conscious publications—its simplified
HTML format does not match the range of possibilities for
typography and layout one is used to from designing for
paper. Another open-source solution, PNG tarballs, is not
a viable alternative for sharing books.
The main schism between PDF and HTML is that one represents the domain of print (easily portable, and with fixed
page size), while the other the domain of web (embedded
within it by hyperlinks pointing both directions, and with
flexible page size). EPUB is developed with the intention of
synthetizing both of them into a single format, but instead
it reduces them into a third container, which is doomed to
reinvent the whole thing once again.
It is unlikely that there will appear an ultimate convertor
between PDF and HTML, simply because of the specificities
of print and the web and the fact that they overlap only in
some respects. Monoskop tends to provide HTML formats

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COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW

next to PDFs where time allows. And if the PDF were to
suddenly be doomed, there would be a big conversion party.
On the side of audio and video, most media files on
Monoskop are in open formats—OGG and WEBM. There
are many other challenges: keeping up-to-date with PHP
and MySQL development, with the MediaWiki software
and its numerous extensions, and the mysterious ICANN
organization that controls the web domain.

as an imperative to us to embrace redundancy, to promote
spreading their contents across as many nodes and sites
as anyone wishes. We may look at copying not as merely
mirroring or making backups, but opening up for possibilities to start new libraries, new platforms, new databases.
That is how these came about as well. Let there be Zzzzzrgs,
Ůbuwebs and Multiskops.

AD

What were your biggest challenges beside technical ones?
For example, have you ever been in trouble regarding copyright issues, or if not, how would you deal with such a
situation?
DB

Monoskop operates on the assumption of making transformative use of the collected material. The fact of bringing
it into certain new contexts, in which it can be accessed,
viewed and interpreted, adds something that bookstores
don’t provide. Time will show whether this can be understood as fair use. It is an opt-out model and it proves to
be working well so far. Takedowns are rare, and if they are
legitimate, we comply.
AD

Perhaps related to this question, what is your experience
with users engagement? I remember Sean (from Aaaaarg,
in conversation with Matthew Fuller, Mute 2011) saying
that some people mirror or download the whole site, not
so much in an attempt to ‘have everything’ but as a way
to make sure that the content remains accessible. It is a
conscious decision because one knows that one day everything might be taken down. This is of course particularly
pertinent, especially since while we’re doing this interview
Sean and Marcell are being sued by a Canadian publisher.
DB

That is absolutely true and any of these websites can disappear any time. Archives like Aaaaarg, Monoskop or UbuWeb
are created by makers rather than guardians and it comes

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225

COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW

Bibliography
Fuller, Matthew. ‘In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with
Sean Dockray’. Mute, 4 May 2011. www.metamute.org/editorial/

articles/paradise-too-many-books-interview-seandockray. Accessed 31 May 2016.
Online digital libraries
Aaaaarg, http://aaaaarg.fail.
Bibliotik, https://bibliotik.me.
Issuu, https://issuu.com.
Karagarga, https://karagarga.in.
Library Genesis / LibGen, http://gen.lib.rus.ec.
Memory of the World, https://library.memoryoftheworld.org.
Monoskop, https://monoskop.org.
Pad.ma, https://pad.ma.
Scribd, https://scribd.com.
Textz.com, https://textz.com.
UbuWeb, www.ubu.com.

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COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW

Dockray
The Scan and the Export
2010


the image, corrects the contrast, crops out the use­
less bits, sharpens the text, and occasionally even
attempts to read it. All of this computation wants
to repress any traces of reading and scanning, with
the obvious goal of returning to the pure book, or
an even more Platonic form.
That purified, originary version of the text
might be the e-book. Publishers are occasionally
skipping the act of printing altogether and selling
the files themselves, such that the words reserved
for “
well-scanned”books ultimately describe ebooks: clean, searchable, small (i.e., file size). Al­
though it is perfectly understandable for a reader
to prefer aligned text without smudges or other
markings where “
paper”is nothing but a pure,
bright white, this movement towards the clean has
its consequences. Distinguished as a form by the
fact that it is produced, distributed, and consumed
digitally, the e-book never leaves the factory.
A minimal gap is, however, created between
the file that the producer uses and the one that
the consumer uses— imagine the cultural chaos
if the typical way of distributing books were as
Word documents!— through the process of export­
ing. Whereas scanning is a complex process and
material transformation (which includes exporting
at the very end), exporting is merely converting
formats. But however minor an act, this conver­
sion is what puts a halt to the writing and turns
the file into a product for reading. It is also at this
stage that forms of “
digital rights management”ate
applied in order to restrict copying and printing of
the file.
Sharing and copying texts is as old as books
themselves— actually, one could argue that this is
almost a definition of the book— but computers
and the Internet have only accelerated this
activ­ity. From transcription to tracing to photocopying
to scanning, the labour and material costs involved
in producing a copy has fallen to nothing in our
present digital file situation. Once the scan has
generated a digitized version of some kind, say a
PDF, it easily replicates and circulates. This is not
aberrant behaviour, either, but normative comput­
er use: copy and paste are two of the first choices
in any contextual menu. Personal file storage has
slowly been migrating onto computer networks,
particularly with the growth of mobile devices, so

Sean Dockray

The Scan and the Export
The scan is an ambivalent image. It oscillates
back and forth: between a physical page and a
digital file, between one reader and another, be­
tween an economy of objects and an economy of
data. Scans are failures in terms of quality, neither
as “
readable”as the original book nor the inevi­
table ebook, always containing too much visual
information or too little.
Technically speaking, it is by scanning that
one can make a digital representation of a physical
object, such as a book. When a representation of
that representation (the image) appears on a digital
display device, it hovers like a ghost, one world
haunting another. But it is not simply the object
asserting itself in the milieu of light, informa­
tion, and electricity. Much more is encoded in
the image: indexes of past readings and the act of
scanning itself.
An incomplete inventory of modifications to
the book through reading and other typical events
in the life of the thing: folded pages, underlines,
marginal notes, erasures, personal symbolic sys­
tems, coffee spills, signatures, stamps, tears, etc.
Intimacy between reader and text marking the
pages, suggesting some distant future palimpsest in
which the original text has finally given way to a
mass of negligible marks.
Whereas the effects of reading are cumulative,
the scan is a singular event. Pages are spread and
pressed flat against a sheet of glass. The binding
stretches, occasionally to the point of breaking.
A camera driven by a geared down motor slides
slowly down the surface of the page. Slight move­
ment by the person scanning (who is also a scan­
ner; this is a man-machine performance) before
the scan is complete produces a slight motion blur,
the type goes askew, maybe a finger enters the
frame of the image. The glass is rarely covered in
its entirety by the book and these windows into
the actual room where the scanning is done are
ultimately rendered as solid, censored black. After
the physical scanning process comes post-produc­
tion. Software— automated or not— straightens

99

one's files are not always located on one's
equip­ment. The act of storing and retrieving shuffles
data across machines and state lines.
A public space is produced when something
is shared— which is to say, made public — but this
space is not the same everywhere or in all
circum­stances. When music is played for a room full of
people, or rather when all those people are simply
sharing the room, something is being made public.
Capitalism itself is a massive mechanism for
making things public, for appropriating materials,
people, and knowledge and subjecting them to its
logic. On the other hand, a circulating library, or a
library with a reading room, creates a public space
around the availability of books and other forms of
material knowledge. And even books being sold
through shops create a particular kind of public,
which is quite different from the public that is
formed by bootlegging those same books.
ft would appear that publicness is not simply a
question of state control or the absence of money.
Those categorical definitions offer very little to
help think about digital files and their native
tendency to replicate and travel across networks.
What kinds of public spaces are these, coming into
the foreground by an incessant circulation of data?
Tw o paradigmatic forms of publicness can be
described through the lens of the scan and the
export, two methods for producing a digital text.
Although neither method necessarily results in a
file that must be distributed, such files typically
are. In the case of the export, the system of
distribution tends to be through official, secure
digital repositories; limited previews provide a
small window into the content, which is ultimately
accessible only through the interface of the
shopping cart. On the other hand, the scan is
created by and moves between individuals, often
via improvised and itinerant distribution systems.
The scan travels from person to person, like a
virus. As long as it passes between people, that
common space between them stays alive. That
space might be contagious; it might break out into
something quite persuasive, an intimate publicness
becoming more common.
The scan is an image of a thing and is therefore
different from the thing (it is digital, not physical,
and it includes indexes of reading and scanning),

whereas a copy of the export is essentially identi­cal
to the export. Here is one reason there will ex­ist
many variations of a scan for a particular text,
while there will be one approved version (always a
clean one) of the export. A person may hold in his
or her possession a scan of a book but, no matter
what publishers may claim, the scan will never be
the book. Even if one was to inspect two files and
find them to be identical in every observable and
measurable quality, it may be revealed that these
are in fact different after all: one is a legitimate
copy and the other is not. Legitimacy in this case
has nothing whatsoever to do with internal traits,
such as fidelity to the original, but with external
ones, namely, records of economic transactions in
customer databases.
In practical terms, this means that a digital
book must be purchased by every single reader.
Unlike the book, which is commonly purchased,
read, then handed it off to a friend (who then
shares it with another friend and so on until it
comes to rest on someone’
s bookshelf) the digital
book is not transferable, by design and by law.
If ownership is fundamentally the capacity to give
something away, these books are never truly ours.
The intimate, transient publics that emerge out
of passing a book around are here eclipsed by a
singular, more inclusive public in which everyone
relates to his or her individual (identical) file.
Recently, with the popularization of digital
book readers (a device for another man-machine
pairing), the picture of this kind of publicness has
come into greater definition. Although a group of
people might all possess the same file, they will be
viewing that file through their particular readers,
which means surprisingly that they might all be
seeing something different. With variations built
into the device (in resolution, size, colour, display
technology) or afforded to the user (perhaps to
change font size or other flexible design ele­
ments), familiar forms of orientation within the
writing disappear as it loses the historical struc­
ture of the book and becomes pure, continuous
text. For example, page numbers give way to the
more abstract concept of a "location" when the
file is derived from the export as opposed to the
scan, from the text data as opposed to the
physi­cal object. The act of reading in a group is also

100

different ways. An analogy: they are not prints
from the same negative, but entirely different
photographs of the same subject. Our scans are
variations, perhaps competing (if we scanned the
same pages from the same edition), but, more
likely, functioning in parallel.
Gompletists prefer the export, which has a
number of advantages from their perspective:
the whole book is usually kept intact as one unit,
the file; file sizes are smaller because the files are
based more on the text than an image; the file is
found by searching (the Internet) as opposed to
searching through stacks, bookstores, and attics; it
is at least theoretically possible to have every file.
Each file is complete and the same everywhere,
such that there should be no need for variations.
At present, there are important examples of where
variations do occur, notably efforts to improve
metadata, transcode out of proprietary formats,
and to strip DRM restrictions. One imagines an
imminent future where variations proliferate based
on an additive reading— a reader makes highlights,
notations, and marginal arguments and then
re­distributes the file such that someone's
"reading" of a particular text would generate its own public,
the logic of the scan infiltrating the export.

different — "Turn to page 24" is followed by the
sound of a race of collective page flipping, while
"Go to location 2136" leads to finger taps and
caresses on plastic. Factions based on who has the
same edition of a book are now replaced by those
with people who have the same reading device.
If historical structures within the book are
made abstract then so are those organizing
struc­tures outside of the book. In other words, it's not
simply that the book has become the digital book
reader, but that the reader now contains the
li­brary itself! Public libraries are on the brink of be­
ing outmoded; books are either not being acquired
or they are moving into deep storage; and physical
spaces are being reclaimed as cafes, restaurants,
auditoriums, and gift shops. Even the concept
of donation is thrown into question: when most
public libraries were being initiated a century ago,
it was often women's clubs that donated their
col­lections to establish the institution; it is difficult to
imagine a corresponding form of cultural sharing
of texts within the legal framework of the export.
Instead, publishers might enter into a contract
directly with the government to allow access to
files from computers within the premises of the
library building. This fate seems counter-intuitive,
considering the potential for distribution latent
in the underlying technology, but even more so
when compared to the "traveling libraries" at the
turn of the twentieth century, which were literally
small boxes that brought books to places without
libraries (most often, rural communities).
Many scans, in fact, are made from library
books, which are identified through a stamp or a
sticker somewhere. (It is not difficult to see how
the scan is closely related to the photocopy, such
that they are now mutually evolving technolo­
gies.) Although it circulates digitally, like the
export, the scan is rooted in the object and is
never complete. In a basic sense, scanning is slow
and time-consuming (photocopies were slow and
expensive), and it requires that choices are made
about what to focus on. A scan of an entire book
is rare— really a labour of love and endurance;
instead, scanners excerpt from books, pulling out
the most interesting, compelling, difficult-to-find,
or useful bits. They skip pages. The scan is partial,
subjective. You and I will scan the same book in

About the Author

Sean Dockray is a Los Angeles-based artist. He is a
co­-director of Telic Arts Exchange and has initiated several
collaborative projects including AAAARG.ORG and The
Public School. He recently co-organized There is
noth­ing less passive than the act of fleeing, a 13-day seminar at
various sites in Berlin organized through The Public School
that discussed the promises, pitfalls, and possibilities for
extra-institutionality.

101

t often the starting-point is an idea composed of
a group of centrally aroused sensations due to simultaneous
excitation of a group
This would probably
in every case he in large part the result of association by
contiguity in terms of the older classification, although
there might be some part played by the immediate
excita­tion of the separatefP pby an external stimulus. Starting
from this given mass of central elements, all change comes
from the fact that some of the elements disappear and are
replaced by others through a second series of associations
by contiguity. The parts of the original idea which remain
serve as the excitants for the new elements which arise.
The nature of the process is exactly like that by which
the elements of the first idea were excited, and no new
process comes in. These successive associations are thus
really in their mechanism but a series of simultaneous
associations in which the elements that make up the different
ideas are constantly changing, but with some elements
that persist from idea to idea. There is thus a constant
flux of the ideas, but there is always a part of each idea
that persists over into the next and serves to start the
mechanism of revival There is never an entire stoppage
in the course of the ideas, never an absolute break in the
series, but the second idea is joined to the one that precedes
by an identical element in each.

124

A short time later, this control of urban noise had been implemented almost
everywhere, or at least in the politically best-controlled cities, where repetition
is most advanced.
We see noise reappear, however, in exemplary fashion at certain ritualized
moments: in these instances, the horn emerges as a derivative form of violence
masked by festival. All we have to do is observe how noise proliferates in echo
at such times to get a hint of what the epidemic proliferation of the essential
vio­lence can be like. The noise of car horns on New Year's Eve is, to my mind,
for the drivers an unconscious substitute for Carnival, itself a substitute for the
Dionysian festival preceding the sacrifice. A rare moment, when the hierarchies
are masked behind the windshields and a harmless civil war temporarily breaks
out throughout the city.
Temporarily. For silence and the centralized monopoly on the emission,
audition and surveillance of noise are afterward reimposed. This is an essential
control, because if effective it represses the emergence of a new order and a
challenge to repetition.

103

Thus, with the ball, we are all possible victims; we all expose our­
selves to this danger and we escape back and forth of "I."
The "I" in the game is a token exchanged. And
this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects weave
the collection. I am I now, a subject, that is to say, exposed to being
thrown down, exposed to falling, to being placed beneath the compact
mass of the others; then you take the relay, you are substituted for "I"
and become it; later on, it is he who gives it to you, his work done, his
danger finished, his part of the collective constructed. The "we" is made
by the bursts and occultations of the "I." The "we" is made by passing
the "I." By exchanging the "I." And by substitution and vicariance of
the "I."
That immediately appears easy to think about. Everyone carries
his stone, and the wall is built. Everyone carries his "I," and the "we" is
built. This addition is idiotic and resembles a political speech. No.

104

But then let them say it clearly:

The practice of happiness is subversive when it becom es collective.
Our will tor happiness and liberation is their terror, and they react by terrorizing
us with prison, when the repression of work, of the patriarchal family, and of sex­
ism is not enough.

But then let them say it clearly:

To conspire means to breathe together.

And that is what we are accused of, they want to prevent us from breathing
because we have refused to breathe In Isolation, in their asphyxiating places of
work, in their individuating familial relationships, in their atomizing houses.

There is a crime I confess I have committed:

It is the attack against the separation of life and desire, against sexism in Interindividual relationships, against the reduction of life to the payment of a salary.

105

Counterpublics

The stronger modification of ... analysis — one in which
he has shown little interest, though it is clearly of major
signifi­cance in the critical analysis of gender and sexuality — is that some
publics are defined by their tension with a larger public. Their
par­ticipants are marked off from persons or citizens in general.
Dis­cussion within such a public is understood to contravene the rules
obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dis­
positions or protocols, making different assumptions about what
can be said or what goes without saying. This kind of public is, in
effect, a counterpublic: it maintains at some level, conscious or
not, an awareness of its subordinate status. The sexual cultures of
gay men or of lesbians would be one kind of example, but so would
camp discourse or the media of women's culture. A counterpublic
in this sense is usually related to a subculture, but there are
impor­tant differences between these concepts. A counterpublic, against
the background of the public sphere, enables a horizon of opinion
and exchange] its exchanges remain distinct from authority and
can have a critical relation to power; its extent is in principle
indef­inite, because it is not based on a precise demography but
medi­ated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and ...

106

The term slang, which is less broad than language variety is described
by ... as a label that is frequently used to denote
certain informal or faddish usages of nearly anyone in the speech commu­nity.
However, slang, while subject to rapid change, is widespread and
familiar to a large number of speakers, unlike Polari. The terms jargon
and argot perhaps signify more what Polari stands for. as they are asso­
ciated with group membership and are used to serve as affirmation or
solidarity with other members. Both terms refer to "obscure or secret
language’or language of a particular occupational group ...
While jargon tends to refer to an occupational sociolect,
or a vocabulary particular to a field, argot is more concerned with language
varieties where speakers wish to conceal either themselves or aspects of
their communication from non-members. Although argot is perhaps the
most useful term considered so far in relation to Polari. there exists a
more developed theory that concentrates on stigmatised groups, and could
have been created with Polari specifically in mind: anti-language.
For ..., anti-language was to anti-society what language
was to society. An anti-society is a counter-culture, a society within a
society, a conscious alternative to society, existing by resisting either
pas-sively or by more hostile, destructive means. Anti-languages are
gen­erated by anti-societies and in their simplest forms arc partially relexicalised
languages, consisting of the same grammar but a different vocabulary
... in areas central to the activities ot subcultures.
Therefore a subculture based around illegal drug use would have words tor
drugs, the psychological effects of drugs, the police, money and so on. In
anti-languages the social values of words and phrases tend to be more
emphasised than in mainstream languages.

... found that 41 per cent of the criminals he
interviewed cave "the need for secrecy" as an important reason lor using
an anti-language, while 38 per cent listed 'verbal art'. However ...
in his account of the anti-language or grypserka of Polish
pris­oners. describes how, for the prisoners, their identity was threatened and
the creation of an anti-society provided a means by wtnclt an alternative
social structure (or reality) could be constructed, becoming the source of
a second identity tor the prisoners.

107

Streetwalker theorists cul­tivate the ability to sustain and create hangouts by hanging
out. Hangouts are highly fluid, worldly, nonsanctioned,
communicative, occupations of space, contestatory retreats for the
passing on of knowledge, for the tactical-strategic fashioning
of multivocal sense, of enigm atic vocabularies and gestures,
for the development of keen commentaries on structural
pres­sures and gaps, spaces of complex and open-ended recognition.
Hangouts are spaces that cannot be kept captive by the
private / public split. They are worldly, contestatory concrete
spaces within geographies sieged by and in defiance of logics
and structures of domination.20 The streetwalker theorist
walks in illegitim ate refusal to legitimate oppressive
arrange­ments and logics.

Common

108

As we apprehend it, the process of instituting com ­
munism can only take the form of a collection of
acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such
space, such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge.
That is to say, the elaboration
of the mode of sharing that attaches to them.
In­surrection itself is just an accelerator, a decisive
moment in the process.

... is a collection of places, infrastructures,
communised means; and the dreams, bodies,
mur­murs, thoughts, desires that circulate among those
places, the use of those means, the sharing of those
infrastructures.
The notion of ... responds to the necessity of
a minimal formalisation, which makes us accessible
as well as allows us to remain invisible. It belongs
to the communist way that we explain to ourselves
and formulate the basis of our sharing. So that the
most recent arrival is, at the very least, the equal of
the elder.

Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate be longing itself,
its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every
condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these
singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a
Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.

110

Dockray
Interface Access Loss
2013


Interface Access Loss

I want to begin this talk at the end -- by which I mean the end of property - at least according to
the cyber-utopian account of things, where digital file sharing and online communication liberate
culture from corporations and their drive for profit. This is just one of the promised forms of
emancipation -- property, in a sense, was undone. People, on a massive scale, used their
computers and their internet connections to share digitized versions of their objects with each
other, quickly producing a different, common form of ownership. The crisis that this provoked is
well-known -- it could be described in one word: Napster. What is less recognized - because it is
still very much in process - is the subsequent undoing of property, of both the private and common
kind. What follows is one story of "the cloud" -- the post-dot-com bubble techno-super-entity -which sucks up property, labor, and free time.

Object, Interface

It's debated whether the growing automation of production leads to global structural
unemployment or not -- Karl Marx wrote that "the self-expansion of capital by means of machinery
is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of
livelihood have been destroyed by that machinery" - but the promise is, of course, that when
robots do the work, we humans are free to be creative. Karl Kautsky predicted that increasing
automation would actually lead, not to a mass surplus population or widespread creativity, but
something much more mundane: the growth of clerks and bookkeepers, and the expansion of
unproductive sectors like "the banking system, the credit system, insurance empires and
advertising."

Marx was analyzing the number of people employed by some of the new industries in the middle
of the 19th century: "gas-works, telegraphy, photography, steam navigation, and railways." The
facts were that these industries were incredibly important, expansive and growing, highly
mechanized.. and employed a very small number of people. It is difficult not to read his study of
these technologies of connection and communication - against the background of our present
moment, in which the rise of the Internet has been accompanied by the deindustrialization of
cities, increased migrant and mobile labor, and jobs made obsolete by computation.

There are obvious examples of the impact of computation on the workplace: at factories and
distribution centers, robots engineered with computer-vision can replace a handful of workers,
with a savings of millions of dollars per robot over the life of the system. And there are less
apparent examples as well, like algorithms determining when and where to hire people and for
how long, according to fluctuating conditions.
Both examples have parallels within computer programming, namely reuse and garbage
collection. Code reuse refers to the practice of writing software in such a way that the code can be
used again later, in another program, to perform the same task. It is considered wasteful to give the
same time, attention, and energy to a function, because the development environment is not an
assembly line - a programmer shouldn't repeat. Such repetition then gives way to copy-andpasting (or merely calling). The analogy here is to the robot, to the replacement of human labor
with technology.

Now, when a program is in the midst of being executed, the computer's memory fills with data -but some of that is obsolete, no longer necessary for that program to run. If left alone, the memory
would become clogged, the program would crash, the computer might crash. It is the role of the
garbage collector to free up memory, deleting what is no longer in use. And here, I'm making the
analogy with flexible labor, workers being made redundant, and so on.

In Object-Oriented Programming, a programmer designs the software that she is writing around
“objects,” where each object is conceptually divided into “public” and “private” parts. The public
parts are accessible to other objects, but the private ones are hidden to the world outside the
boundaries of that object. It's a “black box” - a thing that can be known through its inputs and
outputs - even in total ignorance of its internal mechanisms. What difference does it make if the
code is written in one way versus an other .. if it behaves the same? As William James wrote, “If no
practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing,
and all dispute is idle.”

By merely having a public interface, an object is already a social entity. It makes no sense to even
provide access to the outside if there are no potential objects with which to interact! So to

understand the object-oriented program, we must scale up - not by increasing the size or
complexity of the object, but instead by increasing the number and types of objects such that their
relations become more dense. The result is an intricate machine with an on and an off state, rather
than a beginning and an end. Its parts are interchangeable -- provided that they reliably produce
the same behavior, the same inputs and outputs. Furthermore, this machine can be modified:
objects can be added and removed, changing but not destroying the machine; and it might be,
using Gerald Raunig’s appropriate term, “concatenated” with other machines.

Inevitably, this paradigm for describing the relationship between software objects spread outwards,
subsuming more of the universe outside of the immediate code. External programs, powerful
computers, banking institutions, people, and satellites have all been “encapsulated” and
“abstracted” into objects with inputs and outputs. Is this a conceptual reduction of the richness
and complexity of reality? Yes, but only partially. It is also a real description of how people,
institutions, software, and things are being brought into relationship with one another according to
the demands of networked computation.. and the expanding field of objects are exactly those
entities integrated into such a network.

Consider a simple example of decentralized file-sharing: its diagram might represent an objectoriented piece of software, but here each object is a person-computer, shown in potential relation
to every other person-computer. Files might be sent or received at any point in this machine,
which seems particularly oriented towards circulation and movement. Much remains private, but a
collection of files from every person is made public and opened up to the network. Taken as a
whole, the entire collection of all files - which on the one hand exceeds the storage capacity of
any one person’s technical hardware, is on the other hand entirely available to every personcomputer. If the files were books.. then this collective collection would be a public library.

In order for a system like this to work, for the inputs and the outputs to actually engage with one
another to produce action or transmit data, there needs to be something in place already to enable
meaningful couplings. Before there is any interaction or any relationship, there must be some
common ground in place that allows heterogenous objects to ‘talk to each other’ (to use a phrase
from the business casual language of the Californian Ideology). The term used for such a common
ground - especially on the Internet - is platform, a word for that which enables and anticipates

future action without directly producing it. A platform provides tools and resources to the objects
that run “on top” of the platform so that those objects don't need to have their own tools and
resources. In this sense, the platform offers itself as a way for objects to externalize (and reuse)
labor. Communication between objects is one of the most significant actions that a platform can
provide, but it requires that the objects conform some amount of their inputs and outputs to the
specifications dictated by the platform.

But haven’t I only introduced another coupling, instead of between two objects, this time between
the object and the platform? What I'm talking about with "couplings" is the meeting point between
things - in other words, an “interface.” In the terms of OOP, the interface is an abstraction that
defines what kinds of interaction are possible with an object. It maps out the public face of the
object in a way that is legible and accessible to other objects. Similarly, computer interfaces like
screens and keyboards are designed to meet with human interfaces like fingers and eyes, allowing
for a specific form of interaction between person and machine. Any coupling between objects
passes through some interface and every interface obscures as much as it reveals - it establishes
the boundary between what is public and what is private, what is visible and what is not. The
dominant aesthetic values of user interface design actually privilege such concealment as “good
design,” appealing to principles of simplicity, cleanliness, and clarity.
Cloud, Access

One practical outcome of this has been that there can be tectonic shifts behind the interface where entire systems are restructured or revolutionized - without any interruption, as long as the
interface itself remains essentially unchanged. In Pragmatism’s terms, a successful interface keeps
any difference (in back) from making a difference (in front). Using books again as an example: for
consumers to become accustomed to the initial discomfort of purchasing a product online instead
of from a shop, the interface needs to make it so that “buying a book” is something that could be
interchangeably accomplished either by a traditional bookstore or the online "marketplace"
equivalent. But behind the interface is Amazon, which through low prices and wide selection is
the most visible platform for buying books and uses that position to push retailers and publishers
both to, at best, the bare minimum of profitability.

In addition to selling things to people and collecting data about its users (what they look at and
what they buy) to personalize product recommendations, Amazon has also made an effort to be a
platform for the technical and logistical parts of other retailers. Ultimately collecting data from
them as well, Amazon realizes a competitive advantage from having a comprehensive, up-to-theminute perspective on market trends and inventories. This volume of data is so vast and valuable
that warehouses packed with computers are constructed to store it, protect it, and make it readily
available to algorithms. Data centers, such as these, organize how commodities circulate (they run
business applications, store data about retail, manage fulfillment) but also - increasingly - they
hold the commodity itself - for example, the book. Digital book sales started the millennium very
slowly but by 2010 had overtaken hardcover sales.

Amazon’s store of digital books (or Apple’s or Google’s, for that matter) is a distorted reflection of
the collection circulating within the file-sharing network, displaced from personal computers to
corporate data centers. Here are two regimes of digital property: the swarm and the cloud. For
swarms (a reference to swarm downloading where a single file can be downloaded in parallel
from multiple sources) property is held in common between peers -- however, property is
positioned out of reach, on the cloud, accessible only through an interface that has absorbed legal
and business requirements.

It's just half of the story, however, to associate the cloud with mammoth data centers; the other
half is to be found in our hands and laps. Thin computing, including tablets and e-readers, iPads
and Kindles, and mobile phones have co-evolved with data centers, offering powerful, lightweight
computing precisely because so much processing and storage has been externalized.

In this technical configuration of the cloud, the thin computer and the fat data center meet through
an interface, inevitably clean and simple, that manages access to the remote resources. Typically,
a person needs to agree to certain “terms of service,” have a unique, measurable account, and
provide payment information; in return, access is granted. This access is not ownership in the
conventional sense of a book, or even the digital sense of a file, but rather a license that gives the
person a “non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy… solely for your personal and noncommercial use,” contradicting the First Sale Doctrine, which gives the “owner” the right to sell,
lease, or rent their copy to anyone they choose at any price they choose. The doctrine,

established within America's legal system in 1908, separated the rights of reproduction, from
distribution, as a way to "exhaust" the copyright holder's control over the commodities that people
purchased.. legitimizing institutions like used book stores and public libraries. Computer software
famously attempted to bypass the First Sale Doctrine with its "shrink wrap" licenses that restricted
the rights of the buyer once she broke through the plastic packaging to open the product. This
practice has only evolved and become ubiquitous over the last three decades as software began
being distributed digitally through networks rather than as physical objects in stores. Such
contradictions are symptoms of the shift in property regimes, or what Jeremy Rifkin called “the age
of access.” He writes that “property continues to exist but is far less likely to be exchanged in
markets. Instead, suppliers hold on to property in the new economy and lease, rent, or charge an
admission fee, subscription, or membership dues for its short-term use.”

Thinking again of books, Rifkin’s description gives the image of a paid library emerging as the
synthesis of the public library and the marketplace for commodity exchange. Considering how, on
the one side, traditional public libraries are having their collections deaccessioned, hours of
operation cut, and are in some cases being closed down entirely, and on the other side, the
traditional publishing industry finds its stores, books, and profits dematerialized, the image is
perhaps appropriate. Server racks, in photographs inside data centers, strike an eerie resemblance
to library stacks - - while e-readers are consciously designed to look and feel something like a
book. Yet, when one peers down into the screen of the device, one sees both the book - and the
library.

Like a Facebook account, which must uniquely correspond to a real person, the e-reader is an
individualizing device. It is the object that establishes trusted access with books stored in the cloud
and ensures that each and every person purchases their own rights to read each book. The only
transfer that is allowed is of the device itself, which is the thing that a person actually does own.
But even then, such an act must be reported back to the cloud: the hardware needs to be deregistered and then re-registered with credit card and authentication details about the new owner.

This is no library - or it's only a library in the most impoverished sense of the word. It is a new
enclosure, and it is a familiar story: things in the world (from letters, to photographs, to albums, to
books) are digitized (as emails, JPEGs, MP3s, and PDFs) and subsequently migrate to a remote

location or service (Gmail, Facebook, iTunes, Kindle Store). The middle phase is the biggest
disruption, when the interface does the poorest job concealing the material transformations taking
place, when the work involved in creating those transformations is most apparent, often because
the person themselves is deeply involved in the process (of ripping vinyl, for instance). In the third
phase, the user interface becomes easier, more “frictionless,” and what appears to be just another
application or folder on one’s computer is an engorged, property-and-energy-hungry warehouse a
thousand miles away.

Capture, Loss

Intellectual property's enclosure is easy enough to imagine in warehouses of remote, secure hard
drives. But the cloud internalizes processing as well as storage, capturing the new forms of cooperation and collaboration characterizing the new economy and its immaterial labor. Social
relations are transmuted into database relations on the "social web," which absorbs selforganization as well. Because of this, the cloud impacts as strongly on the production of
publications, as on their consumption, in the tradition sense.

Storage, applications, and services offered in the cloud are marketed for consumption by authors
and publishers alike. Document editing, project management, and accounting are peeled slowly
away from the office staff and personal computers into the data centers; interfaces are established
into various publication channels from print on demand to digital book platforms. In the fully
realized vision of cloud publishing, the entire technical and logistical apparatus is externalized,
leaving only the human labor.. and their thin devices remaining. Little distinguishes the authorobject from the editor-object from the reader-object. All of them.. maintain their position in the
network by paying for lightweight computers and their updates, cloud services, and broadband
internet connections.
On the production side of the book, the promise of the cloud is a recovery of the profits “lost” to
file-sharing, as all that exchange is disciplined, standardized and measured. Consumers are finally
promised the access to the history of human knowledge that they had already improvised by
themselves, but now without the omnipresent threat of legal prosecution. One has the sneaking
suspicion though.. that such a compromise is as hollow.. as the promises to a desperate city of the

jobs that will be created in a new constructed data center - - and that pitting “food on the table”
against “access to knowledge” is both a distraction from and a legitimation of the forms of power
emerging in the cloud. It's a distraction because it's by policing access to knowledge that the
middle-man platform can extract value from publication, both on the writing and reading sides of
the book; and it's a legitimation because the platform poses itself as the only entity that can resolve
the contradiction between the two sides.

When the platform recedes behind the interface, these two sides are the the most visible
antagonism - in a tug-of-war with each other - - yet neither the “producers” nor the “consumers” of
publications are becoming more wealthy, or working less to survive. If we turn the picture
sideways, however, a new contradiction emerges, between the indebted, living labor - of authors,
editors, translators, and readers - on one side, and on the other.. data centers, semiconductors,
mobile technology, expropriated software, power companies, and intellectual property.
The talk in the data center industry of the “industrialization” of the cloud refers to the scientific
approach to improving design, efficiency, and performance. But the term also recalls the basic
narrative of the Industrial Revolution: the movement from home-based manufacturing by hand to
large-scale production in factories. As desktop computers pass into obsolescence, we shift from a
networked, but small-scale, relationship to computation (think of “home publishing”) to a
reorganized form of production that puts the accumulated energy of millions to work through
these cloud companies and their modernized data centers.

What kind of buildings are these blank superstructures? Factories for the 21st century? An engineer
named Ken Patchett described the Facebook data center that way in a television interview, “This is
a factory. It’s just a different kind of factory than you might be used to.” Those factories that we’re
“used to,” continue to exist (at Foxconn, for instance) producing the infrastructure, under
recognizably exploitative conditions, for a “different kind of factory,” - a factory that extends far
beyond the walls of the data center.

But the idea of the factory is only part of the picture - this building is also a mine.. and the
dispersed workforce devote most of their waking hours to mining-in-reverse, packing it full of data,
under the expectation that someone - soon - will figure out how to pull out something valuable.

Both metaphors rely on the image of a mass of workers (dispersed as it may be) and leave a darker
and more difficult possibility: the data center is like the hydroelectric plant, damming up property,
sociality, creativity and knowledge, while engineers and financiers look for the algorithms to
release the accumulated cultural and social resources on demand, as profit.

This returns us to the interface, site of the struggles over the management and control of access to
property and infrastructure. Previously, these struggles were situated within the computer-object
and the implied freedom provided by its computation, storage, and possibilities for connection
with others. Now, however, the eviscerated device is more interface than object, and it is exactly
here at the interface that the new technological enclosures have taken form (for example, see
Apple's iOS products, Google's search box, and Amazon's "marketplace"). Control over the
interface is guaranteed by control over the entire techno-business stack: the distributed hardware
devices, centralized data centers, and the software that mediates the space between. Every major
technology corporation must now operate on all levels to protect against any loss.

There is a centripetal force to the cloud and this essay has been written in its irresistible pull. In
spite of the sheer mass of capital that is organized to produce this gravity and the seeming
insurmountability of it all, there is no chance that the system will absolutely manage and control
the noise within it. Riots break out on the factory floor; algorithmic trading wreaks havoc on the
stock market in an instant; data centers go offline; 100 million Facebook accounts are discovered
to be fake; the list will go on. These cracks in the interface don't point to any possible future, or
any desirable one, but they do draw attention to openings that might circumvent the logic of
access.

"What happens from there is another question." This is where I left things off in the text when I
finished it a year ago. It's a disappointing ending: we just have to invent ways of occupying the
destruction, violence and collapse that emerge out of economic inequality, global warming,
dismantled social welfare, and so on. And there's not much that's happened since then to make us
very optimistic - maybe here I only have to mention the NSA. But as I began with an ending, I
really should end at a beginning.
I think we were obliged to adopt a negative, critical position in response the cyber-utopianism of

the last almost 20 years, whether in its naive or cynical forms. We had to identify and theorize the
darker side of things. But it can become habitual, and when the dark side materializes, as it has
over the past few years - so that everyone knows the truth - then the obligation flips around,
doesn't it? To break out of habitual criticism as the tacit, defeated acceptance of what is. But, what
could be? Where do we find new political imaginaries? Not to ask what is the bright side, or what
can we do to cope, but what are the genuinely emancipatory possibilities that are somehow still
latent, buried under the present - or emerging within those ruptures in it? - - - I can't make it all
the way to a happy ending, to a happy beginning, but at least it's a beginning and not the end.

Dockray
Openings and Closings
2013


Militarization of campuses

Early, on a recent November morning, 400 Military Police with tear gas and helicopters arrested 72 people, almost all students of the University of Sao Paulo. Those people were occupying the Rectory in response to an other arrest – of 3 fellow students – which was itself a consequence of the contract that the university administration signed with the MP, an agreement inviting the police back onto campus after decades in which this presence was essentially prohibited. University “autonomy” had been established by Article 207 of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution to close a chapter on Brazil’s military rule, during which time the Military Police enforced a series of decrees aimed at eliminating opposition to the dictatorship, including the local articulation of the 1960’s student movement. The 1964 Suplicy de Lacerda law forbade student organizations from engaging in politics; in 1968, Institutional Act No. 5 did away with the writ of habeus corpus; and Decree 477 a year later gave university and education authorities the right to expel students and professors involved in protests. A similar provision of “university asylum” restricted the access of policemen onto Greece’s campuses for 35 years. Like Brazil, this measure was adopted after the fall of a military regime that had violently crushed student uprisings and, like Brazil, this prohibition on police incursions into campuses collapsed in 2011. Greek politicians abolished the law in order to more effectively implement austerity measures imposed by European financial interests. Ten days after the raid at the University of Sao Paulo, the chancellor of the University of California, Davis ordered police to clear a handful of tents from a campus quadrangle. Because the peaceful demonstration was planned in solidarity with other actions on UC campuses drawing inspiration from the “occupy movement,” police force swiftly and forcefully dismantled the encampment. Students were pepper-­‐sprayed at close range by a well-­‐armored policeman wearing little concern. Such examples of the militarization of university campuses have become more common, especially in the context of growing social unrest. In California, they demonstrate the continued influence of Ronald Reagan, not simply for implementing neoliberal policies that have slashed public programs, produced a trillion dollars in US student loan debt and contracted the middle class; but also for campaigning in 1966 for governor of California on a promise to crack down on campus activists, making partnerships with conservative school officials and the FBI in order to “clean out left-­‐wing elements” from the University of California. Linda Katehi – that UC Davis chancellor – was also an author of a 2011 report that recommended terminating university asylum to the Greek government. The report noted that “the politicization of students… represents a beyond-­‐reasonable involvement in the political process,” continuing on to state that “Greek University campuses are not secure” because of “elements that seek political instability.”

Mobilization of books

After the Military Police operation in Sao Paulo, the rector appeared on television to accuse the students of preparing Molotov cocktails; independent media, on the other hand, described the students carrying left-­‐wing books. Even more recently at UC Riverside, a contingent faculty member holding a cardboard shield that was painted to look like the cover of Figures of the Thinkable, by Cornelius Castoriadis, was dragged across the pavement by police and charged with a felony, “assault with a deadly weapon.” In Berkeley, students covered a plaza in books, open and facedown, after their tent occupation was broken up. Many of the crests and seals of universities feature a book, no doubt drawing on the book as both a symbol of knowledge and an actual repository for it. And by extension, books have been mobilized at various moments in recent occupations and protests to make material reference to education and the metastasizing knowledge economy. No doubt the use of radical theory literalizes an attempt to bridge theory and practice, while evoking a utopian imaginary, or simply taking Deleuze’s words at face value: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Against a background of library closures and cutbacks, as well as the concomitant demands for the humanities and social sciences to justify themselves in economic terms, it is as if books have come into view, desperately, like a rat in daylight. There is almost nowhere for them to go – the space in the remaining libraries is being given over to audio-­‐visual material, computer terminals, public programming, and cafes, while publishers are shifting to digital distribution models that are designed to circumvent libraries entirely. So books have come out onto the street. Militarization of Books When knowledge does escape the jurisdiction of both the state and the market, it’s often at the hands of students (both the officially enrolled and the autodidacts). For example, returning to Brazil, the average cost of required reading material for a freshman is more than six months of minimum wage pay, with up to half of the texts not available in Brazil or simply out of print. Unsurprisingly, a system of copy shops provides on-­‐demand chapters, course readers, and other texts; but the Brazilian Association of Reprographic Rights has been particularly hostile to the practice. One year before Sao Paulo, at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, seven armed police officers in three cars (accompanied by the Chief of the Delegation for the Repression of Immaterial Property Crimes) raided the Xerox room of the School of Social Work, arresting the operator of the machines and confiscating all illegitimate copies. Similar shows of force have proliferated ever since Brazilian copyright law was amended in 1998 to eliminate the exceptions that had previously afforded the right to copy books for educational purposes. This act of reproduction, felt by students and faculty to be inextricably linked to university autonomy and the right to education, coalesced into a movement by 2006, Copiar Livro é Direito! (Copying Books is a Right!) Illicit copies, when confiscated, usually are destroyed. In this sense, it is worthwhile to understand such an event as a contemporary form of censorship, certainly not out of any ideological disapproval of the publication’s actual content, but rather an objection to the manner of its circulation. Many books banned (and burned) during the dictatorship were obviously a matter of content – those that could “destroy society’s moral base” might “put into practice a subversive plan that places national security in danger.” Even if explicit sexuality, crime, and drug use within literature are generally tolerated today (not everywhere, of course) the rhetoric contained within the 1970 decree that instituted censorship is still alive in matters of circulation. During negotiations for the multi-­‐national Anti-­‐Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Bush and Obama administrations denied the public information, stating that it was “properly classified in the interest of national security.” Certain parts of the negotiations became known through Wikileaks and ACTA was revealed as a vehicle for exporting American intellectual property enforcement. Protecting intellectual property is essential, politicians claim, to maintaining the American “way of life,” although today this has less to do with the moral base of the country than the economic base – workers and corporations. America, Obama said in reference to ACTA, would use the “full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses.” Universities, those institutions for the production of knowledge, are deeply embedded in struggles over intellectual property, and moreover deployed as instruments of national security. The National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which includes (surprise) Linda Katehi, brings together select university presidents and chancellors with the FBI, CIA, and other agencies several times per year. Developed to address intellectual property at the level of cyber-­‐theft (preventing sensitive research from falling into the hands of terrorists) the congenial relationship between university administrations and the FBI raises the spectre of US government spying on student activists in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Financialization of publishing To the side of such partnerships with the state, the forces of financialization have been absorbed into universities, again with the welcome of administrations. Towering US student loan debt is one very clear index; another, less apparent, but growing, is the highly controlled circulation of academic publishing, especially journals and textbooks. Although apparently marginal (or niche) in topic, the vertical structure of the corporations behind most journals is surprisingly large. The Dutch company Elsevier, for example, publishes 250,000 articles per year, and earned $1.6 billion (a profit margin of 36%) in 2010. Texts are written, peer reviewed, and edited on a voluntary basis (usually labor costs are externalized, for example to the state or university). They are sold back to university libraries at extraordinarily high prices, and the libraries are obliged to pay because their constituency relies on access to research as a material for further research. When the website library.nu was taken-­‐down recently for providing access to over 400,000 digital texts, it was not the major “commercial” publishers that were behind the action, but a coalition of 17 educational publishers, including Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis, the Cambridge University Press, and Macmillan. On the heels of FBI raids on prominent torrent sites, and with a similar level of coordination, this publishers’ alliance hired private investigators to deploy software “specifically developed by IT experts” to secure evidence. In order to expand their profitability, corporate academic publishers exploit and reinforce entrenched hierarchies within the academia. Compensation comes in the forms of CV lines and disciplinary visibility; and it is that very validation that individuals need to find and secure employment at research institutions. “Publish or die” is not anything new, but as employment grows increasingly temporary and managerial systems for assessment and quantifying productivity proliferate, it has grown more ominous. Beyond intensifying internal hierarchies, this publishing situation has widened the gap between the university and the rest of the world (even as it subjects the exchange of knowledge to the logic of the stock market); publications are meant for current students and faculty only, and their legitimacy is regularly checked against ID cards, passwords, and other credentials. One without such legitimacy finds themselves on the wrong side of a paywall. Here, we discover the quotidian dimension to the militarization of the university, in the inconveniences of proximity cards, accounts, and login screens. If our contemporary forms of censorship are focused on the manner of a thing’s circulation, then systems of control would be oriented towards policing access. Reprographic machines and file-­‐sharing software are obvious targets but, with the advent of tablet computers (such as Apple’s iPad, marketed heavily towards students), so are actual textbooks. The practice of reselling textbooks, a yearly student money-­‐saving ritual that is perfectly legal under the first-­‐sale doctrine, has long represented lost revenue to publishers. So many, including MacMillan and McGraw-­‐Hill, have moved strongly into the e-­‐textbook market, which allows them to shut the door on the secondary market because students are no longer buying the things themselves, but only temporary access to the things.

Opening of Access

Open Access publishing articulates an alternative, in order to circumvent the entire parasitical apparatus and ultimately deliver texts to readers and researchers for free. In large part, its success depends on whether or not researchers choose to publish their work with OA journals or with pay-­‐for-­‐access ones. If many have chosen the latter, it is because of factors like reputation and the interrelation between publishing and departmental structures of advancement and power. Interestingly, it is institutions with the strongest reputations that are also pushing for more ‘openness.’ Princeton University formally adopted an open-­‐access policy in 2011 (the sixth Ivy League school to do so) in order to discourage the “fruits of [their] scholarship” from languishing “artificially behind a pay wall.” MIT has long promoted openness of its materials, from OpenCourseWare (2002) to its own Open Access policy (2009), to a new online learning infrastructure, MITx. Why is it that elite, private schools are so motivated to open themselves to the world? Would this not dilute their status? The answer is obvious: opening up their research gives their faculty more exposure; it produces a positive image of an institution that is generous and genuinely interested in generating knowledge; and ultimately it builds the university’s brand. They are not giving away degrees and certainly not research positions – rather they are mobilizing their intellectual capital to attract publicity, students, donations, and contracts. We can guess what ‘opening up the university’ means for the institution and the faculty, but what about for the students, including those who may not have the proper title, those learners not enrolled? MITx is an adaptation of the common practice of distance learning, which has a century-­‐and-­‐a-­‐half long history, beginning with the University of London’s External Programme. There are populist overtones (Charles Dickens called the External Programme the “People’s University”) to distance learning that coincide with the promises of public education more generally, namely making higher education available to those traditionally without means for it. History has provided us with less than desirable motivations for distance education – the Free University of Iran was said to have been desirable to the Shah’s regime because the students would never gather – but current western programs are influenced by other concerns. Beyond publicity and social conscience, many of these online learning programs are driven by economics. At the University of California, the Board of Regents launched a pilot program as part of a plan to close a 4.7 billion dollar budget gap, with the projection that such a program could add 25,000 students at 1.1% of the normal cost. Aside from MITx’s free component (it brings in revenue as well if people want to actually get “credit”) most of these distance-­‐learning offerings are immaterial commodities. UCLA Extension is developing curricula and courses for Encore Career Institute, a for-­‐profit venture bringing together Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and a chairwoman of the UC Regents, whose goal is to “deliver some of the fantastic intellectual property that UC has.” And even MITx is not without its restricted-­‐access bedfellows; its pilot online course requires a textbook, which is owned by Elsevier. Students are here conceived of truly as consumers of product, and education has become a subgenre of publication. The classroom and library are seen as inefficient mechanisms for delivering education to the masses or, for that matter, for the delivering the masses to creditors, advertisers, and content providers. Clearly, classrooms will continue to exist, especially in the centers for the reproduction of the elite, such as those proponents of Open Access previously mentioned. But everywhere else, post-­‐ classroom (and post-­‐library) education is exploding. Students do not gather here and they certainly don’t sit-­‐in or take over buildings; they don’t argue outside during a break, over a cigarette, nor do they pass books between themselves. I am not, however, a fatalist on this point – these may be networks of access managed by capital and policed by the state, but new collective forms and subjectivities are already emerging, exploiting or evading the logic of accounts, passwords, and access. They find each other across borders and across disciplines.

Negating Access

After the capitalist restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s, how do we understand the scenes of people clashing with police formations; the revival of campus occupations as a tactic; the disappearance of university autonomy; the withdrawal of learning into the disciplined walls of the academy; in short, how do we understand a situation that appears quite like before? One way – the theme of this essay – would be through the notion of “access.” If access has moved from a question of rights (who has access?) to a matter of legality and economics (what are the terms and price for access, for a particular person?) then over the past few decades we have witnessed access being turned inside-­‐out, in a manner reminiscent of Marx’s “double freedom” of the proletariat: having access to academic resources while not being able to access each other. Library cards, passwords, and keys are assigned to individuals; and so are contracts, degrees, loans, and grades. Students (and faculty) are individuated at every turn, perhaps no more clearly than in online learning where each body collapses into their own profile. Access is not so much a passage into a space as it is an apparatus enclosing the individual. (In this sense, Open Access is one configuration of this apparatus). Two projects that I have worked within over the past 7 years – a file-­‐sharing website for texts, AAAARG.ORG, and a proposal-­‐based learning platform, The Public School – are ongoing efforts in escaping this regime of access in order to create some room to actually understand all of these conditions, their connection to larger processes, and the possibilities for future action. The Public School has no curriculum, no degrees, and nothing to do with the public school system. It is simply a framework within which people propose ideas for things they want to learn about with others; a rotating committee might organize this proposal into an actual class, bringing together a group of strangers and friends who find a way to teach each other. AAAARG.ORG is a collective library comprised of scans, excerpts, and exports that members of its public have found important enough to share with each other. They are premised, in part, on the proposition that making these kinds of spaces is an active, contingent process requiring the coordination, invention, and self-­‐ reflection of many people over time. The creation of these kinds of spaces involves a negation of access, often bringing conflict to the surface. What this means is that the spaces are not territories on which pedagogy happens, but rather that the collective activity of making and defending these spaces is pedagogical.

In the militarized raids of campus occupations and knowledge-­‐sharing assemblages, the state is acting to both produce and defend a structure that generates wealth from the process of education. While there are occasional clashes over content, usually any content is acceptable that circulates through this structure, and the very failure to circulate (to attract grant funding, attention, or feedback) becomes the operative, soft form of suppression. A resistant pedagogy should look for openings – and if they don’t exist, break them open – where space grows from a refusal of access and circulation, borders and disciplines; from an improvised diffusion that generates its own laws and dynamics. But a cautionary note – any time new social relations are born out of such an opening in space and time, a confrontation with power is not far behind.

Dockray, Forster & Public Office
README.md
2018


## Introduction

How might we ensure the survival and availability of community libraries,
individual collections and other precarious archives? If these libraries,
archives and collections are unwanted by official institutions or, worse,
buried beneath good intentions and bureaucracy, then what tools and platforms
and institutions might we develop instead?

While trying to both formulate and respond to these questions, we began making
Dat Library and HyperReadings:

**Dat Library** distributes libraries across many computers so that many
people can provide disk space and bandwidth, sharing in the labour and
responsibility of the archival infrastructure.

**HyperReadings** implements ‘reading lists’ or a structured set of pointers
(a list, a syllabus, a bibliography, etc.) into one or more libraries,
_activating_ the archives.

## Installation

The easiest way to get started is to install [Dat Library as a desktop
app](http://dat-dat-dat-library.hashbase.io), but there is also a programme
called ‘[datcat](http://github.com/sdockray/dat-cardcat)’, which can be run on
the command line or included in other NodeJS projects.

## Accidents of the Archive

The 1996 UNESCO publication [Lost Memory: Libraries and Archives Destroyed in
the Twentieth Century](http://www.stephenmclaughlin.net/ph-
library/texts/UNESCO%201996%20-%20Lost%20Memory_%20Libraries%20and%20Archives%20Destroyed%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century.pdf)
makes the fragility of historical repositories startlingly clear. “[A]cidified
paper that crumbles to dust, leather, parchment, film and magnetic light
attacked by light, heat humidity or dust” all assault archives. “Floods,
fires, hurricanes, storms, earthquakes” and, of course, “acts of war,
bombardment and fire, whether deliberate or accidental” wiped out significant
portions of many hundreds of major research libraries worldwide. When
expanding the scope to consider public, private, and community libraries, that
number becomes uncountable.

Published during the early days of the World Wide Web, the report acknowledges
the emerging role of digitization (“online databases, CD-ROM etc.”), but today
we might reflect on the last twenty years, which has also introduced new forms
of loss.

Digital archives and libraries are subject to a number of potential hazards:
technical accidents like disk failures, accidental deletions, misplaced data
and imperfect data migrations, as well as political-economic accidents like
defunding of the hosting institution, deaccessioning parts of the collection
and sudden restrictions of access rights. Immediately after library.nu was
shut down on the grounds of copyright infringement in 2012, [Lawrence Liang
wrote](https://kafila.online/2012/02/19/library-nu-r-i-p/) of feeling “first
and foremost a visceral experience of loss.”

Whatever its legal status, the abrupt absence of a collection of 400,000 books
appears to follow a particularly contemporary pattern. In 2008, Aaron Swartz
moved millions of US federal court documents out from behind a paywall,
resulting in a trial and an FBI investigation. Three years later he was
arrested and indicted for a similar gesture, systematically downloading
academic journal articles from JSTOR. That year, Kazakhstani scientist
Alexandra Elbakyan began [Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub) in
response to scientific journal articles that were prohibitively expensive for
scholars based outside of Western academic institutions. (See
for further analysis and an alternative
approach to the same issues: “When everyone is librarian, library is
everywhere.”) The repository, growing to more than 60 millions papers, was
sued in 2015 by Elsevier for $15 million, resulting in a permanent injunction.
Library Genesis, another library of comparable scale, finds itself in a
similar legal predicament.

Arguably one of the largest digital archives of the “avant-garde” (loosely
defined), UbuWeb is transparent about this fragility. In 2011, its founder
[Kenneth Goldsmith wrote](http://www.ubu.com/resources/): “by the time you
read this, UbuWeb may be gone. […] Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu
could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP pulls the plug, our university
support dries up, or we simply grow tired of it.” Even the banality of
exhaustion is a real risk to these libraries.

The simple fact is that some of these libraries are among the largest in the
world yet are subject to sudden disappearance. We can only begin to guess at
what the contours of “Lost Memory: Libraries and Archives Destroyed in the
Twenty-First Century” will be when it is written ninety years from now.

## Non-profit, non-state archives

Cultural and social movements have produced histories which are only partly
represented in state libraries and archives. Often they are deemed too small
or insignificant or, in some cases, dangerous. Most frequently, they are not
deemed to be anything at all — they are simply neglected. While the market,
eager for new resources to exploit, might occasionally fill in the gaps, it is
ultimately motivated by profit and not by responsibility to communities or
archives. (We should not forget the moment [Amazon silently erased legally
purchased copies of George Orwell’s
1984](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html)
from readers’ Kindle devices because of a change in the commercial agreement
with the publisher.)

So, what happens to these minor libraries? They are innumerable, but for the
sake of illustration let’s say that each could be represented by a single
book. Gathered together, these books would form a great library (in terms of
both importance and scale). But to extend the metaphor, the current reality
could be pictured as these books flying off their shelves to the furthest
reaches of the world, their covers flinging open and the pages themselves
scattering into bookshelves and basements, into the caring hands of relatives
or small institutions devoted to passing these words on to future generations.

While the massive digital archives listed above (library.nu, Library Genesis,
Sci-Hub, etc.) could play the role of the library of libraries, they tend to
be defined more as sites for [biblioleaks](https://www.jmir.org/2014/4/e112/).
Furthermore, given the vulnerability of these archives, we ought to look for
alternative approaches that do not rule out using their resources, but which
also do not _depend_ on them.

Dat Library takes the concept of “a library of libraries” not to manifest it
in a single, universal library, but to realise it progressively and partially
with different individuals, groups and institutions.

## Archival properties

So far, the emphasis of this README has been on _durability_ , and the
“accidents of the archive” have been instances of destruction and loss. The
persistence of an archive is, however, no guarantee of its _accessibility_ , a
common reality in digital libraries where access management is ubiquitous.
Official institutions police access to their archives vigilantly for the
ostensible purpose of preservation, but ultimately create a rarefied
relationship between the archives and their publics. Disregarding this
precious tendency toward preciousness, we also introduce _adaptability_ as a
fundamental consideration in the making of the projects Dat Library and
HyperReadings.

To adapt is to fit something for a new purpose. It emphasises that the archive
is not a dead object of research but a set of possible tools waiting to be
activated in new circumstances. This is always a possibility of an archive,
but we want to treat this possibility as desirable, as the horizon towards
which these projects move. We know how infrastructures can attenuate desire
and simply make things difficult. We want to actively encourage radical reuse.

In the following section, we don’t define these properties but rather discuss
how we implement (or fail to implement) them in software, while highlighting
some of the potential difficulties introduced.

### Durability

In 1964, in the midst of the “loss” of the twentieth-century, Paul Baran’s
RAND Corporation publication [On Distributed
Communications](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf)
examined “redundancy as one means of building … highly survivable and reliable
communications systems”, thus midwifing the military foundations of the
digital networks that we operate within today. While the underlying framework
of the Internet generally follows distributed principles, the client–server/
request–response model of the HTTP protocol is highly centralised in practice
and is only as durable as the server.

Capitalism places a high value on originality and novelty, as exemplified in
art where the ultimate insult would to be the label “redundant”. Worse than
being derivative or merely unoriginal, being redundant means having no reason
to exist — a uselessness that art can’t tolerate. It means wasting a perfectly
good opportunity to be creative or innovative. In a relational network, on the
other hand, redundancy is a mode of support. It doesn’t stimulate competition
to capture its effects, but rather it is a product of cooperation. While this
attitude of redundancy arose within a Western military context, one can’t help
but notice that the shared resources, mutual support, and common
infrastructure seem fundamentally communist in nature. Computer networks are
not fundamentally exploitative or equitable, but they are used in specific
ways and they operate within particular economies. A redundant network of
interrelated, mutually supporting computers running mostly open-source
software can be the guts of an advanced capitalist engine, like Facebook. So,
could it be possible to organise our networked devices, embedded as they are
in a capitalist economy, in an anti-capitalist way?

Dat Library is built on the [Dat
Protocol](https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/papers/dat-paper.md),
a peer-to-peer protocol for syncing folders of data. It is not the first
distributed protocol ([BitTorrent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent)
is the best known and is noted as an inspiration for Dat), nor is it the only
new one being developed today ([IPFS](https://ipfs.io) or the Inter-Planetary
File System is often referenced in comparison), but it is unique in its
foundational goals of preserving scientific knowledge as a public good. Dat’s
provocation is that by creating custom infrastructure it will be possible to
overcome the accidents that restrict access to scientific knowledge. We would
specifically acknowledge here the role that the Dat community — or any
community around a protocol, for that matter — has in the formation of the
world that is built on top of that protocol. (For a sense of the Dat
community’s values — see its [code of conduct](https://github.com/datproject
/Code-of-Conduct/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).)

When running Dat Library, a person sees their list of libraries. These can be
thought of as similar to a
[torrent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrent_file), where items are stored
across many computers. This means that many people will share in the provision
of disk space and bandwidth for a particular library, so that when someone
loses electricity or drops their computer, the library will not also break.
Although this is a technical claim — one that has been made in relation to
many projects, from Baran to BitTorrent — it is more importantly a social
claim: the users and lovers of a library will share the library. More than
that, they will share in the work of ensuring that it will continue to be
shared.

This is not dissimilar to the process of reading generally, where knowledge is
distributed and maintained through readers sharing and referencing the books
important to them. As [Peter Sloterdijk
describes](https://rekveld.home.xs4all.nl/tech/Sloterdijk_RulesForTheHumanZoo.pdf),
written philosophy is “reinscribed like a chain letter through the
generations, and despite all the errors of reproduction — indeed, perhaps
because of such errors — it has recruited its copyists and interpreters into
the ranks of brotherhood (sic)”. Or its sisterhood — but, the point remains
clear that the reading / writing / sharing of texts binds us together, even in
disagreement.

### Accessibility

In the world of the web, durability is synonymous with accessibility — if
something can’t be accessed, it doesn’t exist. Here, we disentangle the two in
order to consider _access_ independent from questions of resilience.

##### Technically Accessible

When you create a new library in Dat, a unique 64-digit “key” will
automatically be generated for it. An example key is
`6f963e59e9948d14f5d2eccd5b5ac8e157ca34d70d724b41cb0f565bc01162bf`, which
points to a library of texts. In order for someone else to see the library you
have created, you must provide to them your library’s unique key (by email,
chat, on paper or you could publish it on your website). In short, _you_
manage access to the library by copying that key, and then every key holder
also manages access _ad infinitum_.

At the moment this has its limitations. A Dat is only writable by a single
creator. If you want to collaboratively develop a library or reading list, you
need to have a single administrator managing its contents. This will change in
the near future with the integration of
[hyperdb](https://github.com/mafintosh/hyperdb) into Dat’s core. At that
point, the platform will enable multiple contributors and the management of
permissions, and our single key will become a key chain.

How is this key any different from knowing the domain name of a website? If a
site isn’t indexed by Google and has a suitably unguessable domain name, then
isn’t that effectively the same degree of privacy? Yes, and this is precisely
why the metaphor of the key is so apt (with whom do you share the key to your
apartment?) but also why it is limited. With the key, one not only has the
ability to _enter_ the library, but also to completely _reproduce_ the
library.

##### Consenting Accessibility

When we say “accessibility”, some hear “information wants to be free” — but
our idea of accessibility is not about indiscriminate open access to
everything. While we do support, in many instances, the desire to increase
access to knowledge where it has been restricted by monopoly property
ownership, or the urge to increase transparency in delegated decision-making
and representative government, we also recognise that Indigenous knowledge
traditions often depend on ownership, control, consent, and secrecy in the
hands of the traditions’ people. [see [“Managing Indigenous Knowledge and
Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual
Property”](https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/system/files_force/Aus%20Indigenous%20Knowledge%20and%20Libraries.pdf?download=1),
pg 83] Accessibility understood in merely quantitative terms isn’t able to
reconcile these positions, which this is why we refuse to limit “access” to a
question of technology.

While “digital rights management” technologies have been developed almost
exclusively for protecting the commercial interests of capitalist property
owners within Western intellectual property regimes, many of the assumptions
and technological implementations are inadequate for the protection of
Indigenous knowledge. Rather than describing access in terms of commodities
and ownership of copyright, it might be defined by membership, status or role
within a community, and the rules of access would not be managed by a
generalised legal system but by the rules and traditions of the people and
their knowledge. [[“The Role of Information Technologies in Indigenous
Knowledge
Management”](https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/system/files_force/Aus%20Indigenous%20Knowledge%20and%20Libraries.pdf?download=1),
101-102] These rights would not expire, nor would they be bought and sold,
because they are shared, i.e., held in common.

It is important, while imagining the possibilities of a technological
protocol, to also consider how different _cultural protocols_ might be
implemented and protected through the life of a project like Dat Library.
Certain aspects of this might be accomplished through library metadata, but
ultimately it is through people hosting their own archives and libraries
(rather than, for example, having them hosted by a state institution) that
cultural protocols can be translated and reproduced. Perhaps we should flip
the typical question of how might a culture exist within digital networks to
instead ask how should digital networks operate within cultural protocols?

### Adaptability (ability to use/modify as one’s own)

Durability and accessibility are the foundations of adoptability. Many would
say that this is a contradiction, that adoption is about use and
transformation and those qualities operate against the preservationist grain
of durability, that one must always be at the expense of the other. We say:
perhaps that is true, but it is a risk we’re willing to take because we don’t
want to be making monuments and cemeteries that people approach with reverence
or fear. We want tools and stories that we use and adapt and are always making
new again. But we also say: it is through use that something becomes
invaluable, which may change or distort but will not destroy — this is the
practical definition of durability. S.R. Ranganathan’s very first Law of
Library Science was [“BOOKS ARE FOR
USE”](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b99721;view=1up;seq=37),
which we would extend to the library itself, such that when he arrives at his
final law, [“THE LIBRARY IS A LIVING
ORGANISM”](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b99721;view=1up;seq=432),
we note that to live means not only to change, but also to live _in the
world_.

To borrow and gently distort another concept of Raganathan’s concepts, namely
that of ‘[Infinite
Hospitality](http://www.dextersinister.org/MEDIA/PDF/InfiniteHospitality.pdf)’,
it could be said that we are interested in ways to construct a form of
infrastructure that is infinitely hospitable. By this we mean, infrastructure
that accommodates the needs and desires of new users/audiences/communities and
allows them to enter and contort the technology to their own uses. We really
don’t see infrastructure as aimed at a single specific group, but rather that
it should generate spaces that people can inhabit as they wish. The poet Jean
Paul once wrote that books are thick letters to friends. Books as
infrastructure enable authors to find their friends. This is how we ideally
see Dat Library and HyperReadings working.

## Use cases

We began work on Dat Library and HyperReadings with a range of exemplary use
cases, real-world circumstances in which these projects might intervene. Not
only would the use cases make demands on the software we were and still are
beginning to write, but they would also give us demands to make on the Dat
protocol, which is itself still in the formative stages of development. And,
crucially, in an iterative feedback loop, this process of design produces
transformative effects on those situations described in the use cases
themselves, resulting in further new circumstances and new demands.

### Thorunka

Wendy Bacon and Chris Nash made us aware of Thorunka and Thor.

_Thorunka_ and _Thor_ were two underground papers in the early 1970’s that
spewed out from a censorship controversy surrounding the University of New
South Wales student newspaper _Tharunka_. Between 1971 and 1973, the student
magazine was under focused attack from the NSW state police, with several
arrests made on charges of obscenity and indecency. Rather than ceding to the
charges, this prompted a large and sustained political protest from Sydney
activists, writers, lawyers, students and others, to which _Thorunka_ and
_Thor_ were central.

> “The campaign contested the idea of obscenity and the legitimacy of the
legal system itself. The newspapers campaigned on the war in Vietnam,
Aboriginal land rights, women’s and gay liberation, and the violence of the
criminal justice system. By 1973 the censorship regime in Australia was
broken. Nearly all the charges were dropped.” – [Quotation from the 107
Projects Event](http://107.org.au/event/tharunka-thor-journalism-politics-
art-1970-1973/).

Although the collection of issues of _Tharunka_ is largely accessible [via
Trove](http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/24773115), the subsequent issues
of _Thorunka_ , and later _Thor_ , are not. For us, this demonstrates clearly
how collections themselves can encourage modes of reading. If you focus on
_Tharunka_ as a singular and long-standing periodical, this significant
political moment is rendered almost invisible. On the other hand, if the
issues are presented together, with commentary and surrounding publications,
the political environment becomes palpable. Wendy and Chris have kindly
allowed us to make their personal collection available via Dat Library (the
key is: 73fd26846e009e1f7b7c5b580e15eb0b2423f9bea33fe2a5f41fac0ddb22cbdc), so
you can discover this for yourself.

### Academia.edu alternative

Academia.edu, started in 2008, has raised tens of millions of dollars as a
social network for academics to share their publications. As a for-profit
venture, it is rife with metrics and it attempts to capitalise on the innate
competition and self-promotion of precarious knowledge workers in the academy.
It is simultaneously popular and despised: popular because it fills an obvious
desire to share the fruits of ones intellectual work, but despised for the
neoliberal atmosphere that pervades every design decision and automated
correspondence. It is, however, just trying to provide a return on investment.

[Gary Hall has written](http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2015/10/18/does-
academiaedu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant.html) that “its financial
rationale rests … on the ability of the angel-investor and venture-capital-
funded professional entrepreneurs who run Academia.edu to exploit the data
flows generated by the academics who use the platform as an intermediary for
sharing and discovering research”. Moreover, he emphasises that in the open-
access world (outside of the exploitative practice of for-profit publishers
like Elsevier, who charge a premium for subscriptions), the privileged
position is to be the one “ _who gate-keeps the data generated around the use
of that content_ ”. This lucrative position has been produced by recent
“[recentralising tendencies](http://commonstransition.org/the-revolution-will-
not-be-decentralised-blockchains/)” of the internet, which in Academia’s case
captures various, scattered open access repositories, personal web pages, and
other archives.

Is it possible to redecentralise? Can we break free of the subjectivities that
Academia.edu is crafting for us as we are interpellated by its infrastructure?
It is incredibly easy for any scholar running Dat Library to make a library of
their own publications and post the key to their faculty web page, Facebook
profile or business card. The tricky — and interesting — thing would be to
develop platforms that aggregate thousands of these libraries in direct
competition with Academia.edu. This way, individuals would maintain control
over their own work; their peer groups would assist in mirroring it; and no
one would be capitalising on the sale of data related to their performance and
popularity.

We note that Academia.edu is a typically centripetal platform: it provides no
tools for exporting one’s own content, so an alternative would necessarily be
a kind of centrifuge.

This alternative is becoming increasingly realistic. With open-access journals
already paving the way, there has more recently been a [call for free and open
access to citation data](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/06
/scholars-push-free-access-online-citation-data-saying-they-need-and-deserve-
access). [The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC)](https://i4oc.org) is
mobilising against the privatisation of data and working towards the
unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data. We see their new
database of citations as making this centrifugal force a possibility.

### Publication format

In writing this README, we have strung together several references. This
writing might be published in a book and the references will be listed as
words at the bottom of the page or at the end of the text. But the writing
might just as well be published as a HyperReadings object, providing the
reader with an archive of all the things we referred to and an editable
version of this text.

A new text editor could be created for this new publication format, not to
mention a new form of publication, which bundles together a set of
HyperReadings texts, producing a universe of texts and references. Each
HyperReadings text might reference others, of course, generating something
that begins to feel like a serverless World Wide Web.

It’s not even necessary to develop a new publication format, as any book might
be considered as a reading list (usually found in the footnotes and
bibliography) with a very detailed description of the relationship between the
consulted texts. What if the history of published works were considered in
this way, such that we might always be able to follow a reference from one
book directly into the pages of another, and so on?

### Syllabus

The syllabus is the manifesto of the twenty-first century. From [Your
Baltimore “Syllabus”](https://apis4blacklives.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/your-
baltimore-syllabus/), to
[#StandingRockSyllabus](https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/),
to [Women and gender non-conforming people writing about
tech](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qx8JDqfuXoHwk4_1PZYWrZu3mmCsV_05Fe09AtJ9ozw/edit),
syllabi are being produced as provocations, or as instructions for
reprogramming imaginaries. They do not announce a new world but they point out
a way to get there. As a programme, the syllabus shifts the burden of action
onto the readers, who will either execute the programme on their own fleshy
operating system — or not. A text that by its nature points to other texts,
the syllabus is already a relational document acknowledging its own position
within a living field of knowledge. It is decidedly not self-contained,
however it often circulates as if it were.

If a syllabus circulated as a HyperReadings document, then it could point
directly to the texts and other media that it aggregates. But just as easily
as it circulates, a HyperReadings syllabus could be forked into new versions:
the syllabus is changed because there is a new essay out, or because of a
political disagreement, or because following the syllabus produced new
suggestions. These forks become a family tree where one can follow branches
and trace epistemological mutations.

## Proposition (or Presuppositions)

While the software that we have started to write is a proposition in and of
itself, there is no guarantee as to _how_ it will be used. But when writing,
we _are_ imagining exactly that: we are making intuitive and hopeful
presuppositions about how it will be used, presuppositions that amount to a
set of social propositions.

### The role of individuals in the age of distribution

Different people have different technical resources and capabilities, but
everyone can contribute to an archive. By simply running the Dat Library
software and adding an archive to it, a person is sharing their disk space and
internet bandwidth in the service of that archive. At first, it is only the
archive’s index (a list of the contents) that is hosted, but if the person
downloads the contents (or even just a small portion of the contents) then
they are sharing in the hosting of the contents as well. Individuals, as
supporters of an archive or members of a community, can organise together to
guarantee the durability and accessibility of an archive, saving a future
UbuWeb from ever having to worry about if their ‘ISP pulling the plug’. As
supporters of many archives, as members of many communities, individuals can
use Dat Library to perform this function many times over.

On the Web, individuals are usually users or browsers — they use browsers. In
spite of the ostensible interactivity of the medium, users are kept at a
distance from the actual code, the infrastructure of a website, which is run
on a server. With a distributed protocol like Dat, applications such as
[Beaker Browser](https://beakerbrowser.com) or Dat Library eliminate the
central server, not by destroying it, but by distributing it across all of the
users. Individuals are then not _just_ users, but also hosts. What kind of
subject is this user-host, especially as compared to the user of the server?
Michel Serres writes in _The Parasite_ :

> “It is raining; a passer-by comes in. Here is the interrupted meal once
more. Stopped for only a moment, since the traveller is asked to join the
diners. His host does not have to ask him twice. He accepts the invitation and
sits down in front of his bowl. The host is the satyr, dining at home; he is
the donor. He calls to the passer-by, saying to him, be our guest. The guest
is the stranger, the interrupter, the one who receives the soup, agrees to the
meal. The host, the guest: the same word; he gives and receives, offers and
accepts, invites and is invited, master and passer-by… An invariable term
through the transfer of the gift. It might be dangerous not to decide who is
the host and who is the guest, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite
and who is the table d’hote, who has the gift and who has the loss, and where
hospitality begins with hospitality.” — Michel Serres, The Parasite (Baltimore
and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 15–16.

Serres notes that _guest_ and _host_ are the same word in French; we might say
the same for _client_ and _server_ in a distributed protocol. And we will
embrace this multiplying hospitality, giving and taking without measure.

### The role of institutions in the age of distribution

David Cameron launched a doomed initiative in 2010 called the Big Society,
which paired large-scale cuts in public programmes with a call for local
communities to voluntarily self-organise to provide these essential services
for themselves. This is not the political future that we should be working
toward: since 2010, austerity policies have resulted in [120,000 excess deaths
in England](http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/11/e017722). In other words,
while it might seem as though _institutions_ might be comparable to _servers_
, inasmuch as both are centralised infrastructures, we should not give them up
or allow them to be dismantled under the assumption that those infrastructures
can simply be distributed and self-organised. On the contrary, institutions
should be defended and organised in order to support the distributed protocols
we are discussing.

One simple way for a larger, more established institution to help ensure the
durability and accessibility of diverse archives is through the provision of
hardware, network capability and some basic technical support. It can back up
the archives of smaller institutions and groups within its own community while
also giving access to its own archives so that those collections might be put
to new uses. A network of smaller institutions, separated by great distances,
might mirror each other’s archives, both as an expression of solidarity and
positive redundancy and also as a means of circulating their archives,
histories and struggles amongst each of the others.

It was the simultaneous recognition that some documents are too important to
be privatised or lost to the threats of neglect, fire, mould, insects, etc.,
that prompted the development of national and state archives (See page 39 in
[Beredo, B. C., Import of the archive: American colonial bureaucracy in the
Philippines, 1898-1916](http://hdl.handle.net/10125/101724)). As public
institutions they were, and still are, tasked with often competing efforts to
house and preserve while simultaneously also ensuring access to public
documents. Fire and unstable weather understandably have given rise to large
fire-proof and climate-controlled buildings as centralised repositories,
accompanied by highly regulated protocols for access. But in light of new
technologies and their new risks, as discussed above, it is compelling to
argue now that, in order to fulfil their public duty, public archives should
be distributing their collections where possible and providing their resources
to smaller institutions and community groups.

Through the provision of disk space, office space, grants, technical support
and employment, larger institutions can materially support smaller
organisations, individuals and their archival afterlives. They can provide
physical space and outreach for dispersed collectors, gathering and piecing
together a fragmented archive.

But what happens as more people and collections are brought in? As more
institutional archives are allowed to circulate outside of institutional
walls? As storage is cut loose from its dependency on the corporate cloud and
into forms of interdependency, such as mutual support networks? Could this
open up spaces for new forms of not-quite-organisations and queer-
institutions? These would be almost-organisations that uncomfortable exist
somewhere between the common categorical markings of the individual and the
institution. In our thinking, its not important what these future forms
exactly look like. Rather, as discussed above, what is important to us is that
in writing software we open up spaces for the unknown, and allow others agency
to build the forms that work for them. It is only in such an atmosphere of
infinite hospitality that we see the future of community libraries, individual
collections and other precarious archives.

## A note on this text

This README was, and still is being, collaboratively written in a
[Git](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git)
[repository](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repository_\(version_control\)).
Git is a free and open-source tool for version control used in software
development. All the code for Hyperreadings, Dat Library and their numerous
associated modules are managed openly using Git and hosted on GitHub under
open source licenses. In a real way, Git’s specification formally binds our
collaboration as well as the open invitation for others to participate. As
such, the form of this README reflects its content. Like this text, these
projects are, by design, works in progress that are malleable to circumstances
and open to contributions, for example by opening a pull request on this
document or raising an issue on our GitHub repositories.

Dockray & Liang
Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
2015


# Sean Dockray & Lawrence Liang — Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the
Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries

 Abdel Kader
Haïdara, a librarian who smuggled hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from
jihadist-occupied Timbuktu to safety in Bamako, stands with ancient volumes
from Timbuktu packed into metal trunks. Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images.

_Foederis aequas Dicamus leges _

(Let us make fair terms for the compact.)

—Virgil’s  _Aeneid_ , XI

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.1All excerpts from _The
Social Contract_ are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _The Social Contract: And,
The First and Second Discourses_, ed. Susan Dunn and Gita May (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2002).

> _June 30, 2015_

>

> _Dear Sean,_

>

> _I have been asked by Raqs Media Collective to contribute to a special
ongoing issue of _e-flux journal _that is part of the Venice Biennale. Raqs’s
section in the issue rethinks Rousseau’s social contract and the possibility
of its being rewritten, as a way of imagining social bonds and solidarities
that can help instigate and affirm a vision of the world as a space of
potential._

>

> _I was wondering if you would join me in a conversation on shadow libraries
and social contracts. The entire universe of the book-sharing communities
seems to offer the possibility of rethinking the terms of the social contract
and its associated terms (consent, general will, private interest, and so on).
While the rise in book sharing is at one level a technological phenomenon (a
library of 100,000 books put in PDF format can presently fit on a one-terabyte
drive that costs less than seventy-five dollars), it is also about how we
think of transformations in social relations mediated by sharing books._

>

> _If the striking image of books in preprint revolution was of being “in
chains,” as Rousseau puts it, I am prompted to wonder about the contemporary
conflict between the digital and mechanisms of control. Are books born free
but are everywhere in chains, or is it the case that they have been set free?
In which case are they writing new social contracts?_

>

> _I was curious about whether you, as the founder of _[
_Aaaaarg.org_](http://aaaaarg.org/) _, had the idea of a social contract in
mind, or even a community, when you started?_

>

> _Lawrence_



**Book I, Chapter VI : The Social Pact**

To find a form of association that may defend and protect with the whole force
of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of
which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and
remain as free as before.’’ Such is the fundamental problem to which the
social contract provides the solution.

We can reduce it to the following terms: ‘‘Each of us puts in common his
person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and
in return each member becomes an indivisible part of the whole.’’

> _June 30, 2015_

>

> _Dear Lawrence,_

>

> _I am just listing a few ideas to put things out there and am happy to try
other approaches:_

>

> _—To think about the two kinds of structure that digital libraries take:
either each library is shared by many user-librarians or there is a library
for each person, shared with all the others. It’s a technological design
question, yes, but it also suggests different social contracts?_

>

> _—What is subtracted when we subtract your capacity/right to share a book
with others, when every one of us must approach the market anew to come into
contact with it? But to take a stab at misappropriating the terms you’ve
listed, consent, what libraries do I consent to? Usually the consent needs to
come from the library, in the form of a card or something, but we don’t ask
enough what we want, maybe. Also what about a social contract of books? Does a
book consent to being in a library? What rights does it have or expect?_

>

> _I really loved the math equation Rousseau used to arrive at the general
will: if you subtract the pluses and minuses of particular wills that cancel
each other out, then the general will is the sum of the differences! But why
does the general need to be the lowest common denominator—certainly there are
more appropriate mathematical concepts that have been developed in the past
few hundred years?_

>

> _Sean_



**Book I, Chapter II: Primitive Societies**

This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His first law is to
attend to his own survival, his first concerns are those he owes to himself;
and as soon as he reaches the age of rationality, being sole judge of how to
survive, he becomes his own master.

It is the relation of things and not of men that constitutes war; and since
the state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from
real relations, private war—war between man and man—cannot exist either in the
state of nature, where there is no settled ownership, or in the social state,
where everything is under the authority of the laws.

> _July 1, 2015_

>

> _Dear Lawrence,_

>

> _Unlike a logic of exchange, or of offer and return with its demands for
reciprocity, the logic of sharing doesn’t ask its members for anything in
return. There are no guarantees that the one who gives a book will get back
anything, whether that is money, an equivalent book, or even a token of
gratitude. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent someone from taking without
giving. I think a logic of sharing will look positively illogical across the
course of its existence. But to me, this is part of the appeal: that it can
accommodate behaviors and relationships that might be impossible within the
market._

>

> _But if there is a lack of a contract governing specific exchanges, then
there is something at another level that defines and organizes the space of
sharing, that governs its boundaries, and that establishes inclusions and
exclusions. Is this something ethics? Identity? Already I am appealing to
something that itself would be shared, and would this sharing precede the
material sharing of, for example, a library? Or would the shared
ethics/identity/whatever be a symptom of the practice of sharing? Well, this
is perhaps the conclusion that anthropologists might come to when trying to
explain the sharing practices of hunter-gatherer societies, but a library?_

>

> _Sean_

>

>

>

> _July 1, 2015_

>

> _Hi Sean,_

>

> _I liked your question of what might account for a sharing instinct when it
comes to books, and whether we appeal to something that already exists as a
shared ethics or identity, or is sharing the basis of a shared
ethics/identity? I have to say that while I have never thought of my own book-
collecting through the analogy of hunter-gatherers, the more I think about it,
the more sense it makes to me. Linguistically we always speak of going on book
hunts and my daily trawling through the various shadow libraries online does
seem to function by way of a hunting-gathering mentality._

>

> _Often I download books I know that I will never personally read because I
know that it may either be of interest to someone else, or that the place of a
library is the cave where one gathers what one has hunted down, not just for
oneself but for others. I also like that we are using so-called primitive
metaphors to account for twenty-first-century digital practices, because it
allows us the possibility of linking these practices to a primal instinct of
sharing, which precedes our encounter with the social norms that classify and
partition that instinct (legal, illegal, authorized, and so on). _

>

> _I don’t know if you remember the meeting that we had in Mumbai a few years
ago—among the other participants, we had an academic from Delhi as an
interlocutor. He expressed an absolute terror at what he saw as the “tyranny
of availability” in online libraries. In light of the immense number of books
available in electronic copies and on our computers or hard discs, he felt
overwhelmed and compared his discomfort with that of being inside a large
library and not knowing what to do. Interestingly, he regularly writes asking
me to supply him with books that he can’t find or does not have access to._

>

> _This got me thinking about the idea of a library and what it may mean, in
its classical sense and its digital sense. An encounter with any library,
especially when it manifests itself physically, is one where you encounter
your own finitude in the face of what seems like the infinity of knowledge.
But personally this sense of awe has also been tinged with an immense
excitement and possibility. The head rush of wanting to jump from a book on
forgotten swear words to an intellectual biography of Benjamin, and the
tingling anticipation as you walk out of the library with ten books, captures
for me more than any other experience the essence of the word potential._

>

> _I have a modest personal library of around four thousand books, which I
know will be kind of difficult for me to finish in my lifetime even if I stop
adding any new books, and yet the impulse to add books to our unending list
never fades. And if you think about this in terms of the number of books that
reside on our computers, then the idea of using numbers becomes a little
pointless, and we need some other way or measure to make sense of our
experience._

>

> _Lawrence_



**Book I, Chapter VII: The Sovereign**

Every individual can, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or
divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen; his private
interest may appear to him quite different from the common interest; his
absolute and naturally independent existence may make him envisage what he
owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would
be less harmful to others than the payment of it would be onerous to him.

> _July 12, 2015_

>

> _Hi Sean,_

>

> _There is no symbol that to my mind captures the regulated nature of the
library more than that of the board that hushes you with its capitalized
SILENCE. Marianne Constable says, “One can acknowledge the figure of silence
in the library and its persistence, even as one may wonder what a silent
library would be, whether libraries ever are silent, and what the various
silences—if any—in a library could be.”_

>

> _If I had to think about the nature of the social contract and the
possibilities of its rewriting from the site of the library one encounters
another set of silent rules and norms. If social contracts are narrative
compacts that establish a political community under the sign of a sovereign
collective called the people, libraries also aspire to establish an authority
in the name of the readers and to that extent they share a common constitutive
character. But just as there is a foundational scandal of absence at the heart
of the social contract that presumes our collective consent (what Derrida
describes as the absence of the people and the presence of their signature)
there seems to be a similar silence in the world of libraries where readers
rarely determine the architecture, the logic, or the rules of the library._

>

> _So libraries have often mirrored, rather than inverted, power relations
that underlie the social contracts that they almost underwrite._  _In contrast
I am wondering if the various shadow libraries that have burgeoned online, the
portable personal libraries that are shared offline: Whether all of them
reimagine the social contract of libraries, and try to create a more insurgent
imagination of the library?_

>

> _Lawrence_

>

>

>

> _July 13, 2015_

>

> _Hi Lawrence,_

>

> _As you know, I’m very interested in structures that allow the people within
ways to meaningfully reconfigure them. This is distinct from participation or
interaction, where the structures are inquisitive or responsive, but not
fundamentally changeable._

>

> _I appreciate the idea that a library might have, not just a collection of
books or a system of organizing, but its own social contract. In the case of
Aaaaarg, as you noticed, it is not explicit. Not only is there no statement as
such, there was never a process prior to the library in which something like a
social contract was designed._

>

> _I did ask users to write out a short statement of their reason for joining
Aaaaarg and have around fifty thousand of these expressions of intention. I
think it’s more interesting to think of the social contract, or at least a
"general will," in terms of those. If Rousseau distinguished between the will
of all and the general will, in a way that could be illustrated by the catalog
of reasons for joining Aaaaarg. Whereas the will of all might be a sum of all
the reasons, the general will would be the sum of what remains after you "take
away the pluses and minuses that cancel one another." I haven’t done the math,
but I don’t think the general will, the general reason, goes beyond a desire
for access._

>

> _To summarize a few significant groupings:_

>

> _—To think outside institutions; _
> _—To find things that one cannot find; _
> _—To have a place to share things;_
> _—To act out a position against intellectual property; _
> _—A love of books (in whatever form)._

>

> _What I do see as common across these groupings is that the desire for
access is, more specifically, a desire to have a relationship with texts and
others that is not mediated by market relations._

>

> _In my original conception of the site, it would be something like a
collective commonplace. Like commonplacing, the excerpts that people would
keep were those parts of texts that seemed particularly useful, that produced
a spark that one wanted to share. This is important: that it was the
experience of being electrified in some way that people were sharing and not a
book as such. Over time, things changed and the shared objects became more
complete so to say, and less “subjective,” but I hope that there is still that
spark. But, at this point, I realize that I am just another one of the many
wills, and just one designer of whatever social contract is underlying the
library._

>

> _So, again—What is the social contract? It wasn’t determined in advance and
it is not written in any about section or FAQ. I would say that it is, like
the library itself, something that is growing and evolving over time, wouldn’t
you?_

>

> _Sean_



**Book II, Chapter VIII : The People**

As an architect, before erecting a large edifice, examines and tests the soil
in order to see whether it can support the weight, so a wise lawgiver does not
begin by drawing up laws that are good in themselves, but considers first
whether the people for whom he designs them are fit to maintain them.

> _July 15, 2015_

>

> _Lawrence,_

>

> _There are many different ways of organizing a library, of structuring it,
and it’s the same for online libraries. I think the most interesting
conversation would not be to bemoan the digital for overloading our ability to
be discerning, or to criticize it for not conforming to the kind of economy
that we expected publishing to have, or become nostalgic for book smells; but
to actually really wonder what it is that could make these libraries great,
places that will be missed in the future if they go away. To me, this is the
most depressing thing about the unfortunate fact that digital shadow libraries
have to operate somewhat below the radar: it introduces a precariousness that
doesn’t allow imagination to really expand, as it becomes stuck on techniques
of evasion, distribution, and redundancy. But what does it mean when a library
functions transnationally? When its contents can be searched? When reading
interfaces aren’t bound by the book form? When its contents can be referenced
from anywhere?_

>

> _What I wanted when building Aaaaarg.org the first time was to make it
useful, in the absolute fullest sense of the word, something for people who
saw books not just as things you buy to read because they’re enjoyable, but as
things you need to have a sense of self, of orientation in the world, to learn
your language and join in the conversation you are a part of—a library for
people who related to books like that._

>

> _Sean_

>

>

>

> _July 17, 2015_

>

> _Hi Sean_,

>

> _To pick up on the reasons that people give for joining Aaaaarg.org: even
though Aaaaarg.org is not bound by a social contract, we do see the
outlines—through common interests and motivations—of a fuzzy sense of a
community. And the thing with fuzzy communities is that they don’t necessarily
need to be defined with the same clarity as enumerated communities, like
nations, do. Sudipta Kaviraj, who used the term fuzzy communities, also speaks
of a “narrative contract”—perhaps a useful way to think about how to make
sense of the bibliophilic motivations and intentions, or what you describe as
the “desire to have a relationship with texts and others that is not mediated
by market relations.”_

>

> _This seems a perfectly reasonable motivation except that it is one that
would be deemed impossible at the very least, and absurd at worst by those for
whom the world of books and ideas can only be mediated by the market. And it’s
this idea of the absurd and the illogical that I would like to think a little
bit about via the idea of the ludic, a term that I think might be useful to
deploy while thinking of ways of rewriting the social contract: a ludic
contract, if you will, entered into through routes allowed by ludic libraries.
_

>

> _If we trace the word ludic back to its French and Latin roots, we find it
going back to the idea of playing (from Latin _ludere  _"to play" or _ludique
_“spontaneously playful”), but today it has mutated into most popular usage
(ludicrous) generally used in relation to an idea that is so impossible it
seems absurd. And more often than not the term conveys an absurdity associated
with a deviation from well-established norms including utility, seriousness,
purpose, and property._

>

> _But what if our participation in various forms of book sharing was less
like an invitation to enter a social contract, and more like an invitation to
play? But play what, you may ask, since the term play has childish and
sometimes frivolous connotation to it? And we are talking here about serious
business. Gadamer proposes that rather than the idea of fun and games, we can
think with the analogy of a cycle, suggesting that it was important not to
tighten the nuts on the axle too much, or else the wheel could not turn. “It
has to have some play in it … and not too much play, or the wheel will fall
off. It was all about _spielraum _, ‘play-room,’ some room for play. It needs
space.” _

>

> _The ludic, or the invitation to the ludic in this account, is first and
foremost a necessary relief—just as playing is—from constraining situations
and circumstances. They could be physical, monetary, or out of sheer
nonavailability (thus the desire for access could be thought of as a tactical
maneuver to create openings). They could be philosophical constraints
(epistemological, disciplinary), social constraints (divisions of class, work,
and leisure time). At any rate all efforts at participating in shadow
libraries seem propelled by an instinct to exceed the boundaries of the self
however defined, and to make some room for play or to create a “ludic
spaciousness,” as it were. _

>

> _The spatial metaphor is also related to the bounded/unbounded (another name
for freedom I guess) and to the extent that the unbounded allows us a way into
our impossible selves; they share a space with dreams, but rarely do we think
of the violation of the right to access as fundamentally being a violation of
our right to dream. Your compilation of the reasons that people wanted to join
Aaaaarg may well be thought of as an archive of one-sentence-long dreams of
the ludic library. _

>

> _If for Bachelard the house protects the dreamer, the library for me is a
ludic shelter, which brings me back to an interesting coincidence. I don’t
know what it is that prompted you to choose the name Aaaaarg.org; I don’t know
if you are aware it binds you irrevocably (to use the legal language of
contracts) with one of the very few theorists of the ludic, the Dutch
philosopher Johan Huizinga, who coined the word _homo ludens _(as against the
more functional, scientific homo sapiens or functional homo faber). In his
1938 text Huizinga observes that “the fun of playing, resists all analysis,
all logical interpretation,” and as a concept it cannot be reduced to any
other mental category. He feels that no language really has an exact
equivalent to the word fun but the closest he comes in his own language is the
Dutch word _aardigkeit, _so the line between aaaarg and aaard may have well
have been dreamt of before Aaaaarg.org even started._

>

> _More soon,_

>

> _Lawrence_

×

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Dockray, Pasquinelli, Smith & Waldorf
There is Nothing Less Passive than the Act of Fleeing
2010


# There is Nothing Less Passive than the Act of Fleeing

[The Public School](/web/20170523052416/http://journalment.org/author/public-
school)

What follows is a condensed and edited version of a text for a panel that was
presented at UCIRA’s _Future Tense: Alternative Arts and Economies in the
University_  conference held in San Diego, California on November 18, 2010.
The panel shared the same name as a 13-day itinerant seminar in Berlin
organized by Dockray, Waldorf, and Fiona Whitton earlier that year, in July.
The seminar began with an excerpt from Tiqqun’s _Introduction to Civil War_ ,
which was co-translated into English by Smith; and later read a chapter from
Pasquinelli’s _Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons_. Both authors have
also participated in meetings at The Public School in Los Angeles and Berlin.
Both the panel and the seminar developed out of longer conversations at The
Public School in Los Angeles, which began in late 2007 under Telic Arts
Exchange. The Public School is a school with no curriculum, where classes are
proposed and organized by the public.


## The Education Factory

The University as I understand it, has been a threshold between youth and the
labor market. Or it has been a threshold between a general education and a
more specialized one. In its more progressive form, it’s been a zone of
transition into an expanding middle class. But does this form still exist? I’m
inclined to think just the opposite, that the University is becoming a mean
for filtering people out of the middle class via student loan debt, which now
exceeds credit card debt. The point of the questions for me is simply what is
the point of the University? What are we fighting for or defending?

The next question might be, do students work? The University is a crucial site
in the reproduction of class relations; we know that students are consumers;
we know the student is a future worker who will be compelled to work, and work
in a specific way, because she/he is crushed by debt contracted during her/his
tenure as a student; we know that students work while attending school, and
that for many students school and work eerily begin to resemble one another.
But asking whether students work is to ask something more specific: do
students produce value and, therefore surplus-value? If we can assume, for the
moment, that students are a factor in the “knowledge production” that takes
place in the University, is this production of knowledge also the production
of value? We confront, maybe, a paradox: all social activity has become
“productive”—captured, absorbed—at the very moment value becomes unmeasurable.

What does this have to do with students, and their work? The thesis of the
social factory was supplemented by the assumption that knowledge had become a
central mode in the production of value in post-Fordist environments. Wouldn’t
this mean that the university could become an increasingly important
flashpoint in social struggles, now that it has become not simply the site of
the reproduction of the capital relation, but involved in the immediate
production process, directly productive of value? Would we have to understand
students themselves as, if not knowledge producers, an irreplaceable moment or
function within that process? None of this remains clear. The question is not
only a sociological one, it is also a political one. The strategy of
reconceptualizing students as workers is rooted in the classical Marxist
identification of revolt with the point of production, that is, exploitation.
To declare all social activity to be productive is another way of saying that
social war can be triggered at any site within society, even among the
precarious, the unemployed, and students.

_Knowledge is tied to struggle. To truly know is to hate truly. This is why
the working class can know and possess everything of capital, as it is enemy
to itself as capital._
—Tronti, 1966

That form of “hate” mentioned by Tronti is suggesting something interesting
form of political passion and a new modus operandi. The relation between hate
and knowledge, suggested by Tronti, is the opposite of the cynical detachment
of the new social figure of the entrepreneur-artist but it’s a joyful hate of
our condition. In order to educate ourselves we should hate our very own
environment and social network in which we were educated—the university. The
position of the artist in their work and the performance of themselves (often
no different) can take are manyfold. There are histories for all of these
postures that can be referenced and adopted. They are all acceptable tactics
as long as we keep doing and churning out more. But where does this get us,
both within the confines of the arts and the larger social structure? We are
taught that the artist is always working, thinking, observing. We have learned
the tricks of communication, performance and adaptability. We can go anywhere,
react to anything, respond in a thoughtful and creative way to all problems.
And we do this because while there is opportunity, we should take it. “We
shouldn’t complain, others have it much worse.” But it doesn’t mean that we
shouldn’t imagine something else. To begin thinking this way, it means a
refusal to deliver an event, to perform on demand. Maybe we need a kind of
inflexibility, of obstruction, of non-conductivity. After all, what exactly
are we producing and performing for? Can we try to think about these talents
of performance, of communication? If so, could this be the basis for an
intimacy, a friendship… another institution?


## Alternative pedagogical models

Let’s consider briefly the desire for “new pedagogical models” and “new forms
of knowledge production”. When articulated by the University, this simply
means new forms of instruction and new forms of research. Liberal faculty and
neoliberal politicians or administrators find themselves joined in this hunt
for future models and forms. On the one hand, faculty imagines that these new
techniques can provide space for continuing the good. On the other hand,
investors, politicians, and administrators look for any means to make the
University profitable; use unpaid labour, eliminate non-productive physical
spaces, and create new markets. Symptomatically, there is very little
resistance to this search for new forms and new models for the simple reason
that there is a consensus that the University should and will continue.

It’s also important to note that many of the so-called new forms and new
models being considered lie beyond the walls and payroll of the institution,
therefore both low-cost and low-risk. It is now a familiar story: the
institution attempts to renew itself by importing its own critique. The Public
School is not a new model and it’s not going to save the University. It is not
even a critique of the University any more or less than it is a critique of
the field of art or of capitalist society. It is not “the next university”
because it is a practice of leaving the University to the side. It would be a
mistake to think that this means isolation or total detachment.

Today, the forms of university governance cannot allow themselves to uproot
self-education. To the contrary, self-education constitutes a vital sap for
the survival of the institutional ruins, snatched up and rendered valuable in
the form of revenue. Governance is the trap, hasty and flexible, of the
common. Instead of countering us frontally, the enemy follows us. We must
immediately reject any weak interpretation of the theme of autonomous
institutions, according to which the institution is a self-governed structure
that lives between the folds of capitalism, without excessively bothering it.
The institutionalisation of self-education doesn’t mean being recognized as
one actor among many within the education market, but the capacity to organize
living knowledge’s autonomy and resistance.

One of the most important “new pedagogical models” that emerged over the past
year in the struggles around the implosion of the “public” university are the
occupations that took place in the Fall of 2009. Unlike other forms of action,
which tend to follow the timetable and cadence of the administration, to the
point of mirroring it, these actions had their own temporality, their own
initiative, their own internal logic. They were not at all concerned with
saving a university that was already in ruins, but rather with creating a
space at the heart of the University within which something else, some future,
could be risked, elaborated, prefigured. Everything had to be improvised, from
moment to moment, and in these improvisations new knowledges were developed
and shared. This improvisation was demanded by the aleatory quality of the
types of relations that emerged within these spaces, relations no longer
regulated by the social alibis that assigns everyone her/his place. When
students occupy university buildings—here in California, in NYC, in Puerto
Rico, in Europe and the UK, everywhere—they do so not because they want to
save their universities. They do so because they know the university for what
it is, as something to be at once seized and abandoned. They know that they
can only rely on and learn from one another.


## The Common and The Public

What is really so disconcerting about this antinomy between the logic of the
common and the logic of the social or the public? For Jacotot, it means the
development of a communist politics that is neither reformist nor seditious2.
It proposes the formation of common spaces at a distance from—if not outside
of—the public sphere and its communicative reason: “whoever forsakes the
workings of the social machine has the opportunity to make the electrical
energy of the emancipation machine.”

What does it mean to forsake the social machine? That is the major political
question facing us today. Such a forsaking would require that our political
energies organize themselves around spaces of experimentation at a distance
not only from the university and what is likely its slow-motion, or sudden,
collapse, but also from an entire imaginary inherited from the workers
movement: the task of a future social emancipation and vectors and forms of
struggle such a task implies. Perhaps what is required is not to put off
equality for the future, but presuppose the common, to affirm that commons as
a fact, a given, which must nevertheless be verified, created, not by a social
body, not by a collective force, but a power of the common, now.

School is not University. Neither is it Academy or College or even Institute.
We are all familiar with the common meaning of the word: it is a place for
learning. In another sense, it also refers to organized education in general,
which is made most clear by the decision to leave, to “drop out of school”.
Alongside these two stable, almost architectural definitions, the word
gestures to composition and movement—the school of bodies, moving
independently, together; the school only exists as long as that collective
movement does. The school takes shape in this oscillation between form and
formlessness, not through the act of constructing a wall but by the process of
realizing its boundary through practice.

Perhaps this is a way to think of how to develop what Felix Guattari called
“the associative sector” in 1982: “everything that isn’t the state, or private
capital, or even cooperatives”3. At first gloss, the associative sector is
only a name for the remainder, the already outside; but, in the language of a
school, it is a constellation of relationships, affinities, new
subjectivities, and movements, flickering into existence through life and use,
An “engaged withdrawal” that simultaneously creates an exit and institutes in
the act of passing through. Which itself might bring us back to school, to the
Greek etymology of school, skhole, “a holding back”, a “keeping clear” of
space for reflective distance. On the one hand, perhaps this reflective space
simply allows theoretical knowledge to shape or affect performative action;
but on the other hand, the production of this “clearing” is not given,
certainly not now and certainly not by the institutions that claim to give it.
Reflective space is not the precondition for performative action. On the
contrary; performative action is the precondition for reflective space—or,
more appropriately, space and action must be coproduced.

Is the University even worth “saving”? We are right to respond with
indignation, or better, with an array of tactics—some procedural, some more
“direct”—against these incursions, which always seem to authorize themselves
by appeals to economic austerity, budget shortfalls, and tightened belts.
Perhaps what is being destroyed in this process is the very notion of the
public sphere itself, a notion that. It is easy to succumb to the illusion
that the only possible result of this destruction of the figure of the public
is privatization. But what if the figure of the public was to be set off
against not only the private and property relations, but against a figure of
the “common” as well? What if, in other words, the notion of the public has
always been an unstable, mediating term between privatization and
communization, and what if the withering of this mediation left these two
process openly at odds with each other? Perhaps, then, it is not simply a
question of saving a university and, more broadly, a public space that is
already withering away; maybe our energies and our intelligence, our
collective or common intellectual forces, should be devoted to organizing and
articulating just this sort of counter-transition, at a distance from the
public and the private.


## Authorship and new forms of knowledge

For decades we have spoken about the “death of the author”. The most sustained
critiques of authorship have been made from the spheres of art and education,
but not coincidentally, these spheres have the most invested in the notion.
Credit and accreditation are the mechanisms for attaching symbolic capital to
individuals via degrees and other lines on CVs. The curriculum vitæ is an
inverted credit report, evidence of underpaid work, kept orderly with an
expectation of some future return.

All of this work, this self-documentation, this fidelity between ourselves and
our papers, is for what, for whom? And what is the consequence of a world
where every person is armed with their vitæ, other than “the war of all
against all?” It’s that sensation that there are no teams but everyone has got
their own jersey.

The idea behind the project The Public School is to teach each other in a very
horizontal way. No curriculum, no hierarchy. But is The Public School able to
produce new knowledge and new content by itself? Can the The Public School
become a sort of autonomous collective author? Or, is The Public School just
about exchanges and social networking?

In the recent history of university struggles, some collectives started to
refresh the idea of coresearch; a form of knowledge that can produce new
subjectivities by researching. New subjectivities that produce new knowledge
and new knowledge that produces new subjectivities If knowledge comes only
from conflict, knowledge goes back to conflict in order to produce new
autonomy and subjectivities.

### The Public School

Sean Dockray, Matteo Pasquinelli, Jason Smith and Caleb Waldorf are founding
members of and collaborators at The Public School. Initiated in 2007 under
Telic Arts Exchange (literally in the basement) in Los Angeles, The Public
School is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows:
first, classes are proposed by the public; then, people have the opportunity
to sign up for the classes; finally, when enough people have expressed
interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed
up. The Public School is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it
has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that
supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that
everything is in everything. The Public School currently exists in Los
Angeles, New York, Berlin, Brussels, Helsinki, Philadelphia, Durham, San Juan,
and is still expanding.

Elbakyan
Why Science is Better with Communism The Case of Sci-Hub transcript and translation
2016


# Transcript and translation of Sci-Hub presentation

_The University of North Texas 's [Open Access Symposium
2016](/symposium/2016/) included [a presentation via Skype by Alexandra
Elbakyan](/symposium/2016/why-science-better-communism-case-sci-hub), the
founder of Sci-Hub. [Elbakyan's
slides](http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc850001/) (and those of
other presenters) have been archived in the UNT Digital Library, and [video of
this presentation](https://youtu.be/hr7v5FF5c8M) (and others) is now available
on YouTube and soon in the UNT Digital Library._

_The presentation was entitled "Why Science is Better with Communism? The Case
of Sci-Hub." Below is an edited transcript of the presentation produced by
Regina Anikina and Kevin Hawkins, with a translation by Kevin Hawkins and Anna
Pechenina._

**Martin Halbert** : We have a recent addition to our lineup of speakers that
we'll start off the day with: Alexandra Elbakyan. As many of you know,
Alexandra is a Kazakhstani graduate student, computer programmer, and the
creator of the controversial Sci-Hub site. The New York Times has compared her
to Edward Snowden for leaking information and because she avoids American law,
but Ars Technica has compared her to Aaron Swartz--so a controversial figure.
We thought it was very important to include her in the dialog about open
access because we want, in this symposium series, to include all the different
perspectives on copyright, intellectual property, open access, and access to
scholarly information. So I'm delighted that we're actually able to have her
here via Skype to present.

---

**Alexandra Elbakyan** : First of all, thank you for inviting me to share my
views. My name is Alexandra. As you might have guessed, I represent the site
Sci-Hub. It was founded in 2011 and immediately became popular among the local
community, almost immediately began providing access to about 40 articles an
hour and now providing more than 200,000.

It has to be said that over the course of the site's development it was
strongly supported by donations, and when for various reasons we had to
suspend the service, there were many displeased users who clamored for the
project to return so that the work in their laboratory could continue.

This is the case not just in poor countries; I can say that in rich countries
the public also doesn't have access to scholarly articles. And not all
universities have subscriptions to those resources that are required for
research.

A few of our users insisted that we start charging users, for example, by
allowing one or two articles to be downloaded for free but charging for more,
so that the service would be supported by those who really need it. But I
didn't end up doing that because the goal of the resource is knowledge for
all.

Certain open-access advocates criticize the site, saying that what we really
need is for articles to be in open access from the start, by changing the
business models of publishers. I can respond by saying that the goal of the
project is first and foremost the dissemination of scholarly knowledge in
society, and we have to work in the conditions we find ourselves in. Of
course, if scholarly publishers had a different business model, then perhaps
this project wouldn't be necessary. We can also imagine that if humans had
wings, we wouldn't need airplanes. But in any case we need to fly, so we make
airplanes.

Scholarly publishers quickly dubbed the work of Sci-Hub as piracy. Admittedly
Sci-Hub violates the laws of copyright, but copyright is related to the rights
of intellectual property. That is, scholarly articles are the property of
publishers, and reading them for free turns out to be something like theft
according to the current law.

The concept of intellectual property itself is not new, although it can seem
otherwise. The history of copyright goes back to around the 18th century,
although the first mentions of something similar can be found in the Talmud.
It's just that recently copyright has been found at the center of passionate
debate since some are trying to forbid the free distribution of information in
the internet.

However, the central focus of the debate is on censorship and privacy. The
defense of intellectual property in the internet requires censorship of
websites, and that is consequently a violation of freedom of speech. This also
raises a question of interference in private life - that is, when the
government in some way monitors users who violate copyright. In principle this
is also an intrusion in communication.

However, the very essence of copyright - that is, the concept of intellectual
property - is almost never questioned. That is, whether knowledge can be
someone's property is rarely discussed.

However, our ancestors were even more daring. They did not just question
intellectual property but property in general. That is, there are works in
which we can find the appearance of the idea of communism. There's Thomas
More's _Utopia_ from the 16th century, but actually such works arose much
earlier, even in Ancient Greece where these questions were already been
discussed in 391 BCE.

If we look at the slogans of communism, we see that one of the core concepts
is the struggle against inequality, the revolt of the suppressed classes,
whose members don't have any power against those who have concentrated basic
resources and power in their hands, with the goal of redistributing these
resources.

We can see that even today there is a certain informational inequality, when,
for example, only students and employees of the most wealthy universities have
full access to scholarly information, while access can be completely lacking
for institutions at the next lower tier and for the general public.

An idea arises: if there isn't private property, then there's no basis for
unequal distribution of wealth. In our case as well: if there's no private
intellectual property and all scholarly publications are nationalized, then
all people will have equal access to knowledge.

However, a question arises: if there is no private property, then what can
stimulate a person to work? One of the ideas is that under communism, rather
than greed or aspiration for wealth being a stimulus for work, a person would
aspire to self-development and learning for the betterment of the world.

Even if such values can't be applied to society as a whole, they at least work
in the world of scholarship. Therefore in the Soviet Union there was a true
cult of science - statues were even erected to the glory of science - and
perhaps thanks to this our country was one of the first to go into space.

However, it's one thing to have a revolution, when there's a mass
redistribution of property in society, but an act of theft is another thing.
This, of course, is not yet a revolution, but it's a small protest against the
property rights and the unequal distribution of wealth. Theft as protest has
always been welcomed and approved of in all eras of society. For example, we
all know about Robin Hood, but there have actually been quite a few noble
bandits in history. I've listed just a few of them.

I think that if the state works well, then accordingly it has a working tax
system and a certain system of redistribution of wealth, and then,
accordingly, there's no cause for revolution, for example. But if for some
reasons the state works poorly, then people begin to solve the problem for
themselves. In this way, Sci-Hub is an appropriate response to the inequality
that has arisen due to lack of access to information.

Pictured is Aldar Köse, a Kazakh folk hero who used his cunning to deceive
wealthy beys and take possession of their property. It's interesting to note
that beys are always depicted as greedy and stupid. And if you look at what's
written in the blogosphere today about scholarly publishers, you can find
these same characteristics.

There's also the interesting figure of the ancient Greek god Hermes, the
patron of thieves. That is, theft was a sufficiently respected activity that
it had its own god.

There's a researcher named Norman Brown who wrote an academic work called
_Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth_. It turns out that this myth is
related to a certain revolution in ancient Greek society, when the lower
classes, which lacked property, began to rise up.

For example, the poet Theognis of Megara wrote that "those who were nothing
became everything" and vice versa. This is essentially one of the most well-
known communist slogans.

For the ancient Greeks this was related, again as Brown says, to the
appearance of trade. Trade was identified with theft. There was no clear
distinction between the exchange of legal and illegal goods - that is, trade
was just as much considered theft as what we call piracy today.

Why did it turn out this way? Because Hermes was originally a god of
boundaries and transitions. Therefore, we can think that property is related
to keeping something within boundaries. At the same time, the things that
Hermes protected - theft, trade and communication - are related to boundary-
crossing.

If we think about scholarly journals, then any journal is first of all a means
of communication, and therefore it's apparent that keeping journals in closed
access contradicts the essence of what they were intended for.

This is, of course, not even the most interesting thing.

Hermes actually evolved - that is, while he was once an intellectual deity, he
later came to be interpreted as the same as Thoth, the Egyptian god of
knowledge, and further came to oversee such things as astrology, alchemy, and
magic - that is, the things from which, you might say, contemporary sciences
arose. So we can say that contemporary science arose from theft.

Of course, someone can object, saying that contemporary science is very
different from esoterica, such as astrology and alchemy, but if we look at the
history of science, we see that contemporary science differs from the ancient
arts in the former being more open.

That is, when the movement towards greater openness appeared, contemporary
science also appeared. Once again this is not an argument in support of
scholarly publishers.

Indeed, in the cultural consciousness science and the process of learning have
always been closely associated with theft, beginning with the legend of Adam
and Eve and the forbidden tree, which is called simply "the tree of
knowledge." And it's interesting that Elsevier's logo depicts some kind of
tree, which, accordingly, raises associations with this tree in the Garden of
Eden - the tree of knowledge - from which it was forbidden to eat the fruit.

Likewise we can recall the well-known legend of Prometheus, a part of our
cultural consciousness, who stole some knowledge and brought it to humans.
Once again we see the connection between science and theft.

Nowadays, many scholars have described science as the knowledge of secrets.
However, if we look closely, we have to ask: what is a secret? A secret is
something private, in essence private property. Accordingly, the disclosure of
the secret signifies that it ceases to be property. Once again we see the
contradiction between scholarship and property rights.

We can recall Robert Merton, who studied research institutes and revealed four
basic ethical norms that in his opinion are important for their successful
functioning. One of them is communism - that is, knowledge is shared.

Accordingly, if we look at certain traditional communities, then we find that
those communities that function within a caste system (dividing people by
occupation) usually turn out to have certain castes of people with
intellectual occupations, and if you look at the ethical norms of such castes,
you find that they are also communistic. You can find this, for example, in
Plato. Or even if you look at India, you find the accumulation of wealth is
usually the occupation of another caste.

To sum up, we have the following take-aways. Science, as a part of culture, is
in conflict with private property. Accordingly, scholarly communication is a
dual conflict. What open access is doing is returning science to its essential
roots.

**Audience question** : I'm a former university press director. I'd just like
to point out also that "property is theft" is the watchword of French
anarchism, a famous phrase from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, so perhaps anarchism
and science are also inseparable. But my main question really has to do with a
challenge that a librarian named Rick Anderson posted on the Scholarly Kitchen
blog two days ago, and that has to do with the fact that evidently Sci-Hub
relies a lot on the access codes that faculty have given to Sci-Hub in one way
or another so that Sci-Hub can gain access to the electronic materials that it
then uses to post on its own site. What Anderson does is points out that if
that information falls into the wrong hands, there are all sorts of terrible
things that can be done because those access codes provide access to personal
information, to student data, to all sorts of other things that could be badly
misused, so my question to you is what assurances can you give us that that
kind of information will not fall into the wrong hands.

**Elbakyan** : Well, first of all I doubt that it's possible to gain access to
all the information that is listed in the post on the Scholarly Kitchen. As a
rule, these logins and passwords can only be used for access to the proxy
server through which you can download articles, whereas for access to other
things, such as email, the login and password won't work. [ _Audience reacts
with skepticism._ ]

**Audience question** : Earlier this week a number of us participated in a
panel presentation on scholarly publishing and social justice, and one of the
primary points that came out of that was that the people who create the
published product - not necessarily the scientist but the people who actually
do the work that results in the published product - deserve to be paid for
their labor, and there is definitely labor involved. So if you're replacing
the market for these publications and eliminating these people's opportunities
to make money, where is the appropriate distribution of wealth.

**Elbakyan** : First of all, we shouldn't confuse the compensation that a
person receives for their labor with the excessive profits that publishers
wring out by limiting access to information. For example, Sci-Hub also does a
fair amount of work and has high expenses, but these expenses are for some
reason covered by donations - that is, there's no need to close access to
information - that is, it's a red herring to say that if articles are
distributed for free, people won't have anything to eat. One does not follow
from the other. In my opinion, though, an optimal system for funding would
consist of grants, donations, and membership fees.

**Audience question** : You've spoken so far exclusively about Sci-Hub. I
wonder if you could comment just briefly on LibGen and whether you see the two
models as identical or whether there are any material differences between
LibGen and Sci-Hub.

**Elbakyan** : Well, LibGen is primarily a repository. It doesn't download
new articles but is more aimed at preserving that which has already been
downloaded.

USDC
Complaint: Elsevier v. SciHub and LibGen
2015


Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 1 of 16

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

Index No. 15-cv-4282 (RWS)
COMPLAINT

ELSEVIER INC., ELSEVIER B.V., ELSEVIER LTD.
Plaintiffs,

v.

SCI-HUB d/b/a WWW.SCI-HUB.ORG, THE LIBRARY GENESIS PROJECT d/b/a LIBGEN.ORG, ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN, JOHN DOES 1-99,
Defendants.

Plaintiffs Elsevier Inc, Elsevier B.V., and Elsevier Ltd. (collectively “Elsevier”),
by their attorneys DeVore & DeMarco LLP, for their complaint against www.scihub.org,
www.libgen.org, Alexandra Elbakyan, and John Does 1-99 (collectively the “Defendants”),
allege as follows:

NATURE OF THE ACTION

1. This is a civil action seeking damages and injunctive relief for: (1) copyright infringement under the copyright laws of the United States (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.); and (2) violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18.U.S.C. § 1030, based upon Defendants’ unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of Elsevier’s copyrighted works. Defendants’ actions in this regard have caused and continue to cause irreparable injury to Elsevier and its publishing partners (including scholarly societies) for which it publishes certain journals.

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Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 2 of 16

PARTIES

2. Plaintiff Elsevier Inc. is a corporation organized under the laws of Delaware, with its principal place of business at 360 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10010.

3. Plaintiff Elsevier B.V. is a corporation organized under the laws of the Netherlands, with its principal place of business at Radarweg 29, Amsterdam, 1043 NX, Netherlands.

4. Plaintiff Elsevier Ltd. is a corporation organized under the laws of the United Kingdom, with its principal place of business at 125 London Wall, EC2Y 5AS United Kingdom.

5. Upon information and belief, Defendant Sci-Hub is an individual or organization engaged in the operation of the website accessible at the URL “www.sci-hub.org,” and related subdomains, including but not limited to the subdomain “www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.org,”
www.elsevier.com.sci-hub.org,” “store.elsevier.com.sci-hub.org,” and various subdomains
incorporating the company and product names of other major global publishers (collectively with www.sci-hub.org the “Sci-Hub Website”). The sci-hub.org domain name is registered by
“Fundacion Private Whois,” located in Panama City, Panama, to an unknown registrant. As of
the date of this filing, the Sci-Hub Website is assigned the IP address 31.184.194.81. This IP address is part of a range of IP addresses assigned to Petersburg Internet Network Ltd., a webhosting company located in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

6. Upon information and belief, Defendant Library Genesis Project is an organization which operates an online repository of copyrighted materials accessible through the website located at the URL “libgen.org” as well as a number of other “mirror” websites
(collectively the “Libgen Domains”). The libgen.org domain is registered by “Whois Privacy
Corp.,” located at Ocean Centre, Montagu Foreshore, East Bay Street, Nassau, New Providence,

2

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 3 of 16

Bahamas, to an unknown registrant. As of the date of this filing, libgen.org is assigned the IP address 93.174.95.71. This IP address is part of a range of IP addresses assigned to Ecatel Ltd., a web-hosting company located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

7. The Libgen Domains include “elibgen.org,” “libgen.info,” “lib.estrorecollege.org,” and “bookfi.org.”

8. Upon information and belief, Defendant Alexandra Elbakyan is the principal owner and/or operator of Sci-Hub. Upon information and belief, Elbakyan is a resident of Almaty, Kazakhstan.

9. Elsevier is unaware of the true names and capacities of the individuals named as Does 1-99 in this Complaint (together with Alexandra Elbakyan, the “Individual Defendants”),
and their residence and citizenship is also unknown. Elsevier will amend its Complaint to allege the names, capacities, residence and citizenship of the Doe Defendants when their identities are learned.

10. Upon information and belief, the Individual Defendants are the owners and operators of numerous of websites, including Sci-Hub and the websites located at the various
Libgen Domains, and a number of e-mail addresses and accounts at issue in this case.

11. The Individual Defendants have participated, exercised control over, and benefited from the infringing conduct described herein, which has resulted in substantial harm to
the Plaintiffs.

JURISDICTION AND VENUE

12. This is a civil action arising from the Defendants’ violations of the copyright laws of the United States (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”),

3

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 4 of 16

18.U.S.C. § 1030. Therefore, the Court has subject matter jurisdiction over this action pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1331.

13. Upon information and belief, the Individual Defendants own and operate computers and Internet websites and engage in conduct that injures Plaintiff in this district, while
also utilizing instrumentalities located in the Southern District of New York to carry out the acts complained of herein.

14. Defendants have affirmatively directed actions at the Southern District of New York by utilizing computer servers located in the District without authorization and by
unlawfully obtaining access credentials belonging to individuals and entities located in the
District, in order to unlawfully access, copy, and distribute Elsevier's copyrighted materials
which are stored on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform.
15.

Defendants have committed the acts complained of herein through unauthorized

access to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted materials which are stored and maintained on computer servers
located in the Southern District of New York.
16.

Defendants have undertaken the acts complained of herein with knowledge that

such acts would cause harm to Plaintiffs and their customers in both the Southern District of
New York and elsewhere. Defendants have caused the Plaintiff injury while deriving revenue
from interstate or international commerce by committing the acts complained of herein.
Therefore, this Court has personal jurisdiction over Defendants.
17.

Venue in this District is proper under 28 U.S.C. § 1391(b) because a substantial

part of the events giving rise to Plaintiffs’ claims occurred in this District and because the
property that is the subject of Plaintiffs’ claims is situated in this District.

4

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 5 of 16

FACTUAL ALLEGATIONS
Elsevier’s Copyrights in Publications on ScienceDirect
18.

Elsevier is a world leading provider of professional information solutions in the

Science, Medical, and Health sectors. Elsevier publishes, markets, sells, and licenses academic
textbooks, journals, and examinations in the fields of science, medicine, and health. The
majority of Elsevier’s institutional customers are universities, governmental entities, educational
institutions, and hospitals that purchase physical and electronic copies of Elsevier’s products and
access to Elsevier’s digital libraries. Elsevier distributes its scientific journal articles and book
chapters electronically via its proprietary subscription database “ScienceDirect”
(www.sciencedirect.com). In most cases, Elsevier holds the copyright and/or exclusive
distribution rights to the works available through ScienceDirect. In addition, Elsevier holds
trademark rights in “Elsevier,” “ScienceDirect,” and several other related trade names.
19.

The ScienceDirect database is home to almost one-quarter of the world's peer-

reviewed, full-text scientific, technical and medical content. The ScienceDirect service features
sophisticated search and retrieval tools for students and professionals which facilitates access to
over 10 million copyrighted publications. More than 15 million researchers, health care
professionals, teachers, students, and information professionals around the globe rely on
ScienceDirect as a trusted source of nearly 2,500 journals and more than 26,000 book titles.
20.

Authorized users are provided access to the ScienceDirect platform by way of

non-exclusive, non-transferable subscriptions between Elsevier and its institutional customers.
According to the terms and conditions of these subscriptions, authorized users of ScienceDirect
must be users affiliated with the subscriber (e.g., full-time and part-time students, faculty, staff

5

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 6 of 16

and researchers of subscriber universities and individuals using computer terminals within the
library facilities at the subscriber for personal research, education or other non-corporate use.)
21.

A substantial portion of American research universities maintain active

subscriptions to ScienceDirect. These subscriptions, under license, allow the universities to
provide their faculty and students access to the copyrighted works within the ScienceDirect
database.
22.

Elsevier stores and maintains the copyrighted material available in ScienceDirect

on servers owned and operated by a third party whose servers are located in the Southern District
of New York and elsewhere. In order to optimize performance, these third-party servers
collectively operate as a distributed network which serves cached copies of Elsevier’s
copyrighted materials by way of particular servers that are geographically close to the user. For
example, a user that accesses ScienceDirect from a University located in the Southern District of
New York will likely be served that content from a server physically located in the District.

Authentication of Authorized University ScienceDirect Users
23.

Elsevier maintains the integrity and security of the copyrighted works accessible

on ScienceDirect by allowing only authenticated users access to the platform. Elsevier
authenticates educational users who access ScienceDirect through their affiliated university’s
subscription by verifying that they are able to access ScienceDirect from a computer system or
network previously identified as belonging to a subscribing university.
24.

Elsevier does not track individual educational users’ access to ScienceDirect.

Instead, Elsevier verifies only that the user has authenticated access to a subscribing university.
25.

Once an educational user authenticates his computer with ScienceDirect on a

university network, that computer is permitted access to ScienceDirect for a limited amount of
6

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 7 of 16

time without re-authenticating. For example, a student could access ScienceDirect from their
laptop while sitting in a university library, then continue to access ScienceDirect using that
laptop from their dorm room later that day. After a specified period of time has passed, however,
a user will have to re-authenticate his or her computer’s access to ScienceDirect by connecting to
the platform through a university network.
26.

As a matter of practice, educational users access university networks, and thereby

authenticate their computers with ScienceDirect, primarily through one of two methods. First,
the user may be physically connected to a university network, for example by taking their
computer to the university’s library. Second, the user may connect remotely to the university’s
network using a proxy connection. Universities offer proxy connections to their students and
faculty so that those users may access university computing resources – including access to
research databases such as ScienceDirect – from remote locations which are unaffiliated with the
university. This practice facilitates the use of ScienceDirect by students and faculty while they
are at home, travelling, or otherwise off-campus.
Defendants’ Unauthorized Access to University Proxy Networks to Facilitate Copyright
Infringement
27.

Upon information and belief, Defendants are reproducing and distributing

unauthorized copies of Elsevier’s copyrighted materials, unlawfully obtained from
ScienceDirect, through Sci-Hub and through various websites affiliated with the Library Genesis
Project. Specifically, Defendants utilize their websites located at sci-hub.org and at the Libgen
Domains to operate an international network of piracy and copyright infringement by
circumventing legal and authorized means of access to the ScienceDirect database. Defendants’
piracy is supported by the persistent intrusion and unauthorized access to the computer networks

7

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 8 of 16

of Elsevier and its institutional subscribers, including universities located in the Southern District
of New York.
28.

Upon information and belief, Defendants have unlawfully obtained and continue

to unlawfully obtain student or faculty access credentials which permit proxy connections to
universities which subscribe to ScienceDirect, and use these credentials to gain unauthorized
access to ScienceDirect.
29.

Upon information and belief, Defendants have used and continue to use such

access credentials to authenticate access to ScienceDirect and, subsequently, to obtain
copyrighted scientific journal articles therefrom without valid authorization.
30.

The Sci-Hub website requires user interaction in order to facilitate its illegal

copyright infringement scheme. Specifically, before a Sci-Hub user can obtain access to
copyrighted scholarly journals, articles, and books that are maintained by ScienceDirect, he must
first perform a search on the Sci-Hub page. A Sci-Hub user may search for content using either
(a) a general keyword-based search, or (b) a journal, article or book identifier (such as a Digital
Object Identifier, PubMed Identifier, or the source URL).
31.

When a user performs a keyword search on Sci-Hub, the website returns a proxied

version of search results from the Google Scholar search database. 1 When a user selects one of
the search results, if the requested content is not available from the Library Genesis Project, SciHub unlawfully retrieves the content from ScienceDirect using the access previously obtained.
Sci-Hub then provides a copy of that article to the requesting user, typically in PDF format. If,
however, the requested content can be found in the Library Genesis Project repository, upon

1

Google Scholar provides its users the capability to search for scholarly literature, but does not provide the
full text of copyrighted scientific journal articles accessible through paid subscription services such as
ScienceDirect. Instead, Google Scholar provides bibliographic information concerning such articles along with a
link to the platform through which the article may be purchased or accessed by a subscriber.

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Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 9 of 16

information and belief, Sci-Hub obtains the content from the Library Genesis Project repository
and provides that content to the user.
32.

When a user searches on Sci-Hub for an article available on ScienceDirect using a

journal or article identifier, the user is redirected to a proxied version of the ScienceDirect page
where the user can download the requested article at no cost. Upon information and belief, SciHub facilitates this infringing conduct by using unlawfully-obtained access credentials to
university proxy servers to establish remote access to ScienceDirect through those proxy servers.
If, however, the requested content can be found in the Library Genesis Project repository, upon
information and belief, Sci-Hub obtains the content from it and provides it to the user.
33.

Upon information and belief, Sci-Hub engages in no other activity other than the

illegal reproduction and distribution of digital copies of Elsevier’s copyrighted works and the
copyrighted works of other publishers, and the encouragement, inducement, and material
contribution to the infringement of the copyrights of those works by third parties – i.e., the users
of the Sci-Hub website.
34.

Upon information and belief, in addition to the blatant and rampant infringement

of Elsevier’s copyrights as described above, the Defendants have also used the Sci-Hub website
to earn revenue from the piracy of copyrighted materials from ScienceDirect. Sci-Hub has at
various times accepted funds through a variety of payment processors, including PayPal,
Yandex, WebMoney, QiQi, and Bitcoin.
Sci-Hub’s Use of the Library Genesis Project as a Repository for Unlawfully-Obtained
Scientific Journal Articles and Books
35.

Upon information and belief, when Sci-Hub pirates and downloads an article from

ScienceDirect in response to a user request, in addition to providing a copy of that article to that
user, Sci-Hub also provides a duplicate copy to the Library Genesis Project, which stores the
9

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 10 of 16

article in a database accessible through the Internet. Upon information and belief, the Library
Genesis Project is designed to be a permanent repository of this and other illegally obtained
content.
36.

Upon information and belief, in the event that a Sci-Hub user requests an article

which has already been provided to the Library Genesis Project, Sci-Hub may provide that user
access to a copy provided by the Library Genesis Project rather than re-download an additional
copy of the article from ScienceDirect. As a result, Defendants Sci-Hub and Library Genesis
Project act in concert to engage in a scheme designed to facilitate the unauthorized access to and
wholesale distribution of Elsevier’s copyrighted works legitimately available on the
ScienceDirect platform.
The Library Genesis Project’s Unlawful Distribution of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Works
37.

Access to the Library Genesis Project’s repository is facilitated by the website

“libgen.org,” which provides its users the ability to search, download content from, and upload
content to, the repository. The main page of libgen.org allows its users to perform searches in
various categories, including “LibGen (Sci-Tech),” and “Scientific articles.” In addition to
searching by keyword, users may also search for specific content by various other fields,
including title, author, periodical, publisher, or ISBN or DOI number.
38.

The libgen.org website indicates that the Library Genesis Project repository

contains approximately 1 million “Sci-Tech” documents and 40 million scientific articles. Upon
information and belief, the large majority of these works is subject to copyright protection and is
being distributed through the Library Genesis Project without the permission of the applicable
rights-holder. Upon information and belief, the Library Genesis Project serves primarily, if not

10

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 11 of 16

exclusively, as a scheme to violate the intellectual property rights of the owners of millions of
copyrighted works.
39.

Upon information and belief, Elsevier owns the copyrights in a substantial

number of copyrighted materials made available for distribution through the Library Genesis
Project. Elsevier has not authorized the Library Genesis Project or any of the Defendants to
copy, display, or distribute through any of the complained of websites any of the content stored
on ScienceDirect to which it holds the copyright. Among the works infringed by the Library
Genesis Project are the “Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology,” and the article “The
Varus Ankle and Instability” (published in Elsevier’s journal “Foot and Ankle Clinics of North
America”), each of which is protected by Elsevier’s federally-registered copyrights.
40.

In addition to the Library Genesis Project website accessible at libgen.org, users

may access the Library Genesis Project repository through a number of “mirror” sites accessible
through other URLs. These mirror sites are similar, if not identical, in functionality to
libgen.org. Specifically, the mirror sites allow their users to search and download materials from
the Library Genesis Project repository.
FIRST CLAIM FOR RELIEF
(Direct Infringement of Copyright)
41.

Elsevier incorporates by reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1-40

42.

Elsevier’s copyright rights and exclusive distribution rights to the works available

above.

on ScienceDirect (the “Works”) are valid and enforceable.
43.

Defendants have infringed on Elsevier’s copyright rights to these Works by

knowingly and intentionally reproducing and distributing these Works without authorization.

11

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 12 of 16

44.

The acts of infringement described herein have been willful, intentional, and

purposeful, in disregard of and indifferent to Plaintiffs’ rights.
45.

Without authorization from Elsevier, or right under law, Defendants are directly

liable for infringing Elsevier’s copyrighted Works pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §§ 106(1) and/or (3).
46.

As a direct result of Defendants’ actions, Elsevier has suffered and continues to

suffer irreparable harm for which Elsevier has no adequate remedy at law, and which will
continue unless Defendants’ actions are enjoined.
47.

Elsevier seeks injunctive relief and costs and damages in an amount to be proven

at trial.
SECOND CLAIM FOR RELIEF
(Secondary Infringement of Copyright)
48.

Elsevier incorporates by reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1-40

49.

Elsevier’s copyright rights and exclusive distribution rights to the works available

above.

on ScienceDirect (the “Works”) are valid and enforceable.
50.

Defendants have infringed on Elsevier’s copyright rights to these Works by

knowingly and intentionally reproducing and distributing these Works without license or other
authorization.
51.

Upon information and belief, Defendants intentionally induced, encouraged, and

materially contributed to the reproduction and distribution of these Works by third party users of
websites operated by Defendants.
52.

The acts of infringement described herein have been willful, intentional, and

purposeful, in disregard of and indifferent to Elsevier’s rights.

12

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 13 of 16

53.

Without authorization from Elsevier, or right under law, Defendants are directly

liable for third parties’ infringement of Elsevier’s copyrighted Works pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §§
106(1) and/or (3).
54.

Upon information and belief, Defendants profited from third parties’ direct

infringement of Elsevier’s Works.
55.

Defendants had the right and the ability to supervise and control their websites

and the third party infringing activities described herein.
56.

As a direct result of Defendants’ actions, Elsevier has suffered and continues to

suffer irreparable harm for which Elsevier has no adequate remedy at law, and which will
continue unless Defendants’ actions are enjoined.
57.

Elsevier seeks injunctive relief and costs and damages in an amount to be proven

at trial.
THIRD CLAIM FOR RELIEF
(Violation of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act)
58.

Elsevier incorporates by reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1-40

59.

Elsevier’s computers and servers, the third-party computers and servers which

above.

store and maintain Elsevier’s copyrighted works for ScienceDirect, and Elsevier’s customers’
computers and servers which facilitate access to Elsevier’s copyrighted works on ScienceDirect,
are all “protected computers” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”).
60.

Defendants (a) knowingly and intentionally accessed such protected computers

without authorization and thereby obtained information from the protected computers in a
transaction involving an interstate or foreign communication (18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C)); and
(b) knowingly and with an intent to defraud accessed such protected computers without
13

Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 14 of 16

authorization and obtained information from such computers, which Defendants used to further
the fraud and obtain something of value (18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(4)).
61.

Defendants’ conduct has caused, and continues to cause, significant and

irreparable damages and loss to Elsevier.
62.

Defendants’ conduct has caused a loss to Elsevier during a one-year period

aggregating at least $5,000.
63.

As a direct result of Defendants’ actions, Elsevier has suffered and continues to

suffer irreparable harm for which Elsevier has no adequate remedy at law, and which will
continue unless Defendants’ actions are enjoined.
64.

Elsevier seeks injunctive relief, as well as costs and damages in an amount to be

proven at trial.
PRAYER FOR RELIEF
WHEREFORE, Elsevier respectfully requests that the Court:
A. Enter preliminary and permanent injunctions, enjoining and prohibiting Defendants,
their officers, directors, principals, agents, servants, employees, successors and
assigns, and all persons and entities in active concert or participation with them, from
engaging in any of the activity complained of herein or from causing any of the injury
complained of herein and from assisting, aiding, or abetting any other person or
business entity in engaging in or performing any of the activity complained of herein
or from causing any of the injury complained of herein;
B. Enter an order that, upon Elsevier’s request, those in privity with Defendants and
those with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, Web
Hosting and Internet Service Providers, domain-name registrars, and domain name

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Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 15 of 16

registries or their administrators that are provided with notice of the injunction, cease
facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendants
engage in any of the activity complained of herein;
C. Enter an order that, upon Elsevier’s request, those organizations which have
registered Defendants’ domain names on behalf of Defendants shall disclose
immediately to Plaintiffs all information in their possession concerning the identity of
the operator or registrant of such domain names and of any bank accounts or financial
accounts owned or used by such operator or registrant;
D. Enter an order that, upon Elsevier’s request, the TLD Registries for the Defendants’
websites, or their administrators, shall place the domain names on
registryHold/serverHold as well as serverUpdate, ServerDelete, and serverTransfer
prohibited statuses, for the remainder of the registration period for any such website.
E. Enter an order canceling or deleting, or, at Elsevier’s election, transferring the domain
name registrations used by Defendants to engage in the activity complained of herein
to Elsevier’s control so that they may no longer be used for illegal purposes;
F. Enter an order awarding Elsevier its actual damages incurred as a result of
Defendants’ infringement of Elsevier’s copyright rights in the Works and all profits
Defendant realized as a result of its acts of infringement, in amounts to be determined
at trial; or in the alternative, awarding Elsevier, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 504, statutory
damages for the acts of infringement committed by Defendants, enhanced to reflect
the willful nature of the Defendants’ infringement;
G. Enter an order disgorging Defendants’ profits;

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Case 1:15-cv-04282-RWS Document 1 Filed 06/03/15 Page 16 of 16

USDC
Opinion: Elsevier against SciHub and LibGen
2015


UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
----------------------------------------

15 Civ. 4282(RWS)
OPINION

ELSEVIER INC., ELSEVIER B.V., and ELSEVIER LTD.,

Plaintiffs,

- against -

WWW.SCI-HUB.ORG, THE LIBRARY GENESIS PROJECT, d/b/a LIBGEN.ORG, ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN, and JOHN DOES 1-99,

Defendants.

----------------------------------------

APPEARANCES

Attorneys for the Plaintiffs

DEVORE & DEMARCO LLP
99 Park Avenue, Suite 1100
New York, NY 1001 6
By:
Joseph DeMarco, Esq.
David Hirschberg, Esq.
Urvashi Sen, Esq.

Pro Se

Alexandra Elbakyan
Almaty, Kazakhstan

1

Sweet, D.J.,

Plaintiffs Elsevier Inc., Elsevier B.V., and Elsevier, Ltd. (collectively, "Elsevier" or the "Plaintiffs") have moved for a preliminary injunction preventing defendants Sci-Hub, Library Genesis Project (the " Project"), Alexandra Elbakyan ("Elbakyan"), Bookfi.org, Elibgen.org, Erestroresollege.org, and Libgen.info (collectively, the "Defendants") from distributing works to which Elsevier owns the copyright. Based upon the facts and conclusions below, the motion is granted and the Defendants are prohibited from distributing the Plaintiffs' copyrighted works.

Prior Proceedings

Elsevier, a major publisher of scientific journal articles and book chapters, brought this action on June 2, 2015, alleging that the Defendants, a series of websites affiliated with the Project (the "Website Defendants") and their owner and operator, Alexandra Elbakyan, infringed Elsevier's copyrighted works and violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (See generally Complaint, Dkt. No. 1.) Elsevier filed the instant motion for a preliminary injunction on June 11, 2015, via an Order to Show Cause. (Dkt. Nos. 5-13.) On June 18, 2015, the Court granted

2

Plaintiffs' Order to Show Cause and authorized service on the

Defendants via email.
week,

(Dkt.

No.

1 5.)

During the following

the Plaintiffs served the Website Defendants via email and

Elbakyan via email and postal mail.
On July 7,
Part One Judge,
and Elbakyan,

2015,

See Dkt.

Nos.

the Honorable Ronnie Abrams,

24-31. )
acting as

held a telephone conference with the Plaintiffs

during which Elbakyan acknowledged receiving the

papers concerning this case and declared that she did not intend
to obtain a lawyer.
conference,

(See Transcript,

Dkt.

No.

38. )

After the

Judge Abrams issued an Order directing Elbakyan to

notify the Court whether she wished assistance in obtaining pro
bono counsel,
se,

and advising her that while she could proceed pro

the Website Defendants,

not being natural persons,
(Dkt. No.

obtain counsel or risk default.

telephonic conference was held on July 14 ,

must

3 6. )

A second

2015,

during which

Elbakyan stated that she needed additional time to find a
lawyer.

( See Transcript,

the request,

Dkt.

No.

4 2. )

Judge Abrams granted

but warned Elbakyan th�t "you have to move quickly

both in attempting to retain an attorney and you' ll have to
stick to the schedule that is set once it' s set. "
After the telephone conference,

(Id.

at 6. )

Judge Abrams issued another

Order setting the preliminary injunction hearing for September
1 6 and directing Elbakyan to inform the Court by July 21 if she
wished assistance in obtaining pro bono counsel.
3

(Dkt. No.

4 0. )

The motion for a preliminary injunction was heard on
September 1 6,
hearing,

201 5.

None of the Defendants appeared at the

although Elbakyan sent a two-page letter to the court

the day before.

(Dkt. No.

50.)

Applicable Standard

Preliminary injunctions are "extraordinary and drastic
remed[ies]

that should not be granted unless the movant,

clear showing,
Armstrong,

carries the burden of persuasion. "

5 20 U. S.

district court may,

9 68,

972 (1997).

by a

Mazurek v.

In a copyright case,

at its discretion,

a

grant a preliminary

injunction when the plaintiffs demonstrate 1) a likelihood of
success on the merits,
injunction,
favor,

2) irreparable harm in the absence of an

3) a balance of the hardships tipping in their

and 4 ) that issuance of an injunction would not do a

disservice to the public interest.
F. 3d 27 5,

278 ( 2d Cir.

W PIX,

Inc.

v. ivi,

Inc.,

691

2012).

The Motion is Granted

With the exception of Elbakyan,

none of the Defendants

filed any opposition to the instant motion,

participated in any

hearing or telephone conference, or in any other way appeared in
4

the case.

Although Elbakyan acknowledges that she is the "main

operator of sci-hub. erg website"
only represent herself pro

se;

(Dkt.

No.

50 at 1. ), she may

since the Website Defendants are

not natural persons, they may only be represented by an attorney
See Max Cash Media, Inc.

admitted to practice in federal court.
v.

Prism Corp. , No.

(S.D. N. Y.

12 Civ.

147, 2012 WL 2861 162, at *1

July 9, 2012);

Auth. , 722 F. 2d 20, 22

(2d Cir.

1983)

(stating reasons for the

rule and noting that it is "venerable and widespread").

Because

the Website Defendants did not retain an attorney to defend this
action, they are in default.
However, the Website Defendants' default does not
the Plaintiffs to an injunction, nor does

automatically entit

the fact that Elbakyan's submission raises no mer
challenge to the Plaintiffs' claims.
Music, No.
2015).

13 Civ.

s-based

See Thurman v.

5194, 2015 WL 2 168134, at *4

Bun Bun
May 7,

(S. D. N. Y.

Instead, notwithstanding the default, the Plaintiffs

must present evidence sufficient to establish that they are
entitled to injunctive relief.
Curveal Fashion, No.
(S. D. N. Y.
Cir.

09 Civ.

Jan 20, 2010);

See id. ;

Inc.

v.

8458, 2010 WL 308303, at *2

CFTC v.

Vartuli, 228 F. 3d 94, 98

2000).

A. Likelihood of S

Gucci Am.,

ss on the
5

rits

(2d

, -

Elsevier has established that the Defendants have
reproduced and distributed its copyrighted works,
of the exclusive rights established by 17
Complaint,

Dkt. No. 1,

at 11-13.)

(1)

"two elements must be

ownership of a valid copyright,

and

(2)

copying of

constituent elements of the work that are original."
Records,

LLC v. Doe 3,

Feist Publ'ns,

See

U.S.C. § 106.

In order to prevail on a

claim for infringement of copyright,
proven:

in violation

604 F.3d 110,

117

Arista

(2d Cir. 2010)

Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co.,

499 U.S.

(quoting

340,

361

(1991) ) .
Elsevier has made a substantial evidentiary showing,
documenting the manner in which the Defendants access its
ScienceDirect database of scientific literature and post
copyrighted material on their own websites free of charge.
According to Elsevier,

the Defendants gain access to

ScienceDirect by using credentials fraudulently obtained from
educational institutions,

including educational institutions

located in the Southern District of New York,
legitimate access to ScienceDirect.
Woltermann

(the "Woltermann Dec.") ,

which are granted

(See Declaration of Anthony
Dkt. No. 8,

at 13-14.)

As

an attachment to one of the supporting declarations to this
motion,

Elsevier includes a sequence of screenshots showing how

a user could go to �ww.sc�-hub.org,
6

one of the Website

Defendants,

search for information on a scientific article,

a set of search results, click on a link,
copyrighted article on ScienceDirect,

get

and be redirected to a

via a proxy.

See

Elsevier also points to a

Walterman Dec. at 41-44 and Ex. U.)

Twitter post (in Russian) indicating that whenever an article is
downloaded via this method,
own servers.
1 2,

Ex.

B.)

the Defendants save a copy on their

(See Declaration of David M. Hirschberg,
As specific examples,

with their copyright registrations.
Dkt.

No. 9,

Exs. B-D.)

No.

Elsevier includes copies of

two of its articles accessed via the Defendants'

Doda,

Dkt.

websites,

along

(Declaration of Paul F.

This showing demonstrates a

likelihood of success on Elsevier' s copyright infringement
claims.
Elsevier also shows a likelihood of success on its claim
under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA").
prohibits,

inter alia,

The CFAA

obtaining information from "any protected

computer" without authorization,

18 U.S. C. § 1030(a)(2)(C),

and

obtaining anything of value by accessing any protected computer
with intent to defraud.

Id.

§ (a) (4).

The definition of

"protected computer" includes one "which is used in or affecting
interstate or foreign commerce or communication,

including a

computer located outside the United States that

is used in a

manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or
communication of the United States."
7

I .

§ (e) (2) (B);

Nexans

Wires S. A.
2006).

v.

Sa

Inc.

166 F.

App'x 559, 562 n. 5

(2d Cir.

Elsevier's ScienceDirect database is located on multiple

servers throughout the world and is accessed by educational
institutions and their students, and qualifies as a computer
used in interstate commerce, and therefore as a protected
computer under the CFAA.

See Woltermann Dec.

at 2-3. )

As

found above, Elsevier has shown that the Defendants' access to
ScienceDirect was unauthorized and accomplished via fraudulent
university credentials.

While the C fAA requires a civil

plaintiff to have suffered over $5,000 in damage or loss, see
Register. com, Inc.

v.

Verio, Inc. , 356 F. 3d 393, 439

(2d Cir.

2004), Elsevier has made the necessary showing since it
documented between 2,000 and 8,500 of its articles being added
to the LibGen database each day

(Woltermann Dec.

at 8, Exs.

G &

H) and because its articles carry purchase prices of between
$19. 95 and $41. 95 each.
Leon, No.

12 Civ.

Id.

at 2;

see Millennium TGA, Inc.

1360, 2013 WL 5719079, at *10

(E. D. N.Y.

v.

Oct.

18, 2013). 1
Elsevier's evidence is also buttressed by Elbakyan's
submission, in which she frankly admits to copyright
infringement.

1

(See Dkt.

No.

50.)

She discusses her time as a

While Elsevier's articles are likely sufficient on their own to qualify as

"[]thing[s]

of value" under the CFAA,

Elbakyan acknowledges in her submission

that the Defendants derive revenue from their website.
50,

at

1

{"That is true that website collects donations,

pressure anyone to send them.").)

8

Letter,

Dkt. No.

however we do not

student at a university in Kazakhstan, where she did not have
access to research papers and found the prices charged to be

just insane.

(Id.

at 1.)

She obtained the papers she needed

"by pirating them," and found may similar students and
researchers, predominantly in developing count

s, who were in

similar situations and helped each other illicitly obtain
research materials that they could not access legitimately or
afford on the open market.

Id.)

As Elbakyan describes it, "I

could obtain any paper by pirating it, so I solved many requests
and people always were very grateful for my help.

After that, I

created sci-hub.org website that simply makes this process
automatic and the website immediately became popular."

(Id.)

Given Elsevier's strong evidentiary showing and Elbakyan's
admissions, the first prong of the preliminary injunction test
is firmly established.

B. Irreparable Harm

Irreparable harm is present "where, but for the grant of
equitable relief, there is a substantial chance that upon final
resolution of the action the parties cannot be returned to the
positions they previously occupied."

Brenntag Int'l Chems.,

Inc. v. Bank of India, 175 F.3d 245, 249

(2d Cir. 1999).

Here,

there is irreparable harm because it is entirely likely that the
9

•'

damage to Elsevier could not be effectively quantified.
Register.com,

356 F.3d at 404

{"irreparable harm may be found

where damages are difficult to establish and measure.").
would be difficult,

if not impossible,

It

to determine how much

money the Plaintiffs have lost due to the availability of
thousands of their articles on the Defendant websites;

some

percentage of those articles would no doubt have been paid for
legitimately if they were not downloadable for free,

but there

appears to be no way of determining how many that would be.
There is also the matter of harm caused by "viral infringement, "
where Elsevier's content could be transmitted and retransmitted
by third parties who acquired it from the Defendants even after
the Defendants' websites were shut down.
Inc.,
275

765 F. Supp. 2d 594,

(2d Cir. 2012).

620

(S.D.N.Y.

See WPIX,
2011),

'to prove the loss of sales due to

infringement is .

notoriously difficult.'"

Colting,

81

607 F.3d 6 8,

(2d Cir. 2010)

Corp. v. Petri-Kine Camera Co.,
(Friendly,

aff'd 691 F.3d

"(C]ourts have tended to issue injunctions

in this context because

1971)

Inc. v. ivi,

Salinger v.

(quoting Omega Importing

451 F.2d 1190,

1195

(2d Cir.

J.)).

Additionally,

the harm done to the Plaintiffs is likely

irreparable because the scale of any money damages would
dramatically exceed Defendants' ability to pay.
F.3d at 249-50

Brenntag,

175

(explaining that even where money damages can be
10

quantified, there is irreparable harm when a defendant will be
unable to cover the damages).
Defendants'

It is highly likely that the

activities will be found to be willful - Elbakyan

herself refers to the websites'

activities as "pirating" (Dkt.

No. 50 at 1) - in which case they would be liable for between
$750 and $150,000 in statutory damages for each pirated work.
See 17 U.S.C.

§ 504(c);

HarperCollins Publishers LLC v. Open

Road Integrated Media, LLP, 58 F.
2014).

Supp. 3d 380, 38 7 (S.D.N.Y.

Since the Plaintiffs credibly allege that the Defendants

infringe an average of over 3,000 new articles each day
(Woltermann Deel. at 7), even if the Court were to award damages
at the lower end of the statutory range the Defendants'
liability could be extensive.

Since the Defendants are an

individual and a set of websites supported by voluntary
donations, the potential damages are likely to be far beyond the
Defendants'

ability to pay.

C. Balance of Hardships

The balance of hardships clearly tips in favor of the
Plaintiffs.

Elsevier has shown that it is likely to succeed on

the merits, and that it continues to suffer irreparable harm due
to the Defendants'
free.

making its copyrighted material available for

As for the Defendants, "it is axiomatic that an infringer
11

of copyright cannot complain about the loss of ability to offer
its infringing product."
omitted).

W PIX,

691 F.3d at 287 (quotation

The Defendants cannot be legally harmed by the fact

that they cannot continue to steal the Plaintiff' s content,

even

See id.

if they tried to do so for public-spirited reasons.

D. Public Interest

To the extent that Elbakyan mounts a legal challenge to the
motion for a preliminary injunction,
interest prong of the test.

it is on the public

In her letter to the Court,

notes that there are "lots of researchers .

she

. especially in

developing countries" who do not have access to key scientific
papers owned by Elsevier and similar organizations,

and who

cannot afford to pay the high fees that Elsevier charges.
No.

50,

at 1.)

Elbakyan states in her letter that Elsevier

operates by racket:
any papers.

(Dkt.

if you do not send money,

On my website,

as they want for free,

you will not read

any person can read as many papers

and sending donations is their free will.

Why Elsevier cannot work like this,

(Id.)

I wonder?

Elbakyan

also notes that researchers do not actually receive money in
exchange for granting Elsevier a copyright.

Id.)

Rather,

she

alleges they give Elsevier ownership of their works "because
Elsevier is an owner of so-called
12

'high-impact'

journals.

If a

researcher wants to be recognized,

make a career - he or she

needs to have publications in such journals.n

{ Id. at 1-2.)

Elbakyan notes that prominent researchers have made attempts to
boycott Elsevier and states that "[t]he general opinion in
research community is that research papers should be distributed
for free (open access),

not sold.

And practices of such

companies like Elsevier are unacceptable,
distribution of knowledge."

because they limit

ld. at 2.)

Elsevier contends that the public interest favors the
issuance of an injunction because doing so will "protect the
delicate ecosystem which supports scientific research
worldwide."

(Pl.'s Br.,

Dkt. No. 6,

at 21.)

It states that the

money it generates by selling access. to scientific research is
used to support new discoveries,
maintain a "de
discovery."

to create new journals,

and to

nitive and accurate record of scientif

( Id.)

It also argues that allowing its articles to

be widely distributed

sks the spread of bad science - while

Elsevier corrects and retracts articles whose conclusions are
later found to be flawed,

it has no way of doing so when the

content is taken out of its control.

Id. at 22.)

Lastly,

Elsevier argues that injunctive relief against the Defendants is
important to deter "cyber-crime," while

ling to issue an

injunction will incentivize pirates to continue to publish
copyrighted works.
13

It cannot be denied that there is a compelling public
interest in fostering scientific achievement, and that ensuring
broad access to scientific research is an important component of
that effort.

As the Second Circuit has noted, "[c]opyright law

inherently balances [] two competing public interests .

.

. the

rights of users and the public interest in broad accessibility
of creative works, and the rights of copyright owners and the
public interest in rewarding and incentivizing creative efforts
(the

'owner-user balance' )."

WPIX, 691 F.3d at 287 .

Elbakyan' s

solution to the problems she identifies, simply making
copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website,
disserves the public interest.

As the Plaintiffs have

established, there is a "delicate ecosystem which supports
scientific research worldwide,"

( Pl.' s Br., Dkt. No. 6 at 21),

and copyright law pays a critical function within that system.
"Inadequate protections for copyright owners can threaten the
very store of knowledge to be accessed; encouraging the
production of creative work thus ultimately serves the public' s
interest in promoting the accessibility of such works. "
691 F.3d at 287 .

W PIX,

The existence of Elsevier shows that

publication of scient ific research

generates substantial

economic value.
The public' s interest in the broad diffusion of scientific
knowledge is sustained by two critical exceptions in copyright
14

law.

First,

the "idea/expression dichotomy" ensures that while

a scientific article may be subject to copyright,

the ideas and

See 17 U. S.C. § 102(b)

insights within that article are not.

("In no case does copyright protection for an original work of
authorship extend to any idea,

procedure,

method of operation,

concept,

to this distinction,

every idea,

principle,

process,

system,

or discovery").

theory,

"Due

and fact in a

copyrighted work becomes instantly available for public
exploitation at the moment of publication."
537 U.S. 186,

219

(2003).

So while Elsevier may be able to keep

its actual articles behind a paywall,
them are fair game for anyone.
doctrine,

comment,

the discoveries within

Secondly,

codified at 17 U.S.C. § 107,

expressions,

as well as ideas,

news reporting,

Eldred v. Ashcroft,

the "fair use"

allows the public to use

nfor purposes such as criticism,

teaching .

.

.

scholarship,

or

research" without being liable for copyright infringement.

(emphasis added)

Under this doctrine,

themselves may be taken and used,
purposes,

Elsevier' s articles

bu.t only for legitimate

and not for wholesale infringement.

U.S. at 219.2

See Eldred,

537

The public interest in the broad dissemination and

use of scientific research is protected by the idea/expression
dichotomy and the fair use doctrine.

2

See Golan v. Holder,

The public interest in wide d1sseminat1on of scientific works

by the fact that copyrights are given only limited

464

15

U.S.

duration.

417, 431-32

132

is also served

See Sony Corp.

(1984).

S.

Ct. 873,

890 (2012);

Eldred,

537 U.S. at 219.

Given the

importance of scientific research and the critical role that
copyright plays in promoting it,

the public interest weighs in

favor of an injunction.

Conclusion

For the reasons set forth above,

It is hereby ordered that:

preliminary injunction is granted.

1. The Defendants,
agents,

their officers,

servants,

employees,

the motion for a

directors,

principals,

successors and assigns,

and

all persons and entities in active concert or participation
with them,

are hereby temporarily restrained from unlawful

access to,

use,

reproduction,

and/or distribution of

Elsevier's copyrighted works and from assisting,

aiding,

or

abetting any other person or business entity in engaging in
unlawful access to,

use,

reproduction,

and/or distribution

of Elsevier' s copyrighted works.
2. Upon the Plaintiffs'

request,

have registered Defendants'

those organizations which

domain names on behalf of

Defendants shall disclose immediately to the Plaintiffs all
information in their possession concerning the identity of
the operator or registrant of such domain names and of any
16

bank accounts or financial accounts owned or used by such
operator or registrant.
3. Defendants shall not transfer ownership of the Defendants'
websites during the pendency of this Action,

or until

further Order of the Court.
4. The TLD Registries for the Defendants'
administrators,

websites,

or their

shall place the domain names on

registryHold/serverHold as well as serverUpdate,
serverDelete,

and serverTransfer prohibited statuses,

until

further Order of the Court.
5. The Defendants shall preserve copies of all computer files
relating to the use of the websites and shall take all
necessary steps to retrieve computer files relating to the
use of the websites that may have been deleted before entry
of this Order.
6. That security in the amount of $ 5, 000 be posted by the
Plaintiffs within one week of the entry of this Order.
Fed.

R.

Civ.

P. 6 5(c).

17

See

It is so ordered.

New York,

fY
October ? ;--1

2015
R BERT W. SWEET

U.S.D.J.

18



Fuller
The Indexalist
2016


## The Indexalist

### From Mondotheque

#####

[Matthew Fuller](/wiki/index.php?title=Matthew_Fuller "Matthew Fuller")

I first spoke to the patient in the last week of that August. That evening the
sun was tender in drawing its shadows across the lines of his face. The eyes
gazed softly into a close middle distance, as if composing a line upon a
translucent page hung in the middle of the air, the hands tapping out a stanza
or two of music on legs covered by the brown folds of a towelling dressing
gown. He had the air of someone who had seen something of great amazement but
yet lacked the means to put it into language. As I got to know the patient
over the next few weeks I learned that this was not for the want of effort.

In his youth he had dabbled with the world-speak language Volapük, one
designed to do away with the incompatibility of tongues, to establish a
standard in which scientific intercourse might be conducted with maximum
efficiency and with minimal friction in movement between minds, laboratories
and publications. Latin biological names, the magnificent table of elements,
metric units of measurement, the nomenclature of celestial objects from clouds
to planets, anatomical parts and medical conditions all had their own systems
of naming beyond any specific tongue. This was an attempt to bring reason into
speech and record, but there were other means to do so when reality resisted
these early measures.

The dabbling, he reflected, had become a little more than that. He had
subscribed to journals in the language, he wrote letters to colleagues and
received them in return. A few words of world-speak remained readily on his
tongue, words that he spat out regularly into the yellow-wallpapered lounge of
the sanatorium with a disgust that was lugubriously palpable.

According to my records, and in piecing together the notes of previous
doctors, there was something else however, something more profound that the
language only hinted at. Just as the postal system did not require the
adoption of any language in particular but had its formats that integrated
them into addressee, address line, postal town and country, something that
organised the span of the earth, so there was a sense of the patient as having
sustained an encounter with a fundamental form of organisation that mapped out
his soul. More thrilling than the question of language indeed was that of the
system of organisation upon which linguistic symbols are inscribed. I present
for the reader’s contemplation some statements typical of those he seemed to
mull over.

“The index card system spoke to my soul. Suffice it to say that in its use I
enjoyed the highest form of spiritual pleasure, and organisational efficiency,
a profound flowering of intellect in which every thought moved between its
enunciation, evidence, reference and articulation in a mellifluous flow of
ideation and the gratification of curiosity.” This sense of the soul as a
roving enquiry moving across eras, across forms of knowledge and through the
serried landscapes of the vast planet and cosmos was returned to over and
over, a sense that an inexplicable force was within him yet always escaping
his touch.

“At every reference stood another reference, each more interesting than the
last. Each the apex of a pyramid of further reading, pregnant with the threat
of digression, each a thin high wire which, if not observed might lead the
author into the fall of error, a finding already found against and written
up.” He mentions too, a number of times, the way the furniture seemed to
assist his thoughts - the ease of reference implied by the way in which the
desk aligned with the text resting upon the pages of the off-print, journal,
newspaper, blueprint or book above which further drawers of cards stood ready
in their cabinet. All were integrated into the system. And yet, amidst these
frenetic recollections there was a note of mourning in his contemplative
moods, “The superposition of all planes of enquiry and of thought in one
system repels those for whom such harmonious speed is suspicious.” This
thought was delivered with a stare that was not exactly one of accusation, but
that lingered with the impression that there was a further statement to follow
it, and another, queued up ready to follow.

As I gained the trust of the patient, there was a sense in which he estimated
me as something of a junior collaborator, a clerk to his natural role as
manager. A lucky, if slightly doubtful, young man whom he might mentor into
efficiency and a state of full access to information. For his world, there was
not the corruption and tiredness of the old methods. Ideas moved faster in his
mind than they might now across the world. To possess a register of thoughts
covering a period of some years is to have an asset, the value of which is
almost incalculable. That it can answer any question respecting any thought
about which one has had an enquiry is but the smallest of its merits. More
important is the fact that it continually calls attention to matters requiring
such attention.

Much of his discourse was about the optimum means of arrangement of the
system, there was an art to laying out the cards. As the patient further
explained, to meet the objection that loose cards may easily be mislaid, cards
may be tabbed with numbers from one to ten. When arranged in the drawer, these
tabs proceed from left to right across the drawer and the absence of a single
card can thus easily be detected. The cards are further arranged between
coloured guide cards. As an alternative to tabbed cards, signal flags may be
used. Here, metal clips may be attached to the top end of the card and that
stand out like guides. For use of the system in relation to dates of the
month, the card is printed with the numbers 1 to 31 at the top. The metal clip
is placed as a signal to indicate the card is to receive attention on the
specified day. Within a large organisation a further card can be drawn up to
assign responsibility for processing that date’s cards. There were numerous
means of working the cards, special techniques for integrating them into any
type of research or organisation, means by which indexes operating on indexes
could open mines of information and expand the knowledge and capabilities of
mankind.

As he pressed me further, I began to experiment with such methods myself by
withdrawing data from the sanatorium’s records and transferring it to cards in
the night. The advantages of the system are overwhelming. Cards, cut to the
right mathematical degree of accuracy, arrayed readily in drawers, set in
cabinets of standard sizes that may be added to at ease, may be apportioned
out amongst any number of enquirers, all of whom may work on them
independently and simultaneously. The bound book, by contrast, may only be
used by one person at a time and that must stay upon a shelf itself referred
to by an index card system. I began to set up a structure of rows of mirrors
on chains and pulleys and a set of levered and hinged mechanical arms to allow
me to open the drawers and to privately consult my files from any location
within the sanatorium. The clarity of the image is however so far too much
effaced by the diffusion of light across the system.

It must further be borne in mind that a system thus capable of indefinite
expansion obviates the necessity for hampering a researcher with furniture or
appliances of a larger size than are immediately required. The continuous and
orderly sequence of the cards may be extended further into the domain of
furniture and to the conduct of business and daily life. Reasoning, reference
and the order of ideas emerging as they embrace and articulate a chaotic world
and then communicate amongst themselves turning the world in turn into
something resembling the process of thought in an endless process of
consulting, rephrasing, adding and sorting.

For the patient, ideas flowed like a force of life, oblivious to any unnatural
limitation. Thought became, with the proper use of the system, part of the
stream of life itself. Thought moved through the cards not simply at the
superficial level of the movement of fingers and the mechanical sliding and
bunching of cards, but at the most profound depths of the movement between
reality and our ideas of it. The organisational grace to be found in
arrangement, classification and indexing still stirred the remnants of his
nervous system until the last day.

Last Revision: 2*08*2016

Retrieved from

[https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php?title=The_Indexalist&oldid=8448](https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php?title=The_Indexalist&oldid=8448)

Fuller & Dockray
In the Paradise of Too Many Books An Interview with Sean Dockray
2011


# In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean Dockray

By Matthew Fuller, 4 May 2011

[0 Comments](/editorial/articles/paradise-too-many-books-interview-sean-
dockray#comments_none) [9191 Reads](/editorial/articles/paradise-too-many-
books-interview-sean-dockray) Print

If the appetite to read comes with reading, then open text archive Aaaaarg.org
is a great place to stimulate and sate your hunger. Here, Matthew Fuller talks
to long-term observer Sean Dockray about the behaviour of text and
bibliophiles in a text-circulation network

Sean Dockray is an artist and a member of the organising group for the LA
branch of The Public School, a geographically distributed and online platform
for the self-organisation of learning.1 Since its initiation by Telic Arts, an
organisation which Sean directs, The Public School has also been taken up as a
model in a number of cities in the USA and Europe.2

We met to discuss the growing phenomenon of text-sharing. Aaaaarg.org has
developed over the last few years as a crucial site for the sharing and
discussion of texts drawn from cultural theory, politics, philosophy, art and
related areas. Part of this discussion is about the circulation of texts,
scanned and uploaded to other sites that it provides links to. Since
participants in The Public School often draw from the uploads to form readers
or anthologies for specific classes or events series, this project provides a
useful perspective from which to talk about the nature of text in the present
era.

**Sean Dockray** **:** People usually talk about three key actors in
discussions about publishing, which all play fairly understandable roles:
readers; publishers; and authors.

**Matthew Fuller:** Perhaps it could be said that Aaaaarg.org suggests some
other actors that are necessary for a real culture of text; firstly that books
also have some specific kind of activity to themselves, even if in many cases
it is only a latent quality, of storage, of lying in wait and, secondly, that
within the site, there is also this other kind of work done, that of the
public reception and digestion, the response to the texts, their milieu, which
involves other texts, but also systems and organisations, and platforms, such
as Aaaaarg.


Image: A young Roland Barthes, with space on his bookshelf

**SD:** Where even the three actors aren't stable! The people that are using
the site are fulfilling some role that usually the publisher has been doing or
ought to be doing, like marketing or circulation.

**MF:** Well it needn't be seen as promotion necessarily. There's also this
kind of secondary work with critics, reviewers and so on - which we can say is
also taken on by universities, for instance, and reading groups, magazines,
reviews - that gives an additional life to the text or brings it particular
kinds of attention, certain kind of readerliness.

**SD:** Situates it within certain discourses, makes it intelligible in a way,
in a different way.

**MF:** Yes, exactly, there's this other category of life to the book, which
is that of the kind of milieu or the organisational structure in which it
circulates and the different kind of networks of reference that it implies and
generates. Then there's also the book itself, which has some kind of agency,
or at least resilience and salience, when you think about how certain books
have different life cycles of appearance and disappearance.

**SD:** Well, in a contemporary sense, you have something like _Nights of
Labour_ , by Ranci _è_ re - which is probably going to be republished or
reprinted imminently - but has been sort of invisible, out of print, until, by
surprise, it becomes much more visible within the art world or something.

**MF:** And it's also been interesting to see how the art world plays a role
in the reverberations of text which isn't the same as that in cultural theory
or philosophy. Certainly _Nights of Labour_ , something that is very close to
the role that cultural studies plays in the UK, but which (cultural studies)
has no real equivalent in France, so then, geographically and linguistically,
and therefore also in a certain sense conceptually, the life of a book
exhibits these weird delays and lags and accelerations, so that's a good
example. I'm interested in what role Aaaaarg plays in that kind of
proliferation, the kind of things that books do, where they go and how they
become manifest. So I think one of the things Aaaaarg does is to make books
active in different ways, to bring out a different kind of potential in
publishing.

**SD:** Yes, the debate has tended so far to get stuck in those three actors
because people tend to end up picking a pair and placing them in opposition to
one another, especially around intellectual property. The discussion is very
simplistic and ends up in that way, where it's the authors against readers, or
authors against their publishers, with the publishers often introducing
scarcity, where the authors don't want it to be - that's a common argument.
There's this situation where the record industry is suing its own audience.
That's typically the field now.

**MF:** So within that kind of discourse of these three figures, have there
been cases where you think it's valid that there needs to be some form of
scarcity in order for a publishing project to exist?

**SD:** It's obviously not for me to say that there does or doesn't need to be
scarcity but the scarcity that I think we're talking about functions in a
really specific way: it's usually within academic publishing, the book or
journal is being distributed to a few libraries and maybe 500 copies of it are
being printed, and then the price is something anywhere from $60 to $500, and
there's just sort of an assumption that the audience is very well defined and
stable and able to cope with that.

**MF:** Yeah, which recognises that the audiences may be stable as an
institutional form, but not that over time the individual parts of say that
library user population change in their relationship to the institution. If
you're a student for a few years and then you no longer have access, you lose
contact with that intellectual community...

**SD:** Then people just kind of have to cling to that intellectual community.
So when scarcity functions like that, I can't think of any reason why that
_needs_ to happen. Obviously it needs to happen in the sense that there's a
relatively stable balance that wants to perpetuate itself, but what you're
asking is something else.

**MF:** Well there are contexts where the publisher isn't within that academic
system of very high costs, sustained by volunteer labour by academics, the
classic peer review system, but if you think of more of a trade publisher like
a left or a movement or underground publisher, whose books are being
circulated on Aaaaarg...

**SD:** They're in a much more precarious position obviously than a university
press whose economics are quite different, and with the volunteer labour or
the authors are being subsidised by salary - you have to look at the entire
system rather than just the publication. But in a situation where the
publisher is much more precarious and relying on sales and a swing in one
direction or another makes them unable to pay the rent on a storage facility,
one can definitely see why some sort of predictability is helpful and
necessary.

**MF:** So that leads me to wonder whether there are models of publishing that
are emerging that work with online distribution, or with the kind of thing
that Aaaaarg does specifically. Are there particular kinds of publishing
initiatives that really work well in this kind of context where free digital
circulation is understood as an a priori, or is it always in this kind of
parasitic or cyclical relationship?

**SD:** I have no idea how well they work actually; I don't know how well,
say, Australian publisher re.press, works for example. 3 I like a lot of what
they publish, it's given visibility when re.press distributes it and that's a
lot of what a publisher's role seems to be (and what Aaaaarg does as well).
But are you asking how well it works in terms of economics?

**MF:** Well, just whether there's new forms of publishing emerging that work
well in this context that cut out some of the problems ?

**SD:** Well, there's also the blog. Certain academic discourses, philosophy
being one, that are carried out on blogs really work to a certain extent, in
that there is an immediacy to ideas, their reception and response. But there's
other problems, such as the way in which, over time, the posts quickly get
forgotten. In this sense, a publication, a book, is kind of nice. It
crystallises and stays around.

**MF:** That's what I'm thinking, that the book is a particular kind of thing
which has it's own quality as a form of media. I also wonder whether there
might be intermediate texts, unfinished texts, draft texts that might
circulate via Aaaaarg for instance or other systems. That, at least to me,
would be kind of unsatisfactory but might have some other kind of life and
readership to it. You know, as you say, the blog is a collection of relatively
occasional texts, or texts that are a work in progress, but something like
Aaaaarg perhaps depends upon texts that are finished, that are absolutely the
crystallisation of a particular thought.


Image: The Tree of Knowledge as imagined by Hans Sebald Beham in his 1543
engraving _Adam and Eve_

**SD:** Aaaaarg is definitely not a futuristic model. I mean, it occurs at a
specific time, which is while we're living in a situation where books exist
effectively as a limited edition. They can travel the world and reach certain
places, and yet the readership is greatly outpacing the spread and
availability of the books themselves. So there's a disjunction there, and
that's obviously why Aaaaarg is so popular. Because often there are maybe no
copies of a certain book within 400 miles of a person that's looking for it,
but then they can find it on that website, so while we're in that situation it
works.

**MF:** So it's partly based on a kind of asymmetry, that's spatial, that's
about the territories of publishers and distributors, and also a kind of
asymmetry of economics?

**SD:** Yeah, yeah. But others too. I remember when I was affiliated with a
university and I had JSTOR access and all these things and then I left my job
and then at some point not too long after that my proxy access expired and I
no longer had access to those articles which now would cost $30 a pop just to
even preview. That's obviously another asymmetry, even though, geographically
speaking, I'm in an identical position, just that my subject position has
shifted from affiliated to unaffiliated.

**MF:** There's also this interesting way in which Aaaaarg has gained
different constituencies globally, you can see the kind of shift in the texts
being put up. It seems to me anyway there are more texts coming from non-
western authors. This kind of asymmetry generates a flux. We're getting new
alliances between texts and you can see new bibliographies emerge.

**SD:** Yeah, the original community was very American and European and
gradually people were signing up at other places in order to have access to a
lot of these texts that didn't reach their libraries or their book stores or
whatever. But then there is a danger of US and European thought becoming
central. A globalisation where a certain mode of thought ends up just erasing
what's going on already in the cities where people are signing up, that's a
horrible possible future.

**MF:** But that's already something that's _not_ happening in some ways?

**SD:** Exactly, that's what seems to be happening now. It goes on to
translations that are being put up and then texts that are coming from outside
of the set of US and western authors and so, in a way, it flows back in the
other direction. This hasn't always been so visible, maybe it will begin to
happen some more. But think of the way people can list different texts
together as ‘issues' - a way that you can make arbitrary groupings - and
they're very subjective, you can make an issue named anything and just lump a
bunch of texts in there. But because, with each text, you can see what other
issues people have also put it in, it creates a trace of its use. You can see
that sometimes the issues are named after the reading groups, people are using
the issues format as a collecting tool, they might gather all Portuguese
translations, or The Public School uses them for classes. At other times it's
just one person organising their dissertation research but you see the wildly
different ways that one individual text can be used.

**MF:** So the issue creates a new form of paratext to the text, acting as a
kind of meta-index, they're a new form of publication themselves. To publish a
bibliography that actively links to the text itself is pretty cool. That also
makes me think within the structures of Aaaaarg it seems that certain parts of
the library are almost at breaking point - for instance the alphabetical
structure.

**SD:** Which is funny because it hasn't always been that alphabetical
structure either, it used to just be everything on one page, and then at some
point it was just taking too long for the page to load up A-Z. And today A is
as long as the entire index used to be, so yeah these questions of density and
scale are there but they've always been dealt with in a very ad hoc kind of
way, dealing with problems as they come. I'm sure that will happen. There
hasn't always been a search and, in a way, the issues, along with
alphabetising, became ways of creating more manageable lists, but even now the
list of issues is gigantic. These are problems of scale.

**MF:** So I guess there's also this kind of question that emerges in the
debate on reading habits and reading practices, this question of the breadth
of reading that people are engaging in. Do you see anything emerging in
Aaaaarg that suggests a new consistency of handling reading material? Is there
a specific quality, say, of the issues? For instance, some of them seem quite
focused, and others are very broad. They may provide insights into how new
forms of relationships to intellectual material may be emerging that we don't
quite yet know how to handle or recognise. This may be related to the lament
for the classic disciplinary road of deep reading of specific materials with a
relatively focused footprint whereas, it is argued, the net is encouraging a
much wider kind of sampling of materials with not necessarily so much depth.

**SD:** It's partially driven by people simply being in the system, in the
same way that the library structures our relationship to text, the net does it
in another way. One comment I've heard is that there's too much stuff on
Aaaaarg, which wasn't always the case. It used to be that I read every single
thing that was posted because it was slow enough and the things were short
enough that my response was, ‘Oh something new, great!' and I would read it.
But now, obviously that is totally impossible, there's too much; but in a way
that's just the state of things. It does seem like certain tactics of making
sense of things, of keeping things away and letting things in and queuing
things for reading later become just a necessary part of even navigating. It's
just the terrain at the moment, but this is only one instance. Even when I was
at the university and going to libraries, I ended up with huge stacks of books
and I'd just buy books that I was never going to read just to have them
available in my library, so I don't think feeling overwhelmed by books is
particularly new, just maybe the scale of it is. In terms of how people
actually conduct themselves and deal with that reality, it's difficult to say.
I think the issues are one of the few places where you would see any sort of
visible answers on Aaaaarg, otherwise it's totally anecdotal. At The Public
School we have organised classes in relationship to some of the issues, and
then we use the classes to also figure out what texts we are going to be
reading in the future, to make new issues and new classes. So it becomes an
organising group, reading and working its way through subject matter and
material, then revisiting that library and seeing what needs to be there.

**MF:** I want to follow that kind of strand of habits of accumulation,
sorting, deferring and so on. I wonder, what is a kind of characteristic or
unusual reading behavior? For instance are there people who download the
entire list? Or do you see people being relatively selective? How does the
mania of the net, with this constant churning of data, map over to forms of
bibliomania?

**SD:** Well, in Aaaaarg it's again very specific. Anecdotally again, I have
heard from people how much they download and sometimes they're very selective,
they just see something that's interesting and download it, other times they
download everything and occasionally I hear about this mania of mirroring the
whole site. What I mean about being specific to Aaaaarg is that a lot of the
mania isn't driven by just the need to have everything; it's driven by the
acknowledgement that the source is going to disappear at some point. That
sense of impending disappearance is always there, so I think that drives a lot
of people to download everything because, you know, it's happened a couple
times where it's just gone down or moved or something like that.

**MF:** It's true, it feels like something that is there even for a few weeks
or a few months. By a sheer fluke it could last another year, who knows.

**SD:** It's a different kind of mania, and usually we get lost in this
thinking that people need to possess everything but there is this weird
preservation instinct that people have, which is slightly different. The
dominant sensibility of Aaaaarg at the beginning was the highly partial and
subjective nature to the contents and that is something I would want to
preserve, which is why I never thought it to be particularly exciting to have
lots of high quality metadata - it doesn't have the publication date, it
doesn't have all the great metadata that say Amazon might provide. The system
is pretty dismal in that way, but I don't mind that so much. I read something
on the Internet which said it was like being in the porn section of a video
store with all black text on white labels, it was an absolutely beautiful way
of describing it. Originally Aaaaarg was about trading just those particular
moments in a text that really struck you as important, that you wanted other
people to read so it would be very short, definitely partial, it wasn't a
completist project, although some people maybe treat it in that way now. They
treat it as a thing that wants to devour everything. That's definitely not the
way that I have seen it.

**MF:** And it's so idiosyncratic I mean, you know it's certainly possible
that it could be read in a canonical mode, you can see that there's that
tendency there, of the core of Adorno or Agamben, to take the a's for
instance. But of the more contemporary stuff it's very varied, that's what's
nice about it as well. Alongside all the stuff that has a very long-term
existence, like historical books that may be over a hundred years old, what
turns up there is often unexpected, but certainly not random or
uninterpretable.


Image: French art historian André Malraux lays out his _Musée Imaginaire_ ,
1947

**SD:** It's interesting to think a little bit about what people choose to
upload, because it's not easy to upload something. It takes a good deal of
time to scan a book. I mean obviously some things are uploaded which are, have
always been, digital. (I wrote something about this recently about the scan
and the export - the scan being something that comes out of a labour in
relationship to an object, to the book, and the export is something where the
whole life of the text has sort of been digital from production to circulation
and reception). I happen to think of Aaaaarg in the realm of the scan and the
bootleg. When someone actually scans something they're potentially spending
hours because they're doing the work on the book they're doing something with
software, they're uploading.

**MF:** Aaaarg hasn't introduced file quality thresholds either.

**SD:** No, definitely not. Where would that go?

**MF:** You could say with PDFs they have to be searchable texts?

**SD:** I'm sure a lot of people would prefer that. Even I would prefer it a
lot of the time. But again there is the idiosyncratic nature of what appears,
and there is also the idiosyncratic nature of the technical quality and
sometimes it's clear that the person that uploads something just has no real
experience of scanning anything. It's kind of an inevitable outcome. There are
movie sharing sites that are really good about quality control both in the
metadata and what gets up; but I think that if you follow that to the end,
then basically you arrive at the exported version being the Platonic text, the
impossible, perfect, clear, searchable, small - totally eliminating any trace
of what is interesting, the hand of reading and scanning, and this is what you
see with a lot of the texts on Aaaaarg. You see the hand of the person who's
read that book in the past, you see the hand of the person who scanned it.
Literally, their hand is in the scan. This attention to the labour of both
reading and redistributing, it's important to still have that.

**MF:** You could also find that in different ways for instance with a pdf, a
pdf that was bought directly as an ebook that's digitally watermarked will
have traces of the purchaser coded in there. So then there's also this work of
stripping out that data which will become a new kind of labour. So it doesn't
have this kind of humanistic refrain, the actual hand, the touch of the
labour. This is perhaps more interesting, the work of the code that strips it
out, so it's also kind of recognising that code as part of the milieu.

**SD:** Yeah, that is a good point, although I don't know that it's more
interesting labour.

**MF:** On a related note, The Public School as a model is interesting in that
it's kind of a convention, it has a set of rules, an infrastructure, a
website, it has a very modular being. Participants operate with a simple
organisational grammar which allows them to say ‘I want to learn this' or ‘I
want to teach this' and to draw in others on that basis. There's lots of
proposals for classes, some of them don't get taken up, but it's a process and
a set of resources which allow this aggregation of interest to occur. I just
wonder how you saw that kind of ethos of modularity in a way, as a set of
minimum rules or set of minimum capacities that allow a particular set of
things occur?

**SD:** This may not respond directly to what you were just talking about, but
there's various points of entry to the school and also having something that
people feel they can take on as their own and I think the minimal structure
invites quite a lot of projection as to what that means and what's possible
with it. If it's not doing what you want it to do or you think, ‘I'm not sure
what it is', there's the sense that you can somehow redirect it.

**MF:** It's also interesting that projection itself can become a technical
feature so in a way the work of the imagination is done also through this kind
of tuning of the software structure. The governance that was handled by the
technical infrastructure actually elicits this kind of projection, elicits the
imagination in an interesting way.

**SD:** Yeah, yeah, I totally agree and, not to put too much emphasis on the
software, although I think that there's good reason to look at both the
software and the conceptual diagram of the school itself, but really in a way
it would grind to a halt if it weren't for the very traditional labour of
people - like an organising committee. In LA there's usually around eight of
us (now Jordan Biren, Solomon Bothwell, Vladada Gallegos, Liz Glynn, Naoko
Miyano, Caleb Waldorf, and me) who are deeply involved in making that
translation of these wishes - thrown onto the website that somehow attract the
other people - into actual classes.

**MF:** What does the committee do?

**SD:** Even that's hard to describe and that's what makes it hard to set up.
It's always very particular to even a single idea, to a single class proposal.
In general it'd be things like scheduling, finding an instructor if an
instructor is what's required for that class. Sometimes it's more about
finding someone who will facilitate, other times it's rounding up materials.
But it could be helping an open proposal take some specific form. Sometimes
it's scanning things and putting them on Aaaaarg. Sometimes, there will be a
proposal - I proposed a class in the very, very beginning on messianic time, I
wanted to take a class on it - and it didn't happen until more than a year and
a half later.

**MF:** Well that's messianic time for you.

**SD:** That and the internet. But other times it will be only a week later.
You know we did one on the Egyptian revolution and its historical context,
something which demanded a very quick turnaround. Sometimes the committee is
going to classes and there will be a new conflict that arises within a class,
that they then redirect into the website for a future proposal, which becomes
another class: a point of friction where it's not just like next, and next,
and next, but rather it's a knot that people can't quite untie, something that
you want to spend more time with, but you may want to move on to other things
immediately, so instead you postpone that to the next class. A lot of The
Public School works like that: it's finding momentum then following it. A lot
of our classes are quite short, but we try and string them together. The
committee are the ones that orchestrate that. In terms of governance, it is
run collectively, although with the committee, every few months people drop
off and new people come on. There are some people who've been on for years.
Other people who stay on just for that point of time that feels right for
them. Usually, people come on to the committee because they come to a lot of
classes, they start to take an interest in the project and before they know it
they're administering it.

**Matthew Fuller's <[m.fuller@gold.ac.uk](mailto:m.fuller@gold.ac.uk)> most
recent book, _Elephant and Castle_ , is forthcoming from Autonomedia. **

**He is collated at**

**Footnotes**

1

2 [http://telic.info/ ](http://telic.info/)

3

Giorgetta, Nicoletti & Adema
A Conversation on Digital Archiving Practices
2015


# A Conversation on Digital Archiving Practices

A couple of months ago Davide Giorgetta and Valerio Nicoletti (both ISIA
Urbino) did an interview with me for their MA in Design of Publishing. Silvio
Lorusso, was so kind to publish the interview on the fantastic
[p-dpa.net](http://p-dpa.net/a-conversation-on-digital-archiving-practices-
with-janneke-adema/). I am reblogging it here.

* * *

[Davide Giorgetta](http://p-dpa.net/creator/davide-giorgetta/) and [Valerio
Nicoletti](http://p-dpa.net/creator/valerio-nicoletti/) are both students from
[ISIA Urbino](http://www.isiaurbino.net/home/), where they attend the Master
Course in Design for Publishing. They are currently investigating the
independent side of digital archiving practices within the scope of the
publishing world.

As part of their research, they asked some questions to Janneke Adema, who is
Research Fellow in Digital Media at Coventry University, with a PhD in Media
(Coventry University) and a background in History (MA) and Philosophy (MA)
(both University of Groningen) and Book and Digital Media Studies (MA) (Leiden
University). Janneke’s PhD thesis focuses on the future of the scholarly book
in the humanities. She has been conducting research for the
[OAPEN](http://project.oapen.org/index.php/about-oapen) project, and
subsequently the OAPEN foundation, from 2008 until 2013 (including research
for OAPEN-NL and DOAB). Her research for OAPEN focused on user needs and
publishing models concerning Open Access books in the Humanities and Social
Sciences.

**Davide Giorgetta & Valerio Nicoletti: Does a way out from the debate between
publishers and digital independent libraries (Monoskop Log, Ubuweb,
Aaaarg.org) exist, in terms of copyright? An alternative solution able to
solve the issue and to provide equal opportunities to everyone? Would the fear
of publishers of a possible reduction of incomes be legitimized if the access
to their digital publications was open and free?**

Janneke Adema: This is an interesting question, since for many academics this
‘way out’ (at least in so far it concerns scholarly publications) has been
envisioned in or through the open access movement and the use of Creative
Commons licenses. However, the open access movement, a rather plural and
loosely defined group of people, institutions and networks, in its more
moderate instantiations tends to distance itself from piracy and copyright
infringement or copy(far)left practices. Through its use of and favoring of
Creative Commons licenses one could even argue that it has been mainly
concerned with a reform of copyright rather than a radical critique of and
rethinking of the common and the right to copy (Cramer 2013, Hall
2014).¹(http://p-dpa.net/a-conversation-on-digital-archiving-practices-
with-janneke-adema/#fn:1 "see footnote") Nonetheless, in its more radical
guises open access can be more closely aligned with the practices associated
with digital pirate libraries such as the ones listed above, for instance
through Aaron Swartz’s notion of [Guerilla Open
Access](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt):

> We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and
share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and
add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the
Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing
networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. (Swartz 2008)

However whatever form or vision of open access you prefer, I do not think it
is a ‘solution’ to any problem—such as copyright/fight—, but I would rather
see it, as I have written
[elsewhere](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/11/18
/embracing-messiness-adema-pdsc14/), ‘as an ongoing processual and critical
engagement with changes in the publishing system, in our scholarly
communication practices and in our media and technologies of communication.’
And in this sense open access practices offer us the possibility to critically
reflect upon the politics of knowledge production, including copyright and
piracy, openness and the commons, indeed, even upon the nature of the book
itself.

With respect to the second part of your question, again, where it concerns
scholarly books, [research by Ronald
Snijder](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=PuDczakAAAAJ&citation_for_view=PuDczakAAAAJ:u-x6o8ySG0sC)
shows no decline in sales or income for publishers once they release their
scholarly books in open access. The open availability does however lead to
more discovery and online consultation, meaning that it actually might lead to
more ‘impact’ for scholarly books (Snijder 2010).

**DG, VN: In which way, if any, are digital archiving practices stimulating
new publishing phenomenons? Are there any innovative outcomes, apart the
obvious relation to p.o.d. tools? (or interesting new projects in this
field)**

JA: Beyond extending access, I am mostly interested in how digital archiving
practices have the potential to stimulate the following practices or phenomena
(which in no way are specific to digital archiving or publishing practices, as
they have always been a potential part of print publications too): reuse and
remix; processual research and iterative publishing; and collaborative forms
of knowledge production. These practices interest me mainly as they have the
potential to critique the way the (printed) book has been commodified and
essentialised over the centuries, in a bound, linear and fixed format, a
practice which is currently being replicated in a digital context. Indeed, the
book has been fixed in this way both discursively and through a system of
material production within publishing and academia—which includes our
institutions and practices of scholarly communication—that prefers book
objects as quantifiable and auditable performance indicators and as marketable
commodities and objects of symbolic value exchange. The practices and
phenomena mentioned above, i.e. remix, versioning and collaboration, have the
potential to help us to reimagine the bound nature of the book and to explore
both a spatial and temporal critique of the book as a fixed object; they can
aid us to examine and experiment with various different incisions that can be
made in our scholarship as part of the informal and formal publishing and
communication of our research that goes beyond the final research commodity.
In this sense I am interested in how these specific digital archiving,
research and publishing practices offer us the possibility to imagine a
different, perhaps more ethical humanities, a humanities that is processual,
contingent, unbound and unfinished. How can these practices aid us in how to
cut well in the ongoing unfolding of our research, how can they help us
explore how to make potentially better interventions? How can we take
responsibility as scholars for our entangled becoming with our research and
publications? (Barad 2007, Kember and Zylinska 2012)

Examples that I find interesting in the realm of the humanities in this
respect include projects that experiment with such a critique of our fixed,
print-based practices and institutions in an affirmative way: for example Mark
Amerika’s [remixthebook](http://www.remixthebook.com/) project; Open
Humanities’ [Living Books about Life](http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/)
series; projects such as
[Vectors](http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/index.php?issue=7) and
[Scalar](http://scalar.usc.edu/); and collaborative knowledge production,
archiving and creation projects, from wiki-based research projects to AAAARG.

**DG, VN: In which way does a digital container influence its content? Does
the same book — if archived on different platforms, such as _Internet Archive_
, _The Pirate Bay_ , _Monoskop Log_ — still remain the same cultural item?**

JA: In short my answer to this question would be ‘no’. Books are embodied
entities, which are materially established through their specific affordances
in relationship to their production, dissemination, reception and
preservation. This means that the specific materiality of the (digital) book
is partly an outcome of these ongoing processes. Katherine Hayles has argued
in this respect that materiality is an emergent property:

> In this view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection of
physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay
between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the
interpretive activities of readers and writers. Materiality thus cannot be
specified in advance; rather, it occupies a borderland— or better, performs as
connective tissue—joining the physical and mental, the artifact and the user.
(2004: 72)

Similarly, Matthew Kirschenbaum points out that the preservation of digital
objects is:

> _logically inseparable_ from the act of their creation’ (…) ‘The lag between
creation and preservation collapses completely, since a digital object may
only ever be said to be preserved _if_ it is accessible, and each individual
access creates the object anew. One can, in a very literal sense, _never_
access the “same” electronic file twice, since each and every access
constitutes a distinct instance of the file that will be addressed and stored
in a unique location in computer memory. (Kirschenbaum 2013)

Every time we access a digital object, we thus duplicate it, we copy it and we
instantiate it. And this is exactly why, in our strategies of conservation,
every time we access a file we also (re)create these objects anew over and
over again. The agency of the archive, of the software and hardware, are also
apparent here, where archives are themselves ‘active ‘‘archaeologists’’ of
knowledge’ (Ernst 2011: 239) and, as Kirschenbaum puts it, ‘the archive writes
itself’ (2013).

In this sense a book can be seen as an apparatus, consisting of an
entanglement of relationships between, among other things, authors, books, the
outside world, readers, the material production and political economy of book
publishing, its preservation and material instantiations, and the discursive
formation of scholarship. Books as apparatuses are thus reality shaping, they
are performative. This relates to Johanna Drucker’s notion of ‘performative
materiality’, where Drucker argues for an extension of what a book _is_ (i.e.
from a focus on its specific properties and affordances), to what a book
_does_ : ‘Performative materiality suggests that what something _is_ has to be
understood in terms of what it _does_ , how it works within machinic,
systemic, and cultural domains.’ For, as Drucker argues, ‘no matter how
detailed a description of material substrates or systems we have, their use is
performative whether this is a reading by an individual, the processing of
code, the transmission of signals through a system, the viewing of a film,
performance of a play, or a musical work and so on. Material conditions
provide an inscriptional base, a score, a point of departure, a provocation,
from which a work is produced as an event’ (Drucker 2013).

So, to come back to your question, these specific digital platforms (Monoskop,
The Pirate Bay etc.) become integral aspects of the apparatus of the book and
each in their own different way participates in the performance and
instantiation of the books in their archives. Not only does a digital book
therefore differ as a material or cultural object from a printed book, a
digital object also has materially distinct properties related to the platform
on which it is made available. Indeed, building further on the theories
described above, a book is a different object every time it is instantiated or
read, be it by a human or machinic entity; they become part of the apparatus
of the book, a performative apparatus. Therefore, as Silvio Lorusso has
stated:

[![The-Post-Digital-Publishing-Archive-An-Inventory-of-Speculative-Strategies
-----Coventry-University-----June-11th-2014-21](https://i2.wp.com/p-dpa.net
/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/The-Post-Digital-Publishing-Archive-An-Inventory-
of-Speculative-Strategies-Coventry-University-June-
11th-2014-21.png)](http://p-dpa.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/The-Post-
Digital-Publishing-Archive-An-Inventory-of-Speculative-Strategies-Coventry-
University-June-11th-2014-21.png)

**DG, VN: In your opinion, can scholarly publishing, in particular self-
archiving practices, constitute a bridge covering the gap between authors and
users in terms of access to knowledge? Could we hope that these practices will
find a broader use, moving from very specific fields (academic papers) to book
publishing in general?**

JA: On the one hand, yes. Self-archiving, or the ‘green road’ to open access,
offers a way for academics to make their research available in a preprint form
via open access repositories in a relatively simple and straightforward way,
making it easily accessible to other academics and more general audiences.
However, it can be argued that as a strategy, the green road doesn’t seem to
be very subversive, where it doesn’t actively rethink, re-imagine, or
experiment with the system of scholarly knowledge production in a more
substantial way, including peer-review and the print-based publication forms
this system continues to promote. With its emphasis on achieving universal,
free, online access to research, a rigorous critical exploration of the form
of the book itself doesn’t seem to be a main priority of green open access
activists. Stevan Harnad, one of the main proponents of green open access and
self-archiving has for instance stated that ‘it’s time to stop letting the
best get in the way of the better: Let’s forget about Libre and Gold OA until
we have managed to mandate Green Gratis OA universally’ (Harnad 2012). This is
where the self-archiving strategy in its current implementation falls short I
think with respect to the ‘breaking-down’ of barriers between authors and
users, where it isn’t necessarily committed to following a libre open access
strategy, which, one could argue, would be more open to adopting and promoting
forms of open access that are designed to make material available for others
to (re) use, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, translate, modify, remix
and build upon? Surely this would be a more substantial strategy to bridge the
gap between authors and users with respect to the production, dissemination
and consumption of knowledge?

With respect to the second part of your question, could these practices find a
broader use? I am not sure, mainly because of the specific characteristics of
academia and scholarly publishing, where scholars are directly employed and
paid by their institutions for the research work they do. Hence, self-
archiving this work would not directly lead to any or much loss of income for
academics. In other fields, such as literary publishing for example, this
issue of remuneration can become quite urgent however, even though many [free
culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_culture_movement) activists (such
as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow) have argued that freely sharing cultural
goods online, or even self-publishing, doesn’t necessarily need to lead to any
loss of income for cultural producers. So in this respect I don’t think we can
lift something like open access self-archiving out of its specific context and
apply it to other contexts all that easily, although we should certainly
experiment with this of course in different domains of digital culture.

**DG, VN: After your answers, we would also receive suggestions from you. Do
you notice any unresolved or raising questions in the contemporary context of
digital archiving practices and their relation to the publishing realm?**

JA: So many :). Just to name a few: the politics of search and filtering
related to information overload; the ethics and politics of publishing in
relationship to when, where, how and why we decide to publish our research,
for what reasons and with what underlying motivations; the continued text- and
object-based focus of our archiving and publishing practices and platforms,
where there is a lack of space to publish and develop more multimodal,
iterative, diagrammatic and speculative forms of scholarship; issues of free
labor and the problem or remuneration of intellectual labor in sharing
economies etc.

**Bibliography**

* Adema, J. (2014) ‘Embracing Messiness’. [17 November 2014] available from [17 November 2014]
* Adema, J. and Hall, G. (2013) ‘The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access’. _New Formations_ 78 (1), 138–156
* Barad, K. (2007) _Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning_. Duke University Press
* Cramer, F. (2013) _Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts_. Rotterdam : New York, NY: nai010 publishers
* Drucker, J. (2013) _Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface_. [online] 7 (1). available from [4 April 2014]
* Ernst, W. (2011) ‘Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media’. in _Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications_. ed. by Huhtamo, E. and Parikka, J. University of California Press
* Hall, G. (2014) ‘Copyfight’. in _Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities_ , [online] Lueneburg: Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC). available from [5 December 2014]
* Harnad, S. (2012) ‘Open Access: Gratis and Libre’. [3 May 2012] available from [4 March 2014]
* Hayles, N.K. (2004) ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’. _Poetics Today_ 25 (1), 67–90
* Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2012) _Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process_. MIT Press
* Kirschenbaum, M. (2013) ‘The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary’. _DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly_ [online] 7 (1). available from [20 July 2014]
* Lorusso, S. (2014) _The Post-Digital Publishing Archive: An Inventory of Speculative Strategies_. in ‘The Aesthetics of the Humanities: Towards a Poetic Knowledge Production’ [online] held 11 June 2014 at Coventry University. available from [31 May 2015]
* Snijder, R. (2010) ‘The Profits of Free Books: An Experiment to Measure the Impact of Open Access Publishing’. _Learned Publishing_ 23 (4), 293–301
* Swartz, A. (2008) _Guerilla Open Access Manifesto_ [online] available from [31 May 2015]

Goldsmith
If We Had To Ask for Permission We Wouldnt Exist: An Open Letter to the Frameworks Community
2010


To the Frameworks Community,

I have been reading your thread on UbuWeb's hacking on the list with great
interest. It seems that with a few exceptions, the list is generally positive
(with reservations) about Ubu, something that makes me happy. Ubu is a friend,
not a foe.

A few things: first of all, Ubu doesn't touch money. We don't make a cent. We
don't accept grants or donations. Nor do we -- or shall we ever -- sell
anything on the site. No one makes a salary here and the work is all done
voluntarily (more love hours than can ever be repaid). Our bandwidth and
server space is donated by universities.

We know that UbuWeb is not very good. In terms of films, the selection is
random and the quality is often poor. The accompanying text to the films can
be crummy, mostly poached from whatever is available around the net. So are
the films: they are mostly grabbed from private closed file-sharing
communities and made available for the public, hence the often lousy quality
of the films. It could be done much better.

Yet, in terms of how we've gone about building the archive, if we had to ask
for permission, we wouldn't exist. Because we have no money, we don't ask
permission. Asking permission always involves paperwork and negotiations,
lawyers, and bank accounts. Yuk. But by doing things the wrong way, we've been
able to pretty much overnight build an archive that's made publically
accessible for free of charge to anyone. And that in turn has attracted a
great number of film and video makers to want to contribute their works to the
archive legitimately. The fastest growing part of Ubu's film section is by
younger and living artists who want to be a part of Ubu. But if you want your
works off Ubu, we never question it and remove it immediately; it's your work
after all. We will try to convince you otherwise, but we will never leave
anything there that an artist or copyright holder wants removed.

Ubu presents orphaned and out-of-print works. Sometimes we had inadvertently
host works that are in print and commercially available for a reasonable
price. While this is strictly against our policy, it happens. (With an army of
interns and students and myself the only one in charge, it's sometimes hard to
keep the whole thing together.) Then someone tells us that we're doing it and
we take it down immediately and apologize. Ouch. The last thing Ubu wants to
do is to harm those who are trying to legitimately sell works. For this
reason, we don't host, for example, any films by Brakhage: they're in print
and affordable for anyone who wants them on DVD or through Netflix. Fantastic.
[The "wall of shame" was a stupid, juvenile move and we removed a few years
ago it when we heard from Joel Bachar that it was hurtful to the community.]

Some of the list members suggested that we work with distributors. That's
exactly what's starting to happen. Last winter, Ubu had a meeting with EAI and
VDB to explore ways that we could move forward together. We need each other.
EAI sent a list of artists who were uncomfortable with their films being
represented on Ubu. We responded by removing them. But others, such as Leslie
Thornton and Peggy Ahwesh insisted that their oeuvres be on Ubu as well as on
EAI. [You can see Leslie Thorton's Ubu page
here](http://ubu.com/film/thornton.html) (all permissioned).

Likewise, a younger generation is starting to see that works must take a
variety of forms and distributive methods, which happen at the same time
without cancelling each other out. The young, prominent video artist Ryan
Trecartin has all his work on Ubu, hi-res copies are distributed by EAI, The
Elizabeth Dee Gallery represent his work (and sells his videos there), while
showing in museums around the world. Clearly Ryan's career hasn't been hurt by
this approach. [You can see his Ryan Trecartin's Ubu page
here](http://ubu.com/film/trecartin.html) (all permissioned).

Older filmmakers and their estates have taken a variety of approaches.
[Michael Snow](http://ubu.com/film/snow.html) contacted Ubu to say that he was
pleased to have some of his films on Ubu, while he felt that others should be
removed. Of course we accommodated him. Having two permissioned films from
Michael Snow beats hosting ten without his blessing. We considered it a
victory. In another case, the children of [Stan
VanDerBeek](http://ubu.com/film/vanderbeek.html) contacted Ubu requesting that
we host their father's films. Re:Voir was upset by this, saying that we were
robbing his children of their royalties when they in fact had given the films
to us. We put a link to purchase DVDs from Re:Voir, regardless. We think
Re:Voir serves a crucial function: Many people prefer their beautiful physical
objects and hi-res DVDs to our pile of pixels. The point is that there is much
(understandable) suspicion and miscommunication. And I'll be the first to
admit that, on a community level, I've remained aloof and distant, and the
cause of much of that alienation. For this, I apologize.

In terms of sales and rentals ("Ubu is bad for business"), you'd know better
than me. But when [Peter Gidal](http://ubu.com/film/gidal.html) approached Ubu
and requested that his films be included in our archive, we were thrilled to
host a number of them. I met Peter in NYC a few months ago and asked him what
the effect of having his films on Ubu had been. He said, in terms of sales and
rentals, it was exactly the same, but in terms of interest, he felt there was
a big uptick from students and scholars by virtue of being able to see and
study that which was unavailable before. Ubu is used mostly by students and in
the classroom. Sadly, as many of you have noted, academic budgets don't
generally provide for adequate rental or projection money. I know this
firsthand: my wife, the video artist [Cheryl
Donegan](http://ubu.com/film/donegan.html) \-- who teaches video at two
prominent East Coast institutions -- is given approximately $200 per semester
(if that) for rentals. Good luck.

This summer, Ubu did a [show at the Walter Reade
Theater](http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/fcssummer/ubuweb.html) at Lincoln
Center in NYC. I insisted that we show AVIs and MP4s from the site on their
giant screen. They looked horrible. But that was the point. I wanted to prove
the value of high-resolution DVDs and real film prints. I wanted to validate
the existence of distributors who make these types of copies available. Ubu's
crummy files are a substitute, a thumbnail for the real thing: sitting in a
dark from with like-minded, warm bodies watching an enormous projection in a
room with a great sound system. Cinema, as you know too well, is a social
experience; Ubu pales by comparison. It will never be a substitute. But sadly,
for many -- unable to live near the urban centers where such fare is shown,
trapped by economics, geography, career, circumstance, health, family, etc. --
Ubu is the only lifeline to this kind of work. As such, we believe that we do
more good in the world than harm.

An ideal situation happened when UbuWeb was asked to participate in a
[show](http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/intermission) at the CCA in Montreal. The CCA
insisted on showing hi-res films, which they rented from distributors of
materials that Ubu hosts. We were thrilled. By having these materials
available to be seen on Ubu, it led to rental fees for the artists and income
for the distributors. It was a win-win situation. This Ubu working at its
best.

Finally, I don't really think it's good for me to join the list. I'm not well-
enough versed in your world to keep up with the high level of conversation
going on there. Nor do I wish to get into a pissing match. However, I can be
contacted [here](http://ubu.com/contact) and am happy to respond.

It think that, in the end, Ubu is a provocation to your community to go ahead
and do it right, do it better, to render Ubu obsolete. Why should there only
be one UbuWeb? You have the tools, the resources, the artwork and the
knowledge base to do it so much better than I'm doing it. I fell into this as
Ubu has grown organically (we do it because we can) and am clearly not the
best person to be representing experimental cinema. Ubu would love you to step
in and help make it better. Or, better yet, put us out of business by doing it
correctly, the way it should have been done in the first place.

Kenneth Goldsmith
UbuWeb


---|---|---|---

Goldsmith
UbuWeb at 15 Years An Overview
2011


# UbuWeb at 15 Years: An Overview

By [Kenneth Goldsmith](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kenneth-
goldsmith)

It's amazing to me that [UbuWeb](http://ubu.com), after fifteen years, is
still going. Run with no money and put together pretty much without
permission, Ubu has succeeded by breaking all the rules, by going about things
the wrong way. UbuWeb can be construed as the Robin Hood of the avant-garde,
but instead of taking from one and giving to the other, we feel that in the
end, we're giving to all. UbuWeb is as much about the legal and social
ramifications of its self-created distribution and
[archiving](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/archiving-is-the-
new-folk-art/) system as it is about the content hosted on the site. In a
sense, the content takes care of itself; but keeping it up there has proved to
be a trickier proposition. The socio-political maintenance of keeping free
server space with unlimited bandwidth is a complicated dance, often interfered
with by darts thrown at us by individuals calling foul-play on copyright
infringement. Undeterred, we keep on: after fifteen years, we're still going
strong. We're lab rats under a microscope: in exchange for the big-ticket
bandwidth, we've consented to be objects of university research in the
ideology and practice of radical distribution.

But by the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Cobbled together, operating
on no money and an all-volunteer staff, UbuWeb has become the unlikely
definitive source for all things avant-garde on the internet. Never meant to
be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP
pulls the plug, our university support dries up, or we simply grow tired of
it. Acquisition by a larger entity is impossible: nothing is for sale. We
don't touch money. In fact, what we host has never made money. Instead, the
site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists—[the music of
Jean Dubuffet](http://www.ubu.com/sound/dubuffet.html), [the poetry of Dan
Graham](http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/poem.html),[ Julian Schnabel’s
country music](http://ubu.com/sound/schnabel.html), [the punk rock of Martin
Kippenberger](http://ubu.com/sound/kippenberger.html), [the diaries of John
Lennon](http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen7/diary.html), [the rants of Karen
Finley](http://www.ubu.com/sound/uproar.html), and [pop songs by Joseph
Beuys](http://www.ubu.com/film/beuys_sonne.html)—all of which was originally
put out in tiny editions and vanished quickly.

However the web provides the perfect place to restage these works. With video,
sound, and text remaining more faithful to the original experience than, say,
painting or sculpture, Ubu proposes a different sort of revisionist art
history, one based on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on
the perceived, or market-based, center. Few people, for example, know that
Richard Serra makes videos. Whilst visiting his recent retrospective at The
Museum of Modern Art in New York, there was no sign of [TELEVISION DELIVERS
PEOPLE](http://www.ubu.com/film/serra_television.html) (1973) or
[BOOMERANG](http://www.ubu.com/film/serra_boomerang.html) (1974), both being
well-visited resources on UbuWeb. Similarly, Salvador Dali’s obscure video,
[IMPRESSIONS DE LA HAUTE MONGOLIE—HOMMAGE Á RAYMOND
ROUSSEL](http://www.ubu.com/film/dali_impressions.html) from the mid-70s can
be viewed. Outside of UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), it’s the only other film he
completed in his lifetime. While you won’t find reproductions of Dali’s
paintings on UbuWeb, you will find [a 1967 recording of an advertisement he
made for a bank.](http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/dali_salvador/Dali-
Salvador_Apoth-du-dollar_1967.mp3)

It’s not all off-beat: there is, in all fairness, lots of primary expressions
of artists’ works which port to the web perfectly: [the films of Hollis
Frampton](http://ubu.com/film/frampton.html), [readings by Alain Robbe-
Grillet](http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/audio5B.html#jealousy), [Samuel
Beckett radio plays](http://www.ubu.com/sound/beckett.html), [the concrete
poems of Mary Ellen Solt](http://ubu.com/historical/solt/index.html), [the
writings of Maurice Blanchot](http://ubu.com/ubu/blanchot_last_man.html) and
the [music of Meredith Monk](http://www.ubu.com/sound/monk.html), to name a
few.

UbuWeb began in 1996 as a site focusing on visual and concrete poetry. With
the advent of the graphical web browser, we began scanning old concrete poems,
astonished by how fresh they looked backlit by the computer screen. Shortly
thereafter, when streaming audio became available, it made sense to extend our
scope to sound poetry, and as bandwidth increased we later added MP3s as well
as video. Sound poetry opened up a whole new terrain: certain of [John Cage’s
readings](http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage.html) of his mesostic texts could be
termed “sound poetry,” hence we included them. As often, though, Cage combined
his readings with an orchestral piece; we included those as well. But soon, we
found ourselves unable to distinguish the difference between “sound poetry”
and “music.” We encountered this dilemma time and again whether it was with
the compositions of [Maurico Kagel](http://www.ubu.com/sound/kagel.html),
[Joan La Barbara](http://www.ubu.com/sound/lab.html), or [Henri
Chopin](http://www.ubu.com/sound/chopin.html), all of whom are as well-known
as composers as they are sound artists. After a while, we gave up trying to
name things; we dropped the term “sound poetry” and referred to it thenceforth
simply as “[Sound](http://www.ubu.com/sound/index.html).”

When we began posting [found street
poems](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/ass.html) that used letter forms in
fantastically innovative ways, we had to reconsider what “concrete poetry”
was. As time went on, we seemed to be outgrowing our original taxonomies until
we simply became a repository for the “avant-garde” (whatever that means—our
idea of what is “avant-garde” seems to be changing all the time). UbuWeb
adheres to no one historical narrative, rather we’re more interested in
putting several disciplines into the same space and seeing how they interact:
poetry, music, film, and literature from all periods encounter and bounce off
of each other in unexpected ways.

In 2005, we acquired a collection called [The 365 Days
Project](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/index.shtml), a year’s worth of
outrageous MP3s that can be best described as celebrity gaffs, recordings of
children screeching, how-to records, song-poems, propagandistic religious
ditties, spoken word pieces, even ventriloquist acts. However, buried deep
within The 365 Days Project were rare tracks by the legendary avant-gardist
[Nicolas Slonimsky](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/2003/070.shtml), an
early-to-mid-twentieth century conductor, performer, and composer belting out
advertisements and children’s ditties on the piano in an off-key voice. UbuWeb
had already been hosting historical recordings from the 1920s he
[conducted](http://www.ubu.com/sound/slonimsky.html) of [Charles
Ives](http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/slonimsky_nicolas/Slonimsky-
Nicolas_02_Ives-Barn-Dance.mp3), [Carl
Ruggles](http://www.ubu.com/sound/agp/AGP167.html), and [Edgard
Varèse](http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/sound/slonimsky_nicolas/Slonimsky-
Nicolas_01_Varese-Ionisation.mp3) in our Sound section, yet nestled in amongst
oddballs like [Louis Farrakhan singing
calypso](http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/2003/091.shtml) or high school
choir’s renditions of “[Fox On The
Run](http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2003/01/365-Days-Project-01-04-dondero-high-
school-a-capella-choir-fox-on-the-run-1996.mp3),” Slonimsky fit into both
categories—high and low—equally well.

A few years back, Jerome Rothenberg, the leading scholar of
[Ethnopoetics](http://ubu.com/ethno/), approached us with an idea to include a
wing which would feature Ethnopoetic sound, visual art, poetry, and essays.
Rothenberg’s interest was specific to UbuWeb: how the avant-garde dovetailed
with the world’s deep cultures—those surviving in situ as well as those that
had vanished except for transcriptions in books or recordings from earlier
decades. Sound offerings include everything from [Slim
Gaillard](http://ubu.com/ethno/soundings/gaillard.html) to [Inuit throat
singing](http://ubu.com/ethno/soundings/inuit.html), each making formal
connections to modernist strains of [Dada](http://www.ubu.com/sound/dada.html)
or [sound poetry](http://ubu.com/sound/poesia_sonora.html). Likewise, the
Ethnopoetic visual poetry section ranges from [Chippewa song
pictures](http://ubu.com/ethno/visuals/chip.html) to [Paleolithic
palimpsests](http://ubu.com/ethno/visuals/paleo.html) to [Apollinaire’s
Calligrammes](http://ubu.com/historical/app/index.html) (1912–18) There are
dozens of papers with topics like “[Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of
Scat](http://ubu.com/ethno/discourses/syntax_of_scat.doc)” to [Kenneth
Rexroth’s writings on American Indian
song](http://ubu.com/ethno/discourses/rexroth_indian.html).

There are over 2500 full-length avant-garde films and videos, both streaming
and downloadable, including the videos of [Vito
Acconci](http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci.html) and the filmic oeuvre of [Jack
Smith](http://www.ubu.com/film/smith_jack.html), You can also find several
biographies and interviews with authors such as [Jorge Luis
Borges](http://www.ubu.com/film/borges.html),[ J. G.
Ballard](http://www.ubu.com/film/ballard.html), [Allen
Ginsberg](http://www.ubu.com/film/ginsberg.html), and [Louis-Ferdinand
Céline](http://www.ubu.com/film/celine.html). And there are a number of films
about avant-garde music, most notably [Robert
Ashley](http://www.ubu.com/sound/ashley.html)’s epic 14-hour [Music with Roots
in the Aether](http://www.ubu.com/film/aether.html), a series of composer
portraits made in the mid-70s featuring artists such as [Pauline
Oliveros](http://www.ubu.com/film/oliveros.html), [Philip
Glass](http://www.ubu.com/film/glass_aether.html), and [Alvin
Lucier](http://www.ubu.com/film/aether.html). A dozen of the rarely screened
films by [Mauricio Kagel](http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel.html) can be viewed as
can [Her Noise](http://www.ubu.com/film/her_noise.html), a documentary about
women and experimental music from 2005. There are also hours of performance
documentation, notably the entire [Cinema of
Transgression](http://www.ubu.com/film/transgression.html) series with films
by [Beth B](http://www.ubu.com/film/b.html) and [Richard
Kern](http://www.ubu.com/film/kern.html), a lecture by [Chris
Burden](http://www.ubu.com/film/burden.html), a bootleg version of [Robert
Smithson’s HOTEL PALENQUE](http://www.ubu.com/film/smithson.html), (1969) and
an astonishing [21-minute clip of Abbie Hoffman making gefilte
fish](http://www.ubu.com/film/hoffman.html) on Christmas Eve of 1973.

Other portions of the site include a vast repository of papers about audio,
performance, conceptual art, and poetry. There are large sections of artists
simply placed together under categories of Historical and Contemporary. And
then there is [/ubu Editions](http://www.ubu.com/ubu/), which offers full-
length PDFs of literature and poetry. Among the 73 titles, authors include Tim
Davis, Ron Silliman, Maurice Blanchot, Caroline Bergvall, Claude Simon, Jeremy
Sigler, Severo Sarduy, and Juliana Spahr. And finally there is a [Conceptual
Writing](http://ubu.com/concept/index.html) wing which highlights contemporary
trends in poetry as well as its historical precedents.

How does it all work? Most importantly, UbuWeb functions on no money: all work
is done by volunteers. Our server space and bandwidth is donated by several
universities, who use UbuWeb as an object of study for ideas related to
radical distribution and gift economies on the web. In terms of content, each
section has an editor who brings to the site their area of expertise. Ubu is
constantly being updated but the mission is different from the flotsam and
jetsam of a blog; rather, we liken it to a library which is ever-expanding in
uncanny—and often uncategorizable—directions. Fifteen years into it, UbuWeb
hosts over 7,500 artists and several thousand works of art. You’ll never find
an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box. UbuWeb has always been and will
always be free and open to all.

The future is eminently scalable: as long as we have the bandwidth and server
space, there is no limit as to how big the site can grow. For the moment, we
have no competition, a fact we’re not happy about. We’re distressed that there
is only one UbuWeb: why aren’t there dozens like it? Looking at the art world,
the problem appears to be a combination of an adherence to an old economy (one
that is working very well with a booming market) and sense of trepidation,
particularly in academic circles, where work on the internet is often not
considered valid for academic credit. As long as the art world continues to
prize economies of scarcity over those based on plentitude, the change will be
a long time coming. But UbuWeb seeks to offer an alternative by invoking a
gift economy of plentitude with a strong emphasis on global education. We’re
on numerous syllabi, ranging from kindergarteners studying pattern poetry to
post graduates listening to hours of Jacques Lacan’s
[Séminaires](http://www.ubu.com/sound/lacan.html).

And yet . . . it could vanish any day. Beggars can’t be choosers and we gladly
take whatever is offered to us. We don’t run on the most stable of servers or
on the swiftest of machines; hacks and crashes eat into the archive on a
periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; occasionally
the army of volunteers dwindles to a team of one. But that’s the beauty of it:
UbuWeb is vociferously anti-institutional, eminently fluid, refusing to bow to
demands other than what we happen to be moved by at a specific moment,
allowing us flexibility and the ability to continually surprise our audience .
. . and even ourselves.

Originally Published: April 26th, 2011

Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called some of the most "exhaustive and
beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by _Publishers Weekly._
Goldsmith is the author of eight books of poetry, founding editor of the
online archive UbuWeb (http://ubu.com), and the editor _I 'll Be Your Mirror:
The Selected Andy Warhol..._

Graziano
Pirate Care: How do we imagine the health care for the future we want?
2018


Pirate Care - How do we imagine the health care for the future we want?

Oct 5, 2018 · 19 min read

by Valeria Graziano

A recent trend to reimagine the systems of care for the future is based on many of the principles of self-organization. From the passive figure of the patient — an aptly named subject, patiently awaiting aid from medical staff and carers — researchers and policymakers are moving towards a model defined as people-powered health — where care is discussed as transforming from a top-down service to a network of coordinated actors.

At the same time, for large numbers of people, to self-organize around their own healthcare needs is not a matter of predilection, but increasingly one of necessity. In Greece, where the measures imposed by the Troika decimated public services, a growing number of grassroots clinics set up by the Solidarity Movement have been providing medical attention to those without a private insurance. In Italy, initiatives such as the Ambulatorio Medico Popolare in Milan offer free consultations to migrants and other vulnerable citizens.

The new characteristic in all of these cases is the fact that they frame what they do in clearly political terms, rejecting or sidestepping the more neutral ways in which the third sector and the NGOs have long presented care practices as apolitical, as ways to help out that should never ask questions bigger than the problems they set out to confront, and as standing beyond left and right (often for the sake of not alienating potential donors and funders).

Rather, the current trends towards self-organization in health care are very vocal and clear in their messages: the care system is in crisis, and we need to learn from what we know already. One thing we know is that the market or the financialization of assets cannot be the solution (do you remember when just a few years ago Occupy was buying back healthcare debts from financial speculators, thus saving thousands Americans from dire economic circumstances? Or that scene from Michael Moore’s Sicko, the documentary where a guy has to choose which finger to have amputated because he does not have enough cash for saving both?).

Another thing we also know is that we cannot simply hold on to past models of managing the public sector, as most national healthcare systems were built for the needs of the last century. Administrations have been struggling to adapt to the changing nature of health conditions (moving from a predominance of epidemic to chronic diseases) and the different needs of today’s populations. And finally, we most definitely know that to go back to even more conservative ideas that frame care as a private issue that should fall on the shoulders of family members (and most often, of female relatives) or hired servants (also gendered and racialised) is not the best we can come up with.

Among the many initiatives that are rethinking how we organize the provision of health and care in ways that are accessible, fair, and efficient, there are a number of actors — mostly small organizations — who are experimenting with the opportunities introduced by digital technologies. While many charities and NGOs remain largely ignorant of the opportunities offered by technology, these new actors are developing DIY devices, wearables, 3D-printed bespoke components, apps and smart objects to intervene in areas otherwise neglected by the bigger players in the care system. These practices are presenting a new mode of operating that I want to call ‘pirate care’.
Pirate Care

Piracy and Care are not always immediately relatable notions. The figure of the pirate in popular and media cultures is often associated with cunning intelligence and masculine modes of action, of people running servers which are allowing people to illegally download music or movie files. One of the very first organizations that articulated the stakes of sharing knowledge was actually named Piratbyrån. “When you pirate mp3s, you are downloading communism” was a popular motto at the time. And yet, bringing the idea of a pirate ethics into resonance with contemporary modes of care invites a different consideration for practices that propose a paradigm change and therefore inevitably position themselves in tricky positions vis-à-vis the law and the status quo. I have been noticing for a while now that another kind of contemporary pirate is coming to the fore in our messy society in the midst of many crises. This new kind of pirate could be best captured by another image: this time it is a woman, standing on the dock of a boat sailing through the Caribbean sea towards the Mexican Gulf, about to deliver abortion pills to other women for whom this option is illegal in their country.

Women on Waves, founded in 1999, engages in its abortion-on-boat missions every couple of years. They are mostly symbolic actions, as they are rather expensive operations, and yet they are potent means for stirring public debate and have often been met with hostility — even military fleets. So far, they have visited seven countries so far, including Mexico, Guatemala and, more recently, Ireland and Poland, where feminists movements have been mobilizing in huge numbers to reclaim reproductive rights.

According to official statistics, more than 47,000 women die every year from complications resulting from illegal, unsafe abortion procedures, a service used by over 21 million women who do not have another choice. As Leticia Zenevich, spokesperson of Women on Waves, told HuffPost: “The fact that women need to leave the state sovereignty to retain their own sovereignty ― it makes clear states are deliberately stopping women from accessing their human right to health.” Besides the boat campaigns, the organization also runs Women on Web, an online medical abortion service active since 2005. The service is active in 17 languages, and it is helping more than 100,000 women per year to get information and access abortion pills. More recently, Women on Waves also begun experimenting with the use of drones to deliver the pills in countries impacted by restrictive laws (such as Poland in 2015 and Northern Ireland in 2016).

Women on Waves are the perfect figure to begin to illustrate my idea of ‘pirate care’. By this term I want to bring attention to an emergent phenomenon in the contemporary world, where more and more often initiatives that want to bring support and care to the most vulnerable subjects in the most unstable situations, increasingly have to do so by operating in that grey zone that exists between the gaps left open by various rules, laws and technologies. Some thrive in this shadow area, carefully avoiding calling attention to themselves for fear of attracting ferocious polemics and the trolling that inevitably accompanies them. In other cases, care practices that were previously considered the norm have now been pushed towards illegality.

Consider for instance the situation highlighted by the Docs Not Cops campaign that started in the UK four years ago, when the government had just introduced its ‘hostile environment’ policy with the aim to make everyday life as hard as possible for migrants with an irregular status. Suddenly, medical staff in hospitals and other care facilities were supposed to carry out document checks before being allowed to offer any assistance. Their mobilization denounced the policy as an abuse of mandate on the part of the Home Office and a threat to public health, given that it effectively discouraged patients to seek help for fear of retaliations. Another sadly famous example of this trend of pushing many acts of care towards illegality would the straitjacketing and criminalization of migrant rescuing NGOs in the Mediterranean on the part of various European countries, a policy led by Italian government. Yet another example would be the increasing number of municipal decrees that make it a crime to offer food, money or shelter to the homeless in many cities in North America and Europe.
Hacker Ethics

This scenario reminds us of the tragic story of Antigone and the age-old question of what to do when the relationship between what the law says and one what feels it is just becomes fraught with tensions and contradictions. Here, the second meaning of ‘pirate care’ becomes apparent as it points to the way in which a number of initiatives have been responding to the current crisis by mobilizing tactics and ethics as first developed within the hacker movement.

As described by Steven Levy in Hackers, the general principles of a hacker ethic include sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to knowledge and tools, and an effort of contributing to society’s democratic wellbeing. To which we could add, following Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, that “bureaucracy should not be allowed to get in the way of doing anything useful.” While here Stallman was reflecting on the experience of the M.I.T. AI Lab in 1971, his critique of bureaucracy captures well a specific trait of the techno-political nexus that is also shaping the present moment: as more technologies come to mediate everyday interactions, they are also reshaping the very structure of the institutions and organizations we inhabit, so that our lives are increasingly formatted to meet the requirements of an unprecedented number of standardised procedures, compulsory protocols, and legal obligations.

According to anthropologists David Graeber, we are living in an era of “total bureaucratization”. But while contemporary populism often presents bureaucracy as a problem of the public sector, implicitly suggesting “the market” to be the solution, Graeber’s study highlights how historically all so-called “free markets” have actually been made possible through the strict enforcement of state regulations. Since the birth of the modern corporation in 19th century America, “bureaucratic techniques (performance reviews, focus groups, time allocation surveys …) developed in financial and corporate circles came to invade the rest of society — education, science, government — and eventually, to pervade almost every aspect of everyday life.”
The forceps and the speculum

And thus, in resonance with the tradition of hacker ethics, a number of ‘pirate care’ practices are intervening in reshaping what looking after our collective health will look like in the future. CADUS, for example, is a Berlin based NGO which has recently set up a Crisis Response Makerspace to build open and affordable medical equipment specifically designed to bring assistance in extreme crisis zones where not many other organizations would venture, such as Syria and Northern Iraq. After donating their first mobile hospital to the Kurdish Red Crescent last year, CADUS is now working to develop a second version, in a container this time, able to be deployed in conflict zones deprived of any infrastructure, and a civil airdrop system to deliver food and medical equipment as fast as possible. The fact that CADUS adopted the formula of the makerspace to invent open emergency solutions that no private company would be interested in developing is not a coincidence, but emerges from a precise vision of how healthcare innovations should be produced and disseminated, and not only for extreme situations.

“Open source is the only way for medicine” — says Marcus Baw of Open Health Hub — as “medical software now is medicine”. Baw has been involved in another example of ‘pirate care’ in the UK, founding a number of initiatives to promote the adoption of open standards, open source code, and open governance in Health IT. The NHS spends about £500 million each time it refreshes Windows licenses, and aside from avoiding the high costs, an open source GP clinical system would be the only way to address the pressing ethical issue facing contemporary medicine: as software and technology become more and more part of the practice of medicine itself, they need to be subject to peer-review and scrutiny to assess their clinical safety. Moreover, that if such solutions are found to be effective and safe lives, it is the duty of all healthcare practitioners to share their knowledge with the rest of humanity, as per the Hippocratic Oath. To illustrate what happens when medical innovations are kept secret, Baw shares the story of the Chamberlen family of obstetricians, who kept the invention of the obstetric forceps, a family trade secret for over 150 years, using the tool only to treat their elite clientele of royals and aristocracy. As a result, thousands of mothers and babies likely died in preventable circumstances.

It is perhaps significant that such a sad historical example of the consequences ofclosed medicine must come from the field of gynaecology, one of the most politically charged areas of medical specialization to this day. So much so that last year another collective of ‘pirate carers’ named GynePunk developed a biolab toolkit for emergency gynaecological care, to allow those excluded from the reproductive healthcare — undocumented migrants, trans and queer women, drug users and sex workers — to perform basic checks on their own bodily fluids. Their prototypes include a centrifuge, a microscope and an incubator that can be cheaply realised by repurposing components of everyday items such as DVD players and computer fans, or by digital fabrication. In 2015, GynePunk also developed a 3D-printable speculum and — who knows? — perhaps their next project might include a pair of forceps…

As the ‘pirate care’ approach keeps proliferating more and more, its tools and modes of organizing is keeping alive a horizon in which healthcare is not de facto reduced to a privilege.

PS. This article was written before the announcement of the launch of Mediterranea, which we believe to be another important example of pirate care. #piratecare #abbiamounanave

Graziano, Mars & Medak
Learning from #Syllabus
2019


ACTIONS

LEARNING FROM
#SYLLABUS
VALERIA GRAZIANO,
MARCELL MARS,
TOMISLAV MEDAK

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LEARNING FROM #SYLLABUS
VALERIA GRAZIANO, MARCELL MARS, TOMISLAV MEDAK
The syllabus is the manifesto of the 21st century.
—Sean Dockray and Benjamin Forster1
#Syllabus Struggles
In August 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old boy living in Ferguson, Missouri,
was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson. Soon after, as the civil protests denouncing police brutality and institutional racism began to mount across the United
States, Dr. Marcia Chatelain, Associate Professor of History and African American
Studies at Georgetown University, launched an online call urging other academics
and teachers ‘to devote the first day of classes to a conversation about Ferguson’ and ‘to recommend texts, collaborate on conversation starters, and inspire
dialogue about some aspect of the Ferguson crisis.’2 Chatelain did so using the
hashtag #FergusonSyllabus.
Also in August 2014, using the hashtag #gamergate, groups of users on 4Chan,
8Chan, Twitter, and Reddit instigated a misogynistic harassment campaign against
game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, media critic Anita Sarkeesian, as well as
a number of other female and feminist game producers, journalists, and critics. In the
following weeks, The New Inquiry editors and contributors compiled a reading list and
issued a call for suggestions for their ‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’.3
In June 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United
States. In the weeks that followed, he became the presumptive Republican nominee,
and The Chronicle of Higher Education introduced the syllabus ‘Trump 101’.4 Historians N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain found ‘Trump 101’ inadequate, ‘a mock college syllabus […] suffer[ing] from a number of egregious omissions and inaccuracies’,
failing to include ‘contributions of scholars of color and address the critical subjects
of Trump’s racism, sexism, and xenophobia’. They assembled ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’.5
Soon after, in response to a video in which Trump engaged in ‘an extremely lewd
conversation about women’ with TV host Billy Bush, Laura Ciolkowski put together a
‘Rape Culture Syllabus’.6

1
2
3
4
5
6

Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office, ‘README.md’, Hyperreadings, 15 February
2018, https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
Marcia Chatelain, ‘Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus’, Dissent Magazine, 28 November 2014,
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus/.
‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’, The New Inquiry, 2 September 2014, https://thenewinquiry.
com/tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
‘Trump 101’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 June 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/
Trump-Syllabus/236824/.
N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’, Public Books, 28 June 2016, https://
www.publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/.
Laura Ciolkowski, ‘Rape Culture Syllabus’, Public Books, 15 October 2016, https://www.
publicbooks.org/rape-culture-syllabus/.

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In April 2016, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe established the Sacred Stone
Camp and started the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the construction of
which threatened the only water supply at the Standing Rock Reservation. The protest at the site of the pipeline became the largest gathering of native Americans in
the last 100 years and they earned significant international support for their ReZpect
Our Water campaign. As the struggle between protestors and the armed forces unfolded, a group of Indigenous scholars, activists, and supporters of the struggles of
First Nations people and persons of color, gathered under the name the NYC Stands
for Standing Rock Committee, put together #StandingRockSyllabus.7
The list of online syllabi created in response to political struggles has continued to
grow, and at present includes many more examples:
All Monuments Must Fall Syllabus
#Blkwomensyllabus
#BLMSyllabus
#BlackIslamSyllabus
#CharlestonSyllabus
#ColinKaepernickSyllabus
#ImmigrationSyllabus
Puerto Rico Syllabus (#PRSyllabus)
#SayHerNameSyllabus
Syllabus for White People to Educate Themselves
Syllabus: Women and Gender Non-Conforming People Writing about Tech
#WakandaSyllabus
What To Do Instead of Calling the Police: A Guide, A Syllabus, A Conversation, A
Process
#YourBaltimoreSyllabus
It would be hard to compile a comprehensive list of all the online syllabi that have
been created by social justice movements in the last five years, especially, but not
exclusively, those initiated in North America in the context of feminist and anti-racist
activism. In what is now a widely spread phenomenon, these political struggles use
social networks and resort to the hashtag template ‘#___Syllabus’ to issue calls for
the bottom-up aggregation of resources necessary for political analysis and pedagogy
centering on their concerns. For this reason, we’ll call this phenomenon ‘#Syllabus’.
During the same years that saw the spread of the #Syllabus phenomenon, university
course syllabi have also been transitioning online, often in a top-down process initiated
by academic institutions, which has seen the syllabus become a contested document
in the midst of increasing casualization of teaching labor, expansion of copyright protections, and technology-driven marketization of education.
In what follows, we retrace the development of the online syllabus in both of these
contexts, to investigate the politics enmeshed in this new media object. Our argument

7

‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://
nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.

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is that, on the one hand, #Syllabus names the problem of contemporary political culture as pedagogical in nature, while, on the other hand, it also exposes academicized
critical pedagogy and intellectuality as insufficiently political in their relation to lived
social reality. Situating our own stakes as both activists and academics in the present
debate, we explore some ways in which the radical politics of #Syllabus could be supported to grow and develop as an articulation of solidarity between amateur librarians
and radical educators.
#Syllabus in Historical Context: Social Movements and Self-Education
When Professor Chatelain launched her call for #FergusonSyllabus, she was mainly
addressing a community of fellow educators:
I knew Ferguson would be a challenge for teachers: When schools opened across
the country, how were they going to talk about what happened? My idea was simple, but has resonated across the country: Reach out to the educators who use
Twitter. Ask them to commit to talking about Ferguson on the first day of classes.
Suggest a book, an article, a film, a song, a piece of artwork, or an assignment that
speaks to some aspect of Ferguson. Use the hashtag: #FergusonSyllabus.8
Her call had a much greater resonance than she had originally anticipated as it reached
beyond the limits of the academic community. #FergusonSyllabus had both a significant impact in shaping the analysis and the response to the shooting of Michael
Brown, and in inspiring the many other #Syllabus calls that soon followed.
The #Syllabus phenomenon comprises different approaches and modes of operating. In some cases, the material is clearly claimed as the creation of a single individual, as in the case of #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus, which is prefaced on the project’s
landing page by a warning to readers that ‘material compiled in this syllabus should
not be duplicated without proper citation and attribution.’9 A very different position on
intellectual property has been embraced by other #Syllabus interventions that have
chosen a more commoning stance. #StandingRockSyllabus, for instance, is introduced as a crowd-sourced process and as a useful ‘tool to access research usually
kept behind paywalls.’10
The different workflows, modes of engagements, and positioning in relation to
intellectual property make #Syllabus readable as symptomatic of the multiplicity
that composes social justice movements. There is something old school—quite
literally—about the idea of calling a list of online resources a ‘syllabus’; a certain
quaintness, evoking thoughts of teachers and homework. This is worthy of investigation especially if contrasted with the attention dedicated to other online cultural
phenomena such as memes or fake news. Could it be that the online syllabus offers

8

9
10

Marcia Chatelain, ‘How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson’, The Atlantic, 25
August 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/how-to-teach-kids-aboutwhats-happening-in-ferguson/379049/.
Frank Leon Roberts, ‘Black Lives Matter: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest’, 2016, http://
www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall2016/.
‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://
nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.

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a useful, fresh format precisely for the characteristics that foreground its connections to older pedagogical traditions and techniques, predating digital cultures?
#Syllabus can indeed be analyzed as falling within a long lineage of pedagogical tools
created by social movements to support processes of political subjectivation and the
building of collective consciousness. Activists and militant organizers have time and
again created and used various textual media objects—such as handouts, pamphlets,
cookbooks, readers, or manifestos—to facilitate a shared political analysis and foment
mass political mobilization.
In the context of the US, anti-racist movements have historically placed great emphasis on critical pedagogy and self-education. In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (an alliance of civil rights initiatives) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), created a network of 41 temporary alternative
schools in Mississippi. Recently, the Freedom Library Project, a campaign born out
of #FergusonSyllabus to finance under-resourced pedagogical initiatives, openly
referenced this as a source of inspiration. The Freedom Summer Project of 1964
brought hundreds of activists, students, and scholars (many of whom were white)
from the north of the country to teach topics and issues that the discriminatory
state schools would not offer to black students. In the words of an SNCC report,
Freedom Schools were established following the belief that ‘education—facts to
use and freedom to use them—is the basis of democracy’,11 a conviction echoed
by the ethos of contemporary #Syllabus initiatives.
Bob Moses, a civil rights movement leader who was the head of the literary skills initiative in Mississippi, recalls the movement’s interest, at the time, in teaching methods
that used the very production of teaching materials as a pedagogical tool:
I had gotten hold of a text and was using it with some adults […] and noticed that
they couldn’t handle it because the pictures weren’t suited to what they knew […]
That got me into thinking about developing something closer to what people were
doing. What I was interested in was the idea of training SNCC workers to develop
material with the people we were working with.12
It is significant that for him the actual use of the materials the group created was much
less important than the process of producing the teaching materials together. This focus
on what could be named as a ‘pedagogy of teaching’, or perhaps more accurately ‘the
pedagogy of preparing teaching materials’, is also a relevant mechanism at play in the
current #Syllabus initiatives, as their crowdsourcing encourages different kinds of people
to contribute what they feel might be relevant resources for the broader movement.
Alongside the crucial import of radical black organizing, another relevant genealogy in
which to place #Syllabus would be the international feminist movement and, in particular, the strategies developed in the 70s campaign Wages for Housework, spearheaded

11
12

Daniel Perlstein, ‘Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools’,
History of Education Quarterly 30.3 (Autumn 1990): 302.
Perlstein, ‘Teaching Freedom’: 306.

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by Selma James and Silvia Federici. The Wages for Housework campaign drove home
the point that unwaged reproductive labor provides a foundation for capitalist exploitation. They wanted to encourage women to denaturalize and question the accepted
division of labor into remunerated work outside the house and labor of love within
the confines of domesticity, discussing taboo topics such as ‘prostitution as socialized housework’ and ‘forced sterilization’ as issues impacting poor, often racialized,
women. The organizing efforts of Wages for Housework held political pedagogy at their
core. They understood that that pedagogy required:
having literature and other materials available to explain our goals, all written in a
language that women can understand. We also need different types of documents,
some more theoretical, others circulating information about struggles. It is important
that we have documents for women who have never had any political experience.
This is why our priority is to write a popular pamphlet that we can distribute massively and for free—because women have no money.13
The obstacles faced by the Wages for Housework campaign were many, beginning
with the issue of how to reach a dispersed constituency of isolated housewives
and how to keep the revolutionary message at the core of their claims accessible
to different groups. In order to tackle these challenges, the organizers developed
a number of innovative communication tactics and pedagogical tools, including
strategies to gain mainstream media coverage, pamphlets and leaflets translated
into different languages,14 a storefront shop in Brooklyn, and promotional tables at
local events.
Freedom Schools and the Wages for Housework campaign are only two amongst
the many examples of the critical pedagogies developed within social movements.
The #Syllabus phenomenon clearly stands in the lineage of this history, yet we should
also highlight its specificity in relation to the contemporary political context in which it
emerged. The #Syllabus acknowledges that since the 70s—and also due to students’
participation in protests and their display of solidarity with other political movements—
subjects such as Marxist critical theory, women studies, gender studies, and African
American studies, together with some of the principles first developed in critical pedagogy, have become integrated into the educational system. The fact that many initiators of #Syllabus initiatives are women and Black academics speaks to this historical
shift as an achievement of that period of struggles. However, the very necessity felt by
these educators to kick-start their #Syllabus campaigns outside the confines of academia simultaneously reveals the difficulties they encounter within the current privatized and exclusionary educational complex.

13
14

Silvia Federici and Arlen Austin (eds) The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1977:
History, Theory and Documents. New York: Autonomedia, 2017: 37.
Some of the flyers and pamphlets were digitized by MayDay Rooms, ‘a safe haven for historical
material linked to social movements, experimental culture and the radical expression of
marginalised figures and groups’ in London, and can be found in their online archive: ‘Wages
for Housework: Pamphlets – Flyers – Photographs’, MayDay Rooms, http://maydayrooms.org/
archives/wages-for-housework/wfhw-pamphlets-flyers-photographs/.

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#Syllabus as a Media Object
Besides its contextualization within the historical legacy of previous grassroots mobilizations, it is also necessary to discuss #Syllabus as a new media object in its own
right, in order to fully grasp its relevance for the future politics of knowledge production and transmission.
If we were to describe this object, a #Syllabus would be an ordered list of links to
scholarly texts, news reports, and audiovisual media, mostly aggregated through a
participatory and iterative process, and created in response to political events indicative of larger conditions of structural oppression. Still, as we have seen, #Syllabus
as a media object doesn’t follow a strict format. It varies based on the initial vision
of their initiators, political causes, and social composition of the relevant struggle.
Nor does it follow the format of traditional academic syllabi. While a list of learning
resources is at the heart of any syllabus, a boilerplate university syllabus typically
also includes objectives, a timetable, attendance, coursework, examination, and an
outline of the grading system used for the given course. Relieved of these institutional
requirements, the #Syllabus typically includes only a reading list and a hashtag. The
reading list provides resources for understanding what is relevant to the here and
now, while the hashtag provides a way to disseminate across social networks the call
to both collectively edit and teach what is relevant to the here and now. Both the list
and the hashtag are specificities and formal features of the contemporary (internet)
culture and therefore merit further exploration in relation to the social dynamics at
play in #Syllabus initiatives.
The different phases of the internet’s development approached the problem of the
discoverability of relevant information in different ways. In the early days, the Gopher
protocol organized information into a hierarchical file tree. With the rise of World Wide
Web (WWW), Yahoo tried to employ experts to classify and catalog the internet into
a directory of links. That seemed to be a successful approach for a while, but then
Google (founded in 1998) came along and started to use a webgraph of links to rank
the importance of web pages relative to a given search query.
In 2005, Clay Shirky wrote the essay ‘Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and
Tags’,15 developed from his earlier talk ‘Folksonomies and Tags: The Rise of User-Developed Classification’. Shirky used Yahoo’s attempt to categorize the WWW to argue
against any attempt to classify a vast heterogenous body of information into a single
hierarchical categorical system. In his words: ‘[Yahoo] missed [...] that, if you’ve got
enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file
system. The links alone are enough.’ Those words resonated with many. By following
simple formatting rules, we, the internet users, whom Time magazine named Person of
the Year in 2006, proved that it is possible to collectively write the largest encyclopedia
ever. But, even beyond that, and as per Shirky’s argument, if enough of us organized
our own snippets of the vast body of the internet, we could replace old canons, hierarchies, and ontologies with folksonomies, social bookmarks, and (hash)tags.

15

Clay Shirky, ‘Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags’, 2005, http://shirky.com/writings/
herecomeseverybody/ontology_overrated.html.

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Very few who lived through those times would have thought that only a few years later
most user-driven services would be acquired by a small number of successful companies and then be shut down. Or, that Google would decide not to include the biggest
hashtag-driven platform, Twitter, into its search index and that the search results on
its first page would only come from a handful of usual suspects: media conglomerates, Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Reddit, Quora. Or, that Twitter would
become the main channel for the racist, misogynist, fascist escapades of the President
of United States.
This internet folk naivety—stoked by an equally enthusiastic, venture-capital-backed
startup culture—was not just naivety. This was also a period of massive experimental
use of these emerging platforms. Therefore, this history would merit to be properly
revisited and researched. In this text, however, we can only hint to this history: to contextualize how the hashtag as a formalization initially emerged, and how with time the
user-driven web lost some of its potential. Nonetheless, hashtags today still succeed in
propagating political mobilizations in the network environment. Some will say that this
propagation is nothing but a reflection of the internet as a propaganda machine, and
there’s no denying that hashtags do serve a propaganda function. However, it equally
matters that hashtags retain the capacity to shape coordination and self-organization,
and they are therefore a reflection of the internet as an organization machine.
As mentioned, #Syllabus as a media object is an ordered list of links to resources.
In the long history of knowledge retrieval systems and attempts to help users find
relevant information from big archives, the list on the internet continues in the tradition of the index card catalog in libraries, of charts in the music industry, or mixtapes
and playlists in popular culture, helping people tell their stories of what is relevant and
what isn’t through an ordered sequence of items. The list (as a format) together with
the hashtag find themselves in the list (pun intended) of the most iconic media objects
of the internet. In the network media environment, being smart in creating new lists
became the way to displace old lists of relevance, the way to dismantle canons, the
way to unlearn. The way to become relevant.
The Academic Syllabus Migrates Online
#Syllabus interventions are a challenge issued by political struggles to educators as
they expose a fundamental contradiction in the operations of academia. While critical pedagogies of yesteryear’s social movements have become integrated into the
education system, the radical lessons that these pedagogies teach students don’t
easily reconcile with their experience: professional practice courses, the rethoric of
employability and compulsory internships, where what they learn is merely instrumental, leaves them wondering how on earth they are to apply their Marxism or feminism
to their everyday lives?
Cognitive dissonance is at the basis of degrees in the liberal arts. And to make things
worse, the marketization of higher education, the growing fees and the privatization
of research has placed universities in a position where they increasingly struggle to
provide institutional space for critical interventions in social reality. As universities become more dependent on the ‘customer satisfaction’ of their students for survival, they
steer away from heated political topics or from supporting faculty members who might
decide to engage with them. Borrowing the words of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten,

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‘policy posits curriculum against study’,16 creating the paradoxical situation wherein
today’s universities are places in which it is possible to do almost everything except
study. What Harney and Moten propose instead is the re-appropriation of the diffuse
capacity of knowledge generation that stems from the collective processes of selforganization and commoning. As Moten puts it: ‘When I think about the way we use the
term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other
people.’17 And it is this practice of sharing a common repertoire—what Moten and
Harney call ‘rehearsal’18—that is crucially constitutive of a crowdsourced #Syllabus.
This contradiction and the tensions it brings to contemporary neoliberal academia can
be symptomatically observed in the recent evolution of the traditional academic syllabus. As a double consequence of (some) critical pedagogies becoming incorporated
into the teaching process and universities striving to reduce their liability risks, academic syllabi have become increasingly complex and extensive documents. They are
now understood as both a ‘social contract’ between the teachers and their students,
and ‘terms of service’19 between the institution providing educational services and the
students increasingly framed as sovereign consumers making choices in the market of
educational services. The growing official import of the syllabus has had the effect that
educators have started to reflect on how the syllabus translates the power dynamics
into their classroom. For instance, the critical pedagogue Adam Heidebrink-Bruno has
demanded that the syllabus be re-conceived as a manifesto20—a document making
these concerns explicit. And indeed, many academics have started to experiment with
the form and purpose of the syllabus, opening it up to a process of co-conceptualization with their students, or proposing ‘the other syllabus’21 to disrupt asymmetries.
At the same time, universities are unsurprisingly moving their syllabi online. A migration
that can be read as indicative of three larger structural shifts in academia.
First, the push to make syllabi available online, initiated in the US, reinforces the differential effects of reputation economy. It is the Ivy League universities and their professorial star system that can harness the syllabus to advertise the originality of their
scholarship, while the underfunded public universities and junior academics are burdened with teaching the required essentials. This practice is tied up with the replication
in academia of the different valorization between what is considered to be the labor of
production (research) and that of social reproduction (teaching). The low esteem (and
corresponding lower rewards and remuneration) for the kinds of intellectual labors that
can be considered labors of care—editing journals, reviewing papers or marking, for
instance—fits perfectly well with the gendered legacies of the academic institution.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York:
Autonomedia, 2013, p. 81.
17 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 110.
18 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 110.
19 Angela Jenks, ‘It’s In The Syllabus’, Teaching Tools, Cultural Anthropology website, 30 June 2016,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/910-it-s-in-the-syllabu/.
20 Adam Heidebrink-Bruno, ‘Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture’,
Hybrid Pedagogy, 28 August 2014, http://hybridpedagogy.org/syllabus-manifesto-criticalapproach-classroom-culture/.
21 Lucy E. Bailey, ‘The “Other” Syllabus: Rendering Teaching Politics Visible in the Graduate
Pedagogy Seminar’, Feminist Teacher 20.2 (2010): 139–56.
16

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Second, with the withdrawal of resources to pay precarious and casualized academics during their ‘prep’ time (that is, the time in which they can develop new
course material, including assembling new lists of references, updating their courses as well as the methodologies through which they might deliver these), syllabi
now assume an ambivalent role between the tendencies for collectivization and
individualization of insecurity. The reading lists contained in syllabi are not covered
by copyrights; they are like playlists or recipes, which historically had the effect of
encouraging educators to exchange lesson plans and make their course outlines
freely available as a valuable knowledge common. Yet, in the current climate where
universities compete against each other, the authorial function is being extended
to these materials too. Recently, US universities have been leading a trend towards
the interpretation of the syllabus as copyrightable material, an interpretation that
opened up, as would be expected, a number of debates over who is a syllabus’
rightful owner, whether the academics themselves or their employers. If the latter interpretation were to prevail, this would enable universities to easily replace
academics while retaining their contributions to the pedagogical offer. The fruits of
a teacher’s labor could thus be turned into instruments of their own deskilling and
casualization: why would universities pay someone to write a course when they can
recycle someone else’s syllabus and get a PhD student or a precarious post doc to
teach the same class at a fraction of the price?
This tendency to introduce a logic of property therefore spurs competitive individualism and erasure of contributions from others. Thus, crowdsourcing the syllabus
in the context of growing precarization of labor risks remaining a partial process,
as it might heighten the anxieties of those educators who do not enjoy the security
of a stable job and who are therefore the most susceptible to the false promises of
copyright enforcement and authorship understood as a competitive, small entrepreneurial activity. However, when inserted in the context of live, broader political
struggles, the opening up of the syllabus could and should be an encouragement
to go in the opposite direction, providing a ground to legitimize the collective nature
of the educational process and to make all academic resources available without
copyright restrictions, while devising ways to secure the proper attribution and the
just remuneration of everyone’s labor.
The introduction of the logic of property is hard to challenge as it is furthered by commercial academic publishers. Oligopolists, such as Elsevier, are not only notorious for
using copyright protections to extract usurious profits from the mostly free labor of
those who write, peer review, and edit academic journals,22 but they are now developing all sorts of metadata, metrics, and workflow systems that are increasingly becoming central for teaching and research. In addition to their publishing business, Elsevier
has expanded its ‘research intelligence’ offering, which now encompasses a whole
range of digital services, including the Scopus citation database; Mendeley reference
manager; the research performance analytics tools SciVal and Research Metrics; the
centralized research management system Pure; the institutional repository and pub-

22 Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, ‘The Oligopoly of Academic
Publishers in the Digital Era’, PLoS ONE 10.6 (10 June 2015),https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502/.

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lishing platform Bepress; and, last but not least, grant discovery and funding flow tools
Funding Institutional and Elsevier Funding Solutions. Given how central digital services
are becoming in today’s universities, whoever owns these platforms is the university.
Third, the migration online of the academic syllabus falls into larger efforts by universities to ‘disrupt’ the educational system through digital technologies. The introduction
of virtual learning environments has led to lesson plans, slides, notes, and syllabi becoming items to be deposited with the institution. The doors of public higher education are being opened to commercial qualification providers by means of the rise in
metrics-based management, digital platforming of university services, and transformation of students into consumers empowered to make ‘real-time’ decisions on how to
spend their student debt.23 Such neoliberalization masquerading behind digitization
is nowhere more evident than in the hype that was generated around Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs), exactly at the height of the last economic crisis.
MOOCs developed gradually from the Massachusetts Institute of Techology’s (MIT) initial experiments with opening up its teaching materials to the public through the OpenCourseWare project in 2001. By 2011, MOOCs were saluted as a full-on democratization of access to ‘Ivy-League-caliber education [for] the world’s poor.’24 And yet, their
promise quickly deflated following extremely low completion rates (as low as 5%).25
Believing that in fifty years there will be no more than 10 institutions globally delivering
higher education,26 by the end of 2013 Sebastian Thrun (Google’s celebrated roboticist
who in 2012 founded the for-profit MOOC platform Udacity), had to admit that Udacity
offered a ‘lousy product’ that proved to be a total failure with ‘students from difficult
neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in
their lives.’27 Critic Aaron Bady has thus rightfully argued that:
[MOOCs] demonstrate what the technology is not good at: accreditation and mass
education. The MOOC rewards self-directed learners who have the resources and
privilege that allow them to pursue learning for its own sake [...] MOOCs are also a
really poor way to make educational resources available to underserved and underprivileged communities, which has been the historical mission of public education.28
Indeed, the ‘historical mission of public education’ was always and remains to this
day highly contested terrain—the very idea of a public good being under attack by
dominant managerial techniques that try to redefine it, driving what Randy Martin

23 Ben Williamson, ‘Number Crunching: Transforming Higher Education into “Performance Data”’,
Medium, 16 August 2018, https://medium.com/ussbriefs/number-crunching-transforming-highereducation-into-performance-data-9c23debc4cf7.
24 Max Chafkin, ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course’,
FastCompany, 14 November 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastianthrun-uphill-climb/.
25 ‘The Rise (and Fall?) Of the MOOC’, Oxbridge Essays, 14 November 2017, https://www.
oxbridgeessays.com/blog/rise-fall-mooc/.
26 Steven Leckart, ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’,
Wired, 20 March 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/.
27 Chafkin, ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun’.
28 Aaron Bady, ‘The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform’, Liberal Education 99.4 (Fall 2013),
https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/mooc-moment-and-end-reform.

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aptly called the ‘financialization of daily life.’29 The failure of MOOCs finally points to a
broader question, also impacting the vicissitudes of #Syllabus: Where will actual study
practices find refuge in the social, once the social is made directly productive for capital at all times? Where will study actually ‘take place’, in the literal sense of the phrase,
claiming the resources that it needs for co-creation in terms of time, labor, and love?
Learning from #Syllabus
What have we learned from the #Syllabus phenomenon?
The syllabus is the manifesto of 21st century.
Political struggles against structural discrimination, oppression, and violence in the
present are continuing the legacy of critical pedagogies of earlier social movements
that coupled the process of political subjectivation with that of collective education.
By creating effective pedagogical tools, movements have brought educators and students into the fold of their struggles. In the context of our new network environment,
political struggles have produced a new media object: #Syllabus, a crowdsourced list
of resources—historic and present—relevant to a cause. By doing so, these struggles
adapt, resist, and live in and against the networks dominated by techno-capital, with
all of the difficulties and contradictions that entails.
What have we learned from the academic syllabus migrating online?
In the contemporary university, critical pedagogy is clashing head-on with the digitization of higher education. Education that should empower and research that should
emancipate are increasingly left out in the cold due to the data-driven marketization
of academia, short-cutting the goals of teaching and research to satisfy the fluctuating demands of labor market and financial speculation. Resistance against the capture of data, research workflows, and scholarship by means of digitization is a key
struggle for the future of mass intellectuality beyond exclusions of class, disability,
gender, and race.
What have we learned from #Syllabus as a media object?
As old formats transform into new media objects, the digital network environment defines the conditions in which these new media objects try to adjust, resist, and live. A
right intuition can intervene and change the landscape—not necessarily for the good,
particularly if the imperatives of capital accumulation and social control prevail. We
thus need to re-appropriate the process of production and distribution of #Syllabus
as a media object in its totality. We need to build tools to collectively control the workflows that are becoming the infrastructures on top of which we collaboratively produce
knowledge that is vital for us to adjust, resist, and live. In order to successfully intervene in the world, every aspect of production and distribution of these new media objects becomes relevant. Every single aspect counts. The order of items in a list counts.
The timestamp of every version of the list counts. The name of every contributor to

29 Randy Martin, Financialization Of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.

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every version of the list counts. Furthermore, the workflow to keep track of all of these
aspects is another complex media object—a software tool of its own—with its own order and its own versions. It is a recursive process of creating an autonomous ecology.
#Syllabus can be conceived as a recursive process of versioning lists, pointing to textual, audiovisual, or other resources. With all of the linked resources publicly accessible to all; with all versions of the lists editable by all; with all of the edits attributable to
their contributors; with all versions, all linked resources, all attributions preservable by
all, just such an autonomous ecology can be made for #Syllabus. In fact, Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office have already proposed such a methodology in
their Hyperreadings, a forkable readme.md plaintext document on GitHub. They write:
A text that by its nature points to other texts, the syllabus is already a relational
document acknowledging its own position within a living field of knowledge. It is
decidedly not self-contained, however it often circulates as if it were.
If a syllabus circulated as a HyperReadings document, then it could point directly to the texts and other media that it aggregates. But just as easily as it circulates, a HyperReadings syllabus could be forked into new versions: the syllabus
is changed because there is a new essay out, or because of a political disagreement, or because following the syllabus produced new suggestions. These forks
become a family tree where one can follow branches and trace epistemological
mutations.30
It is in line with this vision, which we share with the HyperReadings crew, and in line
with our analysis, that we, as amateur librarians, activists, and educators, make our
promise beyond the limits of this text.
The workflow that we are bootstrapping here will keep in mind every aspect of the media object syllabus (order, timestamp, contributor, version changes), allowing diversity
via forking and branching, and making sure that every reference listed in a syllabus
will find its reference in a catalog which will lead to the actual material, in digital form,
needed for the syllabus.
Against the enclosures of copyright, we will continue building shadow libraries and
archives of struggles, providing access to resources needed for the collective processes of education.
Against the corporate platforming of workflows and metadata, we will work with social
movements, political initiatives, educators, and researchers to aggregate, annotate,
version, and preserve lists of resources.
Against the extractivism of academia, we will take care of the material conditions that
are needed for such collective thinking to take place, both on- and offline.

30 Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office, ‘README.md’, Hyperreadings, 15 February
2018, https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.

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Bibliography
Bady, Aaron. ‘The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform’, Liberal Education 99.4 (Fall 2013), https://
www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/mooc-moment-and-end-reform/.
Bailey, Lucy E. ‘The “Other” Syllabus: Rendering Teaching Politics Visible in the Graduate Pedagogy
Seminar’, Feminist Teacher 20.2 (2010): 139–56.
Chafkin, Max. ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course’,
FastCompany, 14 November 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastianthrun-uphill-climb/.
Chatelain, Marcia. ‘How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson’, The Atlantic, 25 August
2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/how-to-teach-kids-about-whatshappening-in-ferguson/379049/.
_____. ‘Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus’, Dissent Magazine, 28 November 2014, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus/.
Ciolkowski, Laura. ‘Rape Culture Syllabus’, Public Books, 15 October 2016, https://www.publicbooks.
org/rape-culture-syllabus/.
Connolly, N.D.B. and Keisha N. Blain. ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’, Public Books, 28 June 2016, https://www.
publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/.
Dockray, Sean, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office. ‘README.md’, HyperReadings, 15 February 2018,
https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
Federici, Silvia, and Arlen Austin (eds) The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1977: History, Theory, Documents, New York: Autonomedia, 2017.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York:
Autonomedia, 2013.
Heidebrink-Bruno, Adam. ‘Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture’, Hybrid
Pedagogy, 28 August 2014, http://hybridpedagogy.org/syllabus-manifesto-critical-approach-classroom-culture/.
Jenks, Angela. ‘It’s In The Syllabus’, Teaching Tools, Cultural Anthropology website, 30 June 2016,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/910-it-s-in-the-syllabus/.
Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, ‘The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era’, PLoS ONE 10.6 (10 June 2015), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502/.
Leckart, Steven. ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’, Wired,
20 March 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/.
Martin, Randy. Financialization Of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Perlstein, Daniel. ‘Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools’,
History of Education Quarterly 30.3 (Autumn 1990).
Roberts, Frank Leon. ‘Black Lives Matter: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest’, 2016, http://www.
blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall2016/.
‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.
Shirky, Clay. ‘Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags’, 2005, http://shirky.com/writings/
herecomeseverybody/ontology_overrated.html.
‘The Rise (and Fall?) Of the MOOC’, Oxbridge Essays, 14 November 2017, https://www.oxbridgeessays.
com/blog/rise-fall-mooc/.
‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’, The New Inquiry, 2 September 2014, https://thenewinquiry.com/
tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
‘Trump 101’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 June 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/
Trump-Syllabus/236824/.
‘Wages for Housework: Pamphlets – Flyers – Photographs,’ MayDay Rooms, http://maydayrooms.org/
archives/wages-for-housework/wfhw-pamphlets-flyers-photographs/.
Williamson, Ben. ‘Number Crunching: Transforming Higher Education into “Performance Data”’,
Medium, 16 August 2018, https://medium.com/ussbriefs/number-crunching-transforming-highereducation-into-performance-data-9c23debc4cf7/.

Hamerman
Pirate Libraries and the Fight for Open Information
2015


| | SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2015 | A BI-WEEKLY WEBPAPER | ISSUE 61

|
---|---|---|---|---
PIRATE LIBRARIES and the fight for open information
/ by _Sarah Hamerman_ |

In a digital era that destabilizes traditional notions of intellectual
property, cultural producers must rethink information access.

Over the last several years, a number of _pirate libraries_ have done just
that. Collaboratively run digital libraries such as
[_Aaaaaarg_](http://aaaaarg.fail/),
_[Monoskop](http://www.monoskop.org/Monoskop)_ , _[Public
Library](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/)_ , and
_[UbuWeb_](http://www.ubuweb.tv/) have emerged, offering access to humanities
texts and audiovisual resources that are technically ‘pirated’ and often hard
to find elsewhere.

Though these sites differ somewhat in content, architecture, and ideological
bent, all of them disavow intellectual copyright law to varying degrees,
offering up pirated books and media with the aim of advancing information
access.

“Information wants to be free,” has served as a catchphrase in recent internet
activism, calling for information democracy, led by media, library and
information advocates.

As online information access is increasingly embedded within the networks of
capital, the digital text-sharing underground actualizes the Internet’s
potential to build a true information commons.

With such projects, the archive becomes a record of collective power, not
corporate or state power; the digital book becomes unlocked, linkable, and
shareable.

Still, these sites comprise but a small subset of the networks of peer-to-peer
file sharing. Many legal battles waged over the explosion of audiovisual file
sharing through p2p services such as Napster, BitTorrent and MediaFire. At its
peak, Napster boasted over 80 million users; the p2p music-sharing service was
shut down after a high-profile lawsuit by the RIAA in 2001.

The US Department of Justice brought charges against open access activist
_[Aaron Swartz](http://www.fvckthemedia.com/issue51/editorial)_ in 2011 for
his large-scale unauthorized downloading of files from the JStor Academic
database. Swartz, who sadly committed suicide before his trial, was an
organizer for Demand Progress, a campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act,
which was defeated in 2012. Swartz’s actions and the fight around SOPA
represent a benchmark in the struggle for open-access and anti-copyright
practices surrounding the digital book.

Aaaaaarg, Monoskop, UbuWeb and Public Library are representative cases of the
pirate library because of their explicit engagement with archival form, their
embrace of ideas of the _[digital commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Commons)_ within current left-leaning thought, and their like-minded focus on critical theory and the arts.

All of these projects lend themselves to be considered _as libraries_ ,
retooled for open digital networks.

_Aaaaaarg.org_ , started by Los Angeles based artist Sean Dockray, hosts
full-text pdfs of over 50,000 books and articles. The library is connected to a an
alternative education project called the Public School, which serves as a
platform for self-organizing lectures, workshops and projects in cities across
the globe. _Aaaaaarg_ ’s catalog is viewable by the public, but
upload/download privileges are restricted through an invite system, thus
circumventing copyright law.


The site is divided into a “Library,” in which users can search for texts by
author; “Collections,” or user-generated grouping of texts designed for
reading groups or research interests; and “Discussions,” a message board where
participants can request texts and volunteer for working groups. Most
recently, _Aaaaaarg_ has introduced a “compiler” tool that allows readers to
select excerpts from longer texts and assemble them into new PDFs, and a
reading tool that allows readers to save reference points and insert comments
into texts. Though the library is easily searchable, it doesn’t maintain
high-quality _[metadata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata)_. Dockray and
other organizers intend to preserve a certain subjective and informal quality,
focusing more on discussion and collaboration than correct preservation and
classification practice.

_Aaaaaarg_ has been threatened with takedowns a few times, but has survived by
creating mirrored sites and reconstituted itself by varying the number of A’s
in the URL. Its shifts in location, organization, and capabilities reflect
both the decentralized, ad-hoc nature of its maintenance and the organizers’
attempts to elude copyright regulations. Text-sharing sites such as _Aaaaaarg_
have also been referred to as _[shadow
libraries_](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/),
reflecting their quasi-covert status and their efforts to evade shutdown.

Monoskop.org, a project founded by media artist _[Dušan
Barok](http://monoskop.org/Du%C5%A1an_Barok)_ , is a wiki for collaborative
studies of art, media and the humanities that was born in 2004 out of Barok’s
study of media art and related cultural practices. Its significant holdings -
about 3,000 full-length texts and many more excerpts, links and citations -
include avant-garde and modernist magazines, writings on sound art, scanned
illustrations, and media theory texts.

As a wiki, any user can edit any article or upload content, and see their
changes reflected immediately. Monoskop is comprised of two sister sites: the
Monoskop wiki and Monoskop Log, the accompanying text repository. Monoskop Log
is structured as a Wordpress site with links hosted on third-party sites, much
like the rare-music download blogs that became popular in the mid-2000s.
Though this architecture is relatively unstable, links are fixed on-demand and
site mirroring and redundancy balance out some of the instability.

Monoskop makes clear that it is offering content under the fair-use doctrine
and that this content is for personal and scholarly use, not commercial use.
Barok notes that though there have been a small number of takedowns, people
generally appreciate unrestricted access to the types of materials in Monoskop
log, whether they are authors or publishers.

_Public Library_ , a somewhat newer pirate library founded by Croatian
Internet activist and researcher Marcell Mars and his collaborators, currently
offers a collection of about 6,300 texts. The project frames itself through a
utopian philosophy of building a truly universal library, radically extending
enlightenment-era conceptions of democracy. Through democratizing the _tools
of librarianship_ – book scanning, classification systems, cataloging,
information – it promises a broader, de-institutionalized public library.

In __[Public Library: An
Essay](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/27/public-library-an-essay/#sdendnote19sym)__ , Public Library’s organizers frame p2p libraries as
“fragile knowledge infrastructures built and maintained by brave librarians
practicing civil disobedience which the world of researchers in the humanities
rely on.” This civil disobedience is a politically motivated refutation of
intellectual property law and the orientation of information networks toward
venture capital and advertising. While the pirate libraries fulfill this
dissident function as a kind of experimental provocation, their content is
audience-specific rather than universal.

_[UbuWeb](http://www.ubuweb.com/resources/index.html)_ , founded in 1996 by
conceptual artist/ writer Kenneth Goldsmith, is the largest online archive of
avant-garde art resources. Its holdings include sound, video and text-based
works dating from the historical avant-garde era to today. While many of the
sites in the “pirate library” continuum source their content through
community-based or peer-to-peer models, UbuWeb focuses on making available out
of print, obscure or difficult to access artistic media, stating that
uploading such historical artifacts doesn’t detract from the physical value of
the work; rather, it enhances it. The website’s philosophy blends the utopian
ideals of avant-garde concrete poetry with the ideals of the digital gift
economy, and it has specifically refused to accept corporate or foundation
funding or adopt a more market-oriented business model.


**Pirate Libraries vs. “The Sharing Economy”**

In pirate libraries, information users become archive builders by uploading
often-copyrighted content to shared networks.

Within the so-called “ _[sharing
economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_economy)_ ,” users essentially
lease e-book content from information corporations such as Amazon, which
markets both the Kindle as platform. This centralization of intellectual
property has dire impacts on the openness of the digital book as a
collaborative knowledge-sharing device.

In contrast, the pirate library actualizes a gift economy based on qualitative
and communal rather than monetized exchange. As Mackenzie Wark writes in _A
Hacker Manifesto_ (2004), “The gift is marginal, but nevertheless plays a
vital role in cementing reciprocal and communal relations among people who
otherwise can only confront each other as buyers and sellers of commodities.”

From theorizing new media art to building solidarity against repressive
regimes, such communal information networks can crucially articulate shared
bodies of political and aesthetic desire and meaning. According to author
Matthew Stadler, literature is by nature communal. “Literature is not owned,”
he writes. “It is, by definition, a space of mutually negotiated meanings that
never closes or concludes, a space that thrives on — indeed requires — open
access and sharing.”

In a roundtable discussion published in _New Formations_ , _Aaaaaarg_ founder
Sean Dockray remarks that the site “actively explored and exploited the
affordances of asynchronous, networked communication,” functioning upon the
logic of the hack. Dockray continues: “But all of this is rather commonplace
for what’s called ‘piracy,’ isn’t it?” Pirate librarianship can be thought of
as a practice of civil disobedience within the stringent information
environment of today.

These projects promise both the realization and destruction of the public
library. They promote information democracy while calling the _professional_
institution of the Library into question, allowing amateurs to upload,
catalog, lend and maintain collections. In _Public Library: An Essay_ , Public
Library’s organizers _[write](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/27
/public-library-an-essay/)_ : “With the emergence of the internet…
librarianship has been given an opportunity… to include thousands of amateur
librarians who will, together with the experts, build a distributed peer-to-peer network to care for the catalog of available knowledge.”

Public Library frames amateur librarianship as a free, collaboratively
maintained and democratic activity, drawing upon the language of the French
Revolution and extending it for the 21st century. While these practices are
democratic in form, they are not necessarily democratic in the populist sense;
rather, they focus on bringing high theoretical discourses to people outside
the academy. Accordingly, they attract a modest but engaged audience of
critics, artists, designers, activists, and scholars.

The activities of Aaaaaarg and Public Library may fall closer to ‘ _[peer
preservation](http://computationalculture.net/article/book-piracy-as-peer-preservation)_ ’
than ‘peer production,’ as the desires to share information
widely and to preserve these collections against shutdown often come into
conflict. In a _[recent piece](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/)_ for e-flux coauthored with Lawrence Liang, Dockray accordingly
laments “the unfortunate fact that digital shadow libraries have to operate
somewhat below the radar: it introduces a precariousness that doesn’t allow
imagination to really expand, as it becomes stuck on techniques of evasion,
distribution, and redundancy.”


UbuWeb and Monoskop, which digitize rare, out-of-print art texts and media
rather than in-print titles, can be said to fulfill the aims of preservation
and access. UbuWeb and Monoskop are openly used and discussed as classroom
resources and in online arts journalism more frequently than the more
aggressively anti-copyright sources; more on-the-record and mainstream
visibility likely -- but doesn’t necessarily -- equate to wider usage.

**From Alternative Space to Alternative Media**

Aaaaaarg _[locates itself as a
‘scaffolding’](http://chtodelat.org/b9-texts-2/vilensky/materialities-of-independent-publishing-a-conversation-with-aaaaarg-chto-delat-i-cite-mute-and-neural/)_ between institutions, a platform that unfolds between institutional
gaps and fills them in, rather than directly opposing them. Over ten years
after it was founded, it continues to provide a community for “niche”
varieties of political critique.

Drawing upon different strains of ‘alternative networking,’ the digital
text-sharing underground gives a voice to those quieted by the mechanisms of
institutional archives, publishing, and galleries. On the one hand, pirate
libraries extend the logic of alternative art spaces/artist-run spaces that
challenge the “white cube” and the art market; instead, they showcase ways of
making that are often ephemeral, performative, and anti-commercial.

Lawrence Liang refers to projects such as Aaaaaarg as “ _[ludic
libraries](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/)_ ,” as
they encourage a sense of intellectual play that deviates from well-
established norms of utility, seriousness, purpose, and property.

Just as alternative, community-oriented art spaces promote “fringe” art forms,
the pirate libraries build upon open digital architectures to promote “fringe”
scholarship, art, technological and archival practices. Though the comparison
between physical architecture and virtual architecture is a metaphor here, the
impact upon creative communities runs parallel.

At the same time, the digital text-sharing underground builds upon Robert W.
McChesney’s calls in _Digital Disconnect_ for a democratic media system that
promotes the expansion of public, student and community journalism. A truly
heterogeneous media system, for McChesney, would promote a multiplicity of
opinions, supplementing for-profit mass media with a substantial and varied
portion of nonprofit and independent media.

In order to create a political system – and a media system – that reflects
multiple interests, rather than the supposedly neutral status quo, we must
support truly free, not-for-profit alternatives to corporate journalism and
“clickbait” media designed to lure traffic for advertisers. We must support
creative platforms that encourage blending high-academic language with pop-
culture; quantitative analysis with art-making; appropriation with
authenticity: the pirate libraries serve just these purposes.

Pirate libraries help bring about what Gary Hall calls the “unbound book” as
text-form; as he writes, we can perceive such a digital book “as liquid and
living, open to being continually updated and collaboratively written, edited,
annotated, critiqued, updated, shared, supplemented, revised, re-ordered,
reiterated and reimagined.” These projects allow us to re-imagine both
archival practices and the digital book for social networks based on the gift.

Aaaaaarg, Monoskop, UbuWeb, and Public Library build a record of critical and
artistic discourse that is held in common, user-responsive and networkable.
Amateur librarians sustain these projects through technological ‘hacks’ that
innovate upon present archival tools and push digital preservation practices
forward.

Pirate libraries critique the ivory tower’s monopoly over the digital book.
They posit a space where alternative communities can flourish.

Between the cracks of the new information capital, the digital text-sharing
underground fosters the coming-into-being of another kind of information
society, one in which the historical record is the democratically-shared basis
for new forms of knowledge.

From this we should take away the understanding that _piracy is normal_ and
the public domain it builds is abundant. While these practices will continue
just beneath the official surface of the information economy, it is high time
for us to demand that our legal structures catch up.

Kelty, Bodo & Allen
Guerrilla Open Access
2018


Memory
of the
World

Edited by

Guerrilla
Open Access
Christopher
Kelty

Balazs
Bodo

Laurie
Allen

Published by Post Office Press,
Rope Press and Memory of the
World. Coventry, 2018.
© Memory of the World, papers by
respective Authors.
Freely available at:
http://radicaloa.co.uk/
conferences/ROA2
This is an open access pamphlet,
licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
license.
Read more about the license at:
https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Figures and other media included
with this pamphlet may be under
different copyright restrictions.
Design by: Mihai Toma, Nick White
and Sean Worley
Printed by: Rope Press,
Birmingham

This pamphlet is published in a series
of 7 as part of the Radical Open
Access II – The Ethics of Care
conference, which took place June
26-27 at Coventry University. More
information about this conference
and about the contributors to this
pamphlet can be found at:
http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/
ROA2
This pamphlet was made possible due
to generous funding from the arts
and humanities research studio, The
Post Office, a project of Coventry
University’s Centre for Postdigital
Cultures and due to the combined
efforts of authors, editors, designers
and printers.

Table of Contents

Guerrilla Open Access:
Terms Of Struggle
Memory of the World
Page 4

Recursive Publics and Open Access
Christopher Kelty
Page 6

Own Nothing
Balazs Bodo
Page 16

What if We Aren't the Only
Guerrillas Out There?
Laurie Allen
Page 26

Guerilla
Open
Access:
Terms Of
Struggle

In the 1990s, the Internet offered a horizon from which to imagine what society
could become, promising autonomy and self-organization next to redistribution of
wealth and collectivized means of production. While the former was in line with the
dominant ideology of freedom, the latter ran contrary to the expanding enclosures
in capitalist globalization. This antagonism has led to epochal copyfights, where free
software and piracy kept the promise of radical commoning alive.
Free software, as Christopher Kelty writes in this pamphlet, provided a model ‘of a
shared, collective, process of making software, hardware and infrastructures that
cannot be appropriated by others’. Well into the 2000s, it served as an inspiration
for global free culture and open access movements who were speculating that
distributed infrastructures of knowledge production could be built, as the Internet
was, on top of free software.
For a moment, the hybrid world of ad-financed Internet giants—sharing code,
advocating open standards and interoperability—and users empowered by these
services, convinced almost everyone that a new reading/writing culture was
possible. Not long after the crash of 2008, these disruptors, now wary monopolists,
began to ingest smaller disruptors and close off their platforms. There was still
free software somewhere underneath, but without the ‘original sense of shared,
collective, process’. So, as Kelty suggests, it was hard to imagine that for-profit
academic publishers wouldn't try the same with open access.
Heeding Aaron Swartz’s call to civil disobedience, Guerrilla Open Access has
emerged out of the outrage over digitally-enabled enclosure of knowledge that
has allowed these for-profit academic publishers to appropriate extreme profits
that stand in stark contrast to the cuts, precarity, student debt and asymmetries
of access in education. Shadow libraries stood in for the access denied to public
libraries, drastically reducing global asymmetries in the process.

4

This radicalization of access has changed how publications
travel across time and space. Digital archiving, cataloging and
sharing is transforming what we once considered as private
libraries. Amateur librarianship is becoming public shadow
librarianship. Hybrid use, as poetically unpacked in Balazs
Bodo's reflection on his own personal library, is now entangling
print and digital in novel ways. And, as he warns, the terrain
of antagonism is shifting. While for-profit publishers are
seemingly conceding to Guerrilla Open Access, they are
opening new territories: platforms centralizing data, metrics
and workflows, subsuming academic autonomy into new
processes of value extraction.
The 2010s brought us hope and then realization how little
digital networks could help revolutionary movements. The
redistribution toward the wealthy, assisted by digitization, has
eroded institutions of solidarity. The embrace of privilege—
marked by misogyny, racism and xenophobia—this has catalyzed
is nowhere more evident than in the climate denialism of the
Trump administration. Guerrilla archiving of US government
climate change datasets, as recounted by Laurie Allen,
indicates that more technological innovation simply won't do
away with the 'post-truth' and that our institutions might be in
need of revision, replacement and repair.
As the contributions to this pamphlet indicate, the terms
of struggle have shifted: not only do we have to continue
defending our shadow libraries, but we need to take back the
autonomy of knowledge production and rebuild institutional
grounds of solidarity.

Memory of the World
http://memoryoftheworld.org

5

Recursive
Publics and
Open Access

Christopher
Kelty

Ten years ago, I published a book calledTwo Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free
Software (Kelty 2008).1 Duke University Press and my editor Ken Wissoker were
enthusiastically accommodating of my demands to make the book freely and openly
available. They also played along with my desire to release the 'source code' of the
book (i.e. HTML files of the chapters), and to compare the data on readers of the
open version to print customers. It was a moment of exploration for both scholarly
presses and for me. At the time, few authors were doing this other than Yochai Benkler
(2007) and Cory Doctorow2, both activists and advocates for free software and open
access (OA), much as I have been. We all shared, I think, a certain fanaticism of the
convert that came from recognizing free software as an historically new, and radically
different mode of organizing economic and political activity. Two Bits gave me a way
to talk not only about free software, but about OA and the politics of the university
(Kelty et al. 2008; Kelty 2014). Ten years later, I admit to a certain pessimism at the
way things have turned out. The promise of free software has foundered, though not
disappeared, and the question of what it means to achieve the goals of OA has been
swamped by concerns about costs, arcane details of repositories and versioning, and
ritual offerings to the metrics God.
When I wrote Two Bits, it was obvious to me that the collectives who built free
software were essential to the very structure and operation of a standardized
Internet. Today, free software and 'open source' refer to dramatically different
constellations of practice and people. Free software gathers around itself those
committed to the original sense of a shared, collective, process of making software,
hardware and infrastructures that cannot be appropriated by others. In political
terms, I have always identified free software with a very specific, updated, version
of classical Millian liberalism. It sustains a belief in the capacity for collective action
and rational thought as aids to establishing a flourishing human livelihood. Yet it
also preserves an outdated blind faith in the automatic functioning of meritorious
speech, that the best ideas will inevitably rise to the top. It is an updated classical
liberalism that saw in software and networks a new place to resist the tyranny of the
conventional and the taken for granted.

6

Christopher Kelty

By contrast, open source has come to mean something quite different: an ecosystem
controlled by an oligopoly of firms which maintains a shared pool of components and
frameworks that lower the costs of education, training, and software creation in the
service of establishing winner-take-all platforms. These are built on open source, but
they do not carry the principles of freedom or openness all the way through to the
platforms themselves.3 What open source has become is now almost the opposite of
free software—it is authoritarian, plutocratic, and nepotistic, everything liberalism
wanted to resist. For example, precarious labor and platforms such as Uber or Task
Rabbit are built upon and rely on the fruits of the labor of 'open source', but the
platforms that result do not follow the same principles—they are not open or free
in any meaningful sense—to say nothing of the Uber drivers or task rabbits who live
by the platforms.
Does OA face the same problem? In part, my desire to 'free the source' of my book
grew out of the unfinished business of digitizing the scholarly record. It is an irony
that much of the work that went into designing the Internet at its outset in the
1980s, such as gopher, WAIS, and the HTML of CERN, was conducted in the name
of the digital transformation of the library. But by 2007, these aims were swamped
by attempts to transform the Internet into a giant factory of data extraction. Even
in 2006-7 it was clear that this unfinished business of digitizing the scholarly record
was going to become a problem—both because it was being overshadowed by other
concerns, and because of the danger it would eventually be subjected to the very
platformization underway in other realms.
Because if the platform capitalism of today has ended up being parasitic on the
free software that enabled it, then why would this not also be true of scholarship
more generally? Are we not witnessing a transition to a world where scholarship
is directed—in its very content and organization—towards the profitability of the
platforms that ostensibly serve it?4 Is it not possible that the platforms created to
'serve science'—Elsevier's increasing acquisition of tools to control the entire lifecycle of research, or ResearchGate's ambition to become the single source for all
academics to network and share research—that these platforms might actually end up
warping the very content of scholarly production in the service of their profitability?
To put this even more clearly: OA has come to exist and scholarship is more available
and more widely distributed than ever before. But, scholars now have less control,
and have taken less responsibility for the means of production of scientific research,
its circulation, and perhaps even the content of that science.

Recursive Publics and Open Access

7

The Method of Modulation
When I wrote Two Bits I organized the argument around the idea of modulation:
free software is simply one assemblage of technologies, practices, and people
aimed at resolving certain problems regarding the relationship between knowledge
(or software tools related to knowledge) and power (Hacking 2004; Rabinow
2003). Free software as such was and still is changing as each of its elements
evolve or are recombined. Because OA derives some of its practices directly from
free software, it is possible to observe how these different elements have been
worked over in the recent past, as well as how new and surprising elements are
combined with OA to transform it. Looking back on the elements I identified as
central to free software, one can ask: how is OA different, and what new elements
are modulating it into something possibly unrecognizable?

Sharing source code
Shareable source code was a concrete and necessary achievement for free
software to be possible. Similarly, the necessary ability to circulate digital texts
is a significant achievement—but such texts are shareable in a much different way.
For source code, computable streams of text are everything—anything else is a
'blob' like an image, a video or any binary file. But scholarly texts are blobs: Word or
Portable Document Format (PDF) files. What's more, while software programmers
may love 'source code', academics generally hate it—anything less than the final,
typeset version is considered unfinished (see e.g. the endless disputes over
'author's final versions' plaguing OA).5 Finality is important. Modifiability of a text,
especially in the humanities and social sciences, is acceptable only when it is an
experiment of some kind.
In a sense, the source code of science is not a code at all, but a more abstract set
of relations between concepts, theories, tools, methods, and the disciplines and
networks of people who operate with them, critique them, extend them and try to
maintain control over them even as they are shared within these communities.

avoid the waste of 'reinventing the wheel' and of pathological
competition, allowing instead modular, reusable parts that
could be modified and recombined to build better things in an
upward spiral of innovation. The 1980s ideas of modularity,
modifiability, abstraction barriers, interchangeable units
have been essential to the creation of digital infrastructures.
To propose an 'open science' thus modulates this definition—
and the idea works in some sciences better than others.
Aside from the obviously different commercial contexts,
philosophers and literary theorists just don't think about
openness this way—theories and arguments may be used
as building blocks, but they are not modular in quite the
same way. Only the free circulation of the work, whether
for recombination or for reference and critique, remains a
sine qua non of the theory of openness proposed there. It
is opposed to a system where it is explicit that only certain
people have access to the texts (whether that be through
limitations of secrecy, or limitations on intellectual property,
or an implicit elitism).

Writing and using copyright licenses
Of all the components of free software that I analyzed, this
is the one practice that remains the least transformed—OA
texts use the same CC licenses pioneered in 2001, which
were a direct descendant of free software licenses.

For free software to make sense as a solution, those involved first had to
characterize the problem it solved—and they did so by identifying a pathology in
the worlds of corporate capitalism and engineering in the 1980s: that computer
corporations were closed organizations who re-invented basic tools and
infrastructures in a race to dominate a market. An 'open system,' by contrast, would

A novel modulation of these licenses is the OA policies (the
embrace of OA in Brazil for instance, or the spread of OA
Policies starting with Harvard and the University of California,
and extending to the EU Mandate from 2008 forward). Today
the ability to control the circulation of a text with IP rights is
far less economically central to the strategies of publishers
than it was in 2007, even if they persist in attempting to do
so. At the same time, funders, states, and universities have all
adopted patchwork policies intended to both sustain green
OA, and push publishers to innovate their own business
models in gold and hybrid OA. While green OA is a significant
success on paper, the actual use of it to circulate work pales

8

Recursive Publics and Open Access

Defining openness

Christopher Kelty

9

in comparison to the commercial control of circulation on the
one hand, and the increasing success of shadow libraries on
the other. Repositories have sprung up in every shape and
form, but they remain largely ad hoc, poorly coordinated, and
underfunded solutions to the problem of OA.

Coordinating collaborations
The collective activity of free software is ultimately the
most significant of its achievements—marrying a form of
intensive small-scale interaction amongst programmers,
with sophisticated software for managing complex objects
(version control and GitHub-like sites). There has been
constant innovation in these tools for controlling, measuring,
testing, and maintaining software.
By contrast, the collective activity of scholarship is still
largely a pre-modern affair. It is coordinated largely by the
idea of 'writing an article together' and not by working
to maintain some larger map of what a research topic,
community, or discipline has explored—what has worked and
what has not.
This focus on the coordination of collaboration seemed to
me to be one of the key advantages of free software, but it
has turned out to be almost totally absent from the practice
or discussion of OA. Collaboration and the recombination of
elements of scholarly practice obviously happens, but it does
not depend on OA in any systematic way: there is only the
counterfactual that without it, many different kinds of people
are excluded from collaboration or even simple participation
in, scholarship, something that most active scholars are
willfully ignorant of.

Fomenting a movement
I demoted the idea of a social movement to merely one
component of the success of free software, rather than let
it be—as most social scientists would have it—the principal
container for free software. They are not the whole story.

10

Christopher Kelty

Is there an OA movement? Yes and no. Librarians remain
the most activist and organized. The handful of academics
who care about it have shifted to caring about it in primarily
a bureaucratic sense, forsaking the cross-organizational
aspects of a movement in favor of activism within universities
(to which I plead guilty). But this transformation forsakes
the need for addressing the collective, collaborative
responsibility for scholarship in favor of letting individual
academics, departments, and disciplines be the focus for
such debates.
By contrast, the publishing industry works with a
phantasmatic idea of both an OA 'movement' and of the actual
practices of scholarship—they too defer, in speech if not in
practice, to the academics themselves, but at the same time
must create tools, innovate processes, establish procedures,
acquire tools and companies and so on in an effort to capture
these phantasms and to prevent academics from collectively
doing so on their own.
And what new components? The five above were central to
free software, but OA has other components that are arguably
more important to its organization and transformation.

Money, i.e. library budgets
Central to almost all of the politics and debates about OA
is the political economy of publication. From the 'bundles'
debates of the 1990s to the gold/green debates of the 2010s,
the sole source of money for publication long ago shifted into
the library budget. The relationship that library budgets
have to other parts of the political economy of research
(funding for research itself, debates about tenured/nontenured, adjunct and other temporary salary structures) has
shifted as a result of the demand for OA, leading libraries
to re-conceptualize themselves as potential publishers, and
publishers to re-conceptualize themselves as serving 'life
cycles' or 'pipeline' of research, not just its dissemination.

Recursive Publics and Open Access

11

Metrics
More than anything, OA is promoted as a way to continue
to feed the metrics God. OA means more citations, more
easily computable data, and more visible uses and re-uses of
publications (as well as 'open data' itself, when conceived of
as product and not measure). The innovations in the world
of metrics—from the quiet expansion of the platforms of the
publishers, to the invention of 'alt metrics', to the enthusiasm
of 'open science' for metrics-driven scientific methods—forms
a core feature of what 'OA' is today, in a way that was not true
of free software before it, where metrics concerning users,
downloads, commits, or lines of code were always after-thefact measures of quality, and not constitutive ones.
Other components of this sort might be proposed, but the
main point is to resist to clutch OA as if it were the beating
heart of a social transformation in science, as if it were a
thing that must exist, rather than a configuration of elements
at a moment in time. OA was a solution—but it is too easy to
lose sight of the problem.
Open Access without Recursive Publics
When we no longer have any commons, but only platforms,
will we still have knowledge as we know it? This is a question
at the heart of research in the philosophy and sociology
of knowledge—not just a concern for activism or social
movements. If knowledge is socially produced and maintained,
then the nature of the social bond surely matters to the
nature of that knowledge. This is not so different than asking
whether we will still have labor or work, as we have long known
it, in an age of precarity? What is the knowledge equivalent of
precarity (i.e. not just the existence of precarious knowledge
workers, but a kind of precarious knowledge as such)?

knowledge and power is shifting dramatically, because the costs—and the stakes—
of producing high quality, authoritative knowledge have also shifted. It is not so
powerful any longer; science does not speak truth to power because truth is no
longer so obviously important to power.
Although this is a pessimistic portrait, it may also be a sign of something yet to
come. Free software as a community, has been and still sometimes is critiqued as
being an exclusionary space of white male sociality (Nafus 2012; Massanari 2016;
Ford and Wajcman 2017; Reagle 2013). I think this critique is true, but it is less a
problem of identity than it is a pathology of a certain form of liberalism: a form that
demands that merit consists only in the content of the things we say (whether in
a political argument, a scientific paper, or a piece of code), and not in the ways we
say them, or who is encouraged to say them and who is encouraged to remain silent
(Dunbar-Hester 2014).
One might, as a result, choose to throw out liberalism altogether as a broken
philosophy of governance and liberation. But it might also be an opportunity to
focus much more specifically on a particular problem of liberalism, one that the
discourse of OA also relies on to a large extent. Perhaps it is not the case that
merit derives solely from the content of utterances freely and openly circulated,
but also from the ways in which they are uttered, and the dignity of the people
who utter them. An OA (or a free software) that embraced that principle would
demand that we pay attention to different problems: how are our platforms,
infrastructures, tools organized and built to support not just the circulation of
putatively true statements, but the ability to say them in situated and particular
ways, with respect for the dignity of who is saying them, and with the freedom to
explore the limits of that kind of liberalism, should we be so lucky to achieve it.

Do we not already see the evidence of this in the 'posttruth' of fake news, or the deliberate refusal by those in
power to countenance evidence, truth, or established
systems of argument and debate? The relationship between

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Recursive Publics and Open Access

13

References

¹ https://twobits.net/download/index.html

Benkler, Yochai. 2007. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets
and Freedom. Yale University Press.
Dunbar-Hester, Christina. 2014. Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in
FM Radio Activism. MIT Press.
Ford, Heather, and Judy Wajcman. 2017. “‘Anyone Can Edit’, Not Everyone Does:
Wikipedia’s Infrastructure and the Gender Gap”. Social Studies of Science 47 (4):
511–527. doi:10.1177/0306312717692172.
Hacking, I. 2004. Historical Ontology. Harvard University Press.
Kelty, Christopher M. 2014. “Beyond Copyright and Technology: What Open Access Can
Tell Us About Precarity, Authority, Innovation, and Automation in the University
Today”. Cultural Anthropology 29 (2): 203–215. doi:10.14506/ca29.2.02.
——— . 2008. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Kelty, Christopher M., et al. 2008. “Anthropology In/of Circulation: a Discussion”. Cultural
Anthropology 23 (3).
Massanari, Adrienne. 2016. “#gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm,
Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures”. New Media & Society 19 (3):
329–346. doi:10.1177/1461444815608807.
Nafus, Dawn. 2012. “‘Patches don’t have gender’: What is not open in open source
software”. New Media & Society 14, no. 4: 669–683. Visited on 04/01/2014. http://
doi:10.1177/1461444811422887.
Rabinow, Paul. 2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton
University Press.
Reagle, Joseph. 2013. “"Free As in Sexist?" Free Culture and the Gender Gap”. First
Monday 18 (1). doi:10.5210/fm.v18i1.4291.

² https://craphound.com/

³ For example, Platform Cooperativism
https://platform.coop/directory

See for example the figure from ’Rent
Seeking by Elsevier,’ by Alejandro Posada
and George Chen (http://knowledgegap.
org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seekingand-financialization-of-the-academicpublishing-industr preliminary-findings/)
4

See Sherpa/Romeo
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php
5

14

Christopher Kelty

Recursive Publics and Open Access

15

Own
Nothing

the contexts we were fleeing from. We made a choice to leave
behind the history, the discourses, the problems and the pain
that accumulated in the books of our library. I knew exactly
what it was I didn’t want to teach to my children once we moved.
So we did not move the books. We pretended that we would
never have to think about what this decision really meant. Up
until today. This year we needed to empty the study with the
shelves. So I’m standing in our library now, the dust covering
my face, my hands, my clothes. In the middle of the floor there
are three big crates and one small box. The small box swallows
what we’ll ultimately take with us, the books I want to show to
my son when he gets older, in case he still wants to read. One of
the big crates will be taken away by the antiquarian. The other
will be given to the school library next door. The third is the
wastebasket, where everything else will ultimately go.

Balazs
Bodo

Flow My Tears
My tears cut deep grooves into the dust on my face. Drip, drip,
drop, they hit the floor and disappear among the torn pages
scattered on the floor.
This year it dawned on us that we cannot postpone it any longer:
our personal library has to go. Our family moved countries
more than half a decade ago, we switched cultures, languages,
and chose another future. But the past, in the form of a few
thousand books in our personal library, was still neatly stacked
in our old apartment, patiently waiting, books that we bought
and enjoyed — and forgot; books that we bought and never
opened; books that we inherited from long-dead parents and
half-forgotten friends. Some of them were important. Others
were relevant at one point but no longer, yet they still reminded
us who we once were.
When we moved, we took no more than two suitcases of personal
belongings. The books were left behind. The library was like
a sick child or an ailing parent, it hung over our heads like an
unspoken threat, a curse. It was clear that sooner or later
something had to be done about it, but none of the options
available offered any consolation. It made no sense to move
three thousand books to the other side of this continent. We
decided to emigrate, and not to take our past with us, abandon

16

Balazs Bodo

Drip, drip, drip, my tears flow as I throw the books into this
last crate, drip, drip, drop. Sometimes I look at my partner,
working next to me, and I can see on her face that she is going
through the same emotions. I sometimes catch the sight of
her trembling hand, hesitating for a split second where a book
should ultimately go, whether we could, whether we should
save that particular one, because… But we either save them all
or we are as ruthless as all those millions of people throughout
history, who had an hour to pack their two suitcases before they
needed to leave. Do we truly need this book? Is this a book we’ll
want to read? Is this book an inseparable part of our identity?
Did we miss this book at all in the last five years? Is this a text
I want to preserve for the future, for potential grandchildren
who may not speak my mother tongue at all? What is the function
of the book? What is the function of this particular book in my
life? Why am I hesitating throwing it out? Why should I hesitate
at all? Drop, drop, drop, a decision has been made. Drop, drop,
drop, books are falling to the bottom of the crates.
We are killers, gutting our library. We are like the half-drown
sailor, who got entangled in the ropes, and went down with the
ship, and who now frantically tries to cut himself free from the
detritus that prevents him to reach the freedom of the surface,
the sunlight and the air.

Own Nothing

17

advantages of a fully digital book future. What I see now is the emergence of a strange
and shapeshifting-hybrid of diverse physical and electronic objects and practices,
where the relative strengths and weaknesses of these different formats nicely
complement each other.
This dawned on me after we had moved into an apartment without a bookshelf. I grew
up in a flat that housed my parents’ extensive book collection. I knew the books by their
cover and from time to time something made me want to take it from the shelf, open
it and read it. This is how I discovered many of my favorite books and writers. With
the e-reader, and some of the best shadow libraries at hand, I felt the same at first. I
felt liberated. I could experiment without cost or risk, I could start—or stop—a book,
I didn’t have to consider the cost of buying and storing a book that was ultimately
not meant for me. I could enjoy the books without having to carry the burden and
responsibility of ownership.

Own Nothing, Have Everything
Do you remember Napster’s slogan after it went legit, trying to transform itself into
a legal music service around 2005? ‘Own nothing, have everything’ – that was the
headline that was supposed to sell legal streaming music. How stupid, I thought. How
could you possibly think that lack of ownership would be a good selling point? What
does it even mean to ‘have everything’ without ownership? And why on earth would
not everyone want to own the most important constituents of their own self, their
own identity? The things I read, the things I sing, make me who I am. Why wouldn’t I
want to own these things?
How revolutionary this idea had been I reflected as I watched the local homeless folks
filling up their sacks with the remains of my library. How happy I would be if I could
have all this stuff I had just thrown away without actually having to own any of it. The
proliferation of digital texts led me to believe that we won’t be needing dead wood
libraries at all, at least no more than we need vinyl to listen to, or collect music. There
might be geeks, collectors, specialists, who for one reason or another still prefer the
physical form to the digital, but for the rest of us convenience, price, searchability, and
all the other digital goodies give enough reason not to collect stuff that collects dust.

Did you notice how deleting an epub file gives you a different feeling than throwing
out a book? You don’t have to feel guilty, you don’t have to feel anything at all.
So I was reading, reading, reading like never before. But at that time my son was too
young to read, so I didn’t have to think about him, or anyone else besides myself. But
as he was growing, it slowly dawned on me: without these physical books how will I be
able to give him the same chance of serendipity, and of discovery, enchantment, and
immersion that I got in my father’s library? And even later, what will I give him as his
heritage? Son, look into this folder of PDFs: this is my legacy, your heritage, explore,
enjoy, take pride in it?
Collections of anything, whether they are art, books, objects, people, are inseparable
from the person who assembled that collection, and when that person is gone, the
collection dies, as does the most important inroad to it: the will that created this
particular order of things has passed away. But the heavy and unavoidable physicality
of a book collection forces all those left behind to make an effort to approach, to
force their way into, and try to navigate that garden of forking paths that is someone
else’s library. Even if you ultimately get rid of everything, you have to introduce
yourself to every book, and let every book introduce itself to you, so you know what
you’re throwing out. Even if you’ll ultimately kill, you will need to look into the eyes of
all your victims.
With a digital collection that’s, of course, not the case.

I was wrong to think that. I now realize that the future is not fully digital, it is more
a physical-digital hybrid, in which the printed book is not simply an endangered
species protected by a few devoted eccentrics who refuse to embrace the obvious

The e-book is ephemeral. It has little past and even less chance to preserve the
fingerprints of its owners over time. It is impersonal, efficient, fast, abundant, like

18

Own Nothing

Balazs Bodo

19

fast food or plastic, it flows through the hand like sand. It lacks the embodiment, the
materiality which would give it a life in a temporal dimension. If you want to network the
dead and the unborn, as is the ambition of every book, then you need to print and bind,
and create heavy objects that are expensive, inefficient and a burden. This burden
subsiding in the object is the bridge that creates the intergenerational dimension,
that forces you to think of the value of a book.
Own nothing, have nothing. Own everything, and your children will hate you when
you die.
I have to say, I’m struggling to find a new balance here. I started to buy books again,
usually books that I’d already read from a stolen copy on-screen. I know what I want
to buy, I know what is worth preserving. I know what I want to show to my son, what
I want to pass on, what I would like to take care of over time. Before, book buying for
me was an investment into a stranger. Now that thrill is gone forever. I measure up
the merchandise well beforehand, I build an intimate relationship, we make love again
and again, before moving in together.
It is certainly a new kind of relationship with the books I bought since I got my e-reader.
I still have to come to terms with the fact that the books I bought this way are rarely
opened, as I already know them, and their role is not to be read, but to be together.
What do I buy, and what do I get? Temporal, existential security? The chance of
serendipity, if not for me, then for the people around me? The reassuring materiality
of the intimacy I built with these texts through another medium?
All of these and maybe more. But in any case, I sense that this library, the physical
embodiment of a physical-electronic hybrid collection with its unopened books and
overflowing e-reader memory cards, is very different from the library I had, and the
library I’m getting rid of at this very moment. The library that I inherited, the library
that grew organically from the detritus of the everyday, the library that accumulated
books similar to how the books accumulated dust, as is the natural way of things, this
library was full of unknowns, it was a library of potentiality, of opportunities, of trips
waiting to happen. This new, hybrid library is a collection of things that I’m familiar with.
I intimately know every piece, they hold little surprise, they offer few discoveries — at
least for me. The exploration, the discovery, the serendipity, the pre-screening takes
place on the e-reader, among the ephemeral, disposable PDFs and epubs.

We Won
This new hybrid model is based on the cheap availability of digital books. In my case, the
free availability of pirated copies available through shadow libraries. These libraries
don’t have everything on offer, but they have books in an order of magnitude larger
than I’ll ever have the time and chance to read, so they offer enough, enough for me
to fill up hard drives with books I want to read, or at least skim, to try, to taste. As if I
moved into an infinite bookstore or library, where I can be as promiscuous, explorative,
nomadic as I always wanted to be. I can flirt with books, I can have a quickie, or I can
leave them behind without shedding a single tear.
I don’t know how this hybrid library, and this analogue-digital hybrid practice of reading
and collecting would work without the shadow libraries which make everything freely
accessible. I rely on their supply to test texts, and feed and grow my print library.
E-books are cheaper than their print versions, but they still cost money, carry a
risk, a cost of experimentation. Book-streaming, the flat-rate, the all-you-can-eat
format of accessing books is at the moment only available to audiobooks, but rarely
for e-books. I wonder why.
Did you notice that there are no major book piracy lawsuits?

Have everything, and own a few.

20

Balazs Bodo

Own Nothing

21

Of course there is the lawsuit against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis in New York, and
there is another one in Canada against aaaaarg, causing major nuisance to those who
have been named in these cases. But this is almost negligible compared to the high
profile wars the music and audiovisual industries waged against Napster, Grokster,
Kazaa, megaupload and their likes. It is as if book publishers have completely given up on
trying to fight piracy in the courts, and have launched a few lawsuits only to maintain
the appearance that they still care about their digital copyrights. I wonder why.
I know the academic publishing industry slightly better than the mainstream popular
fiction market, and I have the feeling that in the former copyright-based business
models are slowly being replaced by something else. We see no major anti-piracy
efforts from publishers, not because piracy is non-existent — on the contrary, it is
global, and it is big — but because the publishers most probably realized that in the
long run the copyright-based exclusivity model is unsustainable. The copyright wars
of the last two decades taught them that law cannot put an end to piracy. As the
Sci-Hub case demonstrates, you can win all you want in a New York court, but this
has little real-world effect as long as the conditions that attract the users to the
shadow libraries remain.
Exclusivity-based publishing business models are under assault from other sides as
well. Mandated open access in the US and in the EU means that there is a quickly
growing body of new research for the access of which publishers cannot charge
money anymore. LibGen and Sci-Hub make it harder to charge for the back catalogue.
Their sheer existence teaches millions on what uncurtailed open access really is, and
makes it easier for university libraries to negotiate with publishers, as they don’t have
to worry about their patrons being left without any access at all.
The good news is that radical open access may well be happening. It is a less and less
radical idea to have things freely accessible. One has to be less and less radical to
achieve the openness that has been long overdue. Maybe it is not yet obvious today
and the victory is not yet universal, maybe it’ll take some extra years, maybe it won’t
ever be evenly distributed, but it is obvious that this genie, these millions of books on
everything from malaria treatments to critical theory, cannot be erased, and open
access will not be undone, and the future will be free of access barriers.

We Are Not Winning at All
But did we really win? If publishers are happy to let go of access control and copyright,
it means that they’ve found something that is even more profitable than selling
back to us academics the content that we have produced. And this more profitable
something is of course data. Did you notice where all the investment in academic
publishing went in the last decade? Did you notice SSRN, Mendeley, Academia.edu,
ScienceDirect, research platforms, citation software, manuscript repositories, library
systems being bought up by the academic publishing industry? All these platforms
and technologies operate on and support open access content, while they generate
data on the creation, distribution, and use of knowledge; on individuals, researchers,
students, and faculty; on institutions, departments, and programs. They produce data
on the performance, on the success and the failure of the whole domain of research
and education. This is the data that is being privatized, enclosed, packaged, and sold
back to us.

Drip, drip, drop, its only nostalgia. My heart is light, as I don’t have to worry about
gutting the library. Soon it won’t matter at all.

Taylorism reached academia. In the name of efficiency, austerity, and transparency,
our daily activities are measured, profiled, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder.
But in this process of quantification, knowledge on ourselves is lost for us, unless we
pay. We still have some patchy datasets on what we do, on who we are, we still have
this blurred reflection in the data-mirrors that we still do control. But this path of
self-enlightenment is quickly waning as less and less data sources about us are freely
available to us.

22

Own Nothing

Who is downloading books and articles? Everyone. Radical open access? We won,
if you like.

Balazs Bodo

23

I strongly believe that information on the self is the foundation
of self-determination. We need to have data on how we operate,
on what we do in order to know who we are. This is what is being
privatized away from the academic community, this is being
taken away from us.
Radical open access. Not of content, but of the data about
ourselves. This is the next challenge. We will digitize every page,
by hand if we must, that process cannot be stopped anymore.
No outside power can stop it and take that from us. Drip, drip,
drop, this is what I console myself with, as another handful of
books land among the waste.
But the data we lose now will not be so easy to reclaim.

24

Balazs Bodo

Own Nothing

25

What if
We Aren't
the Only
Guerrillas
Out
There?
Laurie
Allen

My goal in this paper is to tell the story
of a grass-roots project called Data
Refuge (http://www.datarefuge.org)
that I helped to co-found shortly after,
and in response to, the Trump election
in the USA. Trump’s reputation as
anti-science, and the promise that his
administration would elevate people into
positions of power with a track record
of distorting, hiding, or obscuring the
scientific evidence of climate change
caused widespread concern that
valuable federal data was now in danger.
The Data Refuge project grew from the
work of Professor Bethany Wiggin and
the graduate students within the Penn
Program in Environmental Humanities
(PPEH), notably Patricia Kim, and was
formed in collaboration with the Penn
Libraries, where I work. In this paper, I
will discuss the Data Refuge project, and
call attention to a few of the challenges
inherent in the effort, especially as
they overlap with the goals of this
collective. I am not a scholar. Instead,
I am a librarian, and my perspective as
a practicing informational professional
informs the way I approach this paper,
which weaves together the practical
and technical work of ‘saving data’ with
the theoretical, systemic, and ethical
issues that frame and inform what we
have done.

I work as the head of a relatively small and new department within the libraries
of the University of Pennsylvania, in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the
US. I was hired to lead the Digital Scholarship department in the spring of 2016,
and most of the seven (soon to be eight) people within Digital Scholarship joined
the library since then in newly created positions. Our group includes a mapping
and spatial data librarian and three people focused explicitly on supporting the
creation of new Digital Humanities scholarship. There are also two people in the
department who provide services connected with digital scholarly open access
publishing, including the maintenance of the Penn Libraries’ repository of open
access scholarship, and one Data Curation and Management Librarian. This
Data Librarian, Margaret Janz, started working with us in September 2016, and
features heavily into the story I’m about to tell about our work helping to build Data
Refuge. While Margaret and I were the main people in our department involved in
the project, it is useful to understand the work we did as connected more broadly
to the intersection of activities—from multimodal, digital, humanities creation to
open access publishing across disciplines—represented in our department in Penn.
At the start of Data Refuge, Professor Wiggin and her students had already been
exploring the ways that data about the environment can empower communities
through their art, activism, and research, especially along the lower Schuylkill
River in Philadelphia. They were especially attuned to the ways that missing data,
or data that is not collected or communicated, can be a source of disempowerment.
After the Trump election, PPEH graduate students raised the concern that the
political commitments of the new administration would result in the disappearance
of environmental and climate data that is vital to work in cities and communities
around the world. When they raised this concern with the library, together we cofounded Data Refuge. It is notable to point out that, while the Penn Libraries is a
large and relatively well-resourced research library in the United States, it did not
have any automatic way to ingest and steward the data that Professor Wiggin and
her students were concerned about. Our system of acquiring, storing, describing
and sharing publications did not account for, and could not easily handle, the
evident need to take in large quantities of public data from the open web and make
them available and citable by future scholars. Indeed, no large research library
was positioned to respond to this problem in a systematic way, though there was
general agreement that the community would like to help.
The collaborative, grass-roots movement that formed Data Refuge included many
librarians, archivists, and information professionals, but it was clear from the
beginning that my own profession did not have in place a system for stewarding
these vital information resources, or for treating them as ‘publications’ of the

26

Laurie Allen

What if We Aren't the Only Guerrillas Out There?

27

federal government. This fact was widely understood by various members of our
profession, notably by government document librarians, who had been calling
attention to this lack of infrastructure for years. As Government Information
Librarian Shari Laster described in a blog post in November of 2016, government
documents librarians have often felt like they are ‘under siege’ not from political
forces, but from the inattention to government documents afforded by our systems
and infrastructure. Describing the challenges facing the profession in light of the
2016 election, she commented: “Government documents collections in print are
being discarded, while few institutions are putting strategies in place for collecting
government information in digital formats. These strategies are not expanding in
tandem with the explosive proliferation of these sources, and certainly not in pace
with the changing demands for access from public users, researchers, students,
and more.” (Laster 2016) Beyond government documents librarians, our project
joined efforts that were ongoing in a huge range of communities, including: open
data and open science activists; archival experts working on methods of preserving
born-digital content; cultural historians; federal data producers and the archivists
and data scientists they work with; and, of course, scientists.

the scientific record to fight back, in a concrete way, against
an anti-fact establishment. By downloading data and moving
it into the Internet Archive and the Data Refuge repository,
volunteers were actively claiming the importance of accurate
records in maintaining or creating a just society.

This distributed approach to the work of downloading and saving the data
encouraged people to see how they were invested in environmental and scientific
data, and to consider how our government records should be considered the
property of all of us. Attending Data Rescue events was a way for people who value

Of course, access to data need not rely on its inclusion in
a particular repository. As is demonstrated so well in other
contexts, technological methods of sharing files can make
the digital repositories of libraries and archives seem like a
redundant holdover from the past. However, as I will argue
further in this paper, the data that was at risk in Data Refuge
differed in important ways from the contents of what Bodó
refers to as ‘shadow libraries’ (Bodó 2015). For opening
access to copies of journals articles, shadow libraries work
perfectly. However, the value of these shadow libraries relies
on the existence of the widely agreed upon trusted versions.
If in doubt about whether a copy is trustworthy, scholars
can turn to more mainstream copies, if necessary. This was
not the situation we faced building Data Refuge. Instead, we
were often dealing with the sole public, authoritative copy
of a federal dataset and had to assume that, if it were taken
down, there would be no way to check the authenticity of
other copies. The data was not easily pulled out of systems
as the data and the software that contained them were often
inextricably linked. We were dealing with unique, tremendously
valuable, but often difficult-to-untangle datasets rather than
neatly packaged publications. The workflow we established
was designed to privilege authenticity and trustworthiness
over either the speed of the copying or the easy usability of
the resulting data. 2 This extra care around authenticity was
necessary because of the politicized nature of environmental
data that made many people so worried about its removal
after the election. It was important that our project
supported the strongest possible scientific arguments that
could be made with the data we were ‘saving’. That meant
that our copies of the data needed to be citable in scientific
scholarly papers, and that those citations needed to be
able to withstand hostile political forces who claim that the
science of human-caused climate change is ‘uncertain’. It

28

What if We Aren't the Only Guerrillas Out There?

Born from the collaboration between Environmental Humanists and Librarians,
Data Refuge was always an effort both at storytelling and at storing data. During
the first six months of 2017, volunteers across the US (and elsewhere) organized
more than 50 Data Rescue events, with participants numbering in the thousands.
At each event, a group of volunteers used tools created by our collaborators at
the Environmental and Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) (https://envirodatagov.
org/) to support the End of Term Harvest (http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/) project
by identifying seeds from federal websites for web archiving in the Internet
Archive. Simultaneously, more technically advanced volunteers wrote scripts to
pull data out of complex data systems, and packaged that data for longer term
storage in a repository we maintained at datarefuge.org. Still other volunteers
held teach-ins, built profiles of data storytellers, and otherwise engaged in
safeguarding environmental and climate data through community action (see
http://www.ppehlab.org/datarefugepaths). The repository at datarefuge.org that
houses the more difficult data sources has been stewarded by myself and Margaret
Janz through our work at Penn Libraries, but it exists outside the library’s main
technical infrastructure.1

Laurie Allen

29

was easy to imagine in the Autumn of 2016, and even easier
to imagine now, that hostile actors might wish to muddy the
science of climate change by releasing fake data designed
to cast doubt on the science of climate change. For that
reasons, I believe that the unique facts we were seeking
to safeguard in the Data Refuge bear less similarity to the
contents of shadow libraries than they do to news reports
in our current distributed and destabilized mass media
environment. Referring to the ease of publishing ideas on the
open web, Zeynep Tufecki wrote in a recent column, “And
sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your
lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really
filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by altright trolls or a swarm of Russian bots? Was it maybe even
generated with the help of artificial intelligence? (Yes, there
are systems that can create increasingly convincing fake
videos.)” (Tufekci 2018). This was the state we were trying to
avoid when it comes to scientific data, fearing that we might
have the only copy of a given dataset without solid proof that
our copy matched the original.
If US federal websites cease functioning as reliable stewards
of trustworthy scientific data, reproducing their data
without a new model of quality control risks producing the
very censorship that our efforts are supposed to avoid,
and further undermining faith in science. Said another way,
if volunteers duplicated federal data all over the Internet
without a trusted system for ensuring the authenticity of
that data, then as soon as the originals were removed, a sea of
fake copies could easily render the original invisible, and they
would be just as effectively censored. “The most effective
forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and
attention, not muzzling speech itself.” (Tufekci 2018).
These concerns about the risks of open access to data should
not be understood as capitulation to the current marketdriven approach to scholarly publishing, nor as a call for
continuation of the status quo. Instead, I hope to encourage
continuation of the creative approaches to scholarship
represented in this collective. I also hope the issues raised in

30

Laurie Allen

Data Refuge will serve as a call to take greater responsibility for the systems into
which scholarship flows and the structures of power and assumptions of trust (by
whom, of whom) that scholarship relies on.
While plenty of participants in the Data Refuge community posited scalable
technological approaches to help people trust data, none emerged that were
strong enough to risk further undermining faith in science that a malicious attack
might cause. Instead of focusing on technical solutions that rely on the existing
systems staying roughly as they are, I would like to focus on developing networks
that explore different models of trust in institutions, and that honor the values
of marginalized and indigenous people. For example, in a recent paper, Stacie
Williams and Jarrett Drake describe the detailed decisions they made to establish
and become deserving of trust in supporting the creation of an Archive of Police
Violence in Cleveland (Williams and Drake 2017). The work of Michelle Caswell and
her collaborators on exploring post-custodial archives, and on engaging in radical
empathy in the archives provide great models of the kind of work that I believe is
necessary to establish new models of trust that might help inform new modes of
sharing and relying on community information (Caswell and Cifor 2016).
Beyond seeking new ways to build trust, it has become clear that new methods
are needed to help filter and contextualize publications. Our current reliance
on a few for-profit companies to filter and rank what we see of the information
landscape has proved to be tremendously harmful for the dissemination of facts,
and has been especially dangerous to marginalized communities (Noble 2018).
While the world of scholarly humanities publishing is doing somewhat better than
open data or mass media, there is still a risk that without new forms of filtering and
establishing quality and trustworthiness, good ideas and important scholarship will
be lost in the rankings of search engines and the algorithms of social media. We
need new, large scale systems to help people filter and rank the information on the
open web. In our current situation, according to media theorist dana boyd, “[t]he
onus is on the public to interpret what they see. To self-investigate. Since we live
in a neoliberal society that prioritizes individual agency, we double down on media
literacy as the ‘solution’ to misinformation. It’s up to each of us as individuals to
decide for ourselves whether or not what we’re getting is true.” (boyd 2018)
In closing, I’ll return to the notion of Guerrilla warfare that brought this panel
together. While some of our collaborators and some in the press did use the term
‘Guerrilla archiving’ to describe the data rescue efforts (Currie and Paris 2017),
I generally did not. The work we did was indeed designed to take advantage of
tactics that allow a small number of actors to resist giant state power. However,

What if We Aren't the Only Guerrillas Out There?

31

if anything, the most direct target of these guerrilla actions in my mind was not
the Trump administration. Instead, the action was designed to prompt responses
by the institutions where many of us work and by communities of scholars and
activists who make up these institutions. It was designed to get as many people as
possible working to address the complex issues raised by the two interconnected
challenges that the Data Refuge project threw into relief. The first challenge,
of course, is the need for new scientific, artistic, scholarly and narrative ways of
contending with the reality of global, human-made climate change. And the second
challenge, as I’ve argued in this paper, is that our systems of establishing and
signaling trustworthiness, quality, reliability and stability of information are in dire
need of creative intervention as well. It is not just publishing but all of our systems
for discovering, sharing, acquiring, describing and storing that scholarship that
need support, maintenance, repair, and perhaps in some cases, replacement. And
this work will rely on scholars, as well as expert information practitioners from a
range of fields (Caswell 2016).

¹ At the time of this writing, we are working
on un-packing and repackaging the data
within Data Refuge for eventual inclusion
in various Research Library Repositories.

Ideally, of course, all federally produced
datasets would be published in neatly
packaged and more easily preservable
containers, along with enough technical
checks to ensure their validity (hashes,
checksums, etc.) and each agency would
create a periodical published inventory of
datasets. But the situation we encountered
with Data Refuge did not start us in
anything like that situation, despite the
hugely successful and important work of
the employees who created and maintained
data.gov. For a fuller view of this workflow,
see my talk at CSVConf 2017 (Allen 2017).

2

Closing note: The workflow established and used at Data Rescue events was
designed to tackle this set of difficult issues, but needed refinement, and was retired
in mid-2017. The Data Refuge project continues, led by Professor Wiggin and her
colleagues and students at PPEH, who are “building a storybank to document
how data lives in the world – and how it connects people, places, and non-human
species.” (“DataRefuge” n.d.) In addition, the set of issues raised by Data Refuge
continue to inform my work and the work of many of our collaborators.

32

Laurie Allen

What if We Aren't the Only Guerrillas Out There?

33

References
Allen, Laurie. 2017. “Contexts and Institutions.” Paper presented at csv,conf,v3, Portland,
Oregon, May 3rd 2017. Accessed May 20, 2018. https://youtu.be/V2gwi0CRYto.
Bodo, Balazs. 2015. “Libraries in the Post - Scarcity Era.” In Copyrighting Creativity:
Creative Values, Cultural Heritage Institutions and Systems of Intellectual Property,
edited by Porsdam. Routledge.
boyd, danah. 2018. “You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You?” Data & Society: Points.
March 9, 2018. https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-doyou-7cad6af18ec2.
Caswell, Michelle. 2016. “‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the
Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies.” Reconstruction: Studies in
Contemporary Culture 16:1 (2016) (special issue “Archives on Fire”),
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/161/Caswell.shtml.
Caswell, Michelle, and Marika Cifor. 2016. “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical
Empathy in the Archives.” Archivaria 82 (0): 23–43.
Currie, Morgan, and Britt Paris. 2017. “How the ‘Guerrilla Archivists’ Saved History – and
Are Doing It Again under Trump.” The Conversation (blog). February 21, 2017.
https://theconversation.com/how-the-guerrilla-archivists-saved-history-and-aredoing-it-again-under-trump-72346.
“DataRefuge.” n.d. PPEH Lab. Accessed May 21, 2018.
http://www.ppehlab.org/datarefuge/.
“DataRescue Paths.” n.d. PPEH Lab. Accessed May 20, 2018.
http://www.ppehlab.org/datarefugepaths/.
“End of Term Web Archive: U.S. Government Websites.” n.d. Accessed May 20, 2018.
http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/.
“Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.” n.d. EDGI. Accessed May 19, 2018.
https://envirodatagov.org/.
Laster, Shari. 2016. “After the Election: Libraries, Librarians, and the Government - Free
Government Information (FGI).” Free Government Information (FGI). November 23,
2016. https://freegovinfo.info/node/11451.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce
Racism. New York: NYU Press.
Tufekci, Zeynep. 2018. “It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech.”
WIRED. Accessed May 20, 2018.
https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/.
“Welcome - Data Refuge.” n.d. Accessed May 20, 2018. https://www.datarefuge.org/.
Williams, Stacie M, and Jarrett Drake. 2017. “Power to the People: Documenting Police
Violence in Cleveland.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1 (2).
https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.33.

34

Laurie Allen

Guerrilla
Open
Access



Liang
Shadow Libraries
2012


Journal #37 - September 2012

# Shadow Libraries

Over the last few monsoons I lived with the dread that the rain would
eventually find its ways through my leaky terrace roof and destroy my books.
Last August my fears came true when I woke up in the middle of the night to
see my room flooded and water leaking from the roof and through the walls.
Much of the night was spent rescuing the books and shifting them to a dry
room. While timing and speed were essential to the task at hand they were also
the key hazards navigating a slippery floor with books perched till one’s
neck. At the end of the rescue mission, I sat alone, exhausted amongst a
mountain of books assessing the damage that had been done, but also having
found books I had forgotten or had not seen in years; books which I had
thought had been permanently borrowed by others or misplaced found their way
back as I set many aside in a kind of ritual of renewed commitment.

[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_book-library-small-WEB.jpg,2000)

Sorting the badly damaged from the mildly wet, I could not help but think
about the fragile histories of books from the library of Alexandria to the
great Florence flood of 1966. It may have seemed presumptuous to move from the
precarity of one’s small library and collection to these larger events, but is
there any other way in which one experiences earth-shattering events if not
via a microcosmic filtering through one’s own experiences? I sent a distressed
email to a friend Sandeep a committed bibliophile and book collector with a
fantastic personal library, who had also been responsible for many of my new
acquisitions. He wrote back on August 17, and I quote an extract of the email:

> Dear Lawrence

>

> I hope your books are fine. I feel for you very deeply, since my nightmares
about the future all contain as a key image my books rotting away under a
steady drip of grey water. Where was this leak, in the old house or in the
new? I spent some time looking at the books themselves: many of them I greeted
like old friends. I see you have Lewis Hyde’s _Trickster Makes the World_ and
Edward Rice’s _Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton_ in the pile: both top-class
books. (Burton is a bit of an obsession with me. The man did and saw
everything there was to do and see, and thought about it all, and wrote it all
down in a massive pile of notes and manuscripts. He squirrelled a fraction of
his scholarship into the tremendous footnotes to the Thousand and One Nights,
but most of it he could not publish without scandalising the Victorians, and
then he died, and his widow made a bonfire in the backyard, and burnt
everything because she disapproved of these products of a lifetime’s labors,
and of a lifetime such as few have ever had, and no one can ever have again. I
almost hope there is a special hell for Isabel Burton to burn in.)

Moving from one’s personal pile to the burning of the work of one of the
greatest autodidacts of the nineteenth century and back it was strangely
comforting to be reminded that libraries—the greatest of time machines
invented—were testimonies to both the grandeur and the fragility of
civilizations. Whenever I enter huge libraries it is with a tingling sense of
excitement normally reserved for horror movies, but at the same time this same
sense of awe is often accompanied by an almost debilitating sense of what it
means to encounter finitude as it is dwarfed by centuries of words and
scholarship. Yet strangely when I think of libraries it is rarely the New York
public library that comes to mind even as I wish that we could have similar
institutions in India. I think instead of much smaller collections—sometimes
of institutions but often just those of friends and acquaintances. I enjoy
browsing through people’s bookshelves, not just to discern their reading
preferences or to discover for myself unknown treasures, but also to take
delight in the local logic of their library, their spatial preferences and to
understand the order of things not as a global knowledge project but as a
personal, often quirky rationale.

[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_library-of-congress.jpg,2000 "Machine
room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th century.")

Machine room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th
century.

Like romantic love, bibliophilia is perhaps shaped by one’s first love. The
first library that I knew intimately was a little six by eight foot shop
hidden in a by-lane off one of the busiest roads in Bangalore, Commercial
street. From its name to what it contained, Mecca stores could well have been
transported out of an Arabian nights tale. One side of the store was lined
with plastic ware and kitchen utensils of every shape and size while the other
wall was piled with books, comics, and magazines. From my eight-year-old
perspective it seemed large enough to contain all the knowledge of the world.
I earned a weekly stipend packing noodles for an hour every day after school
in the home shop that my parents ran, which I used to either borrow or buy
second hand books from the store. I was usually done with them by Sunday and
would have them reread by Wednesday. The real anguish came in waiting from
Wednesday to Friday for the next set. After finally acquiring a small
collection of books and comics myself I decided—spurred on by a fatal
combination of entrepreneurial enthusiasm and a pedantic desire to educate
others—to start a small library myself. Packing my books into a small aluminum
case and armed with a makeshift ledger, I went from house to house convincing
children in the neighborhood to forgo twenty-five paisa in exchange for a book
or comic with an additional caveat that they were not to share them with any
of their friends. While the enterprise got off to a reasonable start it soon
met its end when I realized that despite my instructions, my friends were
generously sharing the comics after they were done with them, which thereby
ended my biblioempire ambitions.

Over the past few years the explosion of ebook readers and consequent rise in
the availability of pirated books have opened new worlds to my booklust.
[Library.nu](library.nu), which began as gigapedia, suddenly made the idea of
the universal library seem like reality. By the time it shut down in February
2012 the library had close to a million books and over half a million active
users. Bibliophiles across the world were distraught when the site was shut
down and if it were ever possible to experience what the burning of the
library of Alexandria must have felt it was that collective ache of seeing the
closure of [library.nu.](library.nu)

What brings together something as monumental as the New York public library, a
collective enterprise like [library.nu](library.nu) and Mecca stores if not
the word library? As spaces they may have little in common but as virtual
spaces they speak as equals even if the scale of their imagination may differ.
All of them partake of their share in the world of logotopias. In an
exhibition designed to celebrate the place of the library in art, architecture
and imagination the curator Sascha Hastings coined the term logotopia to
designate “word places”—a happy coincidence of architecture and language.

There is however a risk of flattening the differences between these spaces by
classifying them all under a single utopian ideal of the library. Imagination
after all has a geography and physiology and requires our alertness to these
distinctions. Lets think instead of an entire pantheon (both of spaces as well
as practices) that we can designate as shadow libraries (or shadow logotopias
if you like) which exist in the shadows cast by the long history of monumental
libraries. While they are often dwarfed by the idea of the library, like the
shadows cast by our bodies, sometimes these shadows surge ahead of the body.

[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_london-blitz-WEB.jpg,2000 "The London
Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.")

The London Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.

At the heart of all libraries lies a myth—that of the burning of the library
of Alexandria. No one knows what the library of Alexandria looked like or
possesses an accurate list of its contents. What we have long known though is
a sense of loss. But a loss of what? Of all the forms of knowledge in the
world in a particular time. Because that was precisely what the library of
Alexandria sought to collect under its roofs. It is believed that in order to
succeed in assembling a universal library, King Ptolemy I wrote “to all the
sovereigns and governors on earth” begging them to send to him every kind of
book by every kind of author, “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and
sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians, and all others too.” The king’s
scholars had calculated that five hundred thousand scrolls would be required
if they were to collect in Alexandria “all the books of all the peoples of the
world.”1

What was special about the Library of Alexandria was the fact that until then
the libraries of the ancient world were either private collections of an
individual or government storehouses where legal and literary documents were
kept for official reference. By imagining a space where the public could have
access to all the knowledge of the world, the library also expressed a new
idea of the human itself. While the library of Alexandria is rightfully
celebrated, what is often forgotten in the mourning of its demise is another
library—one that existed in the shadows of the grand library but whose
whereabouts ensured that it survived Caesar’s papyrus destroying flames.

According to the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first
century BC, Alexandria boasted a second library, the so-called daughter
library, intended for the use of scholars not affiliated with the Museion. It
was situated in the south-western neighborhood of Alexandria, close to the
temple of Serapis, and was stocked with duplicate copies of the Museion
library’s holdings. This shadow library survived the fire that destroyed the
primary library of Alexandria but has since been eclipsed by the latter’s
myth.

Alberto Manguel says that if the library of Alexandria stood tall as an
expression of universal ambitions, there is another structure that haunts our
imagination: the tower of Babel. If the library attempted to conquer time, the
tower sought to vanquish space. He says “The Tower of Babel in space and the
Library of Alexandria in time are the twin symbols of these ambitions. In
their shadow, my small library is a reminder of both impossible yearnings—the
desire to contain all the tongues of Babel and the longing to possess all the
volumes of Alexandria.”2 Writing about the two failed projects Manguel adds
that when seen within the limiting frame of the real, the one exists only as
nebulous reality and the other as an unsuccessful if ambitious real estate
enterprise. But seen as myths, and in the imagination at night, the solidity
of both buildings for him is unimpeachable.3

The utopian ideal of the universal library was more than a question of built
up form or space or even the possibility of storing all of the knowledge of
the world; its real aspiration was in the illusion of order that it could
impose on a chaotic world where the lines drawn by a fine hairbrush
distinguished the world of animals from men, fairies from ghosts, science from
magic, and Europe from Japan. In some cases even after the physical structure
that housed the books had crumbled and the books had been reduced to dust the
ideal remained in the form of the order imagined for the library. One such
residual evidence comes to us by way of the _Pandectae_ —a comprehensive
bibliography created by Conrad Gesner in 1545 when he feared that the Ottoman
conquerors would destroy all the books in Europe. He created a bibliography
from which the library could be built again—an all embracing index which
contained a systematic organization of twenty principal groups with a matrix
like structure that contained 30,000 concepts.4

It is not surprising that Alberto Manguel would attempt write a literary,
historical and personal history of the library. As a seventeen-year-old man in
Buenos Aries, Manguel read for the blind seer Jorge Luis Borges who once
imagined in his appropriately named story—The Tower of Babel—paradise as a
kind of library. Modifying his mentor’s statement in what can be understood as
a gesture to the inevitable demands of the real and yet acknowledging the
possible pleasures of living in shadows, Manguel asserts that sometimes
paradise must adapt itself to suit circumstantial requirements. Similarly
Jacques Rancière writing about the libraries of the working class in the
eighteenth century tells us about Gauny a joiner and a boy in love with
vagrancy and botany who decides to build a library for himself. For the sons
of the poor proletarians living in Saint Marcel district, libraries were built
only a page at a time. He learnt to read by tracing the pages on which his
mother bought her lentils and would be disappointed whenever he came to the
end of a page and the next page was not available, even though he urged his
mother to buy her lentils from the same grocer. 5

[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_DGF-D-Tropics-detail-hi-res-
WEB.jpg,2000 "Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Chronotopes & Dioramas , 2009.
Diorama installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.")

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, _Chronotopes & Dioramas_, 2009. Diorama
installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.

Is the utopian ideal of the universal library as exemplified by the library of
Alexandria or modernist pedagogic institutions of the twentieth century
adequate to the task of describing the space of the shadow library, or do we
need a different account of these other spaces? In an era of the ebook reader
where the line between a book and a library is blurred, the very idea of a
library is up for grabs. It has taken me well over two decades to build a
collection of a few thousand books while around two hundred thousand books
exist as bits and bytes on my computer. Admittedly hard drives crash and data
is lost, but is that the same threat as those of rain or fire? Which then is
my library and which its shadow? Or in the spirit of logotopias would it be
more appropriate to ask the spatial question: where is the library?

If the possibility of having 200,000 books on one’s computer feels staggering
here is an even more startling statistic. The Library of Congress which is the
largest library in the world with holdings of approximately thirty million
books, which would—if they were piled on the floor—cover 364 kilometers could
potentially fit into an SD card. It is estimated that by 2030 an ordinary SD
card will have the capacity of storing up to 64 TB and assuming each book were
digitized at an average size of 1MB it would technically be possible to fit
two Libraries of Congress in one’s pocket.

It sounds like science fiction, but isn’t it the case that much of the science
fiction of a decade ago finds itself comfortably within the weaves of everyday
life. How do we make sense of the future of the library? While it may be
tempting to throw our hands up in boggled perplexity about what it means to be
able to have thirty million books lets face it: the point of libraries have
never been that you will finish what’s there. Anyone with even a modest book
collection will testify to the impossibility of ever finishing their library
and if anything at all the library stands precisely at the cusp of our
finitude and our infinity. Perhaps that is what Borges—the consummate mixer of
time and space—meant when he described paradise as a library, not as a spatial
idea but a temporal one: that it was only within the confines of infinity that
one imagine finishing reading one’s library. It would therefore be more
interesting to think of the shadow library as a way of thinking about what it
means to dwell in knowledge. While all our aspirations for a habitat should
have a utopian element to them, lets face it, utopias have always been
difficult spaces to live in.

In contrast to the idea of utopia is heterotopia—a term with its origins in
medicine (referring to an organ of the body that had been dislodged from its
usual space) and popularized by Michel Foucault both in terms of language as
well as a spatial metaphor. If utopia exists as a nowhere or imaginary space
with no connection to any existing social spaces, then heterotopias in
contrast are realities that exist and are even foundational, but in which all
other spaces are potentially inverted and contested. A mirror for instance is
simultaneously a utopia (placeless place) even as it exists in reality. But
from the standpoint of the mirror you discover your absence as well. Foucault
remarks, “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this
place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once
absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and
absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this
virtual point which is over there.”6

In _The Order of Things_ Foucault sought to investigate the conceptual space
which makes the order of knowledge possible; in his famed reading of Borges’s
Chinese encyclopedia he argues that the impossibility involved in the
encyclopedia consists less in the fantastical status of the animals and their
coexistence with real animals such as (d) sucking pigs and (e) sirens, but in
where they coexist and what “transgresses the boundaries of all imagination,
of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which
links each of those categories to all the others.” 7 Heterotopias destabilize
the ground from which we build order and in doing so reframe the very
epistemic basis of how we know.

Foucault later developed a greater spatial understanding of heterotopias in
which he uses specific examples such as the cemetery (at once the space of the
familiar since everyone has someone in the cemetery and at the heart of the
city but also over a period of time the other city, where each family
possesses its dark resting place).8 Indeed, the paradox of heterotopias is
that they are both separate from yet connected to all other spaces. This
connectedness is precisely what builds contestation into heterotopias.
Imaginary spaces such as utopias exist completely outside of order.
Heteretopias by virtue of their connectedness become sites in which epistemes
collide and overlap. They bring together heterogeneous collections of unusual
things without allowing them a unity or order established through resemblance.
Instead, their ordering is derived from a process of similitude that produces,
in an almost magical, uncertain space, monstrous combinations that unsettle
the flow of discourse.

If the utopian ideal of the library was to bring together everything that we
know of the world then the length of its bookshelves was coterminous with the
breadth of the world. But like its predecessors in Alexandria and Babel the
project is destined to be incomplete haunted by what it necessarily leaves out
and misses. The library as heterotopia reveals itself only through the
interstices and lays bare the fiction of any possibility of a coherent ground
on which a knowledge project can be built. Finally there is the question of
where we stand once the grounds that we stand on itself has been dislodged.
The answer from my first foray into the tiny six by eight foot Mecca store to
the innumerable hours spent on [ library.nu]( library.nu) remains the same:
the heterotopic pleasure of our finite selves in infinity.

×

This essay is a part of a work I am doing for an exhibition curated by Raqs
Media Collective, Sarai Reader 09. The show began on August 19, 2012, with a
deceptively empty space containing only the proposal, with ideas for the
artworks to come over a period of nine months. See
.

**Lawrence Liang** is a researcher and writer based at the Alternative Law
Forum, Bangalore. His work lies at the intersection of law and cultural
politics, and has in recent years been looking at question of media piracy. He
is currently finish a book on law and justice in Hindi cinema.

© 2012 e-flux and the author

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## [Breaking the Contract](/journal/37/61241/breaking-the-contract/)


1\. The Contract The Duchampian revolution leads not to the liberation of the
artist from work, but to his or her proletarization via alienated construction
and transportation work. In fact, contemporary art institutions no longer need
an artist as a traditional producer. Rather, today the artist is more often
hired for a certain period of time as a worker to realize this or that
institutional project. — Boris Groys 1 When his readymades entered the space
of art, Duchamp...

Shadow Libraries

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Notes - Shadow Libraries

1

Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).

Go to Text

2

Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._

Go to Text

3

Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).

Go to Text

4

Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.

Go to Text

5

Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

Go to Text

6

Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).

Go to Text

7

Ibid, xv.

Go to Text

8

In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.

Go to Text

Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).

Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._

Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).

Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.

Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).

Ibid, xv.

In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.

Ludovico
The Liquid Library
2013


# The liquid library

* [Alessandro Ludovico](https://www.eurozine.com/authors/alessandro-ludovico/)

26 August 2013

Traditional libraries are increasingly putting their holdings online, if not
in competition with Google Books then in partnership, in order to keep pace
with the mass digitization of content. Yet it isn't only the big institutional
actors that are driving this process forward: small-scale, independent
initiatives based on open source principles offer interesting approaches to
re-defining the role and meaning of the library, writes Alessandro Ludovico.

A deep conflict is brewing silently in libraries around the globe. Traditional
librarians - skilled, efficient and acknowledged - are being threatened by
bosses, themselves trying to cope with substantial funding cuts, with the word
"digital", touted as a panacea for saving space and money. At the same time,
in other (less traditional) places, there is a massive digitization of books
underway aimed at establishing virtual libraries much bigger than any
conventional one. These phenomena are questioning the library as point of
reference and as public repository of knowledge. Not only is its bulky
physicality being questioned, but the core idea that, after the advent of
truly ubiquitous networks, we still need a central place to store, preserve,
index, lend and share knowledge.

![Books vs. tablet](http://www.eurozine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08
/eurozine-tablet-book.jpg)

Tablet-PC on hardcover book. Photo: Anton Kudelin. Source: Shutterstock

It is important not to forget that traditional libraries (public and private)
still guarantee the preservation of and access to a huge number of digitally-
unavailable texts, and that a book's material condition sometimes tells part
of the story, not to mention the experience of reading it in a library. Still,
it is evident that we are facing the biggest digitization ever attempted, in a
process comparable to what Napster meant for music in the early 2000s. But
this time there are many more "institutional" efforts running simultaneously,
so that we are constantly hearing announcements that new historical material
has been made accessible online by libraries and institutions of all sizes.

The biggest digitizers are Google Books (private) and Internet Archive (non-
profit). The former is officially aiming to create a privately owned,
"universal library", which in April 2013 claimed to contain 30 millions
digitized books.1 The latter is an effort to make a comparably huge public
library by using Creative Commons licenses and getting rid of Digital Rights
Management chains, and currently claims to hold almost 5 millions digitized
books.

These monumental efforts are struggling with one specific element: the time it
takes to create digital content by converting it from another medium. This
process, of course, creates accidents. Krissy Wilson's blog/artwork _The Art
of Google Books_2 explores daily the non-digital elements (accidental or not)
emerging in scanned pages, which can be purely material - such as scribbled
notes, parts of the scanning person's hand, dried flowers - or typographical
or linguistic, or deleted or missing parts, all of them precisely annotated.
This small selection of illustrations of how physicality causes technology to
fail may be self-reflective, but it shows a particular aspect of a larger
development. In fact, industrial scanning is only one side of the coin. The
other is the private and personal digitization and sharing of books.

On the basis of brilliant open source tools like the DIY Bookscanner,3 there
are various technical and conceptual efforts to building specialist digital
libraries. _Monoskop_4 is exemplary: its creator Dusan Barok has transformed
his impressive personal collection of media (about contemporary art, culture
and politics, with a special focus on eastern Europe) into a common resource,
freely downloadable and regularly updated. It is a remarkably inspired
selection that can be shared regardless of possible copyright restrictions.
_Monoskop_ is an extreme and excellent example of a personal digital library
made public. But any small or big collection can be easily shared. Calibre5 is
an open source software that enables one to efficiently manage a personal
library and to create temporary or stable autonomous zones in which entire
libraries can be shared among a few friends or entire communities.

Marcell Mars,6 a hacktivist and programmer, has worked intensively around this
subject. Together with Tomislav Medak and Vuk Cosic, he organized the HAIP
2012 festival in Ljubljana, where software developers worked collectively on a
complex interface for searching and downloading from major independent online
e-book collections, turning them into a sort of temporary commons. Mars'
observation that, "when everyone is a librarian, the library is everywhere,"
explains the infinite and recursive de-centralization of personal digital
collections and the role of the digital in granting much wider access to
published content.

This access, however, emphasizes the intrinsic fragility of the digital - its
complete dependence on electricity and networks, on the integrity of storage
media and on updated hard and software. Among the few artists to have
conceptually explored this fragility as it affects books is David Guez, whose
work _Humanpédia_7 can be defined as an extravagant type of "time-based art".
The work is clearly inspired by Ray Bradbury's _Fahrenheit 451_ , in which a
small secret community conspires against a total ban on books by memorizing
entire tomes, preserving and orally transmitting their contents. Guez applies
this strategy to Wikipedia, calling for people to memorize a Wikipedia
article, thereby implying that our brains can store information more reliably
than computers.

So what, in the end, will be the role of old-fashioned libraries?
Paradoxically enough, they could become the best place to learn how to
digitize books or how to print out and bind digitized books that have gone out
of print. But they must still be protected as a common good, where cultural
objects can be retrieved and enjoyed anytime in the future. A timely work in
this respect is La Société Anonyme's _The SKOR Codex_.8 The group (including
Dusan Barok, Danny van der Kleij, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk) has
printed a book whose content (text, pictures and sounds) is binary encoded,
with enclosed visual instructions about how to decode it. A copy will be
indefinitely preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France by signed
agreement. This work is a time capsule, enclosing information meant to be
understood in the future. At any rate, we can rest assured that it will be
there (with its digital content), ready to be taken from the shelf, for many
years to come.

1

See:
[http://www.nybooks.com/](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/25
/national-digital-public-library-launched/)

2



3



4



5



6



7



8



Published 26 August 2013
Original in English
First published by Springerin 3/2013 (German version); Eurozine (English
version)

Contributed by Springerin © Alessandro Ludovico / Springerin / Eurozine

Marczewska, Adema, McDonald & Trettien
The Poethics of Scholarship
2018


Post
Office
Press

Edited by

The Poethics
of Scholarship
Kaja
Marczewska

Janneke
Adema

Frances
McDonald

Whitney
Trettien

Published by Post Office Press and
Rope Press. Coventry, 2018.
© Post Office Press, papers by
respective Authors.
Freely available at:
http://radicaloa.co.uk/
conferences/ROA2
This is an open access pamphlet,
licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Read more about the license at:
https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/
Figures and other media included
with this pamphlet may be under
different copyright restrictions.

This pamphlet is published in a series
of 7 as part of the Radical Open
Access II – The Ethics of Care
conference, which took place June
26-27 at Coventry University. More
information about this conference
and about the contributors to this
pamphlet can be found at:
http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/
ROA2
This pamphlet was made possible due
to generous funding from the arts
and humanities research studio, The
Post Office, a project of Coventry
University’s Centre for Postdigital
Cultures and due to the combined
efforts of authors, editors, designers
and printers.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Post Office Press
Page 4

The Horizon of The Publishable in/as
Open Access: From Poethics to Praxis
Kaja Marczewska
Page 6

Design by: Mihai Toma, Nick White
and Sean Worley
Printed by: Rope Press,
Birmingham

The Poethics of Openness
Janneke Adema
Page 16

Diffractive Publishing
Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien
Page 26

Introduction

Kaja Marczewska tracks in her contribution OA’s development
from a radical and political project driven by experimental
impetus, into a constrained model, limiting publishing in the
service of the neoliberal university. Following Malik, she
argues that OA in its dominant top-down implementation is
determining the horizon of the publishable. Yet a horizon also
suggests conditions of possibility for experimentation and
innovation, which Marczewska locates in a potential OA ethos
of poethics and praxis, in a fusion of attitude and form.

This pamphlet explores ways in which to engage scholars to
further elaborate the poethics of their scholarship. Following
Joan Retallack, who has written extensively about the
responsibility that comes with formulating and performing a
poetics, which she has captured in her concept of poethics
(with an added h), this pamphlet examines what connects
the 'doing' of scholarship with the ethical components of
research. Here, in order to remain ethical we are not able to
determine in advance what being ethical would look like, yet, at
the same time, ethical decisions need to be made and are being
made as part of our publishing practices: where we publish
and with whom, in an open way or not, in what form and shape
and in which formats. Should we then consider the poethics
of scholarship as a poetics of/as change, or as Retallack calls
it, a poetics of the swerve (clinamen), which continuously
unsettles our familiar notions?
This pamphlet considers how, along with discussions about
the contents of our scholarship, and about the different
methodologies, theories and politics that we use to give
meaning and structure to our research, we should have similar
deliberations about the way we do research. This involves
paying more attention to the crafting of our own aesthetics
and poetics as scholars, including a focus on the medial forms,
the formats, and the graphic spaces in and through which we
communicate and perform scholarship (and the discourses
that surround these), as well as the structures and institutions
that shape and determine our scholarly practices.

4

Janneke Adema explores in her paper the relationship between
openness and experimentation in scholarly publishing, outlining
how open access in specific has enabled a reimagining of its
forms and practices. Whilst Adema emphasises that this
relationship is far from guaranteed, through the concept
of scholarly poethics she speculates on how we can forge a
connection between the doing of scholarship and its political,
ethical and aesthetical elements.
In the final contribution to this pamphlet Whitney Trettien and
Frances McDonald ask a pertinent question: ‘how can we build
scholarly infrastructures that foster diffractive reading and
writing?’. To address this question, they reflect on their own
experiences of editing an experimental digital zine: thresholds,
which brings the creative affordances of the split screen, of
the gutter, to scholarship. By transforming materially how
we publish, how we read and write together, McDonald and
Trettien explore the potential of thresholds as a model for
digital publishing more attuned to the ethics of entanglement.

Post Office Press

5

The Horizon of
The Publishable
in/as Open
Access: From
Poethics to
Praxis

maintain by contributing to it for the sake of career progression
and a regular salary. This transgression is unlikely to be noticed
by my publisher (who probably does not care anyway).1 It is a
small and safe act of resistance, but it gestures towards the
centrality of thinking about the poethics—the ethics and the
aesthetics—of any act of making work public that is so crucial
to all discussions of open access (OA) publishing.

Kaja
Marczewska

I am writing this piece having just uploaded a PDF of my recent
book to aaaarg; a book published by Bloomsbury as a hardback
academic monograph retailing at £86—and that is after the
generous 10% discount offered on the publisher’s website. The
book focuses on copying and reproduction as perhaps the most
prominent forms of contemporary cultural production. Given
this focus, it seemed fitting to make the material available via
this guerrilla library, to enable its different circulation and less
controlled iterations. My decision to publish with Bloomsbury
was a pragmatic one. As an early career academic working
within UK higher education, I had little choice but to publish
with an established press if I wanted to continue in the privileged
position I currently find myself in. As someone interested in
economies of cultural production, forms of publishing and
self-organisation, the decision to breach my contract with the
publisher offered a welcome and necessary respite from the
discomfort I felt every time I saw my unaffordable (and perhaps
as a result, unreadable) book for sale. It served as a way of acting
(po)ethically within the system of which I am part. It was both a
gesture of sharing, of making my book more widely available to
a community that might otherwise be unable to access it, and
a selfish act, enabling my ongoing existence within a system I

6

Kaja Marczewska

I open with this personal reflection because I see my participation
inside-outside of academic publishing as pertinent to thinking
about the nature of OA today. Since its inception, OA publishing
has rapidly transformed from a radical, disruptive project of
sharing, making public, and community building, into one that
under the guise of ‘openness’ and ‘access’ maintains the system
that limits the possibilities of both. That is, OA has moved away
from the politically motivated initiative that it once was, opening
up spaces for publishing experimentation, to instead become a
constrained and constraining model of publishing in the service
of the neoliberal university. With this transformation of OA also
come limitations on the forms of publication. The introduction of
the OA requirement as one of the key criteria of REF-ability was
one of the factors contributing to the loss of the experimental
impetus that once informed the drive towards the OA model.
My home institution, for example, requires its staff to deposit
all our REF-able publications in a commercial, Elsevier-owned
repository, as PDFs—even if they have been published in OA
journals on custom-built platforms. The death-by-PDF that
such institutionalised forms of OA bring about, inevitably limits
the potential for pushing the boundaries of form that working
in digital spaces makes possible.
While conventional academic publishers are driven by market
demands and the value of the academic book as a commodity in
their decisions as to what to publish, mainstream OA publishing
practices tend to be motivated by questions on how to publish
a REF-able output, i.e. for all the wrong reasons. This tension
between content and form, and a characteristic commitment
to the latter that publishing OA makes necessary, is the central
focus of my paper. As I will argue, this is perhaps the greatest
paradox of OA: that in its fixation on issues of openness, it is

The Horizon of The Publishable

7

increasingly open only to the kinds of publications that can be
effortlessly slotted into the next institutional REF submission.
But, by doing so, OA publishing as we have come to know it
introduces significant constraints on the forms of publication
possible in academic publishing. In this paper, I consider OA as
a limit to what can be published in academia today, or what I will
refer to here, after Rachel Malik, as a horizon of the publishable.
‘Publishing,’ writes Malik, ‘or rather the horizon of the
publishable, precedes and constitutes both what can be written
and read. […] the horizon of the publishable governs what is
thinkable to publish within a particular historical moment […]
the horizon denotes […] a boundary or limit’ (2015, 709, 72021). Malik suggests that a number of distinct horizons can be
identified and argues that the limits of all writing are based on
generic conventions, i.e. crime fiction, biography, or children’s
picture books, for example, are all delimited by a different
set of categories and practices—by a different horizon. Her
understanding of publishing foregrounds the multiplicity of
processes and relations between them as well as the role
of institutions: commercial, legal, educational, political, and
cultural. It is the conjunction of practices and their contexts
that always constitutes, according to Malik, various horizons
of the publishable. For Malik, then, there is no singular concept
of publishing and no single horizon but rather a multiplicity of
practices and a diversity of horizons.
Open access could be added to Malik’s list as another practice
defined by its unique horizon. Following Malik, it would be
very easy to identify what the horizon of OA might be—what
processes, practices, and institutions define and confine what
can be published OA. But I would like to suggest here that
thinking about OA in the context of Malik’s argument does more
than offer tools for thinking about the limits of OA. I suggest
that it invites a rethinking of the place of OA in publishing today
and, more broadly, of the changing nature of publishing in HE.
That is, I propose that today OA assumes the role of a horizon
in its own right; that it defines and delimits the possibilities of
what can be made public in academia. If seen as such, OA is more
than just one of the practices of publishing; it has become the

8

Kaja Marczewska

horizon of the publishable in academic publishing in the UK today.
The new horizon in academic publishing seems increasingly to
only allow certain accepted forms of OA (such as the PDF or
the postprint) which under the guise of openness, sharing and
access, replicate the familiar and problematic models of our
knowledge economy. The promise of OA as a response to these
fixed forms of publishing seems to have given way to a peculiar
openness that favours metrics and monitoring. Where OA was
originally imagined to shift the perception of the established
horizon, it has now become that very horizon.
Here I want to posit that we should understand poethics as a
commitment to the kind of publishing that recognises the agency
of the forms in which we distribute and circulate published
material and acknowledges that these are always, inevitably
ideological. In her notion of poethics, Joan Retallack (2003)
gestures towards a writing that in form and content questions
what language does and how it works—to ‘the what’ and ‘the
how’ of writing. Similarly, the project of imagining OA as a
poethics is an attempt at thinking about publishing that forces a
reconsideration of both. However, I suggest, that with an often
thoughtless and technodeterministic push towards ‘access’ and
‘openness’, ‘the what’ gets obscured at the cost of ‘the how.’ This
attitude manifests itself most prominently in the proliferation
of OA platforms, similar to Coventry University’s depository
mentioned earlier here, that fit the parameters of REF. But
platforms, as Nick Srnicek (2017) warns us, are problematic. In
their design and modes of operation, they hold out the promise
of freedom, openness, flexibility and entrepreneurial success,
while maintaining the proprietary regimes and modes of capital
accumulation that contribute to new forms of exploitation and
new monopolies. The kind of publishing that mainstream OA
has become (what Sarah Kember describes as a top-down,
policy-driven OA)2 is more akin to this platform capitalism than
a publishing model which evokes the philosophy of openness
and access. In a shift away from a diversity of forms of OA
towards standardised OA platforms, OA has become inherently
antithetical to the politics of OA publishing.

The Horizon of The Publishable

9

What follows, then, is that any work that takes advantage of its openness and circulation
in digital spaces to experiment with ‘the how’ of publishing, in the current knowledge
economy inevitably becomes the negative of publishable, i.e. the unpublishable. OA as
platform capitalism is openly hostile to OA’s poethical potential. In other words, the
REF-able version of OA takes little interest in openness and delimits what is at the
heart of the practice itself, i.e. what can be made open to the public (as a colleague
from one of the Russell Group universities tells me, this only includes three or fourstar rated publications in their case, with other works deemed not good enough to
be made available via the University’s website). To imagine OA as a poethical mode of
publishing is to envisage a process of publishing that pushes beyond the horizon set
by OA itself. It invites reading and writing of texts that might be typically thought of
as unreadable, unwriteable, and unpublishable.
The concept of the ‘horizon’ also interest Joan Retallack, who in Poethical Wager
(2003) explores the horizon as a way of thinking about the contemporary. Retallack
identifies two types of horizons: the pseudoserene horizon of time and the dynamic
coastline of historical poesis (14). Reading Retallack in the context of OA, I would
like to suggest that similarly two models of OA can be identified today: OA as a
pseudoserene horizon and OA as a cultural coastline. One is predictable, static, and
limiting, i.e. designed to satisfy the managerial class of the contemporary university;
the other works towards a poethics of OA, with all its unpredictability, complexity,
and openness. OA publishing which operates within the confines of the pseudoserene
horizon is representative of what happens when we become complacent in the way we
think about the work of publishing. Conversely, OA seen as a dynamic coastline–the
model that Radical Open Access (ROA) collective works to advance–is a space where
publishing is always in process and makes possible a rethinking of the experience of
publishing. Seen as such, ROA is an exposition of the forms of publishing that we
increasingly take for granted, and in doing so mirrors the ethos of poethics. The role
of ROA, then, is to highlight the importance of searching for new models of OA, if
OA is to enact its function as a swerve in attitudes towards knowledge production
and consumption.
But anything new is ugly, Retallack suggests, via Picasso: ‘This is always a by-product
of a truly experimental aesthetics, to move into unaestheticized territory. Definitions
of the beautiful are tied to previous forms’ (Retallack 2003, 28). OA, as it has evolved
in recent years, has not allowed the messiness of the ugly. It has not been messy enough
because it has been co-opted, too quickly and unquestionably, by the agendas of
the contemporary university. OA has become too ‘beautiful’ to enact its disruptive
potential.3 In its drive for legitimisation and recognition, the project of OA has been
motivated by the desire to make this form of publishing too immediately familiar, and

10

Kaja Marczewska

too willingly PDF-able. The consequences of this attitude are
significant. The constraints on the methods and forms of OA
publishing that the institutionalisation of OA have brought
about, inevitably limit the content that is published. As a result,
what is delivered openly to the public is the familiar and the
beautiful. The new, radical, and ugly remains out of sight; not
recognised as a formal REF-able publication, the new lies beyond
the horizon of the OA publication as we know it. In order to enact
a poethics of openness and access, OA requires a more complex
understanding of the notion of openness itself. To be truly ‘open’,
OA publishing need not make as its sole objective a commitment
to openness as a mode of making publications open for the
public, i.e. circulated without a paywall, but instead should also
be driven by an openness to ambiguity, experimentation, and ‘a
delight in complex possibility’ (Retallack 2003, 221) that the
dominant models of OA are unable to accommodate.
To accuse OA of fixing in place the horizon of academic
publishing is to suggest that ‘a certain poetics of responsibility’
(Retallack 2003, 3) seems to have been lost in the bigger
project of OA, responsibility to the community of writers and
readers, and responsibility to the project of publishing. OA as
a ‘poethical attitude’ (Retallack 2003, 3) rather than rampant
technodeterminism, need not be a project which we have to
conform to under the guidelines of the current REF, but can
rather be a practice we choose to engage and engage with,
under conditions that make the poethics of OA possible. What a
re-thinking of OA as a poethics offers, is a way of acknowledging
the need for publishing that models how we want to participate
in academia. Exploring OA as a horizon of academic publishing
is one possible way of addressing this challenge. Although by
nature limiting, the horizon is also, Malik suggests, ‘a condition
of possibility’ (721). The task of OA as poethics is predicated on
the potential of moving away from the horizon as a boundary or a
limit and towards the horizon as a possibility of experimentation
and innovation. I want to conclude with another proposition,
which gestures towards such rethinking of OA as a more open
iteration of the horizon.

The Horizon of The Publishable

11

I have referred to OA publishing as a practice a number of
times in this paper. A decision to use this term was a conscious
attempt at framing OA as praxis. A shift away from poiesis–or
making–and towards the discourse of praxis–action or doing–
has been shaping the debates in the visual arts for some time
now. Art seen as praxis emerges out of a desire for social life
shaped by collective, transformative action. Praxis is a means of
reformulating life and art into a new fusion of critical thought,
creative production, and political activity. This approach grows
out of Aristotle’s understanding of praxis as action which is
always valuable in itself, as opposed to poiesis, i.e. actions aimed
at making or creation. Aristotelean praxis is always implicitly
ethical–always informed by and informing decisions as to how to
live–and political, concerned with forms of living with others. My
understanding of OA as praxis here is informed by such thinking
about ethical action as absolutely necessary for OA to enact
its potential for experimentation and change.

process of producing OA publications, a never-ending flow of
new PDFs and platforms. Instead, open accessing is a mode
of being in academia through the project of publishing as an
ongoing intervention. OA as platform capitalism gives little
consideration to the bigger project of OA as praxis, and as a
result fails to acknowledge the significance of the relationship
between the form of OA, the content published OA, and the
political project that informs both. Approaching OA as praxis,
then, is a tool for reshaping what constitutes the work of
publishing. What a commitment to open accessing, as opposed
to open access, makes possible, is a collective work against OA
as a tool of the neoliberal university and for OA as a poethical
form of publication: a fusion of making and doing, of OA as an
attitude and OA as form. But for poethical OA to become a
possibility, OA as praxis needs to emerge first.

To think about OA as praxis is to invite a conceptual shift
away from making publications OA and towards ‘doing OA’
as a complete project. OA seen as such ceases to exist as yet
another platform and emerges as an attitude that has the
potential to translate into forms of publishing best suited to
communicate it. This is not to suggest that OA should move
away from its preoccupation with the form and medium of
publishing altogether–the emergence of the so called postmedium condition in the arts, the glorification of generalised
‘doing’, and more recently, the popularity of related forms of
‘entrepreneurship’, all have their own problems. Rather, this
move towards praxis is an attempt at drawing attention to a
necessary relationship between making and doing, forms and
attitudes, that seems to be lacking in a lot of OA publishing. OA
as praxis offers a way out of what seems to be the end game
of academic publishing today; it is an invitation to participate
collectively and ethically in the process of making public the
work of scholarship.
Doing OA–open accessing–implies a way of thinking about
what producing various forms of knowledge should stand for.
In other words, open accessing does not suggest a continuous

12

Kaja Marczewska

The Horizon of The Publishable

13

References

¹ For a discussion of the effects of similar
practices of academic book sharing
on publishers, see Janneke Adema,
“Scanners, Collectors and Aggregators. On
the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated)
theory text sharing,” Open Reflections, 20
September 2009, https://openreflections.
wordpress.com/2009/09/20/scannerscollectors-and-aggregators-on-the‘underground-movement’-of-piratedtheory-text-sharing/.

Adema, Janneke. 2009. “Scanners, Collectors and Aggregators. On the ‘underground
movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing.” Open Reflections. Accessed 15 May
2018. https://openreflections.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/scanners-collectors-andaggregators-on-the-‘underground-movement’-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing/.
Adema, Janneke. 2014. “Embracing Messiness: Open access offers the chance to
creatively experiment with scholarly publishing.” LSE Impact Blog. Accessed 15
May 2018. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/11/18/embracingmessiness-adema-pdsc14/.
Kember, Sarah. 2014. “Opening Out from Open Access: Writing and Publishing in Response
to Neoliberalism.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 4.
doi:10.7264/N31C1V51.
Malik, Rachel. 2017. “Horizons of the Publishable: Publishing in/as Literary Studies.” ELH 75
(3): 707-735.
Retallack, Joan. 2003. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

² see: Sarah Kember, “Opening Out from
Open Access: Writing and Publishing in
Response to Neoliberalism,” Ada: A Journal
of Gender, New Media, and Technology 4
(2014): doi:10.7264/N31C1V51.

³ see also: Janneke Adema, “Embracing
Messiness: Open access offers the
chance to creatively experiment with
scholarly publishing,” LSE Impact Blog,
18 November 2014, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/
impactofsocialsciences/2014/11/18/
embracing-messiness-adema-pdsc14/.

14

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The Horizon of The Publishable

15

The
Poethics
Of
Openness

I won’t imply here that openness is the sole or even main reason/motivator/
enabler behind any kind of reimagining in this context; openness has always been
part of a constellation of material-discursive factors—including most importantly
perhaps, the digital, in addition to various other socio-cultural elements—which
have together created (potential) conditions for change in publishing. Yet, within
this constellation I would like to explore how open access, applied and valued in
certain specific, e.g. radical open access, ways—where in other implementations it
has actually inhibited experimentation, but I will return to that later—has been an
instrumental condition for ethico-aesthetic experimentation to take place.

Janneke
Adema

Potential for Experimentation

Last year from the 23rd until the 29th of October the annual Open Access
Week took place, an international advocacy event focused on open access and
related topics. The theme of 2017’s Open Access week was ‘open in order to…’,
prompting participants to explore the concrete, tangible benefits of openness
for scholarly communication and inviting them to reflect on how openness can
make things possible. Behind this prompt, however, lies a wider discussion on
whether openness is a value that is an end in itself, that is intrinsically good, or
whether it predominantly has instrumental value as a means to achieve a certain
end. I will focus on the latter and will start from the presumption that openness
has no intrinsic value, it functions as a floating or empty signifier (Laclau 2005,
129–55; Adema 2014) with no ethics or politics of its own, only in relation to how it
is applied or positioned.1 It is therefore in discussions on the instrumental value of
openness that our politics and ethics in relation to openness come to the fore (for
example, do we value open in order to… ‘grow the commons’ or ‘increase return on
investments and contribute to economic growth’?). In this paper I want to explore
ways in which openness has contributed to and advanced a specific ‘end’: how has
it enabled experimentation with the material forms and relations that underlie and
structure scholarly publishing? Here, I am thinking of both the formats (e.g. print,
digital) we use to communicate our research, and the systems, roles, models and
practices that have evolved around them (e.g. notions of authorship, the book and
publication, publishing models). How has open access facilitated an exploration of
new practices, structures and institutions, questioning the system of academic
publishing as currently set up?

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Janneke Adema

What is clear foremost, is that the open availability of research content has
been an important material condition for scholars and publishers to explore new
formats and new forms of interaction around publications. In order to remix and
re-use content, do large scale text and data-mining, experiment with open peer
review and emerging genres such as living books, wiki-publications, versionings and
multimodal adaptations, both the scholarly materials and platforms that lie at the
basis of these publishing gestures strongly benefit from being open. To enable new
forms of processual scholarship, communal authorship and public engagement with
texts online, open access is essential; it is no surprise therefore that many of the
ground-breaking experimental journals and projects in the HSS, such as Kairos,
Vectors and Inflexions, have been purposefully open access from the start.
Yet openness as a specific practice of publishing materials online has also influenced
how publishing itself is perceived. Making content openly available on blogs and
personal websites, or via institutional repositories and shadow libraries, has
enabled scholars to bypass legacy publishers, intermediaries and other traditional
gatekeepers, to publish their research and connect to other researchers in more
direct ways. This development has led to various reimaginings of the system of
scholarly publishing and the roles and structures that have traditionally buttressed
the publishing value chain in a print-based environment (which still predominantly
echoes Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, modelled on the 18th century
publishing history of Voltaire's Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (Darnton 1982)).
But next to this rethinking of the value chain, this more direct and open (self-)
publishing also enabled a proliferation of new publication forms, from blogposts to
podcasts and Twitter feeds.
Fuelled on by the open access movement, scholars, libraries and universities are
increasingly making use of open source platforms and software such as OJS to

The Poethics of Openness

17

take the process of publishing itself back into their own hands, setting up their
own formal publication outlets, from journals to presses and repositories. The open
access movement has played an important role in making a case against the high
profits sustaining the commercial publishing industry. This situation has created
serious access issues (e.g. the monograph crisis) due to the toxic combination
of market-driven publication decisions and increasingly depleted library funds,
affecting the availability of specialised and niche content (Fitzpatrick 2011; Hall
2008). This frustration in particular, next to the lack of uptake of open access
and multimodal publishing by the legacy presses, has motivated the rise of not-forprofit scholar- and library-led presses (Adema and Stone 2017). To that effect,
open access has stimulated a new ecosystem of publishing models and communities
to emerge.
Additionally, the iterative publishing of research-in-process, disseminating content
and eliciting community feedback during and as part of a project’s development,
has strengthened a vision of publishing in which it is perceived as an integral part of
the research process. The open science and notebook movements have simulated
this kind of processual publishing and helped imagine a different definition
of what publishing is and what purposes it fulfils. One of the more contentious
arguments I want to make here is that this potential to publish our research-inprogress has strengthened our agency as scholars with respect to how and when
we communicate our research. With that, our responsibility towards the specific
ways in which we produce it, from the formats (digital, multi-modal, processual), to
the material platforms and relations that support its production and dissemination,
is further extended. Yet, on the other hand, it has also highlighted the plurality of
material and discursive agencies involved in knowledge production, complicating
the centrality of liberal authorial agency. The closed and fixed codex-format, the
book as object, is what is being complicated and experimented with through preand post-publication feedback and interactions, from annotations in the margins
to open peer review and communal forms of knowledge production. The publication
as endpoint, as commodity, is what is being reconsidered here; but also our
author-function, when, through forms of open notebook science the roles of our
collaborators, of the communities involved in knowledge production, become even
more visible. I would like to end this section by highlighting the ways in which mainly
scholar-led projects within the open access landscape have played an important
role in carving out a different (ethical) framework for publishing too, one focused
on an ethics of care and communality, one in which publishing itself is perceived as
a form of care, acknowledging and supporting the various agencies involved in the
publishing process instead of being focused solely on its outcomes.

18

Janneke Adema

Impediment to Change
The above analysis of how openness and open access more
specifically has enabled experimentation, focuses mainly
on how it has the potential to do so. Yet there are similarly
many ways in which it has been inhibiting experimentation,
further strengthening existing publishing models and
established print-based formats. Think for example of how
most openly available scholarly publications are either
made available as PDFs or through Google Books limited
preview, both mimicking closed print formats online; of how
many open licences don’t allow for re-use and adaptations;
of how the open access movement has strategically been
more committed to gratis than to libre openness; of how
commercial publishers
are increasingly adopting open
access as just another profitable business model, retaining
and further exploiting existing relations instead of disrupting
them; of how new commercial intermediaries and gatekeepers
parasitical on open forms of communication are mining
and selling the data around our content to further their
own pockets—e.g. commercial SSRNs such as Academia.
edu and ResearchGate. In addition to all this, open access
can do very little to further experimentation if it is met by
a strong conservatism from scholars, their communities
and institutions, involving fears about the integrity of
scholarly content, and historical preferences for established
institutions and brands, and for the printed monograph and
codex format in assessment exercises—these are just a few
examples of how openness does not necessarily warrant
progressive change and can even effect further closures.
Openness itself does not guarantee experimentation, but
openness has and can be instrumentalised in such a way as
to enable experimenting to take place. It is here that I would
like to introduce a new concept to think and speculate with,
the concept of poethics. I use poethics in Derridean terms, as
a ‘nonself-identical’ concept (Derrida 1973), one that is both
constituted by and alters and adapts itself in intra-action
with the concepts I am connecting it to here: openness and
experimentation. I will posit that as a term poethics can

The Poethics of Openness

19

function in a connecting role as a bridging concept, outlining
the speculative relationship between the two. I borrowed the
concept of poethics (with an added h) from the poet, essayist,
and scholar Joan Retallack, where it has been further taken
on by the artist and critical racial and postcolonial studies
scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva; but in my exploration of
the term, I will also draw on the specific forms of feminist
poetics developed by literary theorist Terry Threadgold. I
will weave these concepts together and adapt them to start
speculating what a specific scholarly poethics might be. I
will argue in what follows that a scholarly poethics connects
the doing of scholarship, with both its political, ethical and
aesthetical elements. In this respect, I want to explore how
in our engagement as scholars with openness, a specific
scholarly poethics can arise, one that enables and creates
conditions for the continual reimagining and reperforming of
the forms and relations of knowledge production.
A Poethics of Scholarship
Poetics is commonly perceived as the theory of readymade textual and literary forms—it presumes structure and
fixed literary objects. Threadgold juxtaposes this theory of
poetics with the more dynamic concept of poiesis, the act of
making or performing in language, which, she argues, better
reflects and accommodates cultural and semiotic processes
and with that the writing process itself (Threadgold 1997, 3).
For Threadgold, feminist writings in particular have examined
this concept of poiesis, rather than poetics, of textuality by
focusing on the process of text creation and the multiple
identities and positions from which meaning is derived. This
is especially visible in forms of feminist rewriting, e.g. of
patriarchal knowledges, theories and narratives, which ‘reveal
their gaps and fissures and the binary logic which structures
them’ (Threadgold 1997, 16). A poetics of rewriting then goes
beyond a passive analysis of texts as autonomous artefacts,
where the engagement with and appraisal of a text is
actively performed, becoming performative, becoming itself
a poiesis, a making; the ‘analyst’ is embodied, becoming part
of the complex socio-cultural context of meaning-making

20

Janneke Adema

(Threadgold 1997, 85). Yet Threadgold emphasises that both
terms complement and denote each other, they are two sides
of the same coin; poetics forms the necessary static counterpoint to the dynamism of poiesis.
Joan Retallack moves beyond any opposition of poetics and
poiesis in her work, bringing them together in her concept of
poethics, which captures the responsibility that comes with
the formulating and performing of a poetics. This, Retallack
points out, always involves a wager, a staking of something
that matters on an uncertain outcome—what Mouffe and
Laclau have described as taking a decision in an undecideable
terrain (Mouffe 2013, 15). For Retallack a poethical attitude
thus necessarily comes with the ‘courage of the swerve’,
where, ‘swerves (like antiromantic modernisms, the civil rights
movement, feminism, postcolonialist critiques) are necessary
to dislodge us from reactionary allegiances and nostalgias’
(Retallack 2004, 3). In other words, they allow change to
take place in already determined situations. A poetics of the
swerve, of change, thus continuously unsettles our familiar
routes and notions; it is a poetics of conscious risk, of letting
go of control, of placing our inherited conceptions of ethics
and politics at risk, and of questioning them, experimenting
with them. For Retallack taking such a wager as a writer or
an artist, is necessary to connect our aesthetic registers to
the ‘character of our time’, acknowledging the complexities
and changing qualities of life and the world. Retallack initially
coined the term poethics to characterise John Cage’s
aesthetic framework, seeing it as focused on ‘making art
that models how we want to live’ (Retallack 2004, 44). The
principle of poethics then implies a practice in which ethics
and aesthetics can come together to reflect upon and
perform life’s changing experiences, whilst insisting upon our
responsibility (in interaction with the world) to guide this
change the best way we can, and to keep it in motion.
Denise Ferreira da Silva takes the concept of poethics
further to consider a new kind of speculative thinking—a
black feminist poethics—which rejects the linear and rational,
one-dimensional thought that characterises Western

The Poethics of Openness

21

European philosophy and theory in favour of a fractal or fourdimensional thinking, which better captures the complexity
of our world. Complicating linear conceptions of history and
memory as being reductive, Ferreira da Silva emphasises
how they are active elements, actively performing our past,
present and future. As such, she points out how slavery and
colonialism, often misconstrued in linear thinking as bygone
remnants of our past, are actively performed in and through
our present, grounded in that past, a past foundational to
our consciousness. Using fractal thinking as a poethical tool,
Ferreira da Silva hopes to break through the formalisations
of linear thought, by mapping blackness, and modes of
colonialism and racial violence not only on time, but on various
forms of space and place, exploring them explicitly from a
four-dimensional perspective (Bradley 2016). As such, she
explains, poethical thinking, ‘deployed as a creative (fractal)
imaging to address colonial and racial subjugation, aims to
interrupt the repetition characteristic of fractal patterns’
(Ferreira da Silva 2016) and refuses ‘to reduce what exists—
anyone and everything—to the register of the object, the
other, and the commodity’ (Ferreira da Silva 2014).

(such as the closed print-based book, single authorship, linear thought, copyright,
exploitative publishing relationships) or succumb to the closures that its own
implementation (e.g. through commercial adaptations) and institutionalisation (e.g.
as part of top-down policy mandates) of necessity also implies and brings with it.
It involves an awareness that publishing in an open way directly impacts on what
research is, what authorship is, and with that what publishing is. It asks us to take
responsibility for how we engage with open access, to take a position in towards
it—towards publishing more broadly—and towards the goals we want it to serve
(which I and others have done through the concept and project of radical open
access, for example). Through open publishing we can take in a critical position,
and we can explore new formats, practices and institutions, we just have to risk it.

These three different but complementary perspectives
from the point of view of literary scholarship and practice,
albeit themselves specific and contextual, map well onto
what I would perceive a ‘scholarly poethics’ to be: a form
of doing scholarship that pays specific attention to the
relation between context and content, ethics and aesthetics;
between the methods and theories informing our scholarship
and the media formats and graphic spaces we communicate
through. It involves scholars taking responsibility for the
practices and systems they are part of and often uncritically
repeat, but also for the potential they have to perform them
differently; to take risks, to take a wager on exploring other
communication forms and practices, or on a thinking that
breaks through formalisations of thought. Especially if as part
of our intra-actions with the world and today’s society we
can better reflect and perform its complexities. A scholarly
poethics, conceptualised as such, would include forms of
openness that do not simply repeat either established forms

22

Janneke Adema

The Poethics of Openness

23

References

This doesn’t mean that as part of
discussions on openness and open access,
openness has not often been perceived as
an intrinsic good, something we want to
achieve exactly because it is perceived as
an a priori good in itself, an ideal to strife
for in opposition to closedness (Tkacz
2014). A variant of this also exists, where
openness is simply perceived as ‘good’
because it opens up access to information,
without further exploring or considering why
this is necessarily a good thing, or simply
assuming that other benefits and change
will derive from there, at the moment
universal access is achieved (Harnad 2012).
1

24

Adema, Janneke. 2014. “Open Access”. In Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities.
Lueneburg: Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC).
Adema, Janneke, and Graham Stone. 2017. “Changing Publishing Ecologies: A Landscape
Study of New University Presses and Academic-Led Publishing”. London: Jisc. http://
repository.jisc.ac.uk/6666/.
Bradley, Rizvana. 2016. “Poethics of the Open Boat (In Response to Denise Ferreira Da
Silva)”. ACCeSsions, no. 2.
Darnton, Robert. 1982. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111 (3): 65–83.
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of
Signs. Northwestern University Press.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2014. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics”. The Black Scholar 44
(2): 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690.
———. 2016. ‘Fractal Thinking’. ACCeSsions, no. 2.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2011. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future
of the Academy. NYU Press.
Hall, Gary. 2008. Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open
Access Now. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Harnad, Stevan. 2012. “Open Access: Gratis and Libre”. Open Access Archivangelism
(blog). 3 May 2012. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/885-OpenAccess-Gratis-and-Libre.html.
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. Verso.
McPherson, Tara. 2010. “Scaling Vectors: Thoughts on the Future of Scholarly
Communication”. Journal of Electronic Publishing 13 (2). http://dx.doi.org/
10.3998/3336451.0013.208.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London; New York: Verso
Books.
Retallack, Joan. 2004. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Threadgold, Terry. 1997. Feminist Poetics Poiesis, Performance, Histories. London; New
York: Routledge.
Tkacz, Nathaniel. 2014. Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness. Chicago; London:
University of Chicago Press.

Janneke Adema

The Poethics of Openness

25

entangled with it—a verb rooted in the Old Norse word for
seaweed, thongull, that undulating biomass that ensnares
and is ensnared by oars and fishing nets; by hydrophones and
deep-sea internet cables; by coral and other forms of marine
life. Adapting another fragment from Haraway, we ask: ‘What
forms of life survive and flourish in these dense, imploded
zones?’ (Haraway 1994, 62).

Diffractive
Publishing
Frances
McDonald
&
Whitney
Trettien

Haraway’s ‘regenerative project’—which now extends far beyond her early work—
has been to craft a critical consciousness based on a different optical metaphor:
diffraction. In physics, a diffraction pattern is the bending of waves, especially
light and sound waves, around obstacles and through apertures. It is, Haraway
writes, ‘the production of difference patterns in the world, not just of the same
reflected—displaced—elsewhere’ (268). If reflective reading forever inscribes the
reader’s identity onto whatever text she touches, then diffractive reading sees
the intimate touching of text and reader as a contingent, dynamic unfolding of
mutually transformative affinities. To engage diffractively with an idea is to become

This question remains not only relevant but is today
increasingly urgent. When Haraway began writing about
diffraction in the late 80s and early 90s, the web was nascent;
it would be several years before Mozilla would launch its
Mosaic browser, bringing the full throttle of connectivity to
a broader public. Today, we wash in the wake of the changes
brought by these new technologies, swirling in the morass of
social media, email, Amazon, e-books, and pirated PDF libraries
that constitute our current textual ecology. Much lies at
stake in how we imagine and practise the work of swimming
through these changing tides. For Karen Barad, a friend
and colleague of Haraway’s and an advocate of diffractive
scholarship, reading and writing are ‘ethical practices’ that
must be reimagined according to an ‘ethics not of externality
but rather entanglement’ (Barad 2012). To Barad’s list of
reading and writing we here add publishing. If entanglement
has an ethics, then it behooves us as scholars to not just
describe and debate it but to transform materially the ways
we see ourselves as reading and writing together. Adding our
voices to a rising chorus that includes Janneke Adema (2015),
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2018), Eileen Joy (2017), Sarah Kember
(2016), Tara McPherson (2018), Gary Hall (2016), Iris van der
Tuin (2014), and others working at the intersection of digital
humanities, scholarly publishing, and feminist methodologies,
we ask: how can we build scholarly infrastructures that foster
diffractive reading and writing? What kind of publishing
model might be best suited to expressing and emboldening
diffractive practices? These are big questions that must be
collectively addressed; in this short piece, we offer our own
experiences designing thresholds, an experimental digital zine,
as one potential model for digital publishing that is attuned to
the ethics of entanglement.

26

Diffractive Publishing

Over a quarter century ago, Donna Haraway observed that the grounding metaphor
for humanistic inquiry is reflection. We describe the process of interpretation as
reflecting upon an object. To learn from a text, we ask students to write reflection
pieces, which encourages them to paper their own experiences over a text’s dense
weave. For Haraway, reflection is a troubling trope for critical study because it
‘displaces the same elsewhere’—that is, it conceives of reading and writing as
exercises in self-actualisation, with the text serving as a mirrored surface upon
which the scholar might see her own reflection cast back at her, mise en abyme.
‘Reflexivity has been much recommended as a critical practice,’ she writes, ‘but my
suspicion is that reflexivity, like reflection, only displaces the same elsewhere, setting
up the worries about copy and original and the search for the authentic and really
real’ (Haraway 1997, 16).

Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien

27

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

handwritten sticky notes, highlighted document pages, and
grainy photographs rub against one another, forming dense and shifting
thickets. the blank spaces between once-distinct districts become cluttered and
close. geographically distant realms ache to converge. the bookcase furiously
semaphores toward the far corner of the room. thin lines of coloured paper
arrive to splay across sections. the wall bursts at every seam.

Whether it be real or virtual, every research project has its own ‘wall’: a ‘dense,
imploded zone’ that is populated by the ideas, images, scenes, and sentences
that ‘stick’ to us, to use Lara Farina’s evocative phrase (2014, 33). They are the
‘encounters’ that Gilles Deleuze describes as the impetus toward work, the things
that ‘strike’ us, as Walter Benjamin puts it, like a hammer to unknown inner chords.
Although instrumental to every humanities project, this entangled web of texts and
ideas has a brutally short lifespan. The writer strives to reassert control by whittling
down its massy excesses; indeed, training to be a scholar in the humanities is in large
part learning to compress and contain the wall’s licentious sprawl. We shorten our
focus to a single period, place, or author, excise those fragments that fall outside
the increasingly narrow range of our expertise, and briskly sever any loose ends that
refuse to be tied. These regulatory measures help align our work with the temporal,
geographic, and aesthetic boundaries of our disciplinary arbiters: the journals and
university presses that publish our work, the departments that hire and tenure us.
In an increasingly tight academic marketplace, where the qualified scholars, articles,
and projects far outnumber the available positions, deviation from the standard
model can seem like risky business indeed.

of such distinguished critics as Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha,
and Fredric Jameson for their long-winded impenetrability.
Unlike its prizewinning paragraphs, the Contest’s message
was clear: the opaque abstractions that clogged the arteries
of academic writing were no longer to be tolerated.
The academy’s stylistic strip-down has served to puncture
the unseemly bloat that had disfigured its prose. But its
sweeping injunction against incomprehensibility bears with
it other casualties. As we slim and trim our texts, cutting
any tangents that distract from the argument’s main thrust,
we unwittingly excise writing’s other gaits—those twists,
roils, and scintillating leaps that Eric Hayot, in his recent
rejoinder to academic style guides, so beautifully describes
as ‘gyrations in prose’ (2014, 58). For Hayot, these stylistic
excesses occur when an author’s passion for her subject
becomes so overwhelming that it can no longer be expressed
plainly. The kinetic energy of these gyrations recalls the
dynamism of the wall; one may glimpse its digressiveness in the
meandering aside, its piecemeal architecture in the sentence
fragment, or its vaulting span in the photo quote. These
snags in intelligibility are not evidence of an elitist desire to
exclude, but are precisely the moments in which the decorous
surface of a text cracks open to offer a glimpse of the tangled
expanses beneath. To experience them as such, the reader
must sacrifice her grip on a text’s argument and allow herself
to be swept up in the muddy momentum of its dance. Caught
amidst a piece’s movements, the reader trades intellectual
insight for precarious intimacy, the ungraspable streaming of
one into another.

The institutional imperatives of compression and containment not only dictate the
structural parameters of a work—its scope and trajectory—but the very texture of
our writing. In a bid to render academic texts more comprehensible to their readers,
modern style guides advocate plain prose. Leanness, they remind us, is legibility. This
aversion to ornament was part of a larger mutiny against the scourge of obfuscation
that plagued the humanities in the latter half of the twentieth century. Between
1995 and 1998, the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a Bad Writing Contest
that took this turgid academic prose as its target, and cheerfully skewered the work

By polishing over these openings under the edict of legibility,
plain prose breeds a restrictive form of plain reading, in which
the reader’s role is to digest discrete parcels of information,
rather than move and be moved along with the rollicking
contours of a work. At stake in advocating for a plurality of
readerly and writerly practices is an ethics of criticism. The
institutional apparatuses that shape our critical practices
instruct us to erase all traces of the serendipitous gyrations
that constitute our writing and reading, and erect in their place

28

Diffractive Publishing

Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien

29

a set of boundaries that keep our work in check. Yet our habits
of critical inquiry are irrefutably subjective and collaborative.
In an effort to move toward such a methodology, we might ask:
What forms of scholarship and knowledge become possible
when we reconceive of the spaces between readers, writers,
and texts as thresholds rather than boundaries, that is, as
contiguous zones of entanglement? How would our critical
apparatus mutate if we ascribed value to the shifting sprawl
of the wall and make public the diffractive processes that
constitute our writing and reading practices?
To put these questions into action, we have created thresholds
(http://openthresholds.org). We solicit work that a traditional
academic journal may deem unfinished, unseemly, or otherwise
unbound, but which discovers precisely in its unboundedness
new and oblique perspectives on art, culture, history, and
philosophy. Along with her piece, the author also submits
the fragments that provoked and surreptitiously steered her
work. We the editors then collaborate closely with the author
to custom-design these pieces for the platform’s split screen
architecture. The result is a more open-ended, processoriented webtext that blooms from, but never fully leaves, the
provocative juxtapositions of the author’s wall.
The split screen design aligns thresholds with a long history
of media that splits content and divides the gaze. In film, the
split screen has long been used to splice together scenes that
are temporally or spatially discontinuous. This divided frame
disrupts the illusion that the camera provides a direct feed of
information and so reveals film to be an authored and infinitely
interpretable object, each scene refracted through others.
The split screen developed under a different name in HTML:
the frame element. Now considered a contrivance due to its
overuse in the late 90s, Netscape Navigator’s development
of the frameset nonetheless marked a major development in
the history of the web. For the first time, designers could load
multiple documents in a single visual field, each with their own
independent actions and scrolling.

30

Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien

Of course, both the cinematic split screen and the HTML
frameset gesture towards a much older material threshold:
the gutter that divides the pages of the codex. Since most of
its content is presented and read linearly, we rarely consider
the book as a split form. However, many writers and poets have
played with the gutter as a signifying space. In Un coup de dés,
a late nineteenth-century poem that inspired much continental
theory and philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth
century, Stéphane Mallarmé famously uses each two-page
spread to rhetorical effect, jumping and twirling the reader’s
eye around and across the gutter. Blaise Cendrars and Sonia
Delaunay in their self-published avant-garde artist’s book La
Prose du Transsiberien (1913) similarly create a ‘simultaneous’
aesthetic that pairs image and text through an accordion
fold. These early instances have more recent cousins in the
textile art of Eve Sedgwick, the extraordinary visual poetry
of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and the work of artists like Fred
Hagstrom and Heather Weston, whose multidimensional books
spur new ways of looking at and thinking about texts.
Drawing inspiration from these exemplars, thresholds brings
the creative affordances of the split screen to the web, and
to scholarship. Think of it as an artist’s browser that hearkens
back to the early web; or imagine in its recto/verso design a
speculative future for the post-digital book. Here, the eye
not only flows along (with) the split screen’s vertical scroll,
but also cuts distinctive lateral lines between each piece as
the reader bends left and right through an issue, one halfscreen at a time. How the reader decides to characterize each
threshold—and how the writer and editors collaboratively
design it—determines the interpretive freight its traversal
can bear. In their poem ‘Extraneous,’ published in the first
issue, Charles Bernstein and Ted Greenwald treat it as a lens
through which their collaboratively authored text passes,
darkly. What emerges on the other side is an echo of the
original, where language, newly daubed in hot swaths of
colour, takes on the acoustic materiality of a riotous chorus. In
‘Gesture of Photographing,’ another collaboratively-authored
piece, Carla Nappi and Dominic Pettman use the threshold to
diffract the work of Vilem Flusser. Each sink into his words on

Diffractive Publishing

31

photography and emerge having penned a short creative work
that responds to yet pushes away from his ideas.
As the reader navigates horizontally through an issue,
twisting and bumping from theory to fiction to image to sound,
thresholds invites her to engage with reading and writing as
a way of making waves of difference in the world. That is, the
platform does not divide each contribution taxonomically
but rather produces an entangled line of juxtapositions and
ripples, producing what Haraway calls ‘worldly interference
patterns’ (Haraway 1994, 60). There is a place, thresholds
implicitly argues, for the fragmentary in our collecting and
collective practices; for opacity and disorientation; for the
wall’s sprawl within the more regimented systems that order
our work.
To reach this place, criticism might begin at the threshold.
The threshold is the zone of entanglement that lies betwixt
and between writing and reading, text and reader, and
between texts themselves. It is restless and unruly, its
dimensions under perpetual renegotiation. To begin here
requires that we acknowledge that criticism does not rest on
solid ground; it too is a restless and unruly set of practices
given to proliferation and digression. To begin here is to enter
into a set of generative traversals that forge fragments into
new relations that in turn push against the given limits of our
inherited architectures of knowledge. To begin here is to
relinquish the fantasy that a text or texts may ever be fully,
finally known, and reconceive of our work as a series of partial
engagements and affective encounters that participate in
texts’ constant remaking.

32

Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien

References
Adema, Janneke. 2015. “Cutting Scholarship Together/Apart: Rethinking the Political
Economy of Scholarly Book Publishing.” In The Routledge Companion to Remix
Studies, ed. By Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. London:
Routledge.
Barad, Karen. 2012. “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”:
Interview with Karen Barad. In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, ed. by
Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1994. “A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural
Studies.” Configurations 2.1: 59-71.
Farina, Lara. 2014. “Sticking Together.” In Burn After Reading/The Future We Want, ed. by
Jeffrey J. Cohen, Eileen A. Joy, and Myra Seaman. Brooklyn: Punctum Books:
31-8.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2018. Generous Thinking. In-progress manuscript posted online at:
https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/.
Hall, Gary. 2016. Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_
OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. London: Routledge.
Hayot, Eric. 2014. "Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do." Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1
(2014): 53-77.
Joy, Eileen. 2017. “Here Be Monsters: A Punctum Publishing Primer.” Posted online: https://
punctumbooks.com/blog/here-be-monsters-a-punctum-publishing-primer/.
Kember, Sarah. 2016. “At Risk? The Humanities and the Future of Academic Publishing,”
Journal of Electronic Publishing 19.2 (Fall). Online: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/
jep/3336451.0019.210?view=text;rgn=main.
McPherson, Tara. 2018. Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
van der Tuin, Iris. 2014. “Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist Onto-Epistemology: On
Encountering Chantal Chawaf and Posthuman Interpellation,” Parallax 20:3: 231-244.

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34

The
Poethics of
Scholarship



Mars & Medak
Against Innovation
2019


Against Innovation: Compromised institutional agency and acts of custodianship
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

abstract
In this essay we reflect on the historic crisis of the university and the public library as two
modern institutions tasked with providing universal access to knowledge and education.
This crisis, precipitated by pushes to marketization, technological innovation and
financialization in universities and libraries, has prompted the emergence of shadow
libraries as collective disobedient practices of maintenance and custodianship. In their
illegal acts of reversing property into commons, commodification into care, we detect a
radical gesture comparable to that of the historical avant-garde. To better understand how
the university and the public library ended up in this crisis, we re-trace their development
starting with the capitalist modernization around the turn of the 20th century, a period of
accelerated technological innovation that also birthed historical avant-garde. Drawing on
Perry Anderson’s ‘Modernity and Revolution’, we interpret that uniquely creative period
as a period of ambivalence toward an ‘unpredictable political future’ that was open to
diverging routes of social development. We situate the later re-emergence of avant-garde
practices in the 1960s as an attempt to subvert the separations that a mature capitalism
imposes on social reality. In the present, we claim, the radicality equivalent to the avantgarde is to divest from the disruptive dynamic of innovation and focus on the repair,
maintenance and care of the broken social world left in techno-capitalism’s wake.
Comparably, the university and the public library should be able to claim the radical
those gesture of slowdown and custodianship too, against the imperative of innovation
imposed on them by policymakers and managers.

Custodians.online, the first letter
On 30 November, 2015 a number of us shadow librarians who advocate, build
and maintain ‘shadow libraries’, i.e. online infrastructures allowing users to
digitise, share and debate digital texts and collections, published a letter
article | 345

ephemera: theory & politics in organization


(Custodians.online, 2015) in support of two of the largest user-created
repositories of pirated textbooks and articles on the Internet – Library Genesis
and Science Hub. Library Genesis and Science Hub’s web domain names were
taken down after a New York court issued an injunction following a copyright
infringement suit filed by the largest commercial academic publisher in the
world – Reed Elsevier. It is a familiar trajectory that a shared digital resource,
once it grows in relevance and size, gets taken down after a court decision.
Shadow libraries are no exception.
The world of higher education and science is structured by uneven development.
The world’s top-ranked universities are concentrated in a dozen rich countries
(Times Higher Education, 2017), commanding most of the global investment
into higher education and research. The oligopoly of commercial academic
publishers is headquartered in no more than half of those. The excessive rise of
subscription fees has made it prohibitively expensive even for the richest
university libraries of the Global North to provide access to all the journals they
would need to (Sample, 2012), drawing protest from academics all over the world
against the outrageously high price tag that Reed Elsevier puts on their work
(‘The Cost of Knowledge’, 2012). Against this concentration of economic might
and exclusivity to access, stands the fact that the rest of the world has little access
to the top-ranked research universities (Baty, 2017; Henning, 2017) and that the
poor universities are left with no option but to tacitly encourage their students to
use shadow libraries (Liang, 2012). The editorial director of global rankings at the
Times Higher Education Phil Baty minces no words when he bluntly states ‘that
money talks in global higher education seems … to be self-evident’ (Baty, 2017).
Uneven economic development reinforces global uneven development in higher
education and science – and vice versa. It is in the face of this combined
economic and educational unevenness, that Library Genesis and Science Hub,
two repositories for a decommodified access to otherwise paywalled resources,
attain a particular import for students, academics and researchers worldwide.
And it is in the face of combined economic and educational unevenness, that
Library Genesis and Science Hub continue to brave the court decisions,
continuously changing their domain names, securing ways of access beyond the
World Wide Web and ensuring robust redundancy of the materials in their
repositories.
The Custodians.online letter highlights two circumstances in this antagonism
that cut to the core of the contradictions of reproduction within academia in the
present. The first is the contrast between the extraction of extreme profits from
academia through inflated subscription prices and the increasingly precarious
conditions of studying, teaching and researching:

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Against innovation

Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin stands
in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level
wages for adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic
material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the
richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot afford them
any longer. (Custodians.online, 2015: n.p.)

The enormous profits accruing to an oligopoly of academic publishers are a
result of a business model premised on harvesting and enclosing the scholarly
writing, peer reviewing and editing is done mostly for free by academics who are
often-times struggling to make their ends meet in the higher education
environment (Larivière et al., 2015).
The second circumstance is that shadow libraries invert the property relation of
copyright that allows publishers to exclude all those students, teachers and
researchers who don’t have institutional access to scholarly writing and yet need
that access for their education and research, their work and their livelihood in
conditions of heightened precarity:
This is the other side of 37% profit margins: our knowledge commons grows in
the fault lines of a broken system. We are all custodians of knowledge, custodians
of the same infrastructures that we depend on for producing knowledge,
custodians of our fertile but fragile commons. To be a custodian is, de facto, to
download, to share, to read, to write, to review, to edit, to digitize, to archive, to
maintain libraries, to make them accessible. It is to be of use to, not to make
property of, our knowledge commons.) (Custodians.online, 2015)

Shadow libraries thus perform an inversion that replaces the ability of ownership
to exclude, with the practice of custodianship (notion implying both the labor of
preservation of cultural artifacts and the most menial and invisible labor of daily
maintenance and cleaning of physical structures) that makes one useful to a
resource held in common and the infrastructures that sustain it.
These two circumstances – antagonism between value extraction and precarity
and antagonism between exclusive property and collective custodianship – signal
a deeper-running crisis of two institutions of higher education and research that
are caught in a joint predicament: the university and the library. This crisis is a
reflection of the impossible challenges placed on them by the capitalist
development, with its global division of labor and its looming threat of massive
technological unemployment, and the response of national policymakers to those
challenges: Are they able to create a labor force that will be able to position itself
in the global labor market with ever fewer jobs to go around? Can they do it with
less money? Can they shift the cost, risk and responsibility for social challenges
to individual students and patrons, who are now facing the prospect of their
investment in education never working out? Under these circumstances, the
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imperative is that these institutions have to re-invent themselves, that they have
to innovate in order to keep up with the disruptive course and accelerated the
pace of change.

Custodianship and repair
In what follows we will argue against submitting to this imperative of innovation.
Starting from the conditions from which shadow libraries emerge, as laid out in
the first Custodians.online letter, we claim that the historical trajectory of the
university and the library demands that they now embrace a position of
disobedience. They need to go back to their universalizing mission of providing
access to knowledge and education unconditionally to all members of society.
That universalism is a powerful political gesture. An infinite demand (Critchley,
2007) whereby they seek to abolish exclusions and affirm the legacy of the radical
equality they have built as part of the history of emancipatory struggles and
advances since the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. At the core of this legacy is a
promise that the capacity of members of society to collectively contest and claim
rights so as to become free, equal and solidaric is underwritten by a capacity to
have informed opinion, attain knowledge and produce a pedagogy of their own.
The library and the university stand in a historical trajectory of revolutions, a
series of historical discontinuities. The French Revolution seized the holdings of
the aristocracy and the Church, and brought a deluge of books to the Blibliotèque
Nationale and the municipal libraries across France (Harris, 1999). The Chartism
might have failed in its political campaign in 1848, but was successful in setting
up the reading rooms and emancipating the working class education from moral
inculcation imposed on them by the ruling classes (Johnson, 2014). The tension
between continuity and discontinuity that comes with disruptive changes was
written into their history long before the present imperative of innovation. And
yet, if these institutions are social infrastructures that have ever since sustained
the production of knowledge and pedagogy by re-producing the organizational
and material conditions of their production, they warn us against taking that
imperative of innovation at face value.
The entrepreneurial language of innovation is the vernacular of global technocapitalism in the present. Radical disruption is celebrated for its ability to depose
old monopolies and birth new ones, to create new markets and its first movers to
replace old ones (Bower and Christensen, 1996). It is a formalization reducing
the complexity of the world to the capital’s dynamic of creative destruction
(Schumpeter, 2013), a variant of an old and still hegemonic productivism that
understands social development as primarily a function of radical advances in
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Against innovation

technological productivity (Mumford, 1967). According to this view, what counts
is that spurts of technological innovation are driven by cycles of financial capital
facing slumping profits in production (Perez, 2011).
However, once the effect of gains from new technologies starts to slump, once
the technologist’s dream of improving the world hits the hard place of venture
capital monetization and capitalist competition, once the fog of hyped-up
technological boom clears, that which is supposedly left behind comes the fore.
There’s then the sunken fixed capital that is no longer productive enough.
There’s then technical infrastructures and social institutions that were there
before the innovation and still remain there once its effect tapers off, removed
from view in the productivist mindset, and yet invisibly sustaining that activity of
innovation and any other activity in the social world we inhabit (Hughes, 1993).
What remains then is the maintenance of stagnant infrastructures, the work of
repair to broken structures and of care for resources that we collectively depend
on.
As a number of scholars who have turned their attention to the matters of repair,
maintenance and care suggest, it is the sedimented material infrastructures of
the everyday and their breakdown that in fact condition and drive much of the
innovation process (Graham and Thrift, 2007; Jackson, 2014). As the renowned
historian of technology Thomas Hughes suggested (Hughes, 1993),
technological changes largely address the critical problems of existing
technologies. Earlier still, in the 1980s, David Noble convincingly argued that the
development of forces of production is a function of the class conflict (Noble,
2011). This turns the temporal logic of innovation on its head. Not the creative
destruction of a techno-optimist kind, but the malfunctioning of technological
infrastructures and the antagonisms of social structures are the elementary
pattern of learning and change in our increasingly technological world. As
Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift argued (2007), once the smooth running
production, consumption and communication patterns in the contemporary
capitalist technosphere start to collapse, the collective coping strategies have to
rise to the challenge. Industrial disasters, breakdowns of infrastructures and
natural catastrophes have taught us that much.
In an age where a global division of labor is producing a growing precarity for
ever larger segments of the world’s working population and the planetary
systems are about to tip into non-linear changes, a truly radical gesture is that
which takes as its focus the repair of the effects of productivism. Approaching the
library and the university through the optic of social infrastructure allows us to
glimpse a radicality that their supposed inertia, complexity and stability make

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possible. This slowdown enables the processes of learning and the construction
of collective responses to the double crisis of growth and the environment.
In a social world in which precarity is differently experienced between different
groups, these institutions can accommodate that heterogeneity and diminish
their insecurities, helping the society effectively support structural change. They
are a commons in the non-substantive sense that Lauren Berlant (2016)
proposes, a ‘transitional form’ that doesn’t elide social antagonisms and that lets
different social positions loosely converge, in order to become ‘a powerful vehicle
for troubling troubled times’ (Berlant, 2016: 394-395).
The trajectory of radical gestures, discontinuities by re-invention, and creative
destruction of the old have been historically a hallmark of the avant-gardes. In
what follows, we will revisit the history of the avant-gardes, claiming that,
throughout their periodic iterations, the avant-gardes returned and mutated
always in response to the dominant processes and crises of the capitalist
development of their time. While primarily an artistic and intellectual
phenomenon, the avant-gardes emerged from both an adversarial and a coconstitutive relation to the institutions of higher education and knowledge
production. By revisiting three epochal moments along the trajectory of the
avant-gardes – 1917, 1967 and 2017 – we now wish to establish how the
structural context for radical disruption and radical transformation were
historically changing, bringing us to the present conjuncture where the library
and the university can reclaim the legacy of the avant-gardes by seemingly doing
its exact opposite: refusing innovation.

1917 – Industrial modernization,
revolutionary subjectivity

accelerated

temporality

and

In his text on ‘Modernity and Revolution’ Perry Anderson (1984) provides an
unexpected, yet the cogent explanation of the immense explosion of artistic
creativity in the short span of time between the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century that is commonly periodized as modernism (or avant-garde,
which he uses sparsely yet interchangeably). Rather than collapsing these wildly
diverging movements and geographic variations of artistic practices into a
monolithic formation, he defines modernism as a broad field of singular
responses resulting from the larger socio-political conjuncture of industrial
modernity. The very different and sometimes antithetical currents of symbolism,
constructivism, futurism, expressionism or suprematism that emerge in
modernism’s fold were defined by three coordinates: 1) an opposition to the
academicism in the art of the ancien régime, which modernist art tendencies both
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Against innovation

draw from and position themselves against, 2) a transformative use of
technologies and means of communication that were still in their promising
infancy and not fully integrated into the exigencies of capitalist accumulation and
3) a fundamental ambivalence vis-à-vis the future social formation – capitalism or
socialism, state or soviet – that the process of modernization would eventually
lead to. As Anderson summarizes:
European modernism in the first years of this century thus flowered in the space
between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a
still unpredictable political future. Or, put another way, it arose at the intersection
between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy,
and a semi-emergent, or -insurgent, labour movement. (Anderson, 1984: 150)

Thus these different modernisms emerged operating within the coordinates of
their historical present, – committed to a substantive subversion of tradition or to
an acceleration of social development. In his influential theory of the avant-garde,
Peter Bürger (1984) roots its development in the critique of autonomy the art
seemingly achieved with the rise of capitalist modernity between the eighteenth
and late nineteenth century. The emergence of bourgeois society allowed artists
to attain autonomy in a triple sense: art was no longer bounded to the
representational hierarchies of the feudal system; it was now produced
individually and by individual fiat of the artist; and it was produced for individual
appreciation, universally, by all members of society. Starting from the ideal of
aesthetic autonomy enshrined in the works of Kant and Schiller, art eventually
severed its links from the boundedness of social reality and made this freedom
into its subject matter. As the markets for literary and fine artworks were
emerging, artists were gaining material independence from feudal patronage, the
institutions of bourgeois art were being established, and ‘[a]estheticism had made
the distance from the praxis of life the content of works’ (Bürger, 1984: 49)
While capitalism was becoming the dominant reality, the freedom of art was
working to suppress the incursion of that reality in art. It was that distance,
between art and life, that historical avant-gardes would undertake to eliminate
when they took aim at bourgeois art. With the ‘pathos of historical
progressiveness on their side’ (Bürger, 1984: 50), the early avant-gardes were
thus out to relate and transform art and life in one go.
Early industrial capitalism unleashed an enormous social transformation
through the formalization and rationalization of processes, the coordination and
homogenization of everyday life, and the introduction of permanent innovation.
Thus emerged modern bureaucracy, mass society and technological revolutions.
Progress became the telos of social development. Productive forces and global
expansion of capitalist relations made the humanity and the world into a new

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horizon of both charitable and profitable endeavors, emancipatory and imperial.
The world became a project (Krajewski, 2014).
The avant-gardes around the turn of the 20th century integrated and critically
inflected these transformations. In the spirit of the October Revolution, its
revolutionary subjectivity approached social reality as eminently transformable.
And yet, a recurrent concern of artists was with the practical challenges and
innovations of accelerated modernization: how to control, coordinate and socially
integrate the immense expansionary forces of early industrialization. This was an
invitation to insert one’s own radical visions into life and create new forms of
standardization and rationality that would bring society out of its pre-industrial
backwardness. Central to the avant-garde was abolishing the old and creating the
new, while overcoming the separation of art and social practice. Unleashing
imaginary and constructive forces in a reality that has become rational, collective
and universal: that was its utopian promise; that was its radical innovation. Yet,
paradoxically, it is only once there is the new that the previously existing social
world can be formalized and totalized as the old and the traditional. As Boris
Groys (2014) insisted, the new can be only established once it stands in a relation
to the archive and the museum. This tendency was probably nowhere more in
evidence than, as Sven Spieker documents in his book ‘The big archive – Art
from bureaucracy’ (2008), in the obsession of Soviet constructivists and
suprematists with the archival ordering of the flood of information that the
emergent bureaucratic administration and industrial management were creating
on an unprecedented scale.
The libraries and the universities followed a similar path. As the world became a
project, the aggregation and organization of all knowledge about the world
became a new frontier. The pioneers of library science, Paul Otlet and Melvil
Dewey, consummating the work of centuries of librarianship, assembled index
card catalogs of everything and devised classificatory systems that were powerful
formalizations of the increasingly complex world. These index card catalogs were
a ‘precursor of computing: universal paper machine’, (Krajewski, 2011), predating the ‘universal Turing machine’ and its hardware implementations by
Konrad Zuse and John von Neumann by almost half a century. Knowledge thus
became universal and universalizable: while libraries were transforming into
universal information infrastructures, they were also transforming into places of
popular reading culture and popular pedagogy. Libraries thus were gaining
centrality in the dissemination of knowledge and culture, as the reading culture
was becoming a massive and general phenomenon. Moreover, during the second
part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century, the working
class would struggle to transform not only libraries, but also universities, into
public institutions providing free access to culture and really useful knowledge
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Against innovation

necessary for the self-development and self-organization of the masses (Johnson,
2014).
While universities across the modernizing Europe, US and USSR would see their
opening to the masses only in the coming decades later, they shyly started to
welcome the working class and women. And yet, universities and schools were
intense places of experimentation and advancement. The Moscow design school
VKhUTEMAS, for instance, carried over the constructivists concerns into the
practicalities of the everyday, constructing socialist objects for a new collective
life, novyi byt, in the spirit of ‘Imagine no possessions’ (2005), as Christina Kiaer
has punned in the title of her book. But more importantly, the activities of
universities were driven by the promise that there are no limits to scientific
discovery and that a Leibnitzian dream of universal formalization of language
can be achieved through advances in mathematics and logic.

1967 – Mature capitalism, spectacle, resistant subjectivity
In this periodization, the central contention is that the radical gesture of
destruction of the old and creation of the new that was characteristic of the avantgarde has mutated as the historic coordinates of its emergence have mutated too.
Over the last century the avant-garde has divested from the radical gestures and
has assumed a relation to the transformation of social reality that is much more
complicated than its erstwhile cohort in disruptive change – technological
innovation – continues to offer. If technological modernization and the avantgarde were traveling companions at the turn of the twentieth century, after the
WWII they gradually parted their ways. While the avant-garde rather critically
inflects what capitalist modernity is doing at a particular moment of its
development, technological innovation remained in the same productivist pattern
of disruption and expansion. That technological innovation would remain
beholden to the cyclical nature of capitalist accumulation is, however, no mere
ideological blind-spot. Machinery and technology, as Karl Marx insists in The
Grundrisse, is after all ‘the most adequate form of capital’ (1857) and thus vital to
its dynamic. Hence it comes as no surprise that the trajectory of the avant-garde
is not only a continued substantive subversion of the ever new separations that
capitalist system produces in the social reality, but also a growing critical distance
to technology’s operation within its development.
Thus we skip forward half a century. The year is 1967. Industrial development is
at its apex. The despotism of mass production and its attendant consumerist
culture rules over the social landscape. After the WWII, the working class has
achieved great advances in welfare. The ‘control crisis’ (Beniger, 1989), resulting
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from an enormous expansion of production, distribution and communication in
the 19th century, and necessitating the emergence of the capacity for
coordination of complex processes in the form of modern bureaucracy and
information technology, persists. As the post-WWII golden period of gains in
productivity, prosperity and growth draws to a close, automation and
computerization start to make their way from the war room to the shop floor.
Growing labor power at home and decolonization abroad make the leading
capitalist economies increasingly struggle to keep profits rates at levels of the
previous two decades. Socialist economies struggle to overcome the initial
disadvantages of belated modernization and instill the discipline over labor in
order to compete in the dual world-system. It is still a couple of years before the
first oil crisis will break out and the neo-liberal retrenchment begin.
The revolutionary subjectivity of 1917 is now replaced by resistant militancy.
Facing the monotony of continuous-flow production and the prospect of bullshit
jobs in service industries that start to expand through the surplus of labor time
created by technological advances (Graeber, 2013), the workers perfect the
ingenuity in shirking the intensity and dullness of work. The consumerist culture
instills boredom (Vaneigem, 2012), the social division of labor produces
gendered exploitation at home (James, 2012), the paternalistic welfare provision
results in loss of autonomy (Oliver, 1990).
Sensibility is shaped by mass media whose form and content are structured by
the necessity of creating aggregate demand for the ever greater mass of
commodities and thus the commodity spectacle comes to mediate social
relations. In 1967 Guy Debord’s ‘The society of the spectacle’ is published. The
book analyses the totalizing capture of Western capitalist society by commodity
fetishism, which appears as objectively given. Commodities and their mediatized
simulacra become the unifying medium of social integration that obscures
separations within the society. So, as the crisis of 1970s approaches, the avantgarde makes its return. It operates now within the coordinates of the mature
capitalist conjuncture. Thus re-semantization, détournement and manipulation
become the representational equivalent of simulating busyness at work, playing
the game of hide-and-seek with the capitalist spectacle and turning the spectacle
onto itself. While the capitalist development avails itself of media and computers
to transform the reality into the simulated and the virtual, the avant-garde’s
subversive twist becomes to take the simulated and the virtual as reality and reappropriate them for playful transformations. Critical distance is no longer
possible under the centripetal impact of images (Foster, 1996), there’s no
revolutionary outside from which to assail the system, just one to escape from.

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Thus, the exodus and autonomy from the dominant trajectory of social
development rather than the revolutionary transformation of the social totality
become the prevailing mode of emancipatory agency. Autonomy through forms
of communitarian experimentation attempts to overcome the separation of life
and work, home and workplace, reproduction and production and their
concealment in the spectacle by means of micro-political experiments.
The university – in the meanwhile transformed into an institution of mass
education, accessible to all social strata – suddenly catapults itself center-stage,
placing the entire post-WWII political edifice with its authoritarian, repressive
and neo-imperial structure into question, as students make radical demands of
solidarity and liberation. The waves of radical political movements in which
students play a central role spread across the world: the US, Czechoslovakia,
France, Western Germany, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, and so on. The institution
becomes a site from which and against which mass civil rights, anti-imperial,
anti-nuclear, environmental, feminist and various other new left movements
emerge.
It is in the context of exodus and autonomy that new formalizations and
paradigms of organizing knowledge emerge. Distributed, yet connected. Built
from bottom up, yet powerful enough to map, reduce and abstract all prior
formalizations. Take, for instance, Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu that introduced
to the world the notion of hypertext and hyperlinking. Pre-dating the World Wide
Web by a good 25 years, Xanadu implemented the idea that a body of written
texts can be understood as a network of two-way references. With the advent of
computer networks, whose early adopters were academic communities, that
formalization materialized in real infrastructure, paving the way for a new
instantiation of the idea that the entire world of knowledge can be aggregated,
linked and made accessible to the entire world. As Fred Turner documents in
‘From counterculture to cyberculture’ (2010), the links between autonomyseeking dropouts and early cyberculture in the US were intimate.
Countercultural ideals of personal liberation at a distance from the society
converged with the developments of personal computers and computer networks
to pave the way for early Internet communities and Silicon Valley
entrepreneurialism.
No less characteristic of the period were new formalizations and paradigms of
technologically-mediated subjectivity. The tension between the virtual and the
real, autonomy and simulation of autonomy, was not only present in the avantgarde’s playful takes on mass media. By the end of the 1950s, the development of
computer hardware reached a stage where it was running fast enough to cheat
human perception in the same way moving images on film and television did. In
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the computer world, that illusion was time-sharing. Before the illusion could
work, the concept of an individual computer user had to be introduced (Hu,
2015). The mainframe computer systems such as IBM 360/370 were fast enough
to run a software-simulated (‘virtual’) clone of the system for every user (Pugh et
al., 1991). This allowed users to access the mainframe not sequentially one after
the other, but at the same time – sharing the process-cycles among themselves.
Every user was made to feel as if they were running their own separate (‘real’)
computer. The computer experience thus became personal and subjectivities
individuated. This interplay of simulation and reality became common in the late
1960s. Fifty years later this interplay would become essential for the massive
deployment of cloud computing, where all computer users leave traces of their
activity in the cloud, but only few can tell what is virtual (i.e. simulated) and what
is real (i.e. ‘bare machine’).
The libraries followed the same double trajectory of universities. In the 1960s,
the library field started to call into question the merit of objectivity and neutrality
that librarianship embraced in the 1920s with its induction into the status of
science. In the context of social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, librarians
started to question ‘The Myth of Library Neutrality’ (Branum, 2008). With the
transition to a knowledge economy and transformation of the information into a
commodity, librarians could no longer ignore that the neutrality had the effect of
perpetuating the implicit structural exclusions of class, gender and race and that
they were the gatekeepers of epistemic and material privilege (Jansen, 1989;
Iverson 1999). The egalitarian politics written into the de-commodification and
enabling the social mission of public libraries started to trump neutrality. Thus
libraries came to acknowledge their commitment to the marginalized, their
pedagogies and their struggles.
At the same time, library science expanded and became enmeshed with
information science. The capacity to aggregate, organize and classify huge bodies
of information, to view it as an interlinked network of references indexed in a
card catalog, sat well with the developments in the computer world. In return, the
expansion of access to knowledge that the new computer networks promised fell
in line with the promise of public libraries.

2017 – Crisis in the present, financialization, compromised subjectivity
We arrive in the present. The effects of neo-liberal restructuring, the global
division of labor and supply-chain economy are petering out. Global capitalism
struggles to maintain growth, while at the same time failing to slow down
accelerating consumption of energy and matter. It thus arrives at a double crisis
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– a crisis of growth and a crisis of planetary boundaries. Against the profit
squeeze of 1970s, fixes were applied in the form of the relocation of production,
the breaking-up of organized labor and the integration of free markets across the
world. Yet those fixes have not stopped the long downturn of the capitalist system
that pinnacled in the crisis of 2008 (Brenner, 2006). Currently capital prefers to
sit on US$ 13.4 trillion of negative yielding bonds rather than risk investing into
production (Wigglesworth and Platt, 2016). Financialization is driving the efforts
to quickly boost and capture value where long-term investment makes little
sense. The finance capital privileges the short-term value maximization through
economic rents over long-term investment into growth. Its logic dominates all
aspects of the economy and the everyday (Brown, 2015). When it is betting on
long-term changes in production, capital is rather picky and chooses to bet on
technologies that are the harbingers of future automation. Those technologies
might be the death knell of the social expectation of full employment, creating a
reserve army of labor that will be pushed to various forms of casualized work,
work on demand and workfare. The brave new world of the gig-economy awaits.
The accelerated transformation of the labor market has made adaptation through
education and re-skilling difficult. Stable employment is mostly available in
sectors where highly specialized technological skills are required. Yet those
sectors need far less workers than the mass-manufacture required. Re-skilling is
only made more difficult by the fact that austerity policies are reducing the
universal provision of social support needed to allow workers to adapt to these
changes: workfare, the housing crisis, cuts in education and arts have converged
to make it so. The growing precarity of employment is doing away with the
separation between working time and free time. The temporal decomposition is
accompanied by the decomposition of workplace and living space. Fewer and
fewer jobs have a defined time and place in which they are performed (Huws,
2016) and while these processes are general, the conditions of precarity diverge
greatly from profession to profession, from individual to individual.
At the same time, we are living through record global warming, the seventh great
extinction and the destabilization of Earth’s biophysical systems. Globally, we’re
overshooting Earth’s regenerative capacities by a factor of 1.6 (Latouche, 2009),
some countries such as the US and the Gulf by a factor of 5 (Global Footprint
Network, 2013). And the environmental inequalities within countries are greater
than those between the countries (Piketty and Chancel, 2015). Unless by some
wonder almost non-existent negative emissions technologies do materialize
(Anderson and Peters, 2016), we are on a path of global destabilization of socioenvironmental metabolisms that no rate of technological change can realistically
mitigate (Loftus et al., 2015). Betting on settling on Mars is equally plausible.

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So, if the avant-garde has at the beginning of the 20th century responded to the
mutations of early modernization, in the 1960s to the integrated spectacle of the
mature capitalism, where is the avant-garde in the present?
Before we try to address the question, we need to return to our two public
institutions of mass education and research – the university and the library.
Where is their equalizing capacity in a historical conjuncture marked by the
rising levels of inequality? In the accelerating ‘race against the machine’
(Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2012), with the advances in big data, AI and
robotization threatening to obliterate almost half of the jobs in advanced
economies (Frey and Osborne, 2013; McKinsey Global Institute, 2018), the
university is no longer able to fulfill the promise that it can provide both the
breadth and the specialization that are required to stave off the effect of a
runaway technological unemployment. It is no surprise that it can’t, because this
is ultimately a political question of changing the present direction of
technological and social development, and not a question of institutional
adaptation.
Yet while the university’s performance becomes increasingly scrutinized on the
basis of what its work is contributing to the stalling economy and challenges of
the labor market, on the inside it continues to be entrenched in defending
hierarchies. The uncertainty created by assessment-tied funding puts academics
on the defensive and wary of experimentation and resistance. Imperatives of
obsessive administrative reporting, performance metrics and short-term
competition for grant-based funding have, in Stefan Collini’s words, led to a ‘a
cumulative reduction in the autonomy, status and influence of academics’, where
‘[s]ystemic underfunding plus competition and punitive performancemanagement is seen as lean efficiency and proper accountability’ (Collini, 2017:
ch.2). Assessment-tied activities produce a false semblance of academic progress
by creating impact indicators that are frequently incidental to the research, while
at the same time demanding enormous amount of wasted effort that goes into
unsuccessful application proposals (Collini, 2017). Rankings based on
comparative performance metrics then allow university managers in the
monetized higher education systems such as UK to pitch to prospective students
how best to invest the debt they will incur in the future, in order to pay for the
growing tuition fees and cost of study, making the prospect of higher education
altogether less plausible for the majority in the long run (Bailey and Freedman,
2011).
Given that universities are not able to easily provide evidence that they are
contributing to the stalling economy, they are asked by the funders to innovate
instead. To paraphrase Marx, ‘innovate innovate that is their Moses and the
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prophets’. Innovation, a popular catch-all word with the government and
institutional administrators, gleaned from the entrepreneurial language of
techno-capitalism, to denote interventions, measures and adaptations in the
functioning of all kind of processes that promise to bring disruptive, almost
punitive radical changes to the failures to respond to the disruptive challenges
unleashed by that very same techno-capitalism.
For instance, higher education policy makers such as former UK universities
minister David Willets, advocate that the universities themselves should use their
competitive advantage, embrace the entrepreneurial opportunity in the global
academic marketplace and transform themselves into startups. Universities have
to become the ‘equivalent of higher education Google or Amazon’ (Gill, 2015). As
Gary Hall reports in his ‘Uberfication of the university’ (2016), a survey UK vicechancellors has detected a number of areas where universities under their
command should become more disruptively innovative:
Among them are “uses of student data analytics for personalized services” (the
number one innovation priority for 90 percent of vice-chancellors); “uses of
technology to transform learning experiences” (massive open online courses
[MOOCs]; mobile virtual learning environments [VLEs]; “anytime-anywhere
learning” (leading to the demise of lectures and timetables); and “student-driven
flexible study modes” (“multiple entry points” into programs, bringing about an
end to the traditional academic year). (Hall, 2016: n.p.)

Universities in the UK are thus pushed to constantly create trendy programs,
‘publish or perish’, perform and assess, hire and fire, find new sources of
funders, find students, find interest of parents, vie for public attention, produce
evidence of immediate impact. All we can expect from such attempts to
transform universities into Googles and Amazons, is that we will end up with an
oligopoly of a few prestige brands franchised all around the world – if the
strategy proves ‘successful’, or – if not – just with a world in which universities
go on faking disruptive innovations while waiting for some miracle to happen
and redeem them in the eyes of neoliberal policy makers.
These are all short-term strategies modeled on the quick extraction of value that
Wendy Brown calls the ‘financialization of everything’ (Brown, 2015: 70).
However, the best in the game of such quick rent-seeking are, as always, those
universities that carry the most prestige, have the most assets and need to be
least afraid for their future, whereas the rest are simply struggling in the prospect
of reduced funding.
Those universities in ‘peripheral’ countries, which rarely show up anywhere near
the top of the global rankings, are in a particularly disadvantaged situation. As
Danijela Dolenec has calculated:
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[T]he whole region [of Western Balkans] invests approximately EUR 495 million in
research and development per year, which is equivalent of one (second-largest) US
university. Current levels of investment cannot have a meaningful impact on the
current model of economic development ... (Dolenec, 2016: 34)

So, these universities don’t have much capacity to capture value in the global
marketplace. In fact, their work in educating masses matters less to their
economies, as these economies are largely based on selling cheap low-skilled
labor. So, their public funders leave them in their underfunded torpor to
improvise their way through education and research processes. It is these
institutions that depend the most on the Library Genesis and Science Hubs of
this world. If we look at the download data of Library Genesis, as has Balasz Bodó
(2015), we can discern a clear pattern that the users in the rich economies use
these shadow libraries to find publications that are not available in the digital
form or are pay-walled, while the users in the developing economies use them to
find publications they don’t have access to in print to start with.
As for libraries, in the shift to the digital they were denied the right to provide
access that has now radically expanded (Sullivan, 2012), so they are losing their
central position in the dissemination and access to knowledge. The decades of
retrenchment in social security, unemployment support, social housing, arts and
education have made libraries, with their resources open to broad communities,
into a stand-in for failing welfare institutions (Mattern, 2014). But with the onset
of 2008 crisis, libraries have been subjected to brutal cuts, affecting their ability
to stay open, service their communities and in particular the marginalized
groups and children (Kean, 2017). Just as universities, libraries have thus seen
their capacity to address structural exclusions of marginalized groups and
provide support to those affected by precarity compromised.
Libraries thus find themselves struggling to provide legitimation for the support
they receive. So they re-invent and re-brand themselves as ‘third places’ of
socialization for the elderly and the youth (Engel-Johnson, 2017), spaces where
the unemployed can find assistance with their job applications and the socially
marginalized a public location with no economic pressures. All these functions,
however, are not something that public libraries didn’t do before, along with
what was their primary function – providing universal access to all written
knowledge, in which they are however nowadays – in the digital economy –
severely limited.
All that innovation that universities and libraries are undertaking seems to be
little innovation at all. It is rather a game of hide and seek, behind which these
institutions are struggling to maintain their substantive mission and operation.
So, what are we to make of this position of compromised institutional agency? In
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a situation where progressive social agency no longer seems to be within the
remit of these institutions? The fact is that with the growing crisis of precarity
and social reproduction, where fewer and fewer have time from casualized work
to study, convenience to do so at home and financial prospects to incur a debt by
enrolling in a university, these institutions should, could and sometimes do
provide sustaining social arrangements and resources – not only to academics,
students and patrons, but also to a general public – that can reduce economic
imperatives and diminish insecurities. While doing this they also create
institutional preconditions that, unlike business-cycle driven institutions, can
support the structural repair that the present double crisis demands.
If the historical avant-garde was birthing of the new, nowadays repeating its
radicalism would seem to imply cutting through the fog of innovation. Its
radicalism would be to inhabit the non-new. The non-new that persists and in the
background sustains the broken social and technological world that the technocapitalist innovation wants to disrupt and transcend. Bullshit jobs and simulating
busyness at work are correlative of the fact that free time and the abundance of
social wealth created by growing productivity have paradoxically resulted in
underemployment and inequality. We’re at a juncture: accelerated crisis of
capitalism, accelerated climate change, accelerated erosion of political systems
are trajectories that leave little space for repair. The full surrender of
technological development into the hands of the market forces leaves even less.
The avant-garde radicalism nowadays is standing with the social institutions that
permit, speaking with Lauren Berlant, the ‘loose convergence’ of social
heterogeneity needed to construct ‘transitional form[s]’ (2016: 394). Unlike the
solutionism of techno-communities (Morozov, 2013) that tend to reduce
uncertainty of situations and conflict of values, social institutions permit
negotiating conflict and complexity in the situations of crisis that Gary Ravetz
calls postnormal – situations ‘where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes
high and decisions urgent’ (Ravetz, 2003: 75). On that view, libraries and
universities as social infrastructures, provide a chance for retardation and
slowdown, and a capacity for collective disobedience. Against the radicalizing
exclusions of property and labor market, they can lower insecurities and
disobediently demand universal access to knowledge and education, a mass
intellectuality and autonomous critical pedagogy that increasingly seems a thing
of the past. Against the imposition to translate quality into metrics and capture
short-term values through assessment, they can resist the game of simulation.
While the playful simulation of reality was a thing in 1967, in 2017 it is no
longer. Libraries and universities can stop faking ‘innovativity’, ‘efficiency’ and
‘utility’.

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Custodians.online, the second letter
On 30 November, 2016 a second missive was published by Custodians.online
(2016). On the twentieth anniversary of UbuWeb, ‘the single-most important
archive of avant-garde and outsider art’ on the Internet, the drafters of the letter
followed up on their initial call to acts of care for the infrastructure of our shared
knowledge commons that the first letter ended with. The second letter was a gift
card to Ubu, announcing that it had received two mirrors, i.e. exact copies of the
Ubu website accessible from servers in two different locations – one in Iceland,
supported by a cultural activist community, and another one in Switzerland,
supported by a major art school – whose maintenance should ensure that Ubu
remains accessible even if its primary server is taken down.
McKenzie Wark in their text on UbuWeb poignantly observes that shadow
libraries are:
tactics for intervening in three kinds of practices, those of the art-world, of
publishing and of scholarship. They respond to the current institutional, technical
and political-economic constraints of all three. As it says in the Communist
Manifesto, the forces for social change are those that ask the property question.
While détournement was a sufficient answer to that question in the era of the
culture industries, they try to formulate, in their modest way, a suitable tactic for
answering the property question in the era of the vulture industries. (Wark, 2015:
116)

As we claimed, the avant-garde radicalism can be recuperated for the present
through the gestures of disobedience, deceleration and demands for
inclusiveness. Ubu already hints toward such recuperation on three coordinates:
1) practiced opposition to the regime of intellectual property, 2) transformative
use of old technologies, and 3) a promise of universal access to knowledge and
education, helping to foster mass intellectuality and critical pedagogy.
The first Custodians.online letter was drafted to voice the need for a collective
disobedience. Standing up openly in public for the illegal acts of piracy, which
are, however, made legitimate by the fact that students, academics and
researchers across the world massively contribute and resort to pirate repositories
of scholarly texts, holds the potential to overturn the noxious pattern of court
cases that have consistently lead to such resources being shut down.
However, the acts of disobedience need not be made explicit in the language of
radicalism. For a public institution, disobedience can also be doing what should
not be done: long-term commitment to maintenance – for instance, of a mirror –
while dealing institutionally with all the conflicts and challenges that doing this
publicly entails.
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The second Custodians.online letter was drafted to suggest that opportunity:
In a world of money-crazed start-ups and surveillance capitalism, copyright
madness and abuse, Ubu represents an island of culture. It shows what a single
person, with dedication and focus, can achieve. There are lessons to be drawn
from this:

1) Keep it simple and avoid constant technology updates. Ubu is plain
HTML, written in a text-editor.
2) Even a website should function offline. One should be able to take the
hard disk and run. Avoid the cloud – computers of people you don’t
know and who don’t care about you.
3) Don’t ask for permission. You would have to wait forever, turning
yourself into an accountant and a lawyer.
4) Don’t promise anything. Do it the way you like it.
5) You don’t need search engines. Rely on word-of-mouth and direct
linking to slowly build your public. You don’t need complicated
protocols, digital currencies or other proxies. You need people who
care.
6) Everything is temporary, even after 20 years. Servers crash, disks die,
life changes and shit happens. Care and redundancy is the only path to
longevity. Care and redundancy is the reason why we decided to run
mirrors. We care and we want this resource to exist… should shit
happen, this multiplicity of locations and institutions might come in
handy. We will see. Find your Ubu. It’s time to mirror each other in
solidarity. (Custodians.online, 2016)

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the authors
Marcell Mars is a research associate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry
University (UK). Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb.
His research ‘Ruling Class Studies’, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011),
examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by
corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He is a doctoral student at
Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, writing a thesis on ‘Foreshadowed
Libraries’. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public
Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.
Email: ki.be@rkom.uni.st
Tomislav Medak is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry
University. Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia
Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as an amateur librarian for the Memory of the
World/Public Library project. His research focuses on technologies, capitalist
development, and postcapitalist transition, particularly on economies of intellectual
property and unevenness of technoscience. He authored two short volumes: ‘The Hard
Matter of Abstraction—A Guidebook to Domination by Abstraction’ and ‘Shit Tech for A
Shitty World’. Together with Marcell Mars he co-edited ‘Public Library’ and ‘Guerrilla
Open Access’.
Email: tom@mi2.hr

Mars & Medak
System of a Takedown
2019


System of a Takedown: Control and De-­commodification in the Circuits of Academic Publishing
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Since 2012 the Public Library/Memory of the World1 project has
been developing and publicly supporting scenarios for massive
disobedience against the current regulation of production and
circulation of knowledge and culture in the digital realm. While
the significance of that year may not be immediately apparent to
everyone, across the peripheries of an unevenly developed world
of higher education and research it produced a resonating void.
The takedown of the book-­sharing site Library.nu in early 2012
gave rise to an anxiety that the equalizing effect that its piracy
had created—­the fact that access to the most recent and relevant
scholarship was no longer a privilege of rich academic institutions
in a few countries of the world (or, for that matter, the exclusive
preserve of academia to begin with)—­would simply disappear into
thin air. While alternatives within these peripheries quickly filled
the gap, it was only through an unlikely set of circumstances that
they were able to do so, let alone continue to exist in light of the
legal persecution they now also face.

48

The starting point for the Public Library/Memory of the World
project was a simple consideration: the public library is the institutional form that societies have devised in order to make knowledge
and culture accessible to all their members regardless of social or
economic status. There’s a political consensus that this principle of
access is fundamental to the purpose of a modern society. Yet, as
digital networks have radically expanded the access to literature
and scientific research, public libraries were largely denied the
ability to extend to digital “objects” the kind of de-­commodified
access they provide in the world of print. For instance, libraries
frequently don’t have the right to purchase e-­books for lending and
preservation. If they do, they are limited by how many times—­
twenty-­six in the case of one publisher—­and under what conditions
they can lend them before not only the license but the “object”
itself is revoked. In the case of academic journals, it is even worse:
as they move to predominantly digital models of distribution,
libraries can provide access to and “preserve” them only for as
long as they pay extortionate prices for ongoing subscriptions. By
building tools for organizing and sharing electronic libraries, creating digitization workflows, and making books available online, the
Public Library/Memory of the World project is aimed at helping to
fill the space that remains denied to real-­world public libraries. It is
obviously not alone in this effort. There are many other platforms,
some more public, some more secretive, working to help people
share books. And the practice of sharing is massive.
—­https://www.memoryoftheworld.org

Capitalism and Schizophrenia
New media remediate old media. Media pay homage to their
(mediatic) predecessors, which themselves pay homage to their
own (mediatic) predecessors. Computer graphics remediate film,
which remediates photography, which remediates painting, and so
on (McLuhan 1965, 8; Bolter and Grusin 1999). Attempts to understand new media technologies always settle on a set of metaphors

(of the old and familiar), in order to approximate what is similar,
and yet at the same time name the new. Every such metaphor has
its semiotic distance, decay, or inverse-­square law that draws the
limit how far the metaphor can go in its explanation of the phenomenon to which it is applied. The intellectual work in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction thus received an unfortunate metaphor:
intellectual property. A metaphor modeled on the scarce and
exclusive character of property over land. As the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction became more and more the Age of Discrete and
Digital Reproduction, another metaphor emerged, one that reveals
the quandary left after decades of decay resulting from the increasing distanciation of intellectual property from the intellectual work
it seeks to regulate, and that metaphor is: schizophrenia.
Technologies compete with each other—­the discrete and the
digital thus competes with the mechanical—­and the aftermath of
these clashes can be dramatic. People lose their jobs, companies
go bankrupt, disciplines lose their departments, and computer
users lose their old files. More often than not, clashes between
competing technologies create antagonisms between different
social groups. Their voices are (sometimes) heard, and society tries
to balance their interests.
If the institutional remedies cannot resolve the social antagonism,
the law is called on to mediate. Yet in the present, the legal system
only reproduces the schizoid impasse where the metaphor of property over land is applied to works of intellect that have in practical
terms become universally accessible in the digital world. Court
cases do not result in a restoration of balance but rather in the
confirmation of entrenched interests. It is, however, not necessary
that courts act in such a one-­sided manner. As Cornelia Vismann
(2011) reminds us in her analysis of the ancient roots of legal mediation, the juridical process has two facets: first, a theatrical aspect
that has common roots with the Greek dramatic theatre and its
social function as a translator of a matter of conflict into a case for
weighted juridical debate; second, an agonistic aspect not unlike a
sporting competition where a winner has to be decided, one that

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leads to judgment and sanction. In the matter of copyright versus
access, however, the fact that courts cannot look past the metaphor of intellectual property, which reduces any understanding of
our contemporary technosocial condition to an analogy with the
scarcity-­based language of property over land, has meant that they
have failed to adjudicate a matter of conflict between the equalizing effects of universal access to knowledge and the guarantees of
rightful remuneration for intellectual labor into a meaningful social
resolution. Rather they have primarily reasserted the agonistic
aspect by supporting exclusively the commercial interests of large
copyright industries that structure and deepen that conflict at the
societal level.
This is not surprising. As many other elements of contemporary
law, the legal norms of copyright were articulated and codified
through the centuries-­long development of the capitalist state
and world-system. The legal system is, as Nicos Poulantzas (2008,
25–­26) suggests, genetically structured by capitalist development.
And yet at the same time it is semi-­autonomous; the development
of its norms and institutional aspects is largely endogenous and
partly responsive to the specific needs of other social subsystems.
Still, if the law and the courts are the codified and lived rationality
of a social formation, then the choice of intellectual property as a
metaphor in capitalist society comes as no surprise, as its principal
objective is to institute a formal political-­economic framework for
the commodification of intellectual labor that produces knowledge
and culture. There can be no balance, only subsumption and
accumulation. Capitalism and schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia abounds wherever the discrete and the digital
breaking barriers to access meets capitalism. One can only wonder
how the conflicting interests of different divisions get disputed
and negotiated in successful corporate giants like Sony Group
where Sony Pictures Entertainment,2 Sony Music Entertainment3
and Sony Computer Entertainment coexist under the same roof
with the Sony Electronics division, which invented the Walkman
back in 1979 and went on to manufacture devices and gadgets like

home (and professional) audio and video players/recorders (VHS,
Betamax, TV, HiFi, cassette, CD/DVD, mp3, mobile phones, etc.),
storage devices, personal computers, and game consoles. In the
famous 1984 Betamax case (“Sony Corp. of America v. Universal
City Studios, Inc.,” Wikipedia 2015), Universal Studios and the Walt
Disney Company sued Sony for aiding copyright infringement with
their Betamax video recorders. Sony won. The court decision in
favor of fair use rather than copyright infringement laid the legal
ground for home recording technology as the foundation of future
analog, and subsequently digital, content sharing.
Five years later, Sony bought its first major Hollywood studio:
Columbia Pictures. In 2004 Sony Music Entertainment merged with
Bertelsmann Music Group to create Sony BMG. However, things
changed as Sony became the content producer and we entered the
age of the discrete and the digital. Another five years later, in 2009,
Sony BMG sued Joel Tenenbaum for downloading and then sharing
thirty-­one songs. The jury awarded US$675,000 to the music
companies (US$22,000 per song). This is known as “the second
file-­sharing case.” “The first file-­sharing case” was 2007’s Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas-­Rasset, which concerned the downloading of
twenty-­four songs. In the second file-­sharing case, the jury awarded
music companies US$1,920,000 in statutory damages (US$80,000
per song). The defendant, Jammie Thomas, was a Native American
mother of four from Brainerd, Minnesota, who worked at the time
as a natural resources coordinator for the Mille Lacs Band of the
Native American Ojibwe people. The conflict between access and
copyright took a clear social relief.
Encouraged by the court decisions in the years that followed, the
movie and music industries have started to publicly claim staggering numbers in annual losses: US$58 billion and 370,000 lost jobs
in the United States alone. The purported losses in sales were,
however, at least seven times bigger than the actual losses and,
if the jobs figures had been true, after only one year there would
have been no one left working in the content industry (Reid 2012).
Capitalism and schizophrenia.

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If there is a reason to make an exception from the landed logic of
property being imposed onto the world of the intellect, a reason
to which few would object, it would be for access for educational
purposes. Universities in particular give an institutional form to
the premise that equal access to knowledge is a prerequisite for
building a society where all people are equal.
In this noble endeavor to make universal access to knowledge
central to social development, some universities stand out more
than the others. Consider, for example, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT). The Free Culture and Open Access movements
have never hidden their origins, inspiration, and model in the
success of the Free Software Movement, which was founded in
1984 by Richard Stallman while he was working at the MIT Artificial
Intelligence lab. It was at the MIT Museum that the “Hall of Hacks”
was set up to proudly display the roots of hacking culture. Hacking
culture at MIT takes many shapes and forms. MIT hackers famously
put a fire truck (2006) and a campus police car (1994) onto the
roof of the Great Dome of the campus’s Building 10; they landed
(and then exploded) a weather balloon onto the pitch of Harvard
Stadium during a Harvard–­Yale football game; turned the quote
that “getting an education from MIT is like taking a drink from a Fire
Hose” into a literal fire hydrant serving as a drinking fountain in
front of the largest lecture hall on campus; and many, many other
“hacks” (Peterson 2011).
The World Wide Web Consortium was founded at MIT in 1993.
Presently its mission states as its goal “to enable human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge,”
on the principles of “Web for All” and the corresponding, more
technologically focused “Web on Everything.” Similarly, MIT began
its OpenCourseWare project in 2002 in order “to publish all of
[MIT’s] course materials online and make them widely available to
everyone” (n.d.). The One Laptop Per Child project was created in
2005 in order to help children “learn, share, create, and collaborate” (2010). Recently the MIT Media Lab (2017) has even started its
own Disobedience Award, which “will go to a living person or group

engaged in what we believe is extraordinary disobedience for
the benefit of society . . . seeking both expected and unexpected
nominees.” When it comes to the governance of access to MIT’s
own resources, it is well known that anyone who is registered and
connected to the “open campus” wireless network, either by being
physically present or via VPN, can search JSTOR, Google Scholar,
and other databases in order to access otherwise paywalled journals from major publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Wiley-­Blackwell,
Springer, Taylor and Francis, or Sage.
The MIT Press has also published numerous books that we love
and without which we would have never developed the Public
Library/Memory of the World project to the stage where it is now.
For instance, only after reading Markus Krajewski’s Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–­1929 (2011) and learning how
conceptually close librarians came to the universal Turing machine
with the invention of the index card catalog did we center the
Public Library/Memory of the World around the idea of the catalog.
Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation (2005) taught us how end
users could become empowered to innovate and accordingly we
have built our public library as a distributed network of amateur
librarians acting as peers sharing their catalogs and books. Sven
Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (2008) showed us the
exciting hybrid meta-­space between psychoanalysis, media theory,
and conceptual art one could encounter by visiting the world of
catalogs and archives. Understanding capitalism and schizophrenia would have been hard without Semiotext(e)’s translations of
Deleuze and Guattari, and remaining on the utopian path would
have been impossible if not for our reading of Cybernetic Revolutionaries (Medina 2011), Imagine No Possessions (Kiaer 2005), or Art
Power (Groys 2008).

Our Road into Schizophrenia, Commodity
Paradox, Political Strategy
Our vision for the Public Library/Memory of the World resonated
with many people. After the project initially gained a large number

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of users, and was presented in numerous prominent artistic
venues such as Museum Reina Sofía, Transmediale, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Calvert22, 98weeks, and many more, it was no
small honor when Eric Kluitenberg and David Garcia invited us to
write about the project for an anthology on tactical media that was
to be published by the MIT Press. Tactical media is exactly where
we would situate ourselves on the map. Building on Michel de
Certeau’s concept of tactics as agency of the weak operating in the
terrain of strategic power, the tactical media (Tactical Media Files
2017) emerged in the political and technological conjuncture of the
1990s. Falling into the “art-­into-­life” lineage of historic avant-­gardes,
Situationism, DIY culture, techno-­hippiedom, and media piracy, it
constituted a heterogeneous field of practices and a manifestly
international movement that combined experimental media and
political activism into interventions that contested the post–­Cold
War world of global capitalism and preemptive warfare on a hybrid
terrain of media, institutions, and mass movements. Practices of
tactical media ranged from ephemeral media pranks, hoaxes, and
hacktivism to reappropriations of media apparatuses, institutional
settings, and political venues. We see our work as following in
that lineage of recuperation of the means of communication from
their capture by personal and impersonal structures of political or
economic power.
Yet the contract for our contribution that the MIT Press sent us in
early 2015 was an instant reminder of the current state of affairs
in academic publishing: in return for our contribution and transfer
of our copyrights, we would receive no compensation: no right to
wage and no right to further distribute our work.
Only weeks later our work would land us fully into schizophrenia:
the Public Library/Memory of the World received two takedown
notices from the MIT Press for books that could be found in its
back then relatively small yet easily discoverable online collection
located at https://library.memoryoftheworld.org, including a notice
for one of the books that had served as an inspiration to us: Art
Power. First, no wage and, now, no access. A true paradox of the

present-­day system of knowledge production: products of our
labor are commodities, yet the labor-­power producing them is
denied the same status. While the project’s vision resonates with
many, including the MIT Press, it has to be shut down. Capitalism
and schizophrenia.4
Or, maybe, not. Maybe we don’t have to go down that impasse.
Starting from the two structural circumstances imposed on us by
the MIT Press—­the denial of wage and the denial of access—­we
can begin to analyze why copyright infringement is not merely, as
the industry and the courts would have it, a matter of illegality. But
rather a matter of legitimate action.
Over the past three decades a deep transformation, induced by
the factors of technological change and economic restructuring,
has been unfolding at different scales, changing the way works
of culture and knowledge are produced and distributed across
an unevenly developed world. As new technologies are adopted,
generalized, and adapted to the realities of the accumulation
process—­a process we could see unfolding with the commodification of the internet over the past fifteen years—­the core and
the periphery adopt different strategies of opposition to the
inequalities and exclusions these technologies start to reproduce.
The core, with its emancipatory and countercultural narratives,
pursues strategies that develop legal, economic, or technological
alternatives. However, these strategies frequently fail to secure
broader transformative effects as the competitive forces of the
market appropriate, marginalize, or make obsolete the alternatives
they advocate. Such seems to have been the destiny of much of the
free software, open access, and free culture alternatives that have
developed over this period.
In contrast, the periphery, in order to advance, relies on strategies
of “stealing” that bypass socioeconomic barriers by refusing to
submit to the harmonized regulation that sets the frame for global
economic exchange. The piracy of intellectual property or industrial
secrets thus creates a shadow system of exchange resisting the

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asymmetries of development in the world economy. However, its
illegality serves as a pretext for the governments and companies of
the core to devise and impose further controls over the technosocial systems that facilitate these exchanges.
Both strategies develop specific politics—­a politics of reform, on
the one hand, and a politics of obfuscation and resistance, on the
other—­yet both are defensive politics that affirm the limitations
of what remains inside and what remains outside of the politically
legitimate.
The copyright industry giants of the past and the IT industry giants
of the present are thus currently sorting it out to whose greater
benefit will this new round of commodification work out. For those
who find themselves outside of the the camps of these two factions
of capital, there’s a window of opportunity, however, to reconceive
the mode of production of literature and science that has been
with us since the beginning of the print trade and the dawn of capitalism. It’s a matter of change, at the tail end of which ultimately
lies a dilemma: whether we’re going to live in a more equal or a
more unjust, a more commonised or a more commodified world.

Authorship, Law, and Legitimacy
Before we can talk of such structural transformation, the normative
question we expect to be asked is whether something that is considered a matter of law and juridical decision can be made a matter
of politics and political process. Let’s see.
Copyright has a fundamentally economic function—­to unambiguously establish individualized property in the products of creative
labor. A clear indication of this economic function is the substantive requirement of originality that the work is expected to have
in order to be copyrightable. Legal interpretations set a very low
standard on what counts as original, as their function is no more
than to demarcate one creative contribution from another. Once
a legal title is unambiguously assigned, there is a person holding

property with whose consent the contracting, commodification,
and marketing of the work can proceed.5 In that respect copyright
is not that different from the requirement of formal freedom that
is granted to a laborer to contract out their own labor-­power as a
commodity to capital, giving capital authorization to extract maximum productivity and appropriate the products of the laborer’s
labor.6 Copyright might be just a more efficient mechanism of
exploitation as it unfolds through selling of produced commodities
and not labor power. Art market obscures and mediates the
capital-­labor relation
When we talk today of illegal copying, we primarily mean an
infringement of the legal rights of authors and publishers. There’s an
immediate assumption that the infringing practice of illegal copying
and distribution falls under the domain of juridical sanction, that it is
a matter of law. Yet if we look to the history of copyright, the illegality
of copying was a political matter long before it became a legal one.
Publisher’s rights, author’s rights, and mechanisms of reputation—­
the three elements that are fundamental to the present-­day
copyright system—­all have their historic roots in the context of
absolutism and early capitalism in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­
century Europe. Before publishers and authors were given a
temporary monopoly over the exploitation of their publications
instituted in the form of copyright, they were operating in a system
where they were forced to obtain a privilege to print books from
royal censors. The first printing privileges granted to publishers, in
early seventeenth-­century Great Britain,7 came with the responsibility of publishers to control what was being published and
disseminated in a growing body of printed matter that started to
reach the public in the aftermath of the invention of print and the
rise of the reading culture. The illegality in these early days of print
referred either to printing books without the permission of the
censor or printing books that were already published by another
printer in the territory where the censor held authority. The transition from the privilege tied to the publisher to the privilege tied to
the natural person of the author would unfold only later.

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In the United Kingdom this transition occurred as the guild of
printers, Stationers’ Company, failed to secure the extension of its
printing monopoly and thus, in order to continue with its business,
decided to advocate the introduction of copyright for the authors
instead. This resulted in the passing of the Copyright Act of 1709,
also known as the Statute of Anne (Rose 2010). The censoring
authority and enterprising publishers now proceeded in lockstep to
isolate the author as the central figure in the regulation of literary
and scientific production. Not only did the author receive exclusive
rights to the work, the author was also made—­as Foucault has
famously analyzed (Foucault 1980, 124)—­the identifiable subject of
scrutiny, censorship, and political sanction by the absolutist state.
Although the Romantic author slowly took the center stage in
copyright regulations, economic compensation for the work would
long remain no more than honorary. Until well into the eighteenth
century, literary writing and creativity in general were regarded as
resulting from divine inspiration and not the individual genius of
the author. Writing was a work of honor and distinction, not something requiring an honest day’s pay.8 Money earned in the growing
printing industry mostly stayed in the pockets of publishers, while
the author received literally an honorarium, a flat sum that served
as a “token of esteem” (Woodmansee 1996, 42). It is only once
authors began to voice demands for securing their material and
political independence from patronage and authority that they also
started to make claims for rightful remuneration.
Thus, before it was made a matter of law, copyright was a matter of
politics and economy.

Copyright, Labor, and Economic Domination
The full-­blown affirmation of the Romantic author-­function marks
the historic moment where a compromise is established between
the right of publishers to the economic exploitation of works and
the right of authors to rightful compensation for those works. Economically, this redistribution from publishers to authors was made

possible by the expanding market for printed books in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while politically this was catalyzed
by the growing desire for the autonomy of scientific and literary
production from the system of feudal patronage and censorship
in gradually liberalizing and modernizing capitalist societies. The
newfound autonomy of production was substantially coupled to
production specifically for the market. However, this irenic balance
could not last for very long. Once the production of culture and
science was subsumed under the exigencies of the generalized
market, it had to follow the laws of commodification and competition from which no form of commodity production can escape.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, copyright expanded to
a number of other forms of creativity, transcending its primarily
literary and scientific ambit and becoming part of the broader
set of intellectual property rights that are fundamental to the
functioning and positioning of capitalist enterprise. The corporatization of the production of culture and knowledge thus brought
about a decisive break from the Romantic model that singularized
authorship in the person of the author. The production of cultural
commodities nowadays involves a number of creative inputs from
both credited (but mostly unwaged) and uncredited (but mostly
waged) contributors. The “moral rights of the author,” a substantive
link between the work and the person of the author, are markedly
out of step with these realities, yet they still perform an important
function in the moral economy of reputation, which then serves as
the legitimation of copyright enforcement and monopoly. Moral
rights allow easy attribution; incentivize authors to subsidize
publishers by self-­financing their own work in the hope of topping
the sales charts, rankings, or indexes; and help markets develop
along winner-­takes-­all principles.
The level of concentration in industries primarily concerned with
various forms of intellectual property rights is staggering. The film
industry is a US$88 billion industry dominated by six major studios
(PwC 2015c). The recorded music industry is an almost US$20
billion industry dominated by only three major labels (PwC 2015b).

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The publishing industry is a US$120 billion industry where the
leading ten companies earn in revenues more than the next forty
largest publishing groups (PwC 2015a; Wischenbart 2014).

The Oligopoly and Academic Publishing
Academic publishing in particular draws the state of play into stark
relief. It’s a US$10 billion industry dominated by five publishers and
financed up to 75 percent from library subscriptions. It’s notorious
for achieving extreme year-­on-­year profit margins—­in the case of
Reed Elsevier regularly over 30 percent, with Taylor and Francis,
Springer, Wiley-­Blackwell and Sage barely lagging behind (Larivière,
Haustein, and Mongeon 2015). Given that the work of contributing
authors is not paid but rather financed by their institutions (provided, that is, that they are employed at an institution) and that
these publications nowadays come mostly in the form of electronic
articles licensed under subscription for temporary use to libraries
and no longer sold as printed copies, the public interest could be
served at a much lower cost by leaving commercial closed-­access
publishers out of the equation entirely.
But that cannot be done, of course. The chief reason for this is that
the system of academic reputation and ranking based on publish-­
or-­perish principles is historically entangled with the business of
academic publishers. Anyone who doesn’t want to put their academic career at risk is advised to steer away from being perceived
as reneging on that not-­so-­tacit deal. While this is patently clear
to many in academia, opting for the alternative of open access
means not playing by the rules, and not playing by the rules can
have real-­life consequences, particularly for younger academics.
Early career scholars have to publish in prestigious journals if they
want to advance in the highly competitive and exclusive system of
academia (Kendzior 2012).
Copyright in academic publishing has thus become simply a mechanism of the direct transfer of economic power from producers to
publishers, giving publishers an instrument for maintaining their

stranglehold on the output of academia. But publishers also have
control over metrics and citation indexes, pandering to the authors
with better tools for maximizing their impact and self-­promotion.
Reputation and copyright are extortive instruments that publishers
can wield against authors and the public to prevent an alternative
from emerging.9
The state of the academic publishing business signals how the
“copyright industries” in general might continue to control the
field as their distribution model now transitions to streaming or
licensed-­access models. In the age of cloud computing, autonomous infrastructures run by communities of enthusiasts are
becoming increasingly a thing of the past. “Copyright industries,”
supported by the complicit legal system, now can pressure proxies
for these infrastructures, such as providers of server colocation,
virtual hosting, and domain-­name network services, to enforce
injunctions for them without ever getting involved in direct, costly
infringement litigation. Efficient shutdowns of precarious shadow
systems allow for a corporate market consolidation wherein the
majority of streaming infrastructures end up under the control of a
few corporations.

Illegal Yet Justified, Collective Civil
Disobedience, Politicizing the Legal
However, when companies do resort to litigation or get involved in
criminal proceedings, they can rest assured that the prosecution
and judicial system will uphold their interests over the right of
public to access culture and knowledge, even when the irrationality
of the copyright system lies in plain sight, as it does in the case of
academic publishing. Let’s look at two examples:
On January 6, 2011, Aaron Swartz, a prominent programmer
and hacktivist, was arrested by the MIT campus police and U.S.
Secret Service on charges of having downloaded a large number
of academic articles from the JSTOR repository. While JSTOR, with
whom Swartz reached a settlement and to whom he returned the

61

62

files, and, later, MIT, would eventually drop the charges, the federal
prosecution decided nonetheless to indict Swartz on thirteen
criminal counts, potentially leading to fifty years in prison and a
US$1 million fine. Under growing pressure by the prosecution
Swartz committed suicide on January 11, 2013.
Given his draconian treatment at the hands of the prosecution
and the absence of institutions of science and culture that would
stand up and justify his act on political grounds, much of Swartz’s
defense focused on trying to exculpate his acts, to make them less
infringing or less illegal than the charges brought against him had
claimed, a rational course of action in irrational circumstances.
However, this was unfortunately becoming an uphill battle as the
prosecution’s attention was accidentally drawn to a statement
written by Swartz in 2008 wherein he laid bare the dysfunctionality
of the academic publishing system. In his Guerrilla Open Access
Manifesto, he wrote: “The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly
being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. . . . Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their
colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at
Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite
universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global
South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.” After a no-­nonsense
diagnosis followed an even more clear call to action: “We need
to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing
networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access” (Swartz 2008).
Where a system has failed to change unjust laws, Swartz felt, the
responsibility was on those who had access to make injustice a
thing of the past.
Whether Swartz’s intent actually was to release the JSTOR repository remains subject to speculation. The prosecution has never
proven that it was. In the context of the legal process, his call to
action was simply taken as a matter of law and not for what it
was—­a matter of politics. Yet, while his political action was pre-

empted, others have continued pursuing his vision by committing
small acts of illegality on a massive scale. In June 2015 Elsevier won
an injunction against Library Genesis, the largest illegal repository
of electronic books, journals, and articles on the Web, and its
subsidiary platform for accessing academic journals, Sci-­hub. A
voluntary and noncommercial project of anonymous scientists
mostly from Eastern Europe, Sci-­hub provides as of end of 2015
access to more than 41 million academic articles either stored
in its database or retrieved through bypassing the paywalls of
academic publishers. The only person explicitly named in Elsevier’s
lawsuit was Sci-­hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who minced no
words: “When I was working on my research project, I found out
that all research papers I needed for work were paywalled. I was
a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university was not
subscribed to anything” (Ernesto 2015). Being a computer scientist,
she found the tools and services on the internet that allowed her to
bypass the paywalls. At first, she would make articles available on
internet forums where people would file requests for the articles
they needed, but eventually she automated the process, making
access available to everyone on the open web. “Thanks to Elsevier’s
lawsuit, I got past the point of no return. At this time I either have
to prove we have the full right to do this or risk being executed like
other ‘pirates’ . . . If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or
force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important
idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge. . . .
Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their
income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal. Also the idea
that knowledge can be a private property of some commercial
company sounds absolutely weird to me” (Ernesto 2015).
If the issue of infringement is to become political, a critical mass
of infringing activity has to be achieved, access technologically
organized, and civil disobedience collectively manifested. Only in
this way do the illegal acts stand a chance of being transformed
into the legitimate acts.

63

64

Where Law Was, there Politics Shall Be
And thus we have made a full round back to where we started. The
parallel development of liberalism, copyright, and capitalism has
resulted in a system demanding that the contemporary subject
act in accordance with two opposing tendencies: “more capitalist
than capitalist and more proletarian than proletariat” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1983, 34). Schizophrenia is, as Deleuze and Guattari
argue, a condition that simultaneously embodies two disjunctive
positions. Desire and blockage, flow and territory. Capitalism is
the constant decoding of social blockages and territorializations
aimed at liberating the production of desires and flows further
and further, only to oppose them at its extreme limit. It decodes
the old socius by means of private property and commodity
production, privatization and abstraction, the flow of wealth and
flows of workers (140). It allows contemporary subjects—­including
corporate entities such as the MIT Press or Sony—­to embrace their
contradictions and push them to their limits. But capturing them in
the orbit of the self-­expanding production of value, it stops them
at going beyond its own limit. It is this orbit that the law sanctions
in the present, recoding schizoid subjects into the inevitability of
capitalism. The result is the persistence of a capitalist reality antithetical to common interest—­commercial closed-­access academic
publishing—­and the persistence of a hyperproletariat—­an intellectual labor force that is too subsumed to organize and resist the
reality that thrives parasitically on its social function. It’s a schizoid
impasse sustained by a failed metaphor.
The revolutionary events of the Paris Commune of 1871, its mere
“existence” as Marx has called it,10 a brief moment of “communal
luxury” set in practice as Kristin Ross (2015) describes it, demanded
that, in spite of any circumstances and reservations, one takes a
side. And such is our present moment of truth.
Digital networks have expanded the potential for access and
created an opening for us to transform the production of knowledge and culture in the contemporary world. And yet they have
likewise facilitated the capacity of intellectual property industries

to optimize, to cut out the cost of printing and physical distribution.
Digitization is increasingly helping them to control access, expand
copyright, impose technological protection measures, consolidate
the means of distribution, and capture the academic valorization
process.
As the potential opening for universalizing access to culture and
knowledge created by digital networks is now closing, attempts at
private legal reform such as Creative Commons licenses have had
only a very limited effect. Attempts at institutional reform such as
Open Access publishing are struggling to go beyond a niche. Piracy
has mounted a truly disruptive opposition, but given the legal
repression it has met with, it can become an agent of change only if
it is embraced as a kind of mass civil disobedience. Where law was,
there politics shall be.
Many will object to our demand to replace the law with politicization. Transitioning from politics to law was a social achievement
as the despotism of political will was suppressed by legal norms
guaranteeing rights and liberties for authors; this much is true. But
in the face of the draconian, failed juridical rationality sustaining
the schizoid impasse imposed by economic despotism, these developments hold little justification. Thus we return once more to the
words of Aaron Swartz to whom we remain indebted for political
inspiration and resolve: “There is no justice in following unjust laws.
It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil
disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
culture. . . . With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send
a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge—­we’ll
make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?” (Swartz 2008).

Notes
1

We initially named our project Public Library because we have developed it
as a technosocial project from a minimal definition that defines public library
as constituted by three elements: free access to books for every member of
a society, a library catalog, and a librarian (Mars, Zarroug and Medak, 2015).
However, this definition covers all public libraries and shadow libraries
complementing the work of public libraries in providing digital access. We have
thus decided to rename our project as Memory of the World, after our project’s

65

initial domain name. This is a phrase coined by Henri La Fontaine, whose men-

66

tion we found in Markus Krajewski’s Paper Machines (2011). It turned out that
UNESCO runs a project under the same name with the objective to preserve
valuable archives for the whole of humanity. We have appropriated that objective. Given that this change has happened since we drafted the initial version
of this text in 2015, we’ll call our project in this text with a double name Public
Library/Memory of the World.
2

Sony Pictures Entertainment became the owner of two (MGM, Columbia Pictures) out of eight Golden Age major movie studios (“Major Film Studio,” Wikipedia 2015).

3

In 2012 Sony Music Entertainment is one of the Big Three majors (“Record
Label,” Wikipedia 2015).

4

Since this anecdote was recounted by Marcell in his opening keynote in the
Terms of Media II conference at Brown University, we have received another
batch of takedown notices from the MIT Press. It seemed as no small irony,
because at the time the Terms of Media conference reader was rumored to be
distributed by the MIT Press.

5

“In law, authorship is a point of origination of a property right which, thereafter, like other property rights, will circulate in the market, ending up in the
control of the person who can exploit it most profitably. Since copyright serves
paradoxically to vest authors with property only to enable them to divest that
property, the author is a notion which needs only to be sustainable for an
instant” (Bently 1994).

6

For more on the formal freedom of the laborer to sell his labor-­power, see
chapter 6 of Marx’s Capital (1867).

7

For a more detailed account of the history of printing privilege in Great Britain,
but also the emergence of peer review out of the self-­censoring performed by
the Royal Academy and Académie de sciences in return for the printing privilege, see Biagioli 2002.

8

The transition of authorship from honorific to professional is traced in Woodmansee 1996.

9

Not all publishers are necessarily predatory. For instance, scholar-­led open-­
access publishers, such as those working under the banner of Radical Open
Access (http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org) have been experimenting with
alternatives to the dominant publishing models, workflows, and metrics, radicalizing the work of conventional open access, which has by now increasingly
become recuperated by big for-­profit publishers, who see in open access an
opportunity to assume the control over the economy of data in academia.
Some established academic publishers, too, have been open to experiments
that go beyond mere open access and are trying to redesign how academic
writing is produced, made accessible, and valorized. This essay has the good
fortune of appearing as a joint publication of two such publishers: Meson Press
and University of Minnesota Press.

10

“The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence”
(Marx 1871).

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Mars, Medak & Sekulic
Taken Literally
2016


Taken literally
Marcell Mars
Tomislav Medak
Dubravka Sekulic

Free people united in building a society of
equals, embracing those whom previous
efforts have failed to recognize, are the historical foundation of the struggle against
enslavement, exploitation, discrimination
and cynicism. Building a society has never
been an easy-going pastime.
During the turbulent 20th century,
different trajectories of social transformation moved within the horizon set by
the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century: equality, brotherhood and liberty
– and class struggle. The 20th century experimented with various combinations
of economic and social rationales in the
arrangement of social reproduction. The
processes of struggle, negotiation, empowerment and inclusion of discriminated social groups constantly complexified and
dynamised the basic concepts regulating
social relations. However, after the process
of intensive socialisation in the form of either welfare state or socialism that dominated a good part of the 20th century, the
end of the century was marked by a return
in the regulation of social relations back
to the model of market domination and
private appropriation. Such simplification
and fall from complexity into a formulaic
state of affairs is not merely a symptom
of overall exhaustion, loss of imagination
and lacking perspective on further social
development, but rather indicates a cynical
abandonment of the effort to build society,
its idea, its vision – and, as some would
want, of society altogether.
In this article, we wish to revisit the
evolution of regulation of ownership in the
field of intellectual production and housing

as two examples of the historical dead-end
in which we find ourselves.
T H E C A P I TA L I S T M O D E
O F P RO D U C T I O N

According to the text-book definition, the
capitalist mode of production is the first
historical organisation of socio-economic relations in which appropriation of the
surplus from producers does not depend
on force, but rather on neutral laws of economic processes on the basis of which the
capitalist and the worker enter voluntarily
into a relation of production. While under
feudalism it was the aristocratic oligopoly
on violence that secured a hereditary hierarchy of appropriation, under capitalism the
neutral logic of appropriation was secured
by the state monopoly on violence. However, given that the early capitalist relations
in the English country-side did not emerge
outside the existing feudal inequalities, and
that the process of generalisation of capitalist relations, particularly after the rise of industrialisation, resulted in even greater and
even more hardened stratification, the state
monopoly on violence securing the neutral
logic of appropriation ended up mostly securing the hereditary hierarchy of appropriation. Although in the new social formation
neither the capitalist nor the worker was born
capitalist or born worker, the capitalist would
rarely become a worker and the worker a capitalist even rarer. However, under conditions
where the state monopoly on violence could
no longer coerce workers to voluntarily sell
their labour and where their resistance to
accept existing class relations could be

229

expressed in the withdrawal of their labour
power from the production process, their
consent would become a problem for the existing social model. That problem found its
resolution through a series of conflicts that
have resulted in historical concessions and
gains of class struggle ranging from guaranteed labor rights, through institutions of the
welfare state, to socialism.
The fundamental property relation
in the capitalist mode of production is that
the worker has an exclusive ownership over
his/her own labour power, while the capitalist has ownership over the means of production. By purchasing the worker's labour
power, the capitalist obtains the exclusive
right to appropriate the entire product of
worker's labour. However, as the regulation
of property in such unconditional formulaic
form quickly results in deep inequalities, it
could not be maintained beyond the early
days of capitalism. Resulting class struggles
and compromises would achieve a series of
conditions that would successively complexify the property relations.
Therefore, the issue of private property – which goods do we have the right to
call our own to the exclusion of others: our
clothes, the flat in which we live, means of
production, profit from the production process, the beach upon which we wish to enjoy
ourselves alone or to utilise by renting it out,
unused land in our neighbourhood – is not
merely a question of the optimal economic
allocation of goods, but also a question of
social rights and emancipatory opportunities that are required in order secure the
continuous consent of society's members to
its organisational arrangements.
230

Taken literally

OW NER S H I P R EG I M ES

Both the concept of private property over
land and the concept of copyright and
intellectual property have their shared
evolutionary beginnings during the early capitalism in England, at a time when
the newly emerging capitalist class was
building up its position in relation to the
aristocracy and the Church. In both cases, new actors entered into the processes
of political articulation, decision-making
and redistribution of power. However, the
basic process of ( re )defining relations has
remained ( until today ) a spatial demarcation: the question of who is excluded or
remains outside and how.
① In the early period of trade in books, after
the invention of the printing press in the 15th
century, the exclusive rights to commercial
exploitation of written works were obtained
through special permits from the Royal Censors, issued solely to politically loyal printers.
The copyright itself was constituted only in
the 17th century. It's economic function is to
unambiguously establish the ownership title
over the products of intellectual labour. Once
that title is established, there is a person with
whose consent the publisher can proceed in
commodifying and distributing the work to
the exclusion of others from its exploitation.
And while that right to economic benefit was
exclusively that of the publishers at the outset, as authors became increasingl aware that
the income from books guaranteed then an
autonomy from the sponsorship of the King
and the aristocracy, in the 19th century copyright gradually transformed into a legal right

that protected both the author and the publisher in equal measure. The patent rights underwent a similar development. They were
standardised in the 17th century as a precondition for industrial development, and were
soon established as a balance between the
rights of the individual-inventor and the
commercial interest of the manufacturer.
However, the balance of interests between the productive creative individuals
and corporations handling production and
distribution did not last long and, with
time, that balance started to lean further
towards protecting the interests of the corporations. With the growing complexity of
companies and their growing dependence
on intellectual property rights as instruments in 20th century competitive struggles, the economic aspect of intellectual
property increasingly passed to the corporation, while the author/inventor was
left only with the moral and reputational
element. The growing importance of intellectual property rights for the capitalist
economy has been evident over the last
three decades in the regular expansions of
the subject matter and duration of protection, but, most important of all – within
the larger process of integration of the capitalist world-system – in the global harmonisation and enforcement of rights protection. Despite the fact that the interests of
authors and the interests of corporations,
of the global south and the global north, of
the public interest and the corporate interest do not fall together, we are being given
a global and uniform – formulaic – rule of
the abstract logic of ownership, notwithstanding the diverging circumstances and

interests of different societies in the context of uneven development.
No-one is surprised today that, in
spite of their initial promises, the technological advances brought by the Internet,
once saddled with the existing copyright
regulation, did not enhance and expand
access to knowledge. But that dysfunction
is nowhere more evident than in academic publishing. This is a global industry of
the size of music recording industry dominated by an oligopoly of five major commercial publishers: Reed Elsevier, Taylor
& Francis, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and
Sage. While scientists write their papers,
do peer-reviews and edit journals for free,
these publishers have over past decades
taken advantage of their oligopolistic position to raise the rates of subscriptions they
sell mostly to publicly financed libraries at
academic institutions, so that the majority of libraries, even in the rich centres of
the global north, are unable to afford access to many journals. The fantastic profit
margins of over 30% that these publishers
reap from year to year are premised on denying access to scientific publications and
the latest developments in science not only
to the general public, but also students and
scholars around the world. Although that
oligopoly rests largely on the rights of the
authors, the authors receive no benefit
from that copyright. An even greater irony is, if they want to make their work open
access to others, the authors themselves or
the institutions that have financed the underlying research through the proxy of the
author are obliged to pay additionally to
the publishers for that ‘service’. ×
231

② With proliferation of enclosures and
signposts prohibiting access, picturesque
rural arcadias became landscapes of capitalistic exploitation. Those evicted by the
process of enclosure moved to the cities
and became wage workers. Far away from
the parts of the cities around the factories,
where working families lived squeezed
into one room with no natural light and
ventilation, areas of the city sprang up in
which the capitalists built their mansions.
At that time, the very possibility of participation in political life was conditioned
on private property, thus excluding and
discriminating by legal means entire social
groups. Women had neither the right to
property ownership nor inheritance rights.
Engels' description of the humiliating
living conditions of Manchester workers in
the 19th century pointed to the catastrophic
effects of industrialisation on the situation
of working class ( e.g. lower pay than during
the pre-industrial era ) and indicated that
the housing problem was not a direct consequence of exploitation but rather a problem
arising from inequitable redistribution of
assets. The idea that living quarters for the
workers could be pleasant, healthy and safe
places in which privacy was possible and
that that was not the exclusive right of the
rich, became an integral part of the struggle
for labor rights, and part of the consciousness of progressive, socially-minded architects and all others dedicated to solving the
housing problem.
Just as joining forces was as the
foundation of their struggle for labor and
political rights, joining forces was and has
remained the mechanism for addressing the
232

Taken literally

inadequate housing conditions. As early as
during the 19th century, Dutch working class
and impoverished bourgeoisie joined forces
in forming housing co-operatives and housing societies, squatting and building without permits on the edges of the cities. The
workers' struggle, enlightened bourgeoisie,
continued industrial development, as well
as the phenomenon of Utopian socialist-capitalists like Jean-Baptiste André Godin, who, for example, under the influence
of Charles Fourier's ideas, built a palace for
workers – the Familistery, all these exerted
pressure on the system and contributed to
the improvement of housing conditions for
workers. Still, the dominant model continued to replicate the rentier system in which
even those with inadequate housing found
someone to whom they could rent out a segment of their housing unit.
The general social collapse after
World War I, the Socialist Revolution and
the coming to power in certain European
cities of the social-democrats brought new
urban strategies. In ‘red’ Vienna, initially
under the urban planning leadership of
Otto Neurath, socially just housing policy
and provision of adequate housing was regarded as the city's responsibility. The city
considered the workers who were impoverished by the war and who sought a way out
of their homelessness by building housing
themselves and tilling gardens as a phenomenon that should be integrated, and
not as an error that needed to be rectified.
Sweden throughout the 1930s continued
with its right to housing policy and served
as an example right up until the mid-1970s
both to the socialist and ( capitalist ) wel-

fare states. The idea of ( private ) ownership became complexified with the idea
of social ownership ( in Yugoslavia ) and
public/social housing elsewhere, but since
the bureaucratic-technological system responsible for implementation was almost
exclusively linked with the State, housing
ended up in unwieldy complicated systems
in which there was under-investment in
maintenance. That crisis was exploited as
an excuse to impose as necessary paradigmatic changes that we today regard as the
beginning of neo-liberal policies.
At the beginning of the 1980s in
Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher created an atmosphere of a state of emergency
around the issue of housing ownership
and, with the passing of the Housing Act
in 1980, reform was set in motion that
would deeply transform the lives of the
Brits. The promises of a better life merely
based on the opportunity to buy and become a ( private ) owner never materialised.
The transition from the ‘right to housing’ and the ‘right to ( participation in the
market through ) purchase’ left housing
to the market. There the prices first fell
drastically at the beginning of the 1990s.
That was followed by a financialisation
and speculation on the property market
making housing space in cities like London primarily an avenue of investment, a
currency, a tax haven and a mechanism
by which the rich could store their wealth.
In today's generation, working and lower
classes, even sometimes the upper middle
class can no longer even dream of buying
a flat in London. ×

P L AT F O R M I SAT I O N

Social ownership and housing – understood both literally as living space, but
also as the articulation of the right to decent life for all members of society – which
was already under attack for decades prior,
would be caught completely unprepared
for the information revolution and its
zero marginal cost economy. Take for
example the internet innovation: after a
brief period of comradely couch-surfing,
the company AirBnB in an even shorter period transformed from the service
allowing small enterprising home owners to rent out their vacant rooms into a
catalyst for amassing the ownership over
housing stock with the sole purpose of
renting it out through AirBnb. In the
last phase of that transformation, new
start-ups appeared that offered to the
newly consolidated feudal lords the service of easier management of their housing ‘fleet’, where the innovative approach
boils down to the summoning of service
workers who, just like Uber drivers, seek
out blue dots on their smart-phone maps
desperately rushing – in fear of bad rating,
for a minimal fee and no taxes paid – to
turn up there before their equally precarious competition does. With these innovations, the residents end up being offered
shorter and shorter but increasingly more
expensive contracts on rental, while in a
worse case the flats are left unoccupied
because the rich owner-investors have
realised that an unoccupied flat is a more
profitable deal than a risky investment in
a market in crisis.

233

The information revolution stepped out
onto the historical stage with the promise
of radical democratisation of communication, culture and politics. Anyone could
become the media and address the global
public, emancipate from the constrictive
space of identity, and obtain access to entire
knowledge of the world. However, instead
of resulting in democratising and emancipatory processes, with the handing over of
Internet and technological innovation to the
market in 1990s it resulted in the gradual
disruption of previous social arrangements
in the allocation of goods and in the intensification of the commodification process.
That trajectory reached its full-blown development in the form of Internet platforms
that simultaneously enabled old owners of
goods to control more closely their accessibility and permited new owners to seek out
new forms of commercial exploitation. Take
for example Google Books, where the process of digitization of the entire printed culture of the world resulted in no more than
ad and retail space where only few books
can be accessed for free. Or Amazon Kinde,
where the owner of the platform has such
dramatic control over books that on behest
of copyright holders it can remotely delete
a purchased copy of a book, as quite indicatively happened in 2009 with Orwell's 1984.
The promised technological innovation that
would bring a new turn of the complexity in
the social allocation of goods resulted in a
simplification and reduction of everything
into private property.
The history of resistance to such extreme forms of enclosure of culture and
knowledge is only a bit younger than the
234

Taken literally

processes of commodification themselves
that had begun with the rise of trade in
books. As early as the French Revolution,
the confiscation of books from the libraries
of clergy and aristocracy and their transfer
into national and provincial libraries signalled that the right of access to knowledge
was a pre-condition for full participation
in society. For its part, the British labor
movement of the mid-19th century had to
resort to opening workers' reading-rooms,
projects of proletarian self-education and
the class struggle in order to achieve the
establishment of the institution of public
libraries financed by taxes, and the right
thereby for access to knowledge and culture for all members of society.
SHAD OW P U B L I C L I B R A R I ES

Public library as a space of exemption from
commodification of knowledge and culture
is an institution that complexifies the unconditional and formulaic application of
intellectual property rights, making them
conditional on the public interest that all
members of the society have the right of
access to knowledge. However, with the
transition to the digital, public libraries
have been radically limited in acquiring
anything they could later provide a decommodified access to. Publishers do not
wish to sell electronic books to libraries,
and when they do decide to give them a
lending licence, that licence runs out after 26 lendings. Closed platforms for electronic publications where the publishers
technologically control both the medium
and the ways the work can be used take us

back to the original and not very well-conceived metaphor of ownership – anyone
who owns the land can literally control
everything that happens on that land –
even if that land is the collective process
of writing and reading. Such limited space
for the activity of public libraries is in radical contrast to the potentials for universal
access to all of culture and knowledge that
digital distribution could make possible
at a very low cost, but with considerable
change in the regulation of intellectual production in society.
Since such change would not be in the
interest of formulaic application of intellectual property, acts of civil disobedience to
that regime have over the last twenty years
created a number of 'shadow public libraries'
that provide universal access to knowledge
and culture in the digital domain in the way
that the public libraries are not allowed to:
Library Genesis, Science Hub, Aaaaarg,
Monoskop, Memory of the World or Ubuweb. They all have a simple objective – to
provide access to books, journals and digitised knowledge to all who find themselves
outside the rich academic institutions of the
West and who do not have the privilege of
institutional access.
These shadow public libraries bravely remind society of all the watershed moments in the struggles and negotiations
that have resulted in the establishment
of social institutions, so as to first enable
the transition from what was an unjust,
discriminating and exploitative to a better society, and later guarantee that these
gains would not be dismantled or rescinded. That reminder is, however, more than a

mere hacker pastime, just as the reactions
of the corporations are not easy-going at
all: in mid-2015, Reed Elsevier initiated
a court case against Library Genesis and
Science Hub and by the end of 2015 the
court in New York issued a preliminary
injunction ordering the shut-down of
their domains and access to the servers. At
the same time, a court case was brought
against Aaaaarg in Quebec.
Shadow public libraries are also a
reminder of how technological complexity does not have to be harnessed only in
the conversion of socialised resources back
into the simplified formulaic logic of private property, how we can take technology
in our hands, in the hands of society that is
not dismantling its own foundations, but
rather taking care of and preserving what
is worthwhile and already built – and thus
building itself further. But, most powerfully shadow public libraries are a reminder to us of how the focus and objective of
our efforts should not be a world that can
be readily managed algorithmically, but a
world in which our much greater achievement is the right guaranteed by institutions – envisioned, demanded, struggled
for and negotiated – a society. Platformisation, corporate concentration, financialisation and speculation, although complex
in themselves, are in the function of the
process of de-socialisation. Only by the
re-introduction of the complexity of socialised management and collective re-appropriation of resources can technological
complexity in a world of escalating expropriation be given the perspective of universal sisterhood, equality and liberation.

235

Mattern
Library as Infrastructure
2014


# Library as Infrastructure

Reading room, social service center, innovation lab. How far can we stretch
the public library?

Shannon Mattern

June 2014

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[![](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-
infrastructure-1x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06
/mattern-library-infrastructure-1x.jpg)Left: Rijksmuseum Library, Amsterdam.
[Photo by[Ton Nolles](https://www.flickr.com/photos/tonnolles/9428619486/)]
Right: Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. [Photo by Google/Connie
Zhou]

Melvil Dewey was a one-man Silicon Valley born a century before Steve Jobs. He
was the quintessential Industrial Age entrepreneur, but unlike the Carnegies
and Rockefellers, with their industries of heavy materiality and heavy labor,
Dewey sold ideas. His ambition revealed itself early: in 1876, shortly after
graduating from Amherst College, he copyrighted his library classification
scheme. That same year, he helped found the American Library Association,
served as founding editor of _Library_ _Journal_ , and launched the American
Metric Bureau, which campaigned for adoption of the metric system. He was 24
years old. He had already established the Library Bureau, a company that sold
(and helped standardize) library supplies, furniture, media display and
storage devices, and equipment for managing the circulation of collection
materials. Its catalog (which would later include another Dewey invention,
[the hanging vertical
file](http://books.google.com/books?id=_YuWb0uptwAC&pg=PA112&dq=vertical+file+%22library+bureau%22+date:1900-1900&lr=&as_brr=0#v=onepage&q=vertical%20file%20%22library%20bureau%22%20date%3A1900-1900&f=false))
represented the library as a “machine” of uplift and enlightenment that
enabled proto-Taylorist approaches to public education and the provision of
social services. As chief librarian at Columbia College, Dewey established the
first library school — called, notably, the School of Library _Economy_ —
whose first class was 85% female; then he brought the school to Albany, where
he directed the New York State Library. In his spare time, he founded the Lake
Placid Club and helped win the bid for the 1932 Winter Olympics.

Dewey was thus simultaneously in the furniture business, the office-supply
business, the consulting business, the publishing business, the education
business, the human resources business, and what we might today call the
“knowledge solutions” business. Not only did he recognize the potential for
monetizing and cross-promoting his work across these fields; he also saw that
each field would be the better for it. His career (which was not without its
[significant
controversies](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A06E0D7163DE733A25755C1A9649C946497D6CF))
embodied a belief that classification systems and labeling standards and
furniture designs and people work best when they work towards the same end —
in other words, that intellectual and material systems and labor practices are
mutually constructed and mutually reinforcing.

Today’s libraries, Apple-era versions of the Dewey/Carnegie institution,
continue to materialize, at multiple scales, their underlying bureaucratic and
epistemic structures — from the design of their web interfaces to the
architecture of their buildings to the networking of their technical
infrastructures. This has been true of knowledge institutions throughout
history, and it will be true of our future institutions, too. I propose that
thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing,
evolving _infrastructures_ — in particular, architectural, technological,
social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better
identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably
expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold
within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and
servers?

[![Dictionary stands from the Library Bureau’s 1890
catalog.](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Dictionary
stands from the Library Bureau’s 1890 catalog.](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-
2x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-
infrastructure-2x.jpg) Dictionary stands from the [Library Bureau’s 1890
catalog](http://books.google.com/books?id=rwdwAAAAIAAJ&dq=library+bureau+catalog+1890&source=gbs_navlinks_s).

## Library as Platform

For millennia libraries have acquired resources, organized them, preserved
them and made them accessible (or not) to patrons. But the [forms of those
resources](http://www.spl.org/prebuilt/cen_conceptbook/page16.htm) have
changed — from scrolls and codices; to LPs and LaserDiscs; to e-books,
electronic databases and open data sets. Libraries have had at least to
comprehend, if not become a key node within, evolving systems of media
production and distribution. Consider the medieval scriptoria where
manuscripts were produced; the evolution of the publishing industry and book
trade after Gutenberg; the rise of information technology and its webs of
wires, protocols and regulations. 1 At every stage, the contexts — spatial,
political, economic, cultural — in which libraries function have shifted; so
they are continuously [reinventing
themselves](http://www.spl.org/prebuilt/cen_conceptbook/page18.htm) and the
means by which they provide those vital information services.

Libraries have also assumed a host of ever-changing social and symbolic
functions. They have been expected to symbolize the eminence of a ruler or
state, to integrally link “knowledge” and “power” — and, more recently, to
serve as “community centers,” “public squares” or “think tanks.” Even those
seemingly modern metaphors have deep histories. The ancient Library of
Alexandria was a prototypical think tank, 2 and the early Carnegie buildings
of the 1880s were community centers with swimming pools and public baths,
bowling alleys, billiard rooms, even rifle ranges, as well as book stacks. 3
As the Carnegie funding program expanded internationally — to more than 2,500
libraries worldwide — secretary James Bertram standardized the design in his
1911 pamphlet “Notes on the Erection of Library Buildings,” which offered
grantees a choice of six models, believed to be the work of architect Edward
Tilton. Notably, they all included a lecture room.

In short, the library has always been a place where informational and social
infrastructures intersect within a physical infrastructure that (ideally)
supports that program.

Now we are seeing the rise of a new metaphor: the library as “platform” — a
buzzy word that refers to a base upon which developers create new
applications, technologies and processes. In an [influential 2012 article in
_Library Journal_](http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/09/future-of-libraries
/by-david-weinberger/), David Weinberger proposed that we think of libraries
as “open platforms” — not only for the creation of software, but also for the
development of knowledge and community. 4 Weinberger argued that libraries
should open up their entire collections, all their metadata, and any
technologies they’ve created, and allow anyone to build new products and
services on top of that foundation. The platform model, he wrote, “focuses our
attention away from the provisioning of resources to the foment” — the “messy,
rich networks of people and ideas” — that “those resources engender.” Thus the
ancient Library of Alexandria, part of a larger museum with botanical gardens,
laboratories, living quarters and dining halls, was a _platform_ not only for
the translation and copying of myriad texts and the compilation of a
magnificent collection, but also for the launch of works by Euclid,
Archimedes, Eratosthenes and their peers.

[![Domnique Perrault, La bibliothèque nationale de France, literally elevated
on a platform. \[Photo by Jean-Pierre
Dalbera\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Domnique
Perrault, La bibliothèque nationale de France, literally elevated on a
platform. \[Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbera\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-3x-
1020x679.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-3x.jpg) Domnique Perrault, La bibliothèque nationale de
France, literally elevated on a platform. [Photo by [Jean-Pierre
Dalbera](https://www.flickr.com/photos/dalbera/4944528385/)]

Yet the platform metaphor has limitations. For one thing, it smacks of Silicon
Valley entrepreneurial epistemology, which prioritizes “monetizable”
“knowledge solutions.” Further, its association with new media tends to
bracket out the similarly generative capacities of low-tech, and even _non_
-technical, library resources. One key misperception of those who proclaim the
library’s obsolescence is that its function as a knowledge institution can be
reduced to its technical services and information offerings. Knowledge is
never solely a product of technology and the information it delivers.

Another problem with the platform model is the image it evokes: a flat, two-
dimensional stage on which resources are laid out for users to _do stuff
with_. The platform doesn’t have any implied depth, so we’re not inclined to
look underneath or behind it, or to question its structure. Weinberger
encourages us to “think of the library not as a portal we go through on
occasion but as infrastructure that is as ubiquitous and persistent as the
streets and sidewalks of a town.” It’s like a “canopy,” he says — or like a
“cloud.” But these metaphors are more poetic than critical; they obfuscate all
the wires, pulleys, lights and scaffolding that you inevitably find underneath
and above that stage — and the casting, staging and direction that determine
what happens _on_ the stage, and that allow it to function _as_ a stage.
Libraries are infrastructures not only because they are ubiquitous and
persistent, but also, and primarily, because they are made of interconnected
networks that undergird all that foment, that create what Pierre Bourdieu
would call “[structuring
structures](http://books.google.com/books?id=WvhSEMrNWHAC&lpg=PA72&ots=puRmifuGmb&dq=bourdieu%20%22structuring%20structures%22&pg=PA72#v=onepage)”
that support Weinberger’s “messy, rich networks of people and ideas.”

It can be instructive for our libraries’ publics — and critical for our
libraries’ leaders — to assess those structuring structures. In this age of
e-books, smartphones, firewalls, proprietary media platforms and digital
rights management; of atrophying mega-bookstores and resurgent independent
bookshops and a metastasizing Amazon; of Google Books and Google Search and
Google Glass; of economic disparity and the continuing privatization of public
space and services — which is simultaneously an age of democratized media
production and vibrant DIY and activist cultures — libraries play a critical
role as mediators, at the hub of all the hubbub. Thus we need to understand
how our libraries function _as_ , and as _part of_ , infrastructural ecologies
— as sites where spatial, technological, intellectual and social
infrastructures shape and inform one another. And we must consider how those
infrastructures can embody the epistemological, political, economic and
cultural values that we _want_ to define our communities. 5

[![Hammond, Beeby and Babka, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public
Library. \[Photo by Robert Dawson, from Public Library: An American
Commons\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Hammond,
Beeby and Babka, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library.
\[Photo by Robert Dawson, from Public Library: An American
Commons\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-4x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-4x.jpg) Hammond, Beeby
and Babka, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library. [Photo by
Robert Dawson, from _[Public Library: An American
Commons](https://placesjournal.org/article/public-library-an-american-
commons/)_ ]

## Library as Social Infrastructure

Public libraries are often seen as “opportunity institutions,” opening doors
to, and for, the disenfranchised. 6 People turn to libraries to access the
internet, take a GED class, get help with a resumé or job search, and seek
referrals to other community resources. A [recent
report](http://nycfuture.org/research/publications/branches-of-opportunity) by
the Center for an Urban Future highlighted the benefits to immigrants,
seniors, individuals searching for work, public school students and aspiring
entrepreneurs: “No other institution, public or private, does a better job of
reaching people who have been left behind in today’s economy, have failed to
reach their potential in the city’s public school system or who simply need
help navigating an increasingly complex world.” 7

The new Department of Outreach Services at the Brooklyn Public Library, for
instance, partners with other organizations to bring library resources to
seniors, school children and prison populations. The Queens Public Library
employs case managers who help patrons identify public benefits for which
they’re eligible. “These are all things that someone could dub as social
services,” said Queens Library president Thomas Galante, “but they’re not. … A
public library today has information to improve people’s lives. We are an
enabler; we are a connector.” 8

Partly because of their skill in reaching populations that others miss,
libraries have recently reported record circulation and visitation, despite
severe budget cuts, decreased hours and the [threatened closure or
sale](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/civic-group-city-bail-cash-strapped-
brooklyn-public-library-system-mired-300-million-repair-article-1.1748855) of
“underperforming” branches. 9 Meanwhile the Pew Research Center has released a
[series of studies](http://libraries.pewinternet.org/) about the materials and
services Americans want their libraries to provide. [Among the
findings](http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/12/11/libraries-in-
communities/): 90 percent of respondents say the closure of their local public
library would have an impact on their community, and 63 percent describe that
impact as “major.”

[![Toyo Ito, Sendai Mediatheque. \[Photo by Forgemind
Archimedia\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Toyo
Ito, Sendai Mediatheque. \[Photo by Forgemind
Archimedia\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-5x-1020x757.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-5x.jpg)Toyo Ito, Sendai
Mediatheque. [Photo by [Forgemind
Archimedia](https://www.flickr.com/photos/eager/11996856324/)]

Libraries also bring communities together in times of calamity or disaster.
Toyo Ito, architect of the acclaimed [Sendai
Mediatheque](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendai_Mediatheque), recalled that
after the 2011 earthquake in Japan, local officials reopened the library
quickly even though it had sustained minor damage, “because it functions as a
kind of cultural refuge in the city.” He continued, “Most people who use the
building are not going there just to read a book or watch a film; many of them
probably do not have any definite purpose at all. They go just to be part of
the community in the building.” 10

We need to attend more closely to such “social infrastructures,” the
“facilities and conditions that allow connection between people,” says
sociologist Eric Klinenberg. In [a recent
interview](http://urbanomnibus.net/2013/10/toward-a-stronger-social-
infrastructure-a-conversation-with-eric-klinenberg/), he argued that urban
resilience can be measured not only by the condition of transit systems and
basic utilities and communication networks, but also by the condition of
parks, libraries and community organizations: “open, accessible, and welcoming
public places where residents can congregate and provide social support during
times of need but also every day.” 11 In his book _Heat Wave_ , Klinenberg
noted that a vital public culture in Chicago neighborhoods drew people out of
sweltering apartments during the 1995 heat wave, and into cooler public
spaces, thus saving lives.

The need for physical spaces that promote a vibrant social infrastructure
presents many design opportunities, and some libraries are devising innovative
solutions. Brooklyn and other cultural institutions have
[partnered](http://www.informationforfamilies.org/Theres_No_Place_Like_Home/Jobs_68.html)
with the [Uni](http://www.theuniproject.org/find-the-uni/), a modular,
portable library that [I wrote about earlier in this
journal](https://placesjournal.org/article/marginalia-little-libraries-in-the-
urban-margins/). And modular solutions — kits of parts — are under
consideration in a design study sponsored by the Center for an Urban Future
and the Architectural League of New York, which aims to [reimagine New York
City’s library branches](http://urbanomnibus.net/2014/06/request-for-
qualifications-re-envisioning-branch-libraries/) so that they can more
efficiently and effectively serve their communities. CUF also plans to
publish, at the end of June, an audit of, and a proposal for, New York’s three
library systems. 12 _New York Times_ architecture critic Michael Kimmelman,
reflecting on the roles played by New York libraries [during recent
hurricanes](http://www.npr.org/2013/08/12/210541233/for-disasters-pack-a
-first-aid-kit-bottled-water-and-a-library-card), goes so far as to
[suggest](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/arts/design/next-time-libraries-
could-be-our-shelters-from-the-storm.html) that the city’s branch libraries,
which have “become our de facto community centers,” “could be designed in the
future with electrical systems out of harm’s way and set up with backup
generators and solar panels, even kitchens and wireless mesh networks.” 13

[![Bobst Library, New York University, after Hurricane Sandy. \[Photos by
bettyx1138\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Bobst
Library, New York University, after Hurricane Sandy. \[Photos by
bettyx1138\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-6x-1020x551.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-6x.jpg) Bobst Library,
New York University, after Hurricane Sandy. [Photos by
[bettyx1138](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bettyx1138/8151244029/)]

But is it too much to expect our libraries to serve as soup kitchens and
recovery centers when they have so many other responsibilities? The library’s
broad mandate means that it often picks up the slack when other institutions
fall short. “It never ceases to amaze me just what libraries are looked upon
to provide,” says Ruth Faklis, director of the Prairie Trail Public Library
District in suburban Chicago:

> This includes, but is not limited to, [serving as] keepers of the homeless …
while simultaneously offering latch-key children a safe and activity-filled
haven. We have been asked to be voter-registration sites, warming stations,
notaries, technology-terrorism watchdogs, senior social-gathering centers,
election sites, substitute sitters during teacher strikes, and the latest —
postmasters. These requests of society are ever evolving. Funding is not
generally attached to these magnanimous suggestions, and when it is, it does
not cover actual costs of the additional burden, thus stretching the library’s
budget even further. I know of no other government entity that is asked to
take on additional responsibilities not necessarily aligned with its mission.
13

In a Metafilter discussion about funding cuts in California, one librarian
offered this poignant lament:

> Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive. … Forget trying to
be the “people’s university” and create a body of well informed citizens.
Instead I helped people navigate through the degrading hoops of modern online
society, fighting for scraps from the plate, and then kicking back afterwards
by pretending to have a farm on Facebook.

[ Read the whole story](http://www.metafilter.com/112698/California-
Dreamin#4183210). It’s quite a punch to the stomach. Given the effort
librarians expend in promoting basic literacies, how much more can this social
infrastructure support? Should we welcome the “design challenge” to engineer
technical and architectural infrastructures to accommodate an ever-
diversifying program — or should we consider that we might have stretched this
program to its limit, and that no physical infrastructure can effectively
scaffold such a motley collection of social services?

Again, we need to look to the infrastructural ecology — the larger network of
public services and knowledge institutions of which each library is a part.
How might towns, cities and regions assess what their various public (and
private) institutions are uniquely qualified and sufficiently resourced to do,
and then deploy those resources most effectively? Should we regard the library
as the territory of the civic _mind_ and ask other social services to attend
to the civic _body_? The assignment of social responsibility isn’t so black
and white — nor are the boundaries between mind and body, cognition and affect
— but libraries do need to collaborate with other institutions to determine
how they leverage the resources of the infrastructural ecology to serve their
publics, with each institution and organization contributing what it’s best
equipped to contribute — and each operating with a clear sense of its mission
and obligation.

Libraries have a natural affinity with cultural institutions. Just this
spring, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio [appointed Tom
Finkelpearl](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/arts/design/mayor-de-blasio-
names-tom-finkelpearl-of-the-queens-museum.html?_r=1) as the city’s new
Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. A former president of the Queens Museum,
Finkelpearl oversaw the first phase of a renovation by Grimshaw Architects,
which, in its next phase, will incorporate a Queens Public Library branch — an
effective pairing, given the commitment of both institutions to education and
local culture. Similarly, Lincoln Center houses the New York Public Library
for the Performing Arts. As commissioner, Finkelpearl could broaden support
for mixed-use development that strengthens infrastructural ecologies. The
[CUF/Architectural League project](http://urbanomnibus.net/2014/06/request-
for-qualifications-re-envisioning-branch-libraries/) is also considering how
collaborative partnerships can inform library program and design.

[![Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Ballard Library and Neighborhood Service Center,
Seattle. \[Photo by Jules
Antonio\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Bohlin
Cywinski Jackson, Ballard Library and Neighborhood Service Center, Seattle.
\[Photo by Jules Antonio\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-7x-
1020x724.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-7x.jpg)Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Ballard Library and
Neighborhood Service Center, Seattle. [Photo by [Jules
Antonio](https://www.flickr.com/photos/julesantonio/8152446538/)]

I’ve recently returned from Seattle, where I revisited [OMA’s Central
Library](https://placesjournal.org/article/seattle-central-library-civic-
architecture-in-the-age-of-media/) on its 10th anniversary and toured several
new branch libraries. 15 Under the 1998 bond measure “Libraries for All,”
citizens voted to tax themselves to support construction of the Central
Library and four new branches, and to upgrade _every_ branch in the system.
The [vibrant, sweeping Ballard branch](http://www.archdaily.com/100821
/ballard-library-and-neighborhood-service-center-bohlin-cywinski-jackson/)
(2005), by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, includes a separate entrance for the
Ballard Neighborhood Service Center, a “[little city
hall](http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhood-service-centers)“ where residents
can find information about public services, get pet licenses, pay utility
bills, and apply for passports and city jobs. While the librarians undoubtedly
field questions about such services, they’re also able to refer patrons next
door, where city employees are better equipped to meet their needs — thus
affording the library staff more time to answer reference questions and host
writing groups and children’s story hours.

Seattle’s City Librarian, Marcellus Turner, is big on partnerships —with
cultural institutions, like local theaters, as well as commercial
collaborators, like the Seahawks football team. 16 After taking the helm in
2011, he identified [five service priorities](http://www.spl.org/about-the-
library/mission-statement) — youth and early learning, technology and access,
community engagement, Seattle culture and history, and re-imagined spaces —
and tasked working groups with developing proposals for how the library can
better address those needs. Each group must consider marketing, funding, staff
deployment and partnership opportunities that “leverage what we have with what
[the partners] have.” For instance, “Libraries that focus on early-childhood
education might employ educators, academicians, or teachers to help us with
research into early-childhood learning and teaching.” 17

The “design challenge” is to consider what physical infrastructures would be
needed to accommodate such partnerships. 18 Many libraries have continued
along a path laid by library innovators from Ptolemy to Carnegie, renovating
their buildings to incorporate public gathering, multi-use, and even
commercial spaces. In Seattle’s Ballard branch, a large meeting room hosts
regular author readings and a vibrant writing group that typically attracts 30
or more participants. In Salt Lake City, the [library
plaza](http://www.slcpl.lib.ut.us/shops) features an artist co-op, a radio
station, a community writing center, the Library Store, and a few cafes — all
private businesses whose ethos is consistent with the library’s. The New York
Public Library has [recently announced](http://www.nypl.org/press/press-
release/april-30-2014/new-york-public-library-opens-doors-coursera-students)
that some of its branches will serve as “learning hubs” for Coursera, the
provider of “massive open online courses.” And many libraries have classrooms
and labs where they offer regular technical training courses.

[![Moshe Safdie, Salt Lake City Public Library. \[Photo by Pedro
Szekely\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Moshe
Safdie, Salt Lake City Public Library. \[Photo by Pedro
Szekely\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-8x-1020x678.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-8x.jpg)Moshe Safdie,
Salt Lake City Public Library. [Photo by [Pedro
Szekely](https://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosz/5139398125/)]

These entrepreneurial models reflect what seems to be an increasingly
widespread sentiment: that while libraries continue to serve a vital role as
“opportunity institutions” for the disenfranchised, this cannot be their
primary self-justification. They cannot duplicate the responsibilities of our
community centers and social service agencies. “Their narrative” — or what I’d
call an “epistemic framing,” by which I mean the way the library packages its
program as a knowledge institution, and the infrastructures that support it —
“must include everyone,” says the University of Michigan’s Kristin
Fontichiaro. 19 What programs and services are consistent with an institution
dedicated to lifelong learning? Should libraries be reconceived as hubs for
civic engagement, where communities can discuss local issues, create media,
and archive community history? 20 Should they incorporate media production
studios, maker-spaces and hacker labs, repositioning themselves in an evolving
ecology of information and educational infrastructures?

These new social functions — which may require new physical infrastructures to
support them — broaden the library’s narrative to include _everyone_ , not
only the “have-nots.” This is not to say that the library should abandon the
needy and focus on an elite patron group; rather, the library should
incorporate the “enfranchised” as a key public, both so that the institution
can reinforce its mission as a social infrastructure for an inclusive public,
_and_ so that privileged, educated users can bring their knowledge and talents
_to_ the library and offer them up as social-infrastructural resources.

Many among this well-resourced population — those who have jobs and home
internet access and can navigate the government bureaucracy with relative ease
— already see themselves as part of the library’s public. They regard the
library as a space of openness, egalitarianism and freedom (in multiple senses
of the term), within a proprietary, commercial, segregated and surveilled
landscape. They understand that no matter how well-connected they are, [they
actually _don’t_ have the world at their
fingertips](https://placesjournal.org/article/marginalia-little-libraries-in-
the-urban-margins/) — that “material protected by stringent copyright and held
in proprietary databases is often inaccessible outside libraries” and that,
“as digital rights management becomes ever more complicated, we … rely even
more on our libraries to help us navigate an increasingly fractured and
litigious digital terrain.” 21 And they recognize that they cannot depend on
Google to organize the world’s information. As the librarian noted in [that
discussion](http://www.metafilter.com/112698/California-Dreamin#4183210) on
Metafilter:

> The [American Library Association] has a proven history of commitment to
intellectual freedom. The public service that we’ve been replaced with has a
spotty history of “not being evil.” When we’re gone, you middle class, you
wealthy, you tech-savvy, who will fight for that with no profit motivation?
Even if you never step foot in our doors, and all of your media comes to a
brightly lit screen, we’re still working for you.

The library’s social infrastructure thus benefits even those who don’t have an
immediate need for its space or its services.

[![David Adjaye, Francis Gregory Neighborhood Library, Washington, D.C.
\[Photo by Edmund
Sumner\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![David
Adjaye, Francis Gregory Neighborhood Library, Washington, D.C. \[Photo by
Edmund Sumner\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-9x-1020x694.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-9x.jpg)David Adjaye,
Francis Gregory Neighborhood Library, Washington, D.C. [Photo by Edmund
Sumner]

Finally, we must acknowledge the library’s role as a civic landmark — a symbol
of what a community values highly enough to place on a prominent site, to
materialize in dignified architecture that communicates its openness to
everyone, and to support with sufficient public funding despite the fact that
it’ll never make a profit. A well-designed library — a contextually-designed
library — can reflect a community’s character back to itself, clarifying who
it is, in all its multiplicity, and what it stands for. 22 David Adjaye’s
[Bellevue](http://www.archdaily.com/258098/bellevue-library-adjaye-
associates/) and [Francis Gregory](http://www.archdaily.com/258109/francis-
gregory-library-adjaye-associates/) branch libraries, in historically
underserved neighborhoods of Washington D.C., have been lauded for performing
precisely this function. [As Sarah Williams Goldhagen
writes](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112443/revolution-your-community-
library):

> Adjaye is so attuned to the nuances of urban context that one might be hard
pressed to identify them as the work of one designer. Francis Gregory is steel
and glass, Bellevue is concrete and wood. Francis Gregory presents a single
monolithic volume, Bellevue an irregular accretion of concrete pavilions.
Context drives the aesthetic.

His designs “make of this humble municipal building an arena for social
interaction, …a distinctive civic icon that helps build a sense of common
identity.” This kind of social infrastructure serves a vital need for an
entire community.

[![Stacks at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, New York Public Library.
\[Published in a 1911 issue of Scientific
American\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Stacks
at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, New York Public Library. \[Published in
a 1911 issue of Scientific American\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-
10x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-10x.jpg)Stacks at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building,
New York Public Library. [Published in a 1911 issue of _Scientific American_ ]

## Library as Technological-Intellectual Infrastructure

Of course, we must not forget the library collection itself. The old-fashioned
bookstack was [at the center of the recent
debate](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323751104578151653883688578)
over the proposed renovation of the New York Public Library’s Schwartzman
Building on 42nd Street, which was
[cancelled](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/arts/design/public-library-
abandons-plan-to-revamp-42nd-street-building.html) last month after more than
a year of lawsuits and protests. This storage infrastructure, and the delivery
system it accommodates, have tremendous significance even in a digital age.
For scholars, the stacks represent near-instant access to any materials within
the extensive collection. Architectural historians defended the historical
significance of the stacks, and engineers argued that they are critical to the
structural integrity of the building.

The way a library’s collection is stored and made accessible shapes the
intellectual infrastructure of the institution. The Seattle Public Library
uses [translucent acrylic
bookcases](http://blog.spacesaver.com/StoragesolvedwithSpacesaver/bid/33285
/You-re-not-going-crazy-Library-book-stacks-ARE-cool) made by Spacesaver — and
even here this seemingly mundane, utilitarian consideration cultivates a
character, an ambience, that reflects the library’s identity and its
intellectual values. It might sound corny, but the luminescent glow permeating
the stacks acts as a beacon, a welcoming gesture. There are still many
contemporary libraries that privilege — perhaps even fetishize — the book and
the bookstack: take MVRDV’s [Book
Mountain](http://www.mvrdv.nl/projects/spijkenisse/) (2012), for a town in the
Netherlands; or TAX arquitectura’s [Biblioteca Jose
Vasconcelos](http://www.designboom.com/architecture/biblioteca-vasconcelos-by-
tax-arquitectura-alberto-kalach/) (2006) in Mexico City.

Stacks occupy a different, though also fetishized, space in Helmut Jahn’s
[Mansueto Library](http://www.archdaily.com/143532/joe-and-rika-mansueto-
library-murphy-jahn/) (2011) at the University of Chicago, which mixes diverse
infrastructures to accommodate media of varying materialities: a grand reading
room, a conservation department, a digitization department, and [a
subterranean warehouse of books retrieved by
robot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESCxYchCaWI&feature=youtu.be). (It’s
worth noting that Boston and other libraries contained [book
railways](http://libraryhistorybuff.blogspot.com/2010/12/book-retrieval-
systems.html) and conveyer belt retrieval systems — proto-robots — a century
ago.) Snøhetta’s [James B. Hunt Jr.
Library](http://www.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary/watch/) (2013) at North Carolina
State University also incorporates a robotic storage and retrieval system, so
that the library can store more books on site, as well as meet its goal of
providing seating for 20 percent of the student population. 23 Here the
patrons come before the collection.

[![Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Seattle Central Library, Spacesaver bookshelves. \[Photo
by
brewbooks\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Rem
Koolhaas/OMA, Seattle Central Library, Spacesaver bookshelves. \[Photo by
brewbooks\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-11x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-11x.jpg)Rem
Koolhaas/OMA, Seattle Central Library, Spacesaver bookshelves. [Photo by
[brewbooks](https://www.flickr.com/photos/brewbooks/4472712525/)]

[![MVRDV, Book Mountain, Spijkenisse, The Netherlands. \[Photo via
MVRDV\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![MVRDV,
Book Mountain, Spijkenisse, The Netherlands. \[Photo via
MVRDV\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-
infrastructure-12x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06
/mattern-library-infrastructure-12x.jpg)MVRDV, Book Mountain, Spijkenisse, The
Netherlands. [Photo via MVRDV]

[![TAX, Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico City. \[Photo by
Clinker\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![TAX,
Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico City. \[Photo by
Clinker\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-13x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-13x.jpg)TAX, Biblioteca
Vasconcelos, Mexico City. [Photo by
[Clinker](https://www.flickr.com/photos/photos_clinker/295038829/)]

[![Helmut Jahn, Mansueto Library, University of Chicago, reading room above
underground stacks. \[Photo by Eric Allix
Rogers\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Helmut
Jahn, Mansueto Library, University of Chicago, reading room above underground
stacks. \[Photo by Eric Allix Rogers\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-
14x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-14x.jpg)Helmut Jahn, Mansueto Library, University of
Chicago, reading room above underground stacks. [Photo by [Eric Allix
Rogers](https://www.flickr.com/photos/reallyboring/5766873063/)]

[![Mansueto Library stacks. \[Photo by Corey
Seeman\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Mansueto
Library stacks. \[Photo by Corey Seeman\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-
15x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-15x.jpg)Mansueto Library stacks. [Photo by [Corey
Seeman](https://www.flickr.com/photos/cseeman/14148827344/)]

Back in the early aughts, when I spent a summer touring libraries, the
institutions on the leading edge were integrating media production facilities,
recognizing that media “consumption” and “creation” lie on a gradient of
knowledge production. Today there’s a lot of talk about — [and action
around](http://www.infodocket.com/2013/12/16/results-of-makerspaces-in-
libraries-study-released/) — integrating hacker labs and maker-spaces. 24 As
Anne Balsamo explains, these sites offer opportunities — embodied, often
inter-generational learning experiences that are integral to the development
of a “technological imagination” — that are rarely offered in formal learning
institutions. 25

The Hunt Library has a maker-space, a GameLab, various other production labs
and studios, an immersion theater, and, rather eyebrow-raisingly, an Apple
Technology Showcase (named after library donors whose surname is Apple, with
an intentional pun on the electronics company). 26 One might think major
funding is needed for those kinds of programs, but the trend actually began in
2011 in tiny Fayetteville, New York (pop. 4,373), thought to be [the first
public library](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2011/11/15/first-public-
library-to-create-a-maker-space/) to have incorporated a maker-space. The
following year, the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh — which for years has
hosted film competitions, gaming tournaments, and media-making projects for
youth — [launched](http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=6653), with
Google and Heinz Foundation support, [The
Labs](http://www.clpgh.org/teens/events/programs/thelabs/): weekly workshops
at three locations where teenagers can access equipment, software and mentors.
Around the same time, Chattanooga — a city blessed with a [super-high-speed
municipal fiber network](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/09/17/how-chattanooga-beat-google-fiber-by-half-a-decade/) —
opened its lauded [4th Floor](http://chattlibrary.org/4th-floor), a
12,000-square foot “public laboratory and educational facility” that “supports
the production, connection, and sharing of knowledge by offering access to
tools and instruction.” Those tools include 3D printers, laser cutters and
vinyl cutters, and the instruction includes everything from tech classes, to
incubator projects for female tech entrepreneurs, to [business pitch
competitions](http://www.nooga.com/158480/hundreds-attend-will-this-float-
business-pitch-event/).

Last year, the Brooklyn Public Library, just a couple blocks from where I
live, opened its [Levy Info
Commons](http://www.bklynlibrary.org/locations/central/infocommons), which
includes space for laptop users and lots of desktop machines featuring
creative software suites; seven reserveable teleconference-ready meeting
rooms, including one that doubles as a recording studio; and a training lab,
which offers an array of digital media workshops led by a local arts and
design organization and also invites patrons to lead their own courses. A
typical month on their robust event calendar includes resume editing
workshops, a Creative Business Tech prototyping workshop, individual meetings
with business counselors, Teen Tech tutorials, computer classes for seniors,
workshops on podcasting and oral history and “adaptive gaming” for people with
disabilities, and even an audio-recording and editing workshop targeted to
poets, to help them disseminate their work in new formats. Also last year, the
Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., opened its
[Digital Commons](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/07
/the-digital-age-is-forcing-libraries-to-change-heres-what-that-looks-like/),
where patrons can use a print-on-demand bookmaking machine, a 3D printer, and
a co-working space known as the “Dream Lab,” or try out a variety of e-book
readers. The Chicago Public Library partnered with the Museum of Science and
Industry to open [a pop-up maker lab](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/07
/3d-printing-for-all-inside-chicago-librarys-new-pop-up-maker-lab/) featuring
open-source design software, laser cutters, a milling machine, and (of course)
3D printers — not one, but _three_.

[![Chattanooga Public Library, 4th Floor. \[Photo by Larry
Miller\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Chattanooga
Public Library, 4th Floor. \[Photo by Larry
Miller\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-17x-1020x680.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-17x.jpg) Chattanooga
Public Library, 4th Floor. [Photo by [Larry
Miller](https://www.flickr.com/photos/drmillerlg/9228431656/sizes/l)]

[![Snøhetta, James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, North Carolina State University,
MakerBot in Apple Technology Showcase. \[Photo by Mal
Booth\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Snøhetta,
James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, North Carolina State University, MakerBot in Apple
Technology Showcase. \[Photo by Mal Booth\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-16x-
1020x680.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-16x.jpg)Snøhetta, James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, North
Carolina State University, MakerBot in Apple Technology Showcase. [Photo by
[Mal Booth](https://www.flickr.com/photos/malbooth/10401308096/sizes/l)]

[![Hunt Library, iPearl Immersion Theater. \[Photo by Payton
Chung\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Hunt
Library, iPearl Immersion Theater. \[Photo by Payton
Chung\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-
infrastructure-18x-1020x573.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-18x.jpg)Hunt Library,
iPearl Immersion Theater. [Photo by [Payton
Chung](https://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/8758630775/sizes/l)]

Some have proposed that libraries — following in the tradition of Alexandria’s
“think tank,” and compelled by a desire to “democratize entrepreneurship” —
make for ideal [co-working or incubator
spaces](http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/02/why-libraries-should-be-next-
great-startup-incubators/4733/), where patrons with diverse skill sets can
organize themselves into start-ups-for-the-people. 27 Others recommend that
librarians entrepreneurialize _themselves_ , rebranding themselves as
professional consultants in a complex information economy. Librarians, in this
view, are uniquely qualified digital literacy tutors; experts in “copyright
compliance, licensing, privacy, information use, and ethics”; gurus of
“aligning … programs with collections, space, and resources”; skilled creators
of “custom ontologies, vocabularies, taxonomies” and structured data; adept
practitioners of data mining. 28 Others recommend that libraries get into the
content production business. In the face of increasing pressure to rent and
license proprietary digital content with stringent use policies, why don’t
libraries do more to promote the creation of independent media or develop
their own free, open-source technologies? Not many libraries have the time and
resources to undertake such endeavors, but [NYPL
Labs](http://www.nypl.org/collections/labs) and Harvard’s [Library Test
Kitchen](http://www.librarytestkitchen.org/), have demonstrated what’s
possible when even back-of-house library spaces become sites of technological
praxis. Unfortunately, those innovative projects are typically hidden behind
the interface (as with so much library labor). Why not bring those operations
to the front of the building, as part of the public program?

Of course, with all these new activities come new spatial requirements.
Library buildings must incorporate a wide variety of furniture arrangements,
lighting designs, acoustical conditions, etc., to accommodate multiple sensory
registers, modes of working, postures and more. Librarians and designers are
now acknowledging — and designing _for_ , rather than designing _out_ —
activities that make noise and can occasionally be a bit messy. I did a study
several years ago on the evolution of library sounds and found widespread
recognition that knowledge-making doesn’t readily happen when “shhh!” is the
prevailing rule. 29

These new physical infrastructures create space for an epistemology embracing
the integration of knowledge consumption and production, of thinking and
making. Yet sometimes I have to wonder, given all the hoopla over “making”:
_are_ tools of computational fabrication really the holy grail of the
knowledge economy? What _knowledge_ is produced when I churn out, say, a
keychain on a MakerBot? I worry that the boosterism surrounding such projects
— and the much-deserved acclaim they’ve received for “rebranding” the library
— glosses over the neoliberal values that these technologies sometimes embody.
Neoliberalism channels the pursuit of individual freedom through property
rights and free markets 30 — and what better way to express yourself than by
3D-printing a bust of your own head at the library, or using the library’s CNC
router to launch your customizable cutting board business on Etsy? While
librarians have long been advocates of free and democratic access to
information, I trust — I hope — that they’re helping their patrons to
cultivate a [critical perspective](https://placesjournal.org/article
/tedification-versus-edification/) regarding [the politics of “technological
innovation”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology) — and the
potential instrumentalism of makerhood. Sure, Dewey was part of this
instrumentalist tradition, too. But our contemporary pursuit of “innovation”
promotes the idea that “making new stuff” = “producing knowledge,” which can
be a dangerous falsehood.

Library staff might want to take up the critique of “innovation,” too. Each
new Google product release, new mobile technology development, new e-reader
launch brings new opportunities for the library to innovate in response. And
while “keeping current” is a crucial goal, it’s important to place that
pursuit in a larger cultural, political-economic and institutional context.
Striving to stay technologically relevant can backfire when it means merely
responding to the profit-driven innovations of commercial media; we see these
mistakes — innovation for innovation’s sake — in the [ed-
tech](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology) arena quite often.

[![George Peabody Library, The John Hopkins University. \[Photo by Thomas
Guignard\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![George
Peabody Library, The John Hopkins University. \[Photo by Thomas
Guignard\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-19x-1020x680.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-19x.jpg)George Peabody
Library, The John Hopkins University. [Photo by [Thomas
Guignard](https://www.flickr.com/photos/timtom/5304555668/)]

## Reading across the Infrastructural Ecology

Libraries need to stay focused on their long-term cultural goals — which
should hold true regardless of what Google decides to do tomorrow — and on
their place within the larger infrastructural ecology. They also need to
consider how their various infrastructural identities map onto each other, or
don’t. Can an institution whose technical and physical infrastructure is
governed by the pursuit of innovation also fulfill its obligations as a social
infrastructure serving the disenfranchised? What ethics are embodied in the
single-minded pursuit of “the latest” technologies, or the equation of
learning with entrepreneurialism?

As Zadie Smith [argued
beautifully](http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/02/north-west-
london-blues/) in the _New York Review of Books_ , we risk losing the
library’s role as a “different kind of social reality (of the three
dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values
beyond the fiscal.” 31 Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus
College, offered an [equally eloquent
plea](http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/some-assumptions-
about-libraries#sthash.jwJlhrsD.dpbs) for the library as a space of exception:

> Libraries are not, or at least should not be, engines of productivity. If
anything, they should slow people down and seduce them with the unexpected,
the irrelevant, the odd and the unexplainable. Productivity is a destructive
way to justify the individual’s value in a system that is naturally communal,
not an individualistic or entrepreneurial zero-sum game to be won by the most
industrious. 32

Libraries, she argued, “will always be at a disadvantage” to Google and Amazon
because they value privacy; they refuse to exploit users’ private data to
improve the search experience. Yet libraries’ failure to compete in
_efficiency_ is what affords them the opportunity to offer a “different kind
of social reality.” I’d venture that there _is_ room for entrepreneurial
learning in the library, but there also has to be room for that alternate
reality where knowledge needn’t have monetary value, where learning isn’t
driven by a profit motive. We can accommodate both spaces for entrepreneurship
_and_ spaces of exception, provided the institution has a strong _epistemic
framing_ that encompasses both. This means that the library needs to know how
to read _itself_ as a social-technical-intellectual infrastructure.

It’s particularly important to cultivate these critical capacities — the
ability to “read” our libraries’ multiple infrastructures and the politics and
ethics they embody — when the concrete infrastructures look like San Antonio’s
[BiblioTech](http://bexarbibliotech.org/), a “bookless” library featuring
10,000 e-books, downloadable via the 3M Cloud App; 600 circulating “stripped
down” 3M e-readers; 200 “enhanced” tablets for kids; and, for use on-site, 48
computers, plus laptops and iPads. The library, which opened last fall, also
offers computer classes and meeting space, but it’s all locked within a
proprietary platformed world.

[![Bexar County BiblioTech, San Antonio, Texas. \[Photo by Bexar
BiblioTech\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Bexar
County BiblioTech, San Antonio, Texas. \[Photo by Bexar
BiblioTech\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-21x-1020x573.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-21x.jpg)Bexar County
BiblioTech, San Antonio, Texas. [Photo by Bexar BiblioTech]

[![Screenshot of the library’s fully digital collection. \[Photo by Bexar
BiblioTech\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Screenshot
of the library’s fully digital collection. \[Photo by Bexar
BiblioTech\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-20x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-20x.jpg)Screenshot of
the library’s fully digital collection. [Photo by Bexar BiblioTech]

In libraries like BiblioTech — and the [Digital Public Library of
America](http://dp.la/) — the collection itself is off-site. Do _patrons_
wonder where, exactly, all those books and periodicals and cloud-based
materials _live_? What’s under, or floating above, the “platform”? Do they
think about the algorithms that lead them to particular library materials, and
the conduits and protocols through which they access them? Do they consider
what it means to supplant bookstacks with server stacks — whose metal racks we
can’t kick, lights we can’t adjust, knobs we can’t fiddle with? Do they think
about the librarians negotiating access licenses and adding metadata to
“digital assets,” or the engineers maintaining the servers? With the
increasing recession of these technical infrastructures — and the human labor
that supports them — further off-site, [behind the
interface](https://placesjournal.org/article/interfacing-urban-intelligence/),
deeper inside the black box, how can we understand the ways in which those
structures structure our intellect and sociality?

We need to develop — both among library patrons and librarians themselves —
new critical capacities to understand the _distributed_ physical, technical
and social architectures that scaffold our institutions of knowledge and
program our values. And we must consider where those infrastructures intersect
— where they should be, and perhaps aren’t, mutually reinforcing one another.
When do our social obligations compromise our intellectual aspirations, or
vice versa? And when do those social or intellectual aspirations for the
library exceed — or fail to fully exploit — the capacities of our
architectural and technological infrastructures? Ultimately, we need to ensure
that we have a strong epistemological framework — a narrative that explains
how the library promotes learning and stewards knowledge — so that everything
hangs together, so there’s some institutional coherence. We need to sync the
library’s intersecting infrastructures so that they work together to support
our shared intellectual and ethical goals.

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###### Author's Note

I’d like to thank the students in my “Archives, Libraries and Databases”
seminar and my “Digital Archives” studio at The New School, who’ve given me
much food for thought over the years. Thanks, too, to my colleagues at the
[Architectural League of New York](http://archleague.org/) and the [Center for
an Urban Future](http://nycfuture.org/). I owe a debt of gratitude also to
Gabrielle Dean, her students, and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins, who gave me
an opportunity to share a preliminary draft of this work. They, along with my
colleagues Julie Foulkes and Aleksandra Wagner, offered feedback for which I’m
very grateful.

###### Notes

1. See Matthew Battles, _Library: An Unquiet History_ (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); Lionel Casson, _Libraries in the Ancient World_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Fred Lerner, _The Story of Libraries_ (New York: Continuum, 1999).
2. Casson explains that when Alexandria was a brand new city in the third century B.C., its founders enticed intellectuals to the city — in an attempt to establish it as a cultural center — with the famous Museum, “a figurative temple for the muses, a place for cultivating the arts they symbolized. It was an ancient version of a think-tank: the members, consisting of noted writers, poets, scientists, and scholars, were appointed by the Ptolemies for life and enjoyed a handsome salary, tax exemption … free lodging, and food. … It was for them that the Ptolemies founded the library of Alexandria” [33-34].
3. Donald Oehlerts, _Books and Blueprints: Building America’s Public Libraries_ (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991): 62.
4. David Weinberger, “[Library as Platform](http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/09/future-of-libraries/by-david-weinberger/),” _Library Journal_ (September 4, 2012).
5. For more on “infrastructural ecologies,” see Reyner Banham, _Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies_ (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009 [1971]); Alan Latham, Derek McCormack, Kim McNamara and Donald McNeil, _Key Concepts in Urban Geography_ (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009): 32; Ming Xu and Josh P. Newell, “[Infrastructure Ecology: A Conceptual Mode for Understanding Urban Sustainability](http://css.snre.umich.edu/publication/infrastructure-ecology-conceptual-model-understanding-urban-sustainability),” Sixth International Conference of the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) Proceedings, Berkeley, CA, June 7-10, 2011; Anu Ramaswami, Christopher Weible, Deborah Main, Tanya Heikkila, Saba Siddiki, Andrew Duvail, Andrew Pattison and Meghan Bernard, “A Social-Ecological-Infrastructural Systems Framework for Interdisciplinary Study of Sustainable City Systems,” _Journal of Industrial Ecology_ 16:6 (December 2012): 801-13. Most references to infrastructural ecologies — and there are few — pertain to systems at the urban scale, but I believe a library is a sufficiently complicated institution, residing at nexus of myriad networks, that it constitutes an infrastructural ecology in its own right.
6. Center for an Urban Future, [“Opportunity Institutions” Conference](http://nycfuture.org/events/event/opportunity-institutions) (March 11, 2013). See also Jesse Hicks and Julie Dressner’s video “[Libraries Now: A Day in the Life of NYC’s Branches](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/libraries-now-new-york-video.html)” (May 16, 2014).
7. Center for an Urban Future, _[Branches of Opportunity](http://nycfuture.org/research/publications/branches-of-opportunity)_ (January 2013): 3.
8. Quoted in Katie Gilbert, “[What Is a Library?](http://narrative.ly/long-live-the-book/what-is-a-library/)” _Narratively_ (January 2, 2014).
9. Real estate sales are among the most controversial elements in the New York Public Library’s much-disputed Central Library Plan, which is premised on the sale of the library’s Mid-Manhattan branch and its Science, Industry and Business Library. See Scott Sherman, “[The Hidden History of New York City’s Central Library Plan](http://www.thenation.com/article/175966/hidden-history-new-york-citys-central-library-plan),” _The Nation_ (August 28, 2013).
10. Toyo Ito, “The Building After,” _Artforum_ (September 2013).
11. Eric Klinenberg, “[Toward a Stronger Social Infrastructure: A Conversation with Eric Klinenberg](http://urbanomnibus.net/2013/10/toward-a-stronger-social-infrastructure-a-conversation-with-eric-klinenberg/),” _Urban Omnibus_ (October 16, 2013).
12. I’m a member of the organizing team for this project, and I hope to write more about its outcomes in a future article for this journal.
13. Michael Kimmelman, “[Next Time, Libraries Could Be Our Shelters From the Storm](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/arts/design/next-time-libraries-could-be-our-shelters-from-the-storm.html),” _New York Times_ (October 2, 2013).
14. Ruth Faklis, in Joseph Janes, Ed., _Library 2020: Today’s Leading Visionaries Describe Tomorrow’s Library_ (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013): 96-7.
15. The Seattle Central Library was a focus of [my first book](http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-new-downtown-library), on public library design. See _The New Downtown Library: Designing With Communities_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
16. Personal communication with Marcellus Turner, March 21, 2014.
17. Marcellus Turner in _Library 2020_ : 92.
18. Ken Worpole addresses library partnerships, and their implications for design in his _Contemporary Library Architecture: A Planning and Design Guide_ (New York: Routledge, 2013). The book offers a comprehensive look the public roles that libraries serve, and how they inform library planning and design.
19. Kristin Fontichiaro in _Library 2020_ : 8.
20. See Bill Ptacek in _Library 2020_ : 119.
21. The quotations are from my earlier article for Places, “[Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins](http://places.designobserver.com/feature/little-libraries-and-tactical-urbanism/33968/).” Within mass-digitization projects like Google Books, as Elisabeth Jones explains, “works that are still in copyright but out of print and works of indeterminate copyright status and/or ownership” will fall between the cracks (in _Library 2020_ : 17).
22. I dedicate a chapter in _The New Downtown Library_ to what makes a library “contextual” — and I address just how slippery that term can be.
23. This sentence was amended after publication to note the multiple motives of implementing the bookBot storage and retrieval system; its compact storage allowed the library to reintegrate some collections that were formerly stored off-site. The library has also developed a Virtual Browse catalog system, which aims to promote virtual discovery that isn’t possible in the physical stacks.
24. According to a late 2013 web-based survey of libraries, 41 percent of respondents provide maker-spaces or maker activities in their libraries, and 36 percent plan to create such spaces in the near future. Most maker-spaces, 51 percent, are in public libraries; 36 percent are in academic libraries; and 9 percent are in school libraries. And among the most popular technologies or technological processes supported in those spaces are computer workstations (67 percent), 3D printers (46 percent), photo editing (45 percent), video editing (43 percent), computer programming/software (39 percent). 33 oercent accommodated digital music recording; 31 percent accommodated 3D modeling, and 30 percent featured work with Arduino and Raspberry Pi circuit boards (Gary Price, “[Results From ‘Makerspaces in Libraries’ Study Released](http://www.infodocket.com/2013/12/16/results-of-makerspaces-in-libraries-study-released/),” _Library Journal_ (December 16, 2013). See also James Mitchell, “[Beyond the Maker Space](http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/05/opinion/backtalk/beyond-the-maker-space-backtalk/),” _Library Journal_ (May 27, 2014).
25. Anne Balsamo, “[Videos and Frameworks for ‘Tinkering’ in a Digital Age](http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/anne-balsamo-tinkering-videos/),” Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning (January 30, 2009).
26. This sentence was amended after publication to note that the Apple Technology Showcase was named after former NCSU faculty member Dr. J. Lawrence Apple and his wife, Ella Apple; in an email to the author, library director Carolyn Argentati wrote that the corporate pun was intentional.
27. Emily Badger, “[Why Libraries Should Be the Next Great Start-Up Incubators](http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/02/why-libraries-should-be-next-great-startup-incubators/4733/),” _Atlantic Cities_ (February 19, 2003).
28. Stephen Abram in _Library 2020_ : 46; Courtney Greene in _Library 2020_ : 51.
29. See my “[Resonant Texts: Sounds of the Contemporary American Public Library](http://www.wordsinspace.net/publications/Mattern_Senses%20and%20Society.pdf),” _The Senses & Society_ 2:3 (Fall 2007): 277-302.
30. See David Harvey, _A Brief History of Neoliberalism_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
31. Zadie Smith, “[The North West London Blues](http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/02/north-west-london-blues/),” _New York Review of Books_ Blog (June 2, 2012).
32. Barbara Fister, “Some Assumptions About Libraries,” Inside Higher Ed (January 2, 2014).

###### __Cite

Shannon Mattern, "Library as Infrastructure," _Places Journal_ , June 2014.
Accessed 09 Jun 2019.

Mattern
Making Knowledge Available
2018


# Making Knowledge Available

## The media of generous scholarship

[Shannon Mattern](http://www.publicseminar.org/author/smattern/ "Posts by
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__Visible Knowledge © Jasinthan Yoganathan | Flickr

A few weeks ago, shortly after reading that Elsevier, the world’s largest
academic publisher, had made over €1 billion in profit in 2017, I received
notice of a new journal issue on decolonization and media.* “Decolonization”
denotes the dismantling of imperialism, the overturning of systems of
domination, and the founding of new political orders. Recalling Achille
Mbembe’s exhortation that we seek to decolonize our knowledge production
practices and institutions, I looked forward to exploring this new collection
of liberated learning online – amidst that borderless ethereal terrain where
information just wants to be free. (…Not really.)

Instead, I encountered a gate whose keeper sought to extract a hefty toll: $42
to rent a single article for the day, or $153 to borrow it for the month. The
keeper of that particular gate, mega-publisher Taylor & Francis, like the
keepers of many other epistemic gates, has found toll-collecting to be quite a
profitable business. Some of the largest academic publishers have, in recent
years, achieved profit margins of nearly 40%, higher than those of Apple and
Google. Granted, I had access to an academic library and an InterLibrary Loan
network that would help me to circumvent the barriers – yet I was also aware
of just how much those libraries were paying for that access on my behalf; and
of all the un-affiliated readers, equally interested and invested in
decolonization, who had no academic librarians to serve as their liaisons.

I’ve found myself standing before similar gates in similar provinces of
paradox: the scholarly book on “open data” that sells for well over $100; the
conference on democratizing the “smart city,” where tickets sell for ten times
as much. Librarian Ruth Tillman was [struck with “acute irony
poisoning”](https://twitter.com/ruthbrarian/status/932701152839454720) when
she encountered a costly article on rent-seeking and value-grabbing in a
journal of capitalism and socialism, which was itself rentable by the month
for a little over $900.

We’re certainly not the first to acknowledge the paradox. For decades, many
have been advocating for open-access publishing, authors have been campaigning
for less restrictive publishing agreements, and librarians have been
negotiating with publishers over exorbitant subscription fees. That fight
continues: in mid-February, over 100 libraries in the UK and Ireland
[submitted a letter](https://www.sconul.ac.uk/page/open-letter-to-the-
management-of-the-publisher-taylor-francis) to Taylor & Francis protesting
their plan to lock up content more than 20 years old and sell it as a separate
package.

My coterminous discoveries of Elsevier’s profit and that decolonization-
behind-a-paywall once again highlighted the ideological ironies of academic
publishing, prompting me to [tweet
something](https://twitter.com/shannonmattern/status/969418644240420865) half-
baked about academics perhaps giving a bit more thought to whether the
politics of their publishing  _venues_  – their media of dissemination –
matched the politics they’re arguing for in their research. Maybe, I proposed,
we aren’t serving either ourselves or our readers very well by advocating for
social justice or “the commons” – or sharing progressive research on labor
politics and care work and the elitism of academic conventions – in journals
that extract huge profits from free labor and exploitative contracts and fees.

Despite my attempt to drown my “call to action” in a swamp of rhetorical
conditionals – “maybe” I was “kind-of” hedging “just a bit”? – several folks
quickly, and constructively, pointed out some missing nuances in my tweet.
[Librarian and LIS scholar Emily Drabinski
noted](https://twitter.com/edrabinski/status/969629307147563008) the dangers
of suggesting that individual “bad actors” are to blame for the hypocrisies
and injustices of a broken system – a system that includes authors, yes, but
also publishers of various ideological orientations, libraries, university
administrations, faculty review committees, hiring committees, accreditors,
and so forth.

And those authors are not a uniform group. Several junior scholars replied to
say that they think  _a lot_  about the power dynamics of academic publishing
(many were “hazed,” at an early age, into the [Impact
Factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor) Olympics, encouraged to
obsessively count citations and measure “prestige”). They expressed a desire
to experiment with new modes and media of dissemination, but lamented that
they had to bracket their ethical concerns and aesthetic aspirations. Because
tenure. Open-access publications, and more-creative-but-less-prestigious
venues, “don’t count.” Senior scholars chimed in, too, to acknowledge that
scholars often publish in different venues at different times for different
purposes to reach different audiences (I’d add, as well, that some
conversations need to happen in enclosed, if not paywalled, environments
because “openness” can cultivate dangerous vulnerabilities). Some also
concluded that, if we want to make “open access” and public scholarship – like
that featured in  _Public Seminar_  – “count,” we’re in for a long battle: one
that’s best waged within big professional scholarly associations. Even then,
there’s so much entrenched convention – so many naturalized metrics and
administrative structures and cultural habits – that we’re kind-of stuck with
these rentier publishers (to elevate the ingrained irony: in August 2017,
Elsevier acquired bepress, an open-access digital repository used by many
academic institutions). They need our content and labor, which we willing give
away for free, because we need their validation even more.

All this is true. Still, I’d prefer to think that we  _can_ actually resist
rentierism, reform our intellectual infrastructures, and maybe even make some
progress in “decolonizing” the institution over the next years and decades. As
a mid-career scholar, I’d like to believe that my peers and I, in
collaboration with our junior colleagues and colleagues-to-be, can espouse new
values – which include attention to the political, ethical, and even aesthetic
dimensions of the means and  _media_ through which we do our scholarship – in
our search committees, faculty reviews, and juries. Change  _can_  happen at
the local level; one progressive committee can set an example for another, and
one college can do the same. Change can take root at the mega-institutional
scale, too. Several professional organizations, like the Modern Language
Association and many scientific associations, have developed policies and
practices to validate open-access publishing. We can look, for example, to the
[MLA Commons](https://mla.hcommons.org/) and the [Manifold publishing
platform](https://manifold.umn.edu/). We can also look to Germany, where a
nationwide consortium of libraries, universities, and research institutes has
been battling Elsevier since 2016 over their subscription and access policies.
Librarians have long been advocates for ethical publishing, and [as Drabinski
explains](https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/9568/10924),
they’re equipped to consult with scholars and scholarly organizations about
the publication media and platforms that best reinforce their core values.
Those values are the chief concern of the [HuMetricsHSS
initiative](http://humetricshss.org/about-2/), which is imagining a “more
humane,” values-based framework for evaluating scholarly work.

We also need to acknowledge the work of those who’ve been advocating for
similar ideals – and working toward a more ethically reflective publishing
culture – for years. Let’s consider some examples from the humanities and
social sciences – like the path-breaking [Institute for the Future of the
Book](http://www.futureofthebook.org/), which provided the platform where my
colleague McKenzie Wark publicly edited his [ _Gamer
Theory_](http://futureofthebook.org/gamertheory2.0/) back in 2006. Wark’s book
began online and became a print book, published by Harvard. Several
institutions – MIT; [Minnesota](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-
division/series/forerunners-ideas-first); [Columbia’s Graduate School of
Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
](https://www.arch.columbia.edu/books)(whose publishing unit is led by a New
School alum, James Graham, who also happens to be a former thesis advisee);
Harvard’s [Graduate School of Design
](http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/publications/)and
[metaLab](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=2006); and The New
School’s own [Vera List Center
](http://www.veralistcenter.org/engage/publications/1993/entry-pointsthe-vera-
list-center-field-guide-on-art-and-social-justice-no-1/)– have been
experimenting with the printed book. And individual scholars and
practitioners, like Nick Sousanis, who [published his
dissertation](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431) as a
graphic novel, regard the bibliographic form as integral to their arguments.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has also been a vibrant force for change, through her
work with the [MediaCommons](http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/) digital
scholarly network, her two [open-review ](http://www.plannedobsolescence.net
/peer-to-peer-review-and-its-aporias/)books, and [her
advocacy](http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/evolving-standards-and-practices-
in-tenure-and-promotion-reviews/) for more flexible, more thoughtful faculty
review standards. Her new manuscript,  _Generous Thinking_ , which lives up to
its name, proposes [public intellectualism
](https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/4-working-in-public/public-
intellectuals/)as one such generous practice and advocates for [its positive
valuation](https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/5-the-university/) within the
academy. “What would be required,” she asks, “for the university to begin
letting go of the notion of prestige and of the competition that creates it in
order to begin aligning its personnel processes with its deepest values?” Such
a realignment, I want to emphasize, need not mean a reduction in rigor, as
some have worried; we can still have standards, while insisting that they
correspond to our values. USC’s Tara McPherson has modeled generous and
careful scholarship through her own work and her collaborations in developing
the [Vectors](http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/index.php?issue=7) and
[Scalar](https://scalar.me/anvc/scalar/) publishing platforms, which launched
in 2005 and 2013, respectively.  _Public Seminar_  is [part of that long
tradition](http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/09/the-life-of-the-mind-online/),
too.

Individual scholars – particularly those who enjoy some measure of security –
can model a different pathway and advocate for a more sane, sustainable, and
inclusive publication and review system. Rather than blaming the “bad actors”
for making bad choices and perpetuating a flawed system, let’s instead
incentive the good ones to practice generosity.

In that spirit, I’d like to close by offering a passage I included in my own
promotion dossier, where I justified my choice to prioritize public
scholarship over traditional peer-reviewed venues. I aimed here to make my
values explicit. While I won’t know the outcome of my review for a few months,
and thus I can’t say whether or not this passage successfully served its
rhetorical purpose, I do hope I’ve convincingly argued here that, in
researching media and technology, one should also think critically about the
media one chooses to make that research public. I share this in the hope that
it’ll be useful to others preparing for their own job searches and faculty
reviews, or negotiating their own politics of practice. The passage is below.

* * *

…[A] concern with public knowledge infrastructures has… informed my choice of
venues for publication. Particularly since receiving tenure I’ve become much
more attuned to publication platforms themselves as knowledge infrastructures.
I’ve actively sought out venues whose operational values match the values I
espouse in my research – openness and accessibility (and, equally important,
good design!) – as well as those that The New School embraces through its
commitment to public scholarship and civic engagement. Thus, I’ve steered away
from those peer-reviewed publications that are secured behind paywalls and
rely on uncompensated editorial labor while their parent companies uphold
exploitative copyright policies and charge exorbitant subscription fees. I’ve
focused instead on open-access venues. Most of my articles are freely
available online, and even my 2015 book,  _Deep Mapping the Media City_ ,
published by the University of Minnesota Press, has been made available
through the Mellon Foundation-funded Manifold open-access publishing platform.
In those cases in which I have been asked to contribute work to a restricted
peer-reviewed journal or costly edited volume, I’ve often negotiated with the
publisher to allow me to “pre-print” my work as an article in an open-access
online venue, or to preview an un-edited copy.

I’ve been invited to address the ethics and epistemologies of scholarly
publishing and pedagogical platforms in a variety of venues, A, B, C, D, and
E. I also often chat with graduate students and junior scholars about their
own “publication politics” and appropriate venues for their work, and I review
their prospectuses and manuscripts.

The most personally rewarding and professionally valuable publishing
experience of my post-tenure career has been my collaboration with  _Places
Journal_ , a highly regarded non-profit, university-supported, open-access
venue for public scholarship on landscape, architecture, urbanism. After
having written thirteen (fifteen by Fall 2017) long-form pieces for  _Places_
since 2012, I’ve effectively assumed their “urban data and mediated spaces”
beat. I work with paid, professional editors who care not only about subject
matter – they’re just as much domain experts as any academic peer reviewer
I’ve encountered – but also about clarity and style and visual presentation.
My research and writing process for  _Places_ is no less time- and labor-
intensive, and the editorial process is no less rigorous, than would be
required for a traditional academic publication, but  _Places_  allows my work
to reach a global, interdisciplinary audience in a timely manner, via a
smartly designed platform that allows for rich illustration. This public
scholarship has a different “impact” than pay-walled publications in prestige
journals. Yet the response to my work on social media, the number of citations
it’s received (in both scholarly and popular literature), and the number of
invitations it’s generated, suggest the significant, if incalculable, value of
such alternative infrastructures for academic publishing. By making my work
open and accessible, I’ve still managed to meet many of the prestige- and
scarcity-driven markers of academic excellence (for more on my work’s impact,
see Appendix A).

_* I’ve altered some details so as to avoid sanctioning particular editors or
authors._

_Shannon Mattern is Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School and
author of numerous books with University of Minnesota Press. Find her on
twitter[@shannonmattern](http://www.twitter.com/shannonmattern)._

Medak
Death and Survival of Dead Labor
2016


# Death and Survival of Dead Labor

by Tomislav Medak — Jan 08, 2016

![](https://schloss-post.com/content/uploads/public-
library_wuerttembergischer-kunstverein-600x450.jpg)

»Public Library. Rethinking the Infrastructures of
Knowledge Production«
Exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2014

**The present-day social model of authorship is co-substantive with the
normative regime of copyright. Copyright’s avowed role is to triangulate a
balance between the rights of authors, cultural industries, and the public.
Its legal foundation is in the natural right of the author over the products
of intellectual labor. The recurrent claims of the death of the author,
disputing the primacy of the author over the work, have failed to do much to
displace the dominant understanding of the artwork as an extension of the
personality of the author.**

The structuralist criticism positing an impersonal structuring structure
within which the work operates; the hypertexual criticism dissolving
boundaries of work in the arborescent web of referentiality; or the remix
culture’s hypostatisation of the collective and re-appropriative nature of all
creativity – while changing the meaning we ascribe to the works of culture –
have all failed to leave an impact on how the production of works is
normativized and regulated.

And yet the nexus author–work–copyright has transformed in fundamental ways,
however in ways opposite to what these openings in our social epistemology
have suggested. The figure of the creator, with the attendant apotheosis of
individual creativity and originality, is nowadays more forcefully than ever
before being mobilized and animated by the efforts to expand the exclusive
realm of exploitation of the work under copyright. The forcefulness though
speaks of a deep-seated neurosis, intimating that the purported balance might
not be what it is claimed to be by the copyright advocates. Much is revealed
as we descend into the hidden abode of production.

## _Of Copyright and Authorship_

Copyright has principally an economic function: to unambiguously establish
individualized property in the products of intellectual labor. Once the legal
title is unambiguously assigned, there is a property holder with whose consent
the contracting, commodification, and marketing of the work can proceed. In
that aspect, copyright is not very different from the requirement of formal
freedom that is granted to the laborer to contract out their own labor power
as a commodity to capital, allowing then the capital to maximize the
productivity and appropriate the products of the worker’s labor – which is in
terms of Marx »dead labor.« In fact, the analogy between the contracting of
labor force and the contracting of intellectual work does not stop there. They
also share a common history.

The liberalism of rights and the commodification of labor have emerged from
the context of waning absolutism and incipient capitalism in Europe of the
seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Before the publishers and authors
could have their monopoly over the exploitation of their publications
instituted in the form of copyright, they had to obtain a privilege to print a
book from royal censors. First printing privileges granted to publishers, for
instance in early seventeenth century Great Britain, came with the burden
placed on publishers to facilitate censorship and control over the
dissemination of the growing body of printed matter in the aftermath of the
invention of movable type printing.

The evolution of regulatory mechanisms of contemporary copyright from the
context of absolutism and early capitalism receives its full relief if one
considers how peer review emerged as a self-censoring mechanism within the
Royal Academy and the Académie des sciences. [1] The internal peer review
process helped the academies maintain the privilege to print the works of
their members, which was given to them only under the condition that the works
they publish limit themselves to matters of science and make no political
statements that could otherwise sour the benevolence of the monarch. Once they
expanded to print in their almanacs, journals, and books the works of authors
outside of the academy ranks, they both expanded their scientific authority
and their regulating function to the entire nascent field of modern science.

The transition from the privilege tied to the publisher to the privilege tied
to the natural person of the author would unfold only later. In Great Britain
this occurred as the guild of printers, Stationers’ Company, failed to secure
the extension of its printing privilege and thus, in order to continue with
the business of printing books, decided to advocate a copyright for the
authors instead, which resulted in the passing of the Copyright Act of 1709,
also known as the Statute of Anne. Thus the author became the central figure
in the regulation of literary and scientific production. Not only did the
author now receive the exclusive rights to the work, the author was also made
– as Foucault has famously analyzed – the identifiable subject of scrutiny,
censorship, and political sanction by the absolutist state or the church.

And yet, although the romantic author now took center stage, copyright
regulation, the economic compensation for the work, would long remain no more
than an honorary one. Until well into the eighteenth century literary writing
and creativity in general were regarded as resulting from the divine
inspiration and not from the individual genius of the author. Money earned in
the growing business with books mostly stayed in the hands of the publishers,
while the author received an honorarium, a flat sum that served as a »token of
esteem.« [2] It was only with the increasingly vocal demand by the authors to
secure material and political independence from the patronage and authority
that they started to make claims for rightful remuneration.

## _Of Compensation and Exploitation
_

The moment of full-blown affirmation of romantic author-function marks a
historic moment of redistribution and establishment of compromise between the
right of publishers to economic exploitation of the works and the right of
authors to rightful compensation for their works. Economically this was made
possible by the expanding market for printed books in the eighteenth and the
nineteenth century, while politically this was catalyzed by the growing desire
for autonomy of scientific and literary production from the system of feudal
patronage and censorship in gradually liberalizing modern capitalist
societies. The autonomy of production was substantially coupled to the
production for the market. However, the irenic balance could not last
unobstructed. Once the production of culture and science was subsumed under
the exigencies of the market, it had to follow the laws of commodification and
competition that no commodity production can escape.

With the development of big corporation and monopoly capitalism, [3] the
purported balance between the author and the publisher, the innovator or
scientist and the company, the labor and the capital, the public circulation
and the pressures of monetization has become unhinged. While the legislative
expansions of protections, court decisions, and multilateral treaties are
legitimated on basis of the rights of creators, they have become the economic
basis for the monopolies dominating the commanding heights of the global
economy to protect their dominant position in the world market. The levels of
concentration in the industries with large portfolios of various forms of
intellectual property rights is staggering. The film industry is a US$88
billion industry dominated by six major studios. The recorded music industry
is an almost US$20 billion industry dominated by three major labels. The
publishing industry is a US$120 billion industry, where the leading ten earn
in revenues more than the next 40 largest publishing groups. Among patent
holding industries, the situation is a little more diversified, but big patent
portfolios in general dictate the dynamics of market power.

Academic publishing in particular draws a stark relief of the state of play.
It is a US$10 billion industry dominated by five publishers, financed up to
75% from the subscriptions of libraries. It is notorious for achieving extreme
year on year profit margins – in the case of Reed Elsevier regularly well over
20%, with Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell only just lagging
behind. [4] Given that the work of contributing authors is not paid, but
financed by their institutions (provided they are employed at an institution)
and that the publications nowadays come mostly in the form of electronic
articles licensed under subscription for temporary use to libraries and no
longer sold as printed copies, the public interest could be served at a much
lower cost by leaving commercial closed-access publishers out of the equation.
However, given the entrenched position of these publishers and their control
over the moral economy of reputation in academia, the public disservice that
they do cannot be addressed within the historic ambit of copyright. It
requires politicization.

## _Of Law and Politics_

When we look back on the history of copyright, before there was legality there
was legitimacy. In the context of an almost completely naturalized and
harmonized global regulation of copyright the political question of legitimacy
seems to be no longer on the table. An illegal copy is an object of exchange
that unsettles the existing economies of cultural production. And yet,
copyright nowadays marks a production model that serves the power of
appropriation from the author and market power of the publishers much more
than the labor of cultural producers. Hence the illegal copy is again an
object begging the question as to what do we do at a rare juncture when a
historic opening presents itself to reorganize how a good, such as knowledge
and culture, is produced and distributed in a society. We are at such a
juncture, a juncture where the regime regulating legality and illegality might
be opened to the questioning of its legitimacy or illegitimacy.

1. Jump Up For a more detailed account of this development, as well as for the history of printing privilege in Great Britain, see Mario Biagioli: »From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review,« in: _Emergences:_ _Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures _12, no. 1 [2002], pp. 11–45.
2. Jump Up The transition of authorship from honorific to professional is traced back in Martha Woodmansee: _The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics_. New York 1996.
3. Jump Up When referencing monopoly markets, we do not imply purely monopolistic markets, where one company is the only enterprise selling a product, but rather markets where a small number of companies hold most of the market. In monopolistic competition, oligopolies profit from not competing on prices. Rather »all the main players are large enough to survive a price war, and all it would do is shrink the size of the industry revenue pie that the firms are fighting over. Indeed, the price in an oligopolistic industry will tend to gravitate toward what it would be in a pure monopoly, so the contenders are fighting for slices of the largest possible revenue pie.« Robert W. McChesney: _Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy_. New York 2013, pp. 37f. The immediate effect of monopolistic competition in culture is that the consumption is shaped to conform to the needs of the large enterprise, i.e. to accommodate the economies of scale, narrowing the range of styles, expressions, and artists published and promoted in the public.
4. Jump Up Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon: »The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era,« in: _PLoS ONE_ 10, no. 6 [June 2015]: e0127502, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.


[Tomislav Medak](https://schloss-post.com/person/tomislav-medak/),
Zagreb/Croatia — Performing Arts, Solitude fellow 2013–2015

Tomislav Medak is a philosopher with interests in contemporary political
philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He is coordinating the theory program
and publishing activities of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA (Zagreb/Croatia),
and works in parallel with the Zagreb-based theatre collective BADco.

Mars & Medak
Knowledge Commons and Activist Pedagogies
2017


KNOWLEDGE COMMONS AND ACTIVIST PEDAGOGIES: FROM IDEALIST POSITIONS TO COLLECTIVE ACTIONS
Conversation with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak (co-authored with Ana Kuzmanic)

Marcell Mars is an activist, independent scholar, and artist. His work has been
instrumental in development of civil society in Croatia and beyond. Marcell is one
of the founders of the Multimedia Institute – mi2 (1999) (Multimedia Institute,
2016a) and Net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb (2000) (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016a). He is a member of Creative Commons Team Croatia (Creative Commons,
2016). He initiated GNU GPL publishing label EGOBOO.bits (2000) (Monoskop,
2016a), meetings of technical enthusiasts Skill sharing (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016b) and various events and gatherings in the fields of hackerism, digital
cultures, and new media art. Marcell regularly talks and runs workshops about
hacking, free software philosophy, digital cultures, social software, semantic web
etc. In 2011–2012 Marcell conducted research on Ruling Class Studies at Jan Van
Eyck in Maastricht, and in 2013 he held fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude
in Stuttgart. Currently, he is PhD researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Lab at
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
Tomislav Medak is a cultural worker and theorist interested in political
philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He is an advocate of free software and
free culture, and the Project Lead of the Creative Commons Croatia (Creative
Commons, 2016). He works as coordinator of theory and publishing activities at
the Multimedia Institute/MaMa (Zagreb, Croatia) (Net.culture club MaMa, 2016a).
Tomislav is an active contributor to the Croatian Right to the City movement
(Pravo na grad, 2016). He interpreted to numerous books into Croatian language,
including Multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2009) and A Hacker Manifesto (Wark,
2006c). He is an author and performer with the internationally acclaimed Zagrebbased performance collective BADco (BADco, 2016). Tomislav writes and talks
about politics of technological development, and politics and aesthetics.
Tomislav and Marcell have been working together for almost two decades.
Their recent collaborations include a number of activities around the Public Library
project, including HAIP festival (Ljubljana, 2012), exhibitions in
Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 2014) and Galerija Nova (Zagreb,
2015), as well as coordinated digitization projects Written-off (2015), Digital
Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016), and Catalogue of
Liberated Books (2013) (in Monoskop, 2016b).
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Ana Kuzmanic is an artist based in Zagreb and Associate Professor at the
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Geodesy at the University in Split
(Croatia), lecturing in drawing, design and architectural presentation. She is a
member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists. Since 2007 she held more
than a dozen individual exhibitions and took part in numerous collective
exhibitions in Croatia, the UK, Italy, Egypt, the Netherlands, the USA, Lithuania
and Slovenia. In 2011 she co-founded the international artist collective Eastern
Surf, which has “organised, produced and participated in a number of projects
including exhibitions, performance, video, sculpture, publications and web based
work” (Eastern Surf, 2017). Ana's artwork critically deconstructs dominant social
readings of reality. It tests traditional roles of artists and viewers, giving the
observer an active part in creation of artwork, thus creating spaces of dialogue and
alternative learning experiences as platforms for emancipation and social
transformation. Grounded within a postdisciplinary conceptual framework, her
artistic practice is produced via research and expression in diverse media located at
the boundaries between reality and virtuality.
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION

I have known Marcell Mars since student days, yet our professional paths have
crossed only sporadically. In 2013 I asked Marcell’s input about potential
interlocutors for this book, and he connected me to McKenzie Wark. In late 2015,
when we started working on our own conversation, Marcell involved Tomislav
Medak. Marcell’s and Tomislav’s recent works are closely related to arts, so I
requested Ana Kuzmanic’s input in these matters. Since the beginning of the
conversation, Marcell, Tomislav, Ana, and I occasionally discussed its generalities
in person. Yet, the presented conversation took place in a shared online document
between November 2015 and December 2016.
NET.CULTURE AT THE DAWN OF THE CIVIL SOCIETY

Petar Jandrić & Ana Kuzmanic (PJ & AK): In 1999, you established the
Multimedia Institute – mi2 (Multimedia Institute, 2016a); in 2000, you established
the Net.culture club MaMa (both in Zagreb, Croatia). The Net.culture club MaMa
has the following goals:
To promote innovative cultural practices and broadly understood social
activism. As a cultural center, it promotes wide range of new artistic and
cultural practices related in the first place to the development of
communication technologies, as well as new tendencies in arts and theory:
from new media art, film and music to philosophy and social theory,
publishing and cultural policy issues.
As a community center, MaMa is a Zagreb’s alternative ‘living room’ and
a venue free of charge for various initiatives and associations, whether they
are promoting minority identities (ecological, LBGTQ, ethnic, feminist and

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others) or critically questioning established social norms. (Net.culture club
MaMa, 2016a)
Please describe the main challenges and opportunities from the dawn of Croatian
civil society. Why did you decide to establish the Multimedia Institute – mi2 and
the Net.culture club MaMa? How did you go about it?
Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (MM & TM): The formative context for
our work had been marked by the process of dissolution of Yugoslavia, ensuing
civil wars, and the rise of authoritarian nationalisms in the early 1990s. Amidst the
general turmoil and internecine bloodshed, three factors would come to define
what we consider today as civil society in the Croatian context. First, the newly
created Croatian state – in its pursuit of ethnic, religious and social homogeneity –
was premised on the radical exclusion of minorities. Second, the newly created
state dismantled the broad institutional basis of social and cultural diversity that
existed under socialism. Third, the newly created state pursued its own nationalist
project within the framework of capitalist democracy. In consequence, politically
undesirable minorities and dissenting oppositional groups were pushed to the
fringes of society, and yet, in keeping with the democratic system, had to be
allowed to legally operate outside of the state, its loyal institutions and its
nationalist consensus – as civil society. Under the circumstances of inter-ethnic
conflict, which put many people in direct or indirect danger, anti-war and human
rights activist groups such as the Anti-War Campaign provided an umbrella under
which political, student and cultural activists of all hues and colours could find a
common context. It is also within this context that the high modernism of cultural
production from the Yugoslav period, driven out from public institutions, had
found its recourse and its continuity.
Our loose collective, which would later come together around the Multimedia
Institute and MaMa, had been decisively shaped by two circumstances. The first
was participation of the Anti-War Campaign, its BBS network ZaMir (Monoskop,
2016c) and in particular its journal Arkzin, in the early European network culture.
Second, the Open Society Institute, which had financed much of the alternative and
oppositional activities during the 1990s, had started to wind down its operations
towards end of the millennium. As the Open Society Institute started to spin off its
diverse activities into separate organizations, giving rise to the Croatian Law
Center, the Center for Contemporary Art and the Center for Drama Art, activities
related to Internet development ended up with the Multimedia Institute. The first
factor shaped us as activists and early adopters of critical digital culture, and the
second factor provided us with an organizational platform to start working
together. In 1998 Marcell was the first person invited to work with the Multimedia
Institute. He invited Vedran Gulin and Teodor Celakoski, who in turn invited other
people, and the group organically grew to its present form.
Prior to our coming together around the Multimedia Institute, we have been
working on various projects such as setting up the cyber-culture platform Labinary
in the space run by the artist initiative Labin Art Express in the former miner town
of Labin located in the north-western region of Istria. As we started working
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together, however, we began to broaden these activities and explore various
opportunities for political and cultural activism offered by digital networks. One of
the early projects was ‘Radioactive’ – an initiative bringing together a broad group
of activists, which was supposed to result in a hybrid Internet/FM radio. The radio
never arrived into being, yet the project fostered many follow-up activities around
new media and activism in the spirit of ‘don’t hate the media, become the media.’
In these early days, our activities had been strongly oriented towards technological
literacy and education; also, we had a strong interest in political theory and
philosophy. Yet, the most important activity at that time was opening the
Net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb in 2000 (Net.culture club MaMa, 2016a).
PJ & AK: What inspired you to found the Net.culture club MaMa?
MM & TM: We were not keen on continuing the line of work that the
Multimedia Institute was doing under the Open Society Institute, which included,
amongst other activities, setting up the first non-state owned Internet service
provider ZamirNet. The growing availability of Internet access and computer
hardware had made the task of helping political, cultural and media activists get
online less urgent. Instead, we thought that it would be much more important to
open a space where those activists could work together. At the brink of the
millennium, institutional exclusion and access to physical resources (including
space) needed for organizing, working together and presenting that work was a
pressing problem. MaMa was one of the only three independent cultural spaces in
Zagreb – capital city of Croatia, with almost one million inhabitants! The Open
Society Institute provided us with a grant to adapt a former downtown leather-shop
in the state of disrepair and equip it with latest technology ranging from servers to
DJ decks. These resources were made available to all members of the general
public free of charge. Immediately, many artists, media people, technologists, and
political activists started initiating own programs in MaMa. Our activities ranged
from establishing art servers aimed at supporting artistic and cultural projects on
the Internet (Monoskop, 2016d) to technology-related educational activities,
cultural programs, and publishing. By 2000, nationalism had slowly been losing its
stranglehold on our society, and issues pertaining to capitalist globalisation had
arrived into prominence. At MaMa, the period was marked by alter-globalization,
Indymedia, web development, East European net.art and critical media theory.
The confluence of these interests and activities resulted in many important
developments. For instance, soon after the opening of MaMa in 2000, a group of
young music producers and enthusiasts kicked off a daily music program with live
acts, DJ sessions and meetings to share tips and tricks about producing electronic
music. In parallel, we had been increasingly drawn to free software and its
underlying ethos and logic. Yugoslav legacy of social ownership over means of
production and worker self-management made us think how collectivized forms of
cultural production, without exclusions of private property, could be expanded
beyond the world of free software. We thus talked some of our musician friends
into opening the free culture label EGOBOO.bits and publishing their music,
together with films, videos and literary texts of other artists, under the GNU
General Public License. The EGOBOO.bits project had soon become uniquely
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successful: producers such as Zvuk broda, Blashko, Plazmatick, Aesqe, No Name
No Fame, and Ghetto Booties were storming the charts, the label gradually grew to
fifty producers and formations, and we had the artists give regular workshops in
DJ-ing, sound editing, VJ-ing, video editing and collaborative writing at schools
and our summer camp Otokultivator. It inspired us to start working on alternatives
to the copyright regime and on issues of access to knowledge and culture.
PJ & AK: The civil society is the collective conscious, which provides leverage
against national and corporate agendas and serves as a powerful social corrective.
Thus, at the outbreak of the US invasion to Iraq, Net.culture club MaMa rejected a
$100 000 USAID grant because the invasion was:
a) a precedent based on the rationale of pre-emptive war, b) being waged in
disregard of legitimate processes of the international community, and c)
guided by corporate interests to control natural resources (Multimedia
Institute, 2003 in Razsa, 2015: 82).
Yet, only a few weeks later, MaMa accepted a $100 000 grant from the German
state – and this provoked a wide public debate (Razsa, 2015; Kršić, 2003; Stubbs,
2012).
Now that the heat of the moment has gone down, what is your view to this
debate? More generally, how do you decide whose money to accept and whose
money to reject? How do you decide where to publish, where to exhibit, whom to
work with? What is the relationship between idealism and pragmatism in your
work?
MM & TM: Our decision seems justified yet insignificant in the face of the
aftermath of that historical moment. The unilateral decision of US and its allies to
invade Iraq in March 2003 encapsulated both the defeat of global protest
movements that had contested the neoliberal globalisation since the early 1990s
and the epochal carnage that the War on Terror, in its never-ending iterations, is
still reaping today. Nowadays, the weaponized and privatized security regime
follows the networks of supply chains that cut across the logic of borders and have
become vital both for the global circuits of production and distribution (see Cowen,
2014). For the US, our global policeman, the introduction of unmanned weaponry
and all sorts of asymmetric war technologies has reduced the human cost of war
down to zero. By deploying drones and killer robots, it did away with the
fundamental reality check of own human casualties and made endless war
politically plausible. The low cost of war has resulted in the growing side-lining of
international institutions responsible for peaceful resolution of international
conflicts such as the UN.
Our 2003 decision carried hard consequences for the organization. In a capitalist
society, one can ensure wages either by relying on the market, or on the state, or on
private funding. The USAID grant was our first larger grant after the initial spinoff money from the Open Society Institute, and it meant that we could employ
some people from our community over the period of next two years. Yet at the
same time, the USAID had become directly involved in Iraq, aiding the US forces
and various private contractors such as Halliburton in the dispossession and
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plunder of the Iraqi economy. Therefore, it was unconscionable to continue
receiving money from them. In light of its moral and existential weight, the
decision to return the money thus had to be made by the general assembly of our
association.
People who were left without wages were part and parcel of the community that
we had built between 2000 and 2003, primarily through Otokultivator Summer
Camps and Summer Source Camp (Tactical Tech Collective, 2016). The other
grant we would receive later that year, from the Federal Cultural Foundation of the
German government, was split amongst a number of cultural organizations and
paid for activities that eventually paved the way for Right to the City (Pravo na
grad, 2016). However, we still could not pay the people who decided to return
USAID money, so they had to find other jobs. Money never comes without
conditionalities, and passing judgements while disregarding specific economic,
historic and organizational context can easily lead to apolitical moralizing.
We do have certain principles that we would not want to compromise – we do
not work with corporations, we are egalitarian in terms of income, our activities are
free for the public. In political activities, however, idealist positions make sense
only for as long as they are effective. Therefore, our idealism is through and
through pragmatic. It is in the similar manner that we invoke the ideal of the
library. We are well aware that reality is more complex than our ideals. However,
the collective sense of purpose inspired by an ideal can carry over into useful
collective action. This is the core of our interest …
PJ & AK: There has been a lot of water under the bridge since the 2000s. From
a ruined post-war country, Croatia has become an integral part of the European
Union – with all associated advantages and problems. What are the main today’s
challenges in maintaining the Multimedia Institute and its various projects? What
are your future plans?
MM & TM: From the early days, Multimedia Institute/MaMa took a twofold
approach. It has always supported people working in and around the organization
in their heterogeneous interests including but not limited to digital technology and
information freedoms, political theory and philosophy, contemporary digital art,
music and cinema. Simultaneously, it has been strongly focused to social and
institutional transformation.
The moment zero of Croatian independence in 1991, which was marked by war,
ethnic cleansing and forceful imposition of contrived mono-national identity, saw
the progressive and modernist culture embracing the political alternative of antiwar movement. It is within these conditions, which entailed exclusion from access
to public resources, that the Croatian civil society had developed throughout the
1990s. To address this denial of access to financial and spatial resources to civil
society, since 2000 we have been organizing collective actions with a number of
cultural actors across the country to create alternative routes for access to resources
– mutual support networks, shared venues, public funding, alternative forms of
funding. All the while, that organizational work has been implicitly situated in an
understanding of commons that draws on two sources – the social contract of the
free software community, and the legacy of social ownership under socialism.
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Later on, this line of work has been developed towards intersectional struggles
around spatial justice and against privatisation of public services that coalesced
around the Right to the City movement (2007 till present) (Pravo na grad, 2016)
and the 2015 Campaign against the monetization of the national highway network.
In early 2016, with the arrival of the short-lived Croatian government formed by
a coalition of inane technocracy and rabid right wing radicals, many institutional
achievements of the last fifteen years seemed likely to be dismantled in a matter of
months. At the time of writing this text, the collapse of broader social and
institutional context is (again) an imminent threat. In a way, our current situation
echoes the atmosphere of Yugoslav civil wars in 1990s. Yet, the Croatian turn to
the right is structurally parallel to recent turn to the right that takes place in most
parts of Europe and the world at large. In the aftermath of the global neoliberal
race to the bottom and the War on Terror, the disenfranchised working class vents
its fears over immigration and insists on the return of nationalist values in various
forms suggested by irresponsible political establishments. If they are not spared the
humiliating sense of being outclassed and disenfranchised by the neoliberal race to
the bottom, why should they be sympathetic to those arriving from the
impoverished (semi)-periphery or to victims of turmoil unleashed by the endless
War on Terror? If globalisation is reducing their life prospects to nothing, why
should they not see the solution to their own plight in the return of the regime of
statist nationalism?
At the Multimedia Institute/MaMa we intend to continue our work against this
collapse of context through intersectionalist organizing and activism. We will
continue to do cultural programs, publish books, and organise the Human Rights
Film Festival. In order to articulate, formulate and document years of practical
experience, we aim to strengthen our focus on research and writing about cultural
policy, technological development, and political activism. Memory of the
World/Public Library project will continue to develop alternative infrastructures
for access, and develop new and existing networks of solidarity and public
advocacy for knowledge commons.
LOCAL HISTORIES AND GLOBAL REALITIES

PJ & AK: Your interests and activities are predominantly centred around
information and communication technologies. Yet, a big part of your social
engagement takes place in Eastern Europe, which is not exactly on the forefront of
technological innovation. Can you describe the dynamics of working from the
periphery around issues developed in global centres of power (such as the Silicon
Valley)?
MM & TM: Computers in their present form had been developed primarily in
the Post-World War II United States. Their development started from the military
need to develop mathematics and physics behind the nuclear weapons and counterair defense, but soon it was combined with efforts to address accounting, logistics
and administration problems in diverse fields such as commercial air traffic,
governmental services, banks and finances. Finally, this interplay of the military
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and the economy was joined by enthusiasts, hobbyists, and amateurs, giving the
development of (mainframe, micro and personal) computer its final historical
blueprint. This story is written in canonical computing history books such as The
Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of
Technical Expertise. There, Nathan Ensmenger (2010: 14) writes: “the term
computer boys came to refer more generally not simply to actual computer
specialists but rather to the whole host of smart, ambitious, and technologically
inclined experts that emerged in the immediate postwar period.”
Very few canonical computing history books cover other histories. But when
that happens, we learn a lot. Be that Slava Gerovitch’s From Newspeak to
Cyberspeak (2002), which recounts the history of Soviet cybernetics, or Eden
Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011), which revisits the history of socialist
cybernetic project in Chile during Allende’s government, or the recent book by
Benjamin Peters How Not to Network a Nation (2016), which describes the history
of Soviet development of Internet infrastructure. Many (other) histories are yet to
be heard and written down. And when these histories get written down, diverse
things come into view: geopolitics, class, gender, race, and many more.
With their witty play and experiments with the medium, the early days of the
Internet were highly exciting. Big corporate websites were not much different from
amateur websites and even spoofs. A (different-than-usual) proximity of positions
of power enabled by the Internet allowed many (media-art) interventions, (rebirth
of) manifestos, establishment of (pseudo)-institutions … In these early times of
Internet’s history and geography, (the Internet subculture of) Eastern Europe
played a very important part. Inspired by Alexei Shulgin, Lev Manovich wrote ‘On
Totalitarian Interactivity’ (1996) where he famously addressed important
differences between understanding of the Internet in the West and the East. For the
West, claims Manovich, interactivity was a perfect vehicle for the ideas of
democracy and equality. For the East, however, interactivity was merely another
form of (media) manipulation. Twenty years later, it seems that Eastern Europe
was well prepared for what the Internet would become today.
PJ & AK: The dominant (historical) narrative of information and
communication technologies is predominantly based in the United States.
However, Silicon Valley is not the only game in town … What are the main
differences between approaches to digital technologies in the US and in Europe?
MM & TM: In the ninties, the lively European scene, which equally included
the East Europe, was the centre of critical reflection on the Internet and its
spontaneous ‘Californian ideology’ (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). Critical culture
in Europe and its Eastern ‘countries in transition’ had a very specific institutional
landscape. In Western Europe, art, media, culture and ‘post-academic’ research in
humanities was by and large publicly funded. In Eastern Europe, development of
the civil society had been funded by various international foundations such as the
Open Society Institute aka the Soros Foundation. Critical new media and critical
art scene played an important role in that landscape. A wide range of initiatives,
medialabs, mailing lists, festivals and projects like Next5minutes (Amsterdam/
Rotterdam), Nettime & Syndicate (mailing lists), Backspace & Irational.org
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(London), Ljudmila (Ljubljana), Rixc (Riga), C3 (Budapest) and others constituted
a loose network of researchers, theorists, artists, activists and other cultural
workers.
This network was far from exclusively European. It was very well connected to
projects and initiatives from the United States such as Critical Art Ensemble,
Rhizome, and Thing.net, to projects in India such as Sarai, and to struggles of
Zapatistas in Chiapas. A significant feature of this loose network was its mutually
beneficial relationship with relevant European art festivals and institutions such as
Documenta (Kassel), Transmediale/HKW (Berlin) or Ars Electronica (Linz). As a
rule of thumb, critical new media and art could only be considered in a conceptual
setup of hybrid institutions, conferences, forums, festivals, (curated) exhibitions
and performances – and all of that at once! The Multimedia Institute was an active
part of that history, so it is hardly a surprise that the Public Library project took a
similar path of development and contextualization.
However, European hacker communities were rarely hanging out with critical
digital culture crowds. This is not the place to extensively present the historic
trajectory of different hacker communities, but risking a gross simplification here
is a very short genealogy. The earliest European hacker association was the
German Chaos Computer Club (CCC) founded in 1981. Already in the early
1980s, CCC started to publicly reveal (security) weaknesses of corporate and
governmental computer systems. However, their focus on digital rights, privacy,
cyberpunk/cypherpunk, encryption, and security issues prevailed over other forms
of political activism. The CCC were very successful in raising issues, shaping
public discussions, and influencing a wide range of public actors from digital rights
advocacy to political parties (such as Greens and Pirate Party). However, unlike the
Italian and Spanish hackers, CCC did not merge paths with other social and/or
political movements. Italian and Spanish hackers, for instance, were much more
integral to autonomist/anarchist, political and social movements, and they have
kept this tradition until the present day.
PJ & AK: Can you expand this analysis to Eastern Europe, and ex-Yugoslavia
in particular? What were the distinct features of (the development of) hacker
culture in these areas?
MM & TM: Continuing to risk a gross simplification in the genealogy, Eastern
European hacker communities formed rather late – probably because of the
turbulent economic and political changes that Eastern Europe went through after
1989.
In MaMa, we used to run the programme g33koskop (2006–2012) with a goal to
“explore the scope of (term) geek” (Multimedia Institute, 2016b). An important
part of the program was to collect stories from enthusiasts, hobbyists, or ‘geeks’
who used to be involved in do-it-yourself communities during early days of
(personal) computing in Yugoslavia. From these makers of first 8-bit computers,
editors of do-it-yourself magazines and other early day enthusiasts, we could learn
that technical and youth culture was strongly institutionally supported (e.g. with
nation-wide clubs called People’s Technics). However, the socialist regime did not
adequately recognize the importance and the horizon of social changes coming
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from (mere) education and (widely distributed) use of personal computers. Instead,
it insisted on an impossible mission of own industrial computer production in order
to preserve autonomy on the global information technology market. What a
horrible mistake … To be fair, many other countries during this period felt able to
achieve own, autonomous production of computers – so the mistake has reflected
the spirit of the times and the conditions of uneven economic and scientific
development.
Looking back on the early days of computing in former Yugoslavia, many geeks
now see themselves as social visionaries and the avant-garde. During the 1990s
across the Eastern Europe, unfortunately, they failed to articulate a significant
political agenda other than fighting the monopoly of telecom companies. In their
daily lives, most of these people enjoyed opportunities and privileges of working in
a rapidly growing information technology market. Across the former Yugoslavia,
enthusiasts had started local Linux User Groups: HULK in Croatia, LUGOS in
Slovenia, LUGY in Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Macedonia. In the spirit
of their own times, many of these groups focused on attempts to convince the
business that free and open source software (at the time GNU/Linux, Apache,
Exim …) was a viable IT solution.
PJ & AK: Please describe further developments in the struggle between
proponents of proprietary software and the Free Software Movement.
MM & TM: That was the time before Internet giants such as Google, Amazon,
eBay or Facebook built their empires on top of Free/Libre/Open Source Software.
GNU General Public Licence, with its famous slogan “free as in free speech, not
free as in free beer” (Stallman, 2002), was strong enough to challenge the property
regime of the world of software production. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley
experimented with various approaches against the challenge of free software such
as ‘tivoizations’ (systems that incorporate copyleft-based software but impose
hardware restrictions to software modification), ‘walled gardens’ (systems where
carriers or service providers control applications, content and media, while
preventing them from interacting with the wider Internet ecosystem), ‘software-asa-service’ (systems where software is hosted centrally and licensed through
subscription). In order to support these strategies of enclosure and turn them into
profit, Silicon Valley developed investment strategies of venture capital or
leveraged buyouts by private equity to close the proprietary void left after the
success of commons-based peer production projects, where a large number of
people develop software collaboratively over the Internet without the exclusion by
property (Benkler, 2006).
There was a period when it seemed that cultural workers, artists and hackers
would follow the successful model of the Free Software Movement and build a
universal commons-based platform for peer produced, shared and distributed
culture, art, science and knowledge – that was the time of the Creative Commons
movement. But that vision never materialized. It did not help, either, that start-ups
with no business models whatsoever (e.g. De.lic.io.us (bookmarks), Flickr
(photos), Youtube (videos), Google Reader (RSS aggregator), Blogspot, and
others) were happy to give their services for free, let contributors use Creative
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Commons licences (mostly on the side of licenses limiting commercial use and
adaptations), let news curators share and aggregate relevant content, and let Time
magazine claim that “You” (meaning “All of us”) are The Person of the Year
(Time Magazine, 2006).
PJ & AK: Please describe the interplay between the Free Software Movement
and the radically capitalist Silicon Valley start-up culture, and place it into the
larger context of political economy of software development. What are its
consequences for the hacker movement?
MM & TM: Before the 2008 economic crash, in the course of only few years,
most of those start-ups and services had been sold out to few business people who
were able to monetize their platforms, users and usees (mostly via advertisement)
or crowd them out (mostly via exponential growth of Facebook and its ‘magic’
network effect). In the end, almost all affected start-ups and services got shut down
(especially those bought by Yahoo). Nevertheless, the ‘golden’ corporate start-up
period brought about a huge enthusiasm and the belief that entrepreneurial spirit,
fostered either by an individual genius or by collective (a.k.a. crowd) endeavour,
could save the world. During that period, unsurprisingly, the idea of hacker
labs/spaces exploded.
Fabulous (self)replicating rapid prototypes, 3D printers, do-it-yourself, the
Internet of Things started to resonate with (young) makers all around the world.
Unfortunately, GNU GPL (v.3 at the time) ceased to be a priority. The
infrastructure of free software had become taken for granted, and enthusiastic
dancing on the shoulders of giants became the most popular exercise. Rebranding
existing Unix services (finger > twitter, irc > slack, talk > im), and/or designing the
‘last mile’ of user experience (often as trivial as adding round corners to the
buttons), would often be a good enough reason to enclose the project, do the
slideshow pitch, create a new start-up backed up by an angel investor, and hope to
win in the game of network effect(s).
Typically, software stack running these projects would be (almost) completely
GNU GPL (server + client), but parts made on OSX (endorsed for being ‘true’
Unix under the hood) would stay enclosed. In this way, projects would shift from
the world of commons to the world of business. In order to pay respect to the open
source community, and to keep own reputation of ‘the good citizen,’ many
software components would get its source code published on GitHub – which is a
prime example of that game of enclosure in its own right. Such developments
transformed the hacker movement from a genuine political challenge to the
property regime into a science fiction fantasy that sharing knowledge while
keeping hackers’ meritocracy regime intact could fix all world’s problems – if only
we, the hackers, are left alone to play, optimize, innovate and make that amazing
technology!
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

PJ & AK: This brings about the old debate between technological determinism
and social determinism, which never seems to go out of fashion. What is your take,
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as active hackers and social activists, on this debate? What is the role of
(information) technologies in social development?
MM & TM: Any discussion of information technologies and social
development requires the following parenthesis: notions used for discussing
technological development are shaped by the context of parallel US hegemony
over capitalist world-system and its commanding role in the development of
information technologies. Today’s critiques of the Internet are far from celebration
of its liberatory, democratizing potential. Instead, they often reflect frustration over
its instrumental role in the expansion of social control. Yet, the binary of freedom
and control (Chun, 2008), characteristic for ideological frameworks pertaining to
liberal capitalist democracies, is increasingly at pains to explain what has become
evident with the creeping commercialization and concentration of market power in
digital networks. Information technologies are no different from other generalpurpose technologies on which they depend – such as mass manufacture, logistics,
or energy systems.
Information technologies shape capitalism – in return, capitalism shapes
information technologies. Technological innovation is driven by interests of
investors to profit from new commodity markets, and by their capacity to optimize
and increase productivity of other sectors of economy. The public has some
influence over development of information technologies. In fact, publicly funded
research and development has created and helped commercialize most of the
fundamental building blocks of our present digital infrastructures ranging from
microprocessors, touch-screens all the way to packet switching networks
(Mazzucato, 2013). However, public influence on commercially matured
information technologies has become limited, driven by imperatives of
accumulation and regulatory hegemony of the US.
When considering the structural interplay between technological development
and larger social systems, we cannot accept the position of technological
determinism – particularly not in the form of Promethean figures of enterpreneurs,
innovators and engineers who can solve the problems of the world. Technologies
are shaped socially, yet the position of outright social determinism is inacceptable
either. The reproduction of social relations depends on contingencies of
technological innovation, just as the transformation of social relations depends on
contingencies of actions by individuals, groups and institutions. Given the
asymmetries that exist between the capitalist core and the capitalist periphery, from
which we hail, strategies for using technologies as agents of social change differ
significantly.
PJ & AK: Based on your activist experience, what is the relationship between
information technologies and democracy?
MM & TM: This relation is typically discussed within the framework of
communicative action (Habermas, 1984 [1981], 1987 [1981]) which describes how
the power to speak to the public has become radically democratized, how digital
communication has coalesced into a global public sphere, and how digital
communication has catalysed the power of collective mobilization. Information
technologies have done all that – but the framework of communicative action
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describes only a part of the picture. Firstly, as Jodi Dean warns us in her critique of
communicative capitalism (Dean, 2005; see also Dean, 2009), the self-referential
intensity of communication frequently ends up as a substitute for the hard (and
rarely rewarding) work of political organization. Secondly, and more importantly,
Internet technologies have created the ‘winner takes all’ markets and benefited
more highly skilled workforce, thus helping to create extreme forms of economic
inequality (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2011). Thus, in any list of world’s richest
people, one can find an inordinate number of entrepreneurs from information
technology sector. This feeds deeply into neoliberal transformation of capitalist
societies, with growing (working and unemployed) populations left out of social
welfare which need to be actively appeased or policed. This is the structural
problem behind liberal democracies, electoral successes of the radical right, and
global “Trumpism” (Blyth, 2015). Intrinsic to contemporary capitalism,
information technologies reinforce its contradictions and pave its unfortunate trail
of destruction.
PJ & AK: Access to digital technologies and digital materials is dialectically
intertwined with human learning. For instance, Stallman’s definition of free
software directly addresses this issue in two freedoms: “Freedom 1: The freedom
to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish,” and
“Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements
(and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community
benefits” (Stallman, 2002: 43). Please situate the relationship between access and
learning in the contemporary context.
MM & TM: The relationships between digital technologies and education are
marked by the same contradictions and processes of enclosure that have befallen
the free software. Therefore, Eastern European scepticism towards free software is
equally applicable to education. The flip side of interactivity is audience
manipulation; the flip side of access and availability is (economic) domination.
Eroded by raising tuitions, expanding student debt, and poverty-level wages for
adjunct faculty, higher education is getting more and more exclusive. However,
occasional spread of enthusiasm through ideas such as MOOCs does not bring
about more emancipation and equality. While they preach loudly about unlimited
access for students at the periphery, neoliberal universities (backed up by venture
capital) are actually hoping to increase their recruitment business (models).
MOOCs predominantly serve members of privileged classes who already have
access to prestige universities, and who are “self-motivated, self-directed, and
independent individuals who would push to succeed anywhere” (Konnikova,
2014). It is a bit worrying that such rise of inequality results from attempts to
provide materials freely to everyone with Internet access!
The question of access to digital books for public libraries is different. Libraries
cannot afford digital books from world’s largest publishers (Digitalbookworld,
2012), and the small amount of already acquired e-books must destroyed after only
twenty six lendings (Greenfield, 2012). Thus, the issue of access is effectively left
to competition between Amazon, Google, Apple and other companies. The state of
affairs in scientific publishing is not any better. As we wrote in the collective open
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letter ‘In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’ (Custodians.online, 2015),
five for-profit publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis
and Sage) own more than half of all existing databases of academic material, which
are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university
of the Global North, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer. Robert
Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, says: “We faculty do the research,
write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all
of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labor at outrageous prices.”
For all the work supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers,
particularly the peer review that grounds their legitimacy, prices of journal articles
prohibit access to science to many academics – and all non-academics – across the
world, and render it a token of privilege (Custodians.online, 2015).
PJ & AK: Please describe the existing strategies for struggle against these
developments. What are their main strengths and weaknesses?
MM & TM: Contemporary problems in the field of production, access,
maintenance and distribution of knowledge regulated by globally harmonized
intellectual property regime have brought about tremendous economic, social,
political and institutional crisis and deadlock(s). Therefore, we need to revisit and
rethink our politics, strategies and tactics. We could perhaps find inspiration in the
world of free software production, where it seems that common effort, courage and
charming obstinacy are able to build alternative tools and infrastructures. Yet, this
model might be insufficient for the whole scope of crisis facing knowledge
production and dissemination. The aforementioned corporate appropriations of free
software such as ‘tivoizations,’ ‘walled gardens,’ ‘software-as-a-service’ etc. bring
about the problem of longevity of commons-based peer-production.
Furthermore, the sense of entitlement for building alternatives to dominant
modes of oppression can only arrive at the close proximity to capitalist centres of
power. The periphery (of capitalism), in contrast, relies on strategies of ‘stealing’
and bypassing socio-economic barriers by refusing to submit to the harmonized
regulation that sets the frame for global economic exchange. If we honestly look
back and try to compare the achievements of digital piracy vs. the achievements of
reformist Creative Commons, it is obvious that the struggle for access to
knowledge is still alive mostly because of piracy.
PJ & AK: This brings us to the struggle against (knowledge as) private
property. What are the main problems in this struggle? How do you go about them?
MM & TM: Many projects addressing the crisis of access to knowledge are
originated in Eastern Europe. Examples include Library Genesis, Science Hub,
Monoskop and Memory of the World. Balázs Bodó’s research (2016) on the ethos
of Library Genesis and Science Hub resonates with our beliefs, shared through all
abovementioned projects, that the concept of private property should not be taken
for granted. Private property can and should be permanently questioned,
challenged and negotiated. This is especially the case in the face of artificial
scarcity (such as lack of access to knowledge caused by intellectual property in
context of digital networks) or selfish speculations over scarce basic human

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resources (such as problems related to housing, water or waterfront development)
(Mars, Medak, & Sekulić, 2016).
The struggle to challenge the property regime used to be at the forefront of the
Free Software Movement. In the spectacular chain of recent events, where the
revelations of sweeping control and surveillance of electronic communications
brought about new heroes (Manning, Assange, Snowden), the hacker is again
reduced to the heroic cypherpunk outlaw. This firmly lies within the old Cold War
paradigm of us (the good guys) vs. them (the bad guys). However, only rare and
talented people are able to master cryptography, follow exact security protocols,
practice counter-control, and create a leak of information. Unsurprisingly, these
people are usually white, male, well-educated, native speakers of English.
Therefore, the narrative of us vs. them is not necessarily the most empowering, and
we feel that it requires a complementary strategy that challenges the property
regime as a whole. As our letter at Custodians.online says:
We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the
very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective
civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names
behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us.
The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced
across the Internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs,
humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our
voices. Share your writing – digitize a book – upload your files. Don’t let our
knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries – care for the metadata – care
for the backup. (Custodians.online, 2015)
FROM CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE TO PUBLIC LIBRARY

PJ & AK: Started in 2012, The Public Library project (Memory of the World,
2016a) is an important part of struggle against commodification of knowledge.
What is the project about; how did it arrive into being?
MM & TM: The Public Library project develops and affirms scenarios for
massive disobedience against current regulation of production and circulation of
knowledge and culture in the digital realm. Started in 2012, it created a lot of
resonance across the peripheries of an unevenly developed world of study and
learning. Earlier that year, takedown of the book-sharing site Library.nu produced
the anxiety that the equalizing effects brought about by piracy would be rolled
back. With the takedown, the fact that access to most recent and most relevant
knowledge was (finally) no longer a privilege of the rich academic institutions in a
few countries of the Global West, and/or the exclusive preserve of the academia to
boot – has simply disappeared into thin air. Certainly, various alternatives from
deep semi-periphery have quickly filled the gap. However, it is almost a miracle
that they still continue to exist in spite of prosecution they are facing on everyday
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Our starting point for the Public Library project is simple: public library is the
institutional form devised by societies in order to make knowledge and culture
accessible to all its members regardless their social or economic status. There is a
political consensus across the board that this principle of access is fundamental to
the purpose of a modern society. Only educated and informed citizens are able to
claim their rights and fully participate in the polity for common good. Yet, as
digital networks have radically expanded availability of literature and science,
provision of de-commodified access to digital objects has been by and large denied
to public libraries. For instance, libraries frequently do not have the right to
purchase e-books for lending and preservations. If they do, they are limited in
regards to how many times and under what conditions they can lend digital objects
before the license and the object itself is revoked (Greenfield, 2012). The case of
academic journals is even worse. As journals become increasingly digital, libraries
can provide access and ‘preserve’ them only for as long as they pay extortionate
subscriptions. The Public Library project fills in the space that remains denied to
real-world public libraries by building tools for organizing and sharing electronic
libraries, creating digitization workflows and making books available online.
Obviously, we are not alone in this effort. There are many other platforms, public
and hidden, that help people to share books. And the practice of sharing is massive.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) is a part of
a wider global movement based, amongst other influences, on the seminal work of
Aaron Swartz. This movement consists of various projects including but not
limited to Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, UbuWeb, and others. Please situate The
Public Library project in the wider context of this movement. What are its distinct
features? What are its main contributions to the movement at large?
MM & TM: The Public Library project is informed by two historic moments in
the development of institution of public library The first defining moment
happened during the French Revolution – the seizure of library collections from
aristocracy and clergy, and their transfer to the Bibliothèque Nationale and
municipal libraries of the post-revolutionary Republic. The second defining
moment happened in England through working class struggles to make knowledge
accessible to the working class. After the revolution of 1848, that struggle resulted
in tax-supported public libraries. This was an important part of the larger attempt
by the Chartist movement to provide workers with “really useful knowledge”
aimed at raising class consciousness through explaining functioning of capitalist
domination and exploring ways of building workers’ own autonomous culture
(Johnson, 1988). These defining revolutionary moments have instituted two
principles underpinning the functioning of public libraries: a) general access to
knowledge is fundamental to full participation in the society, and b)
commodification of knowledge in the form of book trade needs to be limited by
public de-commodified non-monetary forms of access through public institutions.
In spite of enormous expansion of potentials for providing access to knowledge
to all regardless of their social status or geographic location brought about by the
digital technologies, public libraries have been radically limited in pursuing their
mission. This results in side-lining of public libraries in enormous expansion of
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commodification of knowledge in the digital realm, and brings huge profits to
academic publishers. In response to these limitations, a number of projects have
sprung up in order to maintain public interest by illegal means.
PJ & AK: Can you provide a short genealogy of these projects?
MM & TM: Founded in 1996, Ubu was one of the first online repositories.
Then, in 2001, Textz.com started distributing texts in critical theory. After
Textz.com got shot down in early 2004, it took another year for Aaaaarg to emerge
and Monoskop followed soon thereafter. In the latter part of the 2000s, Gigapedia
started a different trajectory of providing access to comprehensive repositories.
Gigapedia was a game changer, because it provided access to thousands and
thousands of scholarly titles and made access to that large corpus no longer limited
to those working or studying in the rich institutions of the Global North. In 2012
publishing industry shut down Gigapedia (at the time, it was known as Library.nu).
Fortunately, the resulting vacuum did not last for long, as Library.nu repository got
merged into the holdings of Library Genesis. Building on the legacy of Soviet
scholars who devised the ways of shadow production and distribution of
knowledge in the form of samizdat and early digital distribution of texts in the
post-Soviet period (Balázs, 2014), Library Genesis has built a robust infrastructure
with the mission to provide access to the largest online library in existence while
keeping a low profile. At this moment Library Genesis provides access to books,
and its sister project Science Hub provides access to academic journals. Both
projects are under threat of closure by the largest academic publisher Reed
Elsevier. Together with the Public Library project, they articulate a position of civil
disobedience.
PJ & AK: Please elaborate the position of civil disobedience. How does it
work; when is it justified?
MM & TM: Legitimating discourses usually claim that shadow libraries fall
into the category of non-commercial fair use. These arguments are definitely valid,
yet they do not build a particularly strong ground for defending knowledge
commons. Once they arrive under attack, therefore, shadow libraries are typically
shut down. In our call for collective disobedience, therefore, we want to make a
larger claim. Access to knowledge as a universal condition could not exist if we –
academics and non-academics across the unevenly developed world – did not
create own ways of commoning knowledge that we partake in producing and
learning. By introducing the figure of the custodian, we are turning the notion of
property upside down. Paraphrasing the Little Prince, to own something is to be
useful to that which you own (Saint-Exupéry, 1945). Custodians are the political
subjectivity of that disobedient work of care.
Practices of sharing, downloading, and uploading, are massive. So, if we want to
prevent our knowledge commons from being taken away over and over again, we
need to publicly and collectively stand behind our disobedient behaviour. We
should not fall into the trap of the debate about legality or illegality of our
practices. Instead, we should acknowledge that our practices, which have been
deemed illegal, are politically legitimate in the face of uneven opportunities
between the Global North and the Global South, in the face of commercialization
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of education and student debt in the Global North … This is the meaning of civil
disobedience – to take responsibility for breaking unjust laws.
PJ & AK: We understand your lack of interest for debating legality –
nevertheless, legal services are very interested in your work … For instance,
Marcell has recently been involved in a law suit related to Aaaaarg. Please describe
the relationship between morality and legality in your (public) engagement. When,
and under which circumstances, can one’s moral actions justify breaking the law?
MM & TM: Marcell has been recently drawn into a lawsuit that was filed
against Aaaaarg for copyright infringement. Marcell, the founder of Aaaaarg Sean
Dockray, and a number of institutions ranging from universities to continentalscale intergovernmental organizations, are being sued by a small publisher from
Quebec whose translation of André Bazin’s What is Cinema? (1967) was twice
scanned and uploaded to Aaaaarg by an unknown user. The book was removed
each time the plaintiff issued a takedown notice, resulting in minimal damages, but
these people are nonetheless being sued for 500.000 Canadian dollars. Should
Aaaaarg not be able to defend its existence on the principle of fair use, a valuable
common resource will yet again be lost and its founder will pay a high price. In this
lawsuit, ironically, there is little economic interest. But many smaller publishers
find themselves squeezed between the privatization of education which leaves
students and adjuncts with little money for books and the rapid concentration of
academic publishing. For instance, Taylor and Francis has acquired a smaller
humanities publisher Ashgate and shut it down in a matter of months (Save
Ashgate Publishing petition, 2015).
The system of academic publishing is patently broken. It syphons off public
funding of science and education into huge private profits, while denying living
wages and access to knowledge to its producers. This business model is legal, but
deeply illegitimate. Many scientists and even governments agree with this
conclusion – yet, situation cannot be easily changed because of entrenched power
passed down from the old models of publishing and their imbrication with
allocation of academic prestige. Therefore, the continuous existence of this model
commands civil disobedience.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) operates
in various public domains including art galleries. Why did you decide to develop
The Public Library project in the context of arts? How do you conceive the
relationship between arts and activism?
MM & TM: We tend to easily conflate the political with the aesthetic.
Moreover, when an artwork expressedly claims political character, this seems to
grant it recognition and appraisal. Yet, socially reflective character of an artwork
and its consciously critical position toward the social reality might not be outright
political. Political action remains a separate form of agency, which is different than
that of socially reflexive, situated and critical art. It operates along a different logic
of engagement. It requires collective mobilization and social transformation.
Having said that, socially reflexive, situated and critical art cannot remain detached
from the present conjuncture and cannot exist outside the political space. Within
the world of arts, alternatives to existing social sensibilities and realities can be
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articulated and tested without paying a lot of attention to consistency and
plausibility. Whereas activism generally leaves less room for unrestricted
articulation, because it needs to produce real and plausible effects.
With the generous support of the curatorial collective What, How and for Whom
(WHW) (2016), the Public Library project was surprisingly welcomed by the art
world, and this provided us with a stage to build the project, sharpen its arguments
and ascertain legitimacy of its political demands. The project was exhibited, with
WHW and other curators, in some of the foremost art venues such as Reina Sofía
in Madrid, Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, 98 Weeks in Beirut,
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana, and Calvert 22 in London.
It is great to have a stage where we can articulate social issues and pursue avenues
of action that other social institutions might find risky to support. Yet, while the
space of art provides a safe haven from the adversarial world of political reality, we
think that the addressed issues need to be politicized and that other institutions,
primarily institutions of education, need to stand behind the demand for universal
access. For instance, teaching and research at the University in Zagreb critically
depends on the capacity of its faculty and students to access books and journals
from sources that are deemed illegal – in our opinion, therefore, the University
needs to take a public stand for these forms of access. In the world of
commercialized education and infringement liability, expecting the University to
publicly support us seems highly improbable. However, it is not impossible! This
was recently demonstrated by the Zürich Academy of Arts, which now hosts a
mirror of Ubu – a crucial resource for its students and faculty alike
(Custodians.online, 2016).
PJ & AK: In the current climate of economic austerity, the question of
resources has become increasingly important. For instance, Web 2.0. has narrowed
available spaces for traditional investigative journalism, and platforms such as
Airbnb and Uber have narrowed spaces for traditional labor. Following the same
line of argument, placing activism into art galleries clearly narrows available
spaces for artists. How do you go about this problem? What, if anything, should be
done with the activist takeover of traditional forms of art? Why?
MM & TM: Art can no longer stand outside of the political space, and it can no
longer be safely stowed away into a niche of supposed autonomy within bourgeois
public sphere detached from commodity production and the state. However, art
academies in Croatia and many other places throughout the world still churn out
artists on the premise that art is apolitical. In this view artists can specialize in a
medium and create in isolation of their studios – if their artwork is recognized as
masterful, it will be bought on the marketplace. This is patently a lie! Art in Croatia
depends on bonds of solidarity and public support.
Frequently it is the art that seeks political forms of engagement rather than vice
versa. A lot of headspace for developing a different social imaginary can be gained
from that venturing aspect of contemporary art. Having said that, art does not need
to be political in order to be relevant and strong.

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THE DOUBLE LIFE OF HACKER CULTURE

PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) is essentially
pedagogical. When everyone is a librarian, and all books are free, living in the
world transforms into living with the world – so The Public Library project is also
essentially anti-capitalist. This brings us to the intersections between critical
pedagogy of Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, and others – and the
hacker culture of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Steven Lévy, and others. In
spite of various similarities, however, critical pedagogy and hacker culture disagree
on some important points.
With its deep roots in Marxism, critical theory always insists on class analysis.
Yet, imbued in the Californian ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), the hacker
culture is predominantly individualist. How do you go about the tension between
individualism and collectivism in The Public Library project? How do you balance
these forces in your overall work?
MM & TM: Hacker culture has always lived a double life. Personal computers
and the Internet have set up a perfect projection screen for a mind-set which
understands autonomy as a pursuit for personal self-realisation. Such mind-set sees
technology as a frontier of limitless and unconditional freedom, and easily melds
with entrepreneurial culture of the Silicon Valley. Therefore, it is hardly a surprise
that individualism has become the hegemonic narrative of hacker culture.
However, not all hacker culture is individualist and libertarian. Since the 1990s, the
hacker culture is heavily divided between radical individualism and radical
mutualism. Fred Turner (2006), Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (1996) have
famously shown that radical individualism was built on freewheeling counterculture of the American hippie movement, while radical mutualism was built on
collective leftist traditions of anarchism and Marxism. This is evident in the Free
Software Movement, which has placed ethics and politics before economy and
technology. In her superb ethnographic work, Biella Coleman (2013) has shown
that projects such as GNU/Linux distribution Debian have espoused radically
collective subjectivities. In that regard, these projects stand closer to mutualist,
anarchist and communist traditions where collective autonomy is the foundation of
individual freedom.
Our work stands in that lineage. Therefore, we invoke two collective figures –
amateur librarian and custodian. These figures highlight the labor of communizing
knowledge and maintaining infrastructures of access, refuse to leave the commons
to the authority of professions, and create openings where technologies and
infrastructures can be re-claimed for radically collective and redistributive
endeavours. In that context, we are critical of recent attempts to narrow hacker
culture down to issues of surveillance, privacy and cryptography. While these
issues are clearly important, they (again) reframe the hacker community through
the individualist dichotomy of freedom and privacy, and, more broadly, through
the hegemonic discourse of the post-historical age of liberal capitalism. In this
way, the essential building blocks of the hacker culture – relations of production,
relations of property, and issues of redistribution – are being drowned out, and
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collective and massive endeavour of commonizing is being eclipsed by the
capacity of the few crypto-savvy tricksters to avoid government control.
Obviously, we strongly disagree with the individualist, privative and 1337 (elite)
thrust of these developments.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) arrives
very close to visions of deschooling offered by authors such as Ivan Illich (1971),
Everett Reimer (1971), Paul Goodman (1973), and John Holt (1967). Recent
research indicates that digital technologies offer some fresh opportunities for the
project of deschooling (Hart, 2001; Jandrić, 2014, 2015b), and projects such as
Monoskop (Monoskop, 2016) and The Public Library project (Memory of the
World, 2016a) provide important stepping-stones for emancipation of the
oppressed. Yet, such forms of knowledge and education are hardly – if at all –
recognised by the mainstream. How do you go about this problem? Should these
projects try and align with the mainstream, or act as subversions of the mainstream,
or both? Why?
MM & TM: We are currently developing a more fine-tuned approach to
educational aspects of amateur librarianship. The forms of custodianship over
knowledge commons that underpin the practices behind Monoskop, Public Library,
Aaaaarg, Ubu, Library Genesis, and Science Hub are part and parcel of our
contemporary world – whether you are a non-academic with no access to scholarly
libraries, or student/faculty outside of the few well-endowed academic institutions
in the Global North. As much as commercialization and privatization of education
are becoming mainstream across the world, so are the strategies of reproducing
one’s knowledge and academic research that depend on the de-commodified access
of shadow libraries.
Academic research papers are narrower in scope than textbooks, and Monoskop
is thematically more specific than Library Genesis. However, all these practices
exhibit ways in which our epistemologies and pedagogies are built around
institutional structures that reproduce inequality and differentiated access based on
race, gender, class and geography. By building own knowledge infrastructures, we
build different bodies of knowledge and different forms of relating to our realities –
in words of Walter Mignolo, we create new forms of epistemic disobedience
(2009). Through Public Library, we have digitized and made available several
collections that represent epistemologically different corpuses of knowledge. A
good example of that is the digital collection of books selected by Black Panther
Herman Wallace as his dream library for political education (Memory of the
World, 2016b).
PJ & AK: Your work breaks traditional distinctions between professionals and
amateurs – when everyone becomes a librarian, the concepts of ‘professional
librarian’ and ‘amateur librarian’ become obsolete. Arguably, this tension is an
inherent feature of the digital world – similar trends can be found in various
occupations such as journalism and arts. What are the main consequences of the
new (power) dynamics between professionals and amateurs?
MM & TM: There are many tensions between amateurs and professionals.
There is the general tension, which you refer to as “the inherent feature of the
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digital world,” but there are also more historically specific tensions. We, amateur
librarians, are mostly interested in seizing various opportunities to politicize and
renegotiate the positions of control and empowerment in the tensions that are
already there. We found that storytelling is a particularly useful, efficient and
engaging way of politicization. The naïve and oft overused claim – particularly
during the Californian nineties – of the revolutionary potential of emerging digital
networks turned out to be a good candidate for replacement by a story dating back
two centuries earlier – the story of emergence of public libraries in the early days
of the French bourgeois revolution in the 19th century.
The seizure of book collections from the Church and the aristocracy in the
course of revolutions casts an interesting light on the tensions between the
professionals and the amateurs. Namely, the seizure of book collections didn’t lead
to an Enlightenment in the understanding of the world – a change in the paradigm
how we humans learn, write and teach each other about the world. Steam engine,
steam-powered rotary press, railroads, electricity and other revolutionary
technological innovations were not seen as results of scientific inquiry. Instead,
they were by and large understood as developments in disciplines such as
mechanics, engineering and practical crafts, which did not challenge religion as the
foundational knowledge about the world.
Consequently, public prayers continued to act as “hoped for solutions to cattle
plagues in 1865, a cholera epidemic in 1866, and a case of typhoid suffered by the
young Prince (Edward) of Wales in 1871” (Gieryn, 1983). Scientists of the time
had to demarcate science from both the religion and the mechanics to provide a
rationale for its supriority as opposed to the domains of spiritual and technical
discovery. Depending on whom they talked to, asserts Thomas F. Gieryn, scientists
would choose to discribe the science as either theoretical or empirical, pure or
applied, often in contradictory ways, but with a clear goal to legitimate to
authorities both the scientific endavor and its claim to resources. Boundary-work of
demarcation had the following characteristics:
(a) when the goal is expansion of authority or expertise into domains claimed
by other professions or occupations, boundary-work heightens the contrast
between rivals in ways flattering to the ideologists’ side;
(b) when the goal is monopolization of professional authority and resources,
boundary-work excludes rivals from within by defining them as outsiders
with labels such as ‘pseudo,’ ‘deviant,’ or ‘amateur’;
(c) when the goal is protection of autonomy over professional activities,
boundary-work exempts members from responsibility for consequences of
their work by putting the blame on scapegoats from outside. (Gieryn, 1983:
791–192)
Once institutionally established, modern science and its academic system have
become the exclusive instances where emerging disciplines had now to seek
recognition and acceptance. The new disciplines (and their respective professions),
in order to become acknowledged by the scientific community as legitimate, had to
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repeat the same boundary-work as the science in general once had to go through
before.
The moral of this story is that the best way for a new scientific discipline to
claim its territory was to articulate the specificity and importance of its insights in a
domain no other discipline claimed. It could achieve that by theorizing,
formalizing, and writing own vocabulary, methods and curricula, and finally by
asking the society to see its own benefit in acknowledging the discipline, its
practitioners and its practices as a separate profession – giving it the green light to
create its own departments and eventually join the productive forces of the world.
This is how democratization of knowledge led to the professionalization of science.
Another frequent reference in our storytelling is the history of
professionalization of computing and its consequences for the fields and disciplines
where the work of computer programmers plays an important role (Ensmenger,
2010: 14; Krajewski, 2011). Markus Krajewski in his great book Paper Machines
(2011), looking back on the history of index card catalog (an analysis that is
formative for our understanding of the significance of library catalog as an
epistemic tool), introduced a thought-provoking idea of the logical equivalence of
the developed index card catalog and the Turing machine, thus making the library a
vanguard of the computing. Granting that equivalence, we however think that the
professionalization of computing much better explains the challenges of today’s
librarianship and tensions between the amateur and professional librarians.
The world recognized the importance and potential of computer technology
much before computer science won its own autonomy in the academia. Computer
science first had to struggle and go through its own historical phase of boundarywork. In 1965 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) had decided to
pool together various attempts to define the terms and foundations of computer
science analysis. Still, the field wasn’t given its definition before Donald Knuth
and his colleagues established the algorithm as as the principle unit of analysis in
computer science in the first volume of Knuth’s canonical The Art of Computer
Programming (2011) [1968]. Only once the algorithm was posited as the main unit
of study of computer science, which also served as the basis for ACM’s
‘Curriculum ‘68’ (Atchison et al., 1968), the path was properly paved for the future
departments of computer science in the university.
PJ & AK: What are the main consequences of these stories for computer
science education?
MM & TM: Not everyone was happy with the algorithm’s central position in
computer science. Furthermore, since the early days, computer industry has been
complaining that the university does not provide students with practical
knowledge. Back in 1968, for instance, IBM researcher Hal Sackman said:
new departments of computer science in the universities are too busy
teaching simon-pure courses in their struggle for academic recognition to pay
serious time and attention to the applied work necessary to educate
programmers and systems analysts for the real world. (in Ensmenger, 2010:
133)
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Computer world remains a weird hybrid where knowledge is produced in both
academic and non-academic settings, through academic curricula – but also
through fairs, informal gatherings, homebrew computer clubs, hacker communities
and the like. Without the enthusiasm and the experiments with ways how
knowledge can be transferred and circulated between peers, we would have
probably never arrived to the Personal Computer Revolution in the beginning of
1980s. Without the amount of personal computers already in use, we would have
probably never experienced the Internet revolution in the beginning of 1990s. It is
through such historical development that computer science became the academic
centre of the larger computer universe which spread its tentacles into almost all
other known disciplines and professions.
PJ & AK: These stories describe the process of professionalization. How do
you go about its mirror image – the process of amateurisation?
MM & TM: Systematization, vocabulary, manuals, tutorials, curricula – all the
processes necessary for achieving academic autonomy and importance in the world
– prime a discipline for automatization of its various skills and workflows into
software tools. That happened to photography (Photoshop, 1990; Instagram, 2010),
architecture (AutoCAD, 1982), journalism (Blogger, 1999; WordPress, 2003),
graphic design (Adobe Illustrator, 1986; Pagemaker, 1987; Photoshop, 1988;
Freehand, 1988), music production (Steinberg Cubase, 1989), and various other
disciplines (Memory of the World, 2016b).
Usually, after such software tool gets developed and introduced into the
discipline, begins the period during which a number of amateurs start to ‘join’ that
profession. An army of enthusiasts with a specific skill, many self-trained and with
understanding of a wide range of software tools, join. This phenomenon often
marks a crisis as amateurs coming from different professional backgrounds start to
compete with certified and educated professionals in that field. Still, the future
development of the same software tools remains under control by software
engineers, who become experts in established workflows, and who promise further
optimizations in the field. This crisis of old professions becomes even more
pronounced if the old business models – and their corporate monopolies – are
challenged by the transition to digital network economy and possibly face the
algorithmic replacement of their workforce and assets.
For professions under these challenging conditions, today it is often too late for
boundary-work described in our earlier answer. Instead of maintaining authority
and expertise by labelling upcoming enthusiasts as ‘pseudo,’ ‘deviant,’ or
‘amateur,’ therefore, contemporary disciplines need to revisit own roots, values,
vision and benefits for society and then (re-)articulate the corpus of knowledge that
the discipline should maintain for the future.
PJ & AK: How does this relate to the dichotomy between amateur and
professional librarians?
MM & TM: We regard the e-book management software Calibre (2016),
written by Kovid Goyal, as a software tool which has benefited from the
knowledge produced, passed on and accumulated by librarians for centuries.
Calibre has made the task of creating and maintaining the catalog easy.
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Our vision is to make sharing, aggregating and accessing catalogs easy and
playful. We like the idea that every rendered catalog is stored on a local hard disk,
that an amateur librarian can choose when to share, and that when she decides to
share, the catalog gets aggregated into a library together with the collections of
other fellow amateur librarians (at https://library.memoryoftheworld.org). For the
purpose of sharing we wrote the Calibre plugin named let’s share books and set up
the related server infrastructure – both of which are easily replicable and
deployable into distributed clones.
Together with Voja Antonić, the legendary inventor of the first eight-bit
computer in Yugoslavia, we also designed and developed a series of book scanners
and used them to digitize hundreds of books focused to Yugoslav humanities such
as the Digital Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016), Catalogue
of Liberated Books (2013), books thrown away from Croatian public libraries
during ideological cleansing of the 1990s Written-off (2015), and the collection of
books selected by the Black Panther Herman Wallace as his dream library for
political education (Memory of the World, 2016b).
In our view, amateur librarians are complementary to professional librarians,
and there is so much to learn and share between each other. Amateur librarians care
about books which are not (yet) digitally curated with curiosity, passion and love;
they dare to disobey in pursuit for the emancipatory vision of the world which is
now under threat. If we, amateur librarians, ever succeed in our pursuits – that
should secure the existing jobs of professional librarians and open up many new
and exciting positions. When knowledge is easily accessed, (re)produced and
shared, there will be so much to follow up upon.
TOWARDS AN ACTIVIST PUBLIC PEDAGOGY

PJ & AK: You organize talks and workshops, publish books, and maintain a major
regional hub for people interested in digital cultures. In Croatia, your names are
almost synonymous with social studies of the digital – worldwide, you are
recognized as regional leaders in the field. Such engagement has a prominent
pedagogical component – arguably, the majority of your work can be interpreted as
public pedagogy. What are the main theoretical underpinnings of your public
pedagogy? How does it work in practice?
MM & TM: Our organization is a cluster of heterogeneous communities and
fields of interest. Therefore, our approaches to public pedagogy hugely vary. In
principle, we subscribe to the idea that all intelligences are equal and that all
epistemology is socially structured. In practice, this means that our activities are
syncretic and inclusive. They run in parallel without falling under the same
umbrella, and they bring together people of varying levels of skill – who bring in
various types of knowledge, and who arrive from various social backgrounds.
Working with hackers, we favour hands-on approach. For a number of years
Marcell has organized weekly Skill Sharing program (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016b) that has started from very basic skills. The bar was incrementally raised to
today’s level of the highly specialized meritocratic community of 1337 hackers. As
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the required skill level got too demanding, some original members left the group –
yet, the community continues to accommodate geeks and freaks. At the other end,
we maintain a theoretically inflected program of talks, lectures and publications.
Here we invite a mix of upcoming theorists and thinkers and some of the most
prominent intellectuals of today such as Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Saskia
Sassen and Robert McChesney. This program creates a larger intellectual context,
and also provides space for our collaborators in various activities.
Our political activism, however, takes an altogether different approach. More
often than not, our campaigns are based on inclusive planning and direct decision
making processes with broad activist groups and the public. However, such
inclusiveness is usually made possible by a campaigning process that allows
articulation of certain ideas in public and popular mobilization. For instance, before
the Right to the City campaign against privatisation of the pedestrian zone in
Zagreb’s Varšavska Street coalesced together (Pravo na grad, 2016), we tactically
used media for more than a year to clarify underlying issues of urban development
and mobilize broad public support. At its peak, this campaign involved no less than
200 activists involved in the direct decision-making process and thousands of
citizens in the streets. Its prerequisite was hard day-to-day work by a small group
of people organized by the important member of our collective Teodor Celakoski.
PJ & AK: Your public pedagogy provides great opportunity for personal
development – for instance, talks organized by the Multimedia Institute have been
instrumental in shaping our educational trajectories. Yet, you often tackle complex
problems and theories, which are often described using complex concepts and
language. Consequently, your public pedagogy is inevitably restricted to those who
already possess considerable educational background. How do you balance the
popular and the elitist aspects of your public pedagogy? Do you intend to try and
reach wider audiences? If so, how would you go about that?
MM & TM: Our cultural work equally consists of more demanding and more
popular activities, which mostly work together in synergy. Our popular Human
Rights Film Festival (2016) reaches thousands of people; yet, its highly selective
programme echoes our (more) theoretical concerns. Our political campaigns are
intended at scalability, too. Demanding and popular activities do not contradict
each other. However, they do require very different approaches and depend on
different contexts and situations. In our experience, a wide public response to a
social cause cannot be simply produced by shaping messages or promoting causes
in ways that are considered popular. The response of the public primarily depends
on a broadly shared understanding, no matter its complexity, that a certain course
of action has an actual capacity to transform a specific situation. Recognizing that
moment, and acting tactfully upon it, is fundamental to building a broad political
process.
This can be illustrated by the aforementioned Custodians.online letter (2015)
that we recently co-authored with a number of our fellow library activists against
the injunction that allows Elsevier to shut down two most important repositories
providing access to scholarly writing: Science Hub and Library Genesis. The letter
is clearly a product of our specific collective work and dynamic. Yet, it clearly
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articulates various aspects of discontent around this impasse in access to
knowledge, so it resonates with a huge number of people around the world and
gives them a clear indication that there are many who disobey the global
distribution of knowledge imposed by the likes of Elsevier.
PJ & AK: Your work is probably best described by John Holloway’s phrase
“in, against, and beyond the state” (Holloway, 2002, 2016). What are the main
challenges of working under such conditions? How do you go about them?
MM & TM: We could situate the Public Library project within the structure of
tactical agency, where one famously moves into the territory of institutional power
of others. While contesting the regulatory power of intellectual property over
access to knowledge, we thus resort to appropriation of universalist missions of
different social institutions – public libraries, UNESCO, museums. Operating in an
economic system premised on unequal distribution of means, they cannot but fail
to deliver on their universalist promise. Thus, while public libraries have a mission
to provide access to knowledge to all members of the society, they are severely
limited in what they can do to accomplish that mission in the digital realm. By
claiming the mission of universal access to knowledge for shadow libraries,
collectively built shared infrastructures redress the current state of affairs outside of
the territory of institutions. Insofar, these acts of commoning can indeed be
regarded as positioned beyond the state (Holloway, 2002, 2016).
Yet, while shadow libraries can complement public libraries, they cannot
replace public libraries. And this shifts the perspective from ‘beyond’ to ‘in and
against’: we all inhabit social institutions which reflect uneven development in and
between societies. Therefore, we cannot simply operate within binaries: powerful
vs. powerless, institutional vs. tactical. Our space of agency is much more complex
and blurry. Institutions and their employees resist imposed limitations, and
understand that their spaces of agency reach beyond institutional limitations.
Accordingly, the Public Library project enjoys strong and unequivocal complicity
of art institutions, schools and libraries for its causes and activities. While
collectively building practices that abolish the present state of affairs and reclaim
the dream of universal access to knowledge, we rearticulate the vision of a
radically equal society equipped with institutions that can do justice to that
“infinite demand” (Critchley, 2013). We are collectively pursuing this collective
dream – in words of our friend and our continuing inspiration Aaron Swartz: “With
enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”
(Swartz, 2008).

Medak, Mars & WHW
Public Library
2015


Public Library

may • 2015
price 50 kn

This publication is realized along with the exhibition
Public Library • 27/5 –13/06 2015 • Gallery Nova • Zagreb
Izdavači / Publishers
Editors
Tomislav Medak • Marcell Mars •
What, How & for Whom / WHW
ISBN 978-953-55951-3-7 [Što, kako i za koga/WHW]
ISBN 978-953-7372-27-9 [Multimedijalni institut]
A Cip catalog record for this book is available from the
National and University Library in Zagreb under 000907085

With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the
European Union

ZAGREB • ¶ May • 2015

Public Library

1.
Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug
& Tomislav Medak

75

Public Library (essay)
2.
Paul Otlet

87

Transformations in the Bibliographical
Apparatus of the Sciences
(Repertory — Classification — Office
of Documentation)
3.
McKenzie Wark

111

Metadata Punk
4.
Tomislav Medak
The Future After the Library
UbuWeb and Monoskop’s Radical Gestures

121

Marcell Mars,
Manar Zarroug
& Tomislav Medak

Public library (essay)

In What Was Revolutionary about the French Revolution? 01 Robert Darnton considers how a complete collapse of the social order (when absolutely
everything — all social values — is turned upside
down) would look. Such trauma happens often in
the life of individuals but only rarely on the level
of an entire society.
In 1789 the French had to confront the collapse of
a whole social order—the world that they defined
retrospectively as the Ancien Régime — and to find
some new order in the chaos surrounding them.
They experienced reality as something that could
be destroyed and reconstructed, and they faced
seemingly limitless possibilities, both for good and
evil, for raising a utopia and for falling back into
tyranny.02
The revolution bootstraps itself.
01 Robert H. Darnton, What Was Revolutionary about the
French Revolution? (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press,
1996), 6.
02 Ibid.

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In the dictionaries of the time, the word revolution was said to derive from the verb to revolve and
was defined as “the return of the planet or a star to
the same point from which it parted.” 03 French political vocabulary spread no further than the narrow
circle of the feudal elite in Versailles. The citizens,
revolutionaries, had to invent new words, concepts
… an entire new language in order to describe the
revolution that had taken place.
They began with the vocabulary of time and space.
In the French revolutionary calendar used from 1793
until 1805, time started on 1 Vendémiaire, Year 1, a
date which marked the abolition of the old monarchy on (the Gregorian equivalent) 22 September
1792. With a decree in 1795, the metric system was
adopted. As with the adoption of the new calendar,
this was an attempt to organize space in a rational
and natural way. Gram became a unit of mass.
In Paris, 1,400 streets were given new names.
Every reminder of the tyranny of the monarchy
was erased. The revolutionaries even changed their
names and surnames. Le Roy or Leveque, commonly
used until then, were changed to Le Loi or Liberté.
To address someone, out of respect, with vous was
forbidden by a resolution passed on 24 Brumaire,
Year 2. Vous was replaced with tu. People are equal.
The watchwords Liberté, égalité, fraternité (freedom, equality, brotherhood)04 were built through
03 Ibid.
04 Slogan of the French Republic, France.fr, n.d.,
http://www.france.fr/en/institutions-and-values/slogan
-french-republic.html.

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literacy, new epistemologies, classifications, declarations, standards, reason, and rationality. What first
comes to mind about the revolution will never again
be the return of a planet or a star to the same point
from which it departed. Revolution bootstrapped,
revolved, and hermeneutically circularized itself.
Melvil Dewey was born in the state of New York in
1851.05 His thirst for knowledge was found its satisfaction in libraries. His knowledge about how to
gain knowledge was developed by studying libraries.
Grouping books on library shelves according to the
color of the covers, the size and thickness of the spine,
or by title or author’s name did not satisfy Dewey’s
intention to develop appropriate new epistemologies in the service of the production of knowledge
about knowledge. At the age of twenty-four, he had
already published the first of nineteen editions of
A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing
and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library,06 the classification system that still bears its
author’s name: the Dewey Decimal System. Dewey
had a dream: for his twenty-first birthday he had
announced, “My World Work [will be] Free Schools
and Free Libraries for every soul.”07
05 Richard F. Snow, “Melvil Dewey”, American Heritage 32,
no. 1 (December 1980),
http://www.americanheritage.com/content/melvil-dewey.
06 Melvil Dewey, A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a
Library (1876), Project Gutenberg e-book 12513 (2004),
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12513/12513-h/12513-h.htm.
07 Snow, “Melvil Dewey”.

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His dream came true. Public Library is an entry
in the catalog of History where a fantastic decimal08
describes a category of phenomenon that—together
with free public education, a free public healthcare,
the scientific method, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, Wikipedia, and free software, among
others—we, the people, are most proud of.
The public library is a part of these invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they
begin to disappear. A utopian dream—about the
place from which every human being will have access to every piece of available knowledge that can
be collected—looked impossible for a long time,
until the egalitarian impetus of social revolutions,
the Enlightment idea of universality of knowledge,
and the expcetional suspenssion of the comercial
barriers to access to knowledge made it possible.
The internet has, as in many other situations, completely changed our expectations and imagination
about what is possible. The dream of a catalogue
of the world — a universal approach to all available
knowledge for every member of society — became
realizable. A question merely of the meeting of
curves on a graph: the point at which the line of
global distribution of personal computers meets
that of the critical mass of people with access to
the internet. Today nobody lacks the imagination
necessary to see public libraries as part of a global infrastructure of universal access to knowledge
for literally every member of society. However, the
08 “Dewey Decimal Classification: 001.”, Dewey.info, 27 October 2014, http://dewey.info/class/001/2009-08/about.en.

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emergence and development of the internet is taking place precisely at the point at which an institutional crisis—one with traumatic and inconceivable
consequences—has also begun.
The internet is a new challenge, creating experiences commonly proferred as ‘revolutionary’. Yet, a
true revolution of the internet is the universal access
to all knowledge that it makes possible. However,
unlike the new epistemologies developed during
the French revolution the tendency is to keep the
‘old regime’ (of intellectual property rights, market
concentration and control of access). The new possibilities for classification, development of languages,
invention of epistemologies which the internet poses,
and which might launch off into new orbits from
existing classification systems, are being suppressed.
In fact, the reactionary forces of the ‘old regime’
are staging a ‘Thermidor’ to suppress the public libraries from pursuing their mission. Today public
libraries cannot acquire, cannot even buy digital
books from the world’s largest publishers.09 The
small amount of e-books that they were able to acquire already they must destroy after only twenty-six
lendings.10 Libraries and the principle of universal
09 “American Library Association Open Letter to Publishers on
E-Book Library Lending”, Digital Book World, 24 September
2012, http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/americanlibrary-association-open-letter-to-publishers-on-e-booklibrary-lending/.
10 Jeremy Greenfield, “What Is Going On with Library E-Book
Lending?”, Forbes, 22 June 2012, http://www.forbes.com/
sites/jeremygreenfield/2012/06/22/what-is-going-on-withlibrary-e-book-lending/.

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access to all existing knowledge that they embody
are losing, in every possible way, the battle with a
market dominated by new players such as Amazon.
com, Google, and Apple.
In 2012, Canada’s Conservative Party–led government cut financial support for Libraries and
Archives Canada (LAC) by Can$9.6 million, which
resulted in the loss of 400 archivist and librarian
jobs, the shutting down of some of LAC’s internet
pages, and the cancellation of the further purchase
of new books.11 In only three years, from 2010 to
2012, some 10 percent of public libraries were closed
in Great Britain.12
The commodification of knowledge, education,
and schooling (which are the consequences of a
globally harmonized, restrictive legal regime for intellectual property) with neoliberal austerity politics
curtails the possibilities of adapting to new sociotechnological conditions, let alone further development, innovation, or even basic maintenance of
public libraries’ infrastructure.
Public libraries are an endangered institution,
doomed to extinction.
Petit bourgeois denial prevents society from confronting this disturbing insight. As in many other
fields, the only way out offered is innovative mar11 Aideen Doran, “Free Libraries for Every Soul: Dreaming
of the Online Library”, The Bear, March 2014, http://www.
thebear-review.com/#!free-libraries-for-every-soul/c153g.
12 Alison Flood, “UK Lost More than 200 Libraries in 2012”,
The Guardian, 10 December 2012, http://www.theguardian.
com/books/2012/dec/10/uk-lost-200-libraries-2012.

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ket-based entrepreneurship. Some have even suggested that the public library should become an
open software platform on top of which creative
developers can build app stores13 or Internet cafés
for the poorest, ensuring that they are only a click
away from the Amazon.com catalog or the Google
search bar. But these proposals overlook, perhaps
deliberately, the fundamental principles of access
upon which the idea of the public library was built.
Those who are well-meaning, intelligent, and
tactfull will try to remind the public of all the many
sides of the phenomenon that the public library is:
major community center, service for the vulnerable,
center of literacy, informal and lifelong learning; a
place where hobbyists, enthusiasts, old and young
meet and share knowledge and skills.14 Fascinating. Unfortunately, for purely tactical reasons, this
reminder to the public does not always contain an
explanation of how these varied effects arise out of
the foundational idea of a public library: universal
access to knowledge for each member of the society produces knowledge, produces knowledge about
knowledge, produces knowledge about knowledge
transfer: the public library produces sociability.
The public library does not need the sort of creative crisis management that wants to propose what
13 David Weinberger, “Library as Platform”, Library Journal,
4 September 2012, http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/09/
future-of-libraries/by-david-weinberger/.
14 Shannon Mattern, “Library as Infrastructure”, Design
Observer, 9 June 2014, http://places.designobserver.com/
entryprint.html?entry=38488.

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the library should be transformed into once our society, obsessed with market logic, has made it impossible for the library to perform its main mission. Such
proposals, if they do not insist on universal access
to knowledge for all members, are Trojan horses for
the silent but galloping disappearance of the public
library from the historical stage. Sociability—produced by public libraries, with all the richness of its
various appearances—will be best preserved if we
manage to fight for the values upon which we have
built the public library: universal access to knowledge for each member of our society.
Freedom, equality, and brotherhood need brave librarians practicing civil disobedience.
Library Genesis, aaaaarg.org, Monoskop, UbuWeb
are all examples of fragile knowledge infrastructures
built and maintained by brave librarians practicing
civil disobedience which the world of researchers
in the humanities rely on. These projects are re-inventing the public library in the gap left by today’s
institutions in crisis.
Library Genesis15 is an online repository with over
a million books and is the first project in history to
offer everyone on the Internet free download of its
entire book collection (as of this writing, about fifteen terabytes of data), together with the all metadata
(MySQL dump) and PHP/HTML/Java Script code
for webpages. The most popular earlier reposito15 See http://libgen.org/.

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ries, such as Gigapedia (later Library.nu), handled
their upload and maintenance costs by selling advertising space to the pornographic and gambling
industries. Legal action was initiated against them,
and they were closed.16 News of the termination of
Gigapedia/Library.nu strongly resonated among
academics and book enthusiasts circles and was
even noted in the mainstream Internet media, just
like other major world events. The decision by Library Genesis to share its resources has resulted
in a network of identical sites (so-called mirrors)
through the development of an entire range of Net
services of metadata exchange and catalog maintenance, thus ensuring an exceptionally resistant
survival architecture.
aaaaarg.org, started by the artist Sean Dockray, is
an online repository with over 50,000 books and
texts. A community of enthusiastic researchers from
critical theory, contemporary art, philosophy, architecture, and other fields in the humanities maintains,
catalogs, annotates, and initiates discussions around
it. It also as a courseware extension to the self-organized education platform The Public School.17
16 Andrew Losowsky, “Library.nu, Book Downloading Site,
Targeted in Injunctions Requested by 17 Publishers,” Huffington Post, 15 February 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2012/02/15/librarynu-book-downloading-injunction_
n_1280383.html.
17 “The Public School”, The Public School, n.d.,
https://www.thepublicschool.org/.

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UbuWeb18 is the most significant and largest online
archive of avant-garde art; it was initiated and is lead
by conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith. UbuWeb,
although still informal, has grown into a relevant
and recognized critical institution of contemporary
art. Artists want to see their work in its catalog and
thus agree to a relationship with UbuWeb that has
no formal contractual obligations.
Monoskop is a wiki for the arts, culture, and media
technology, with a special focus on the avant-garde,
conceptual, and media arts of Eastern and Central
Europe; it was launched by Dušan Barok and others.
In the form of a blog Dušan uploads to Monoskop.
org/log an online catalog of curated titles (at the
moment numbering around 3,000), and, as with
UbuWeb, it is becoming more and more relevant
as an online resource.
Library Genesis, aaaaarg.org, Kenneth Goldsmith,
and Dušan Barok show us that the future of the
public library does not need crisis management,
venture capital, start-up incubators, or outsourcing but simply the freedom to continue extending
the dreams of Melvil Dewey, Paul Otlet19 and other
visionary librarians, just as it did before the emergence of the internet.

18 See http://ubu.com/.
19 “Paul Otlet”, Wikipedia, 27 October 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet.

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With the emergence of the internet and software
tools such as Calibre and “[let’s share books],”20 librarianship has been given an opportunity, similar to astronomy and the project SETI@home21, to
include thousands of amateur librarians who will,
together with the experts, build a distributed peerto-peer network to care for the catalog of available
knowledge, because
a public library is:
— free access to books for every member of society
— library catalog
— librarian
With books ready to be shared, meticulously
cataloged, everyone is a librarian.
When everyone is librarian, library is
everywhere.22
❧

20 “Tools”, Memory of the World, n.d.,
https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/tools/.
21 See http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/.
22 “End-to-End Catalog”, Memory of the World, 26 November 2012,
https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/end-to-end-catalog/.

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Paul Otlet

Transformations
in the Bibliographical Apparatus
of the Sciences [1]
Repertory — Classification — Office
of Documentation
1. Because of its length, its extension to all countries,
the profound harm that it has created in everyone’s
life, the War has had, and will continue to have, repercussions for scientific productivity. The hour for
the revision of the old order is about to strike. Forced
by the need for economies of men and money, and
by the necessity of greater productivity in order to
hold out against all the competition, we are going to
have to introduce reforms into each of the branches
of the organisation of science: scientific research, the
preservation of its results, and their wide diffusion.
Everything happens simultaneously and the distinctions that we will introduce here are only to
facilitate our thinking. Always adjacent areas, or
even those that are very distant, exert an influence
on each other. This is why we should recognize the
impetus, growing each day even greater in the organisation of science, of the three great trends of
our times: the power of associations, technological
progress and the democratic orientation of institutions. We would like here to draw attention to some
of their consequences for the book in its capacity

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as an instrument for recording what has been discovered and as a necessary means for stimulating
new discoveries.
The Book, the Library in which it is preserved,
and the Catalogue which lists it, have seemed for
a long time as if they had achieved their heights of
perfection or at least were so satisfactory that serious
changes need not be contemplated. This may have
been so up to the end of the last century. But for a
score of years great changes have been occurring
before our very eyes. The increasing production of
books and periodicals has revealed the inadequacy of
older methods. The increasing internationalisation
of science has required workers to extend the range
of their bibliographic investigations. As a result, a
movement has occurred in all countries, especially
Germany, the United States and England, for the
expansion and improvement of libraries and for
an increase in their numbers. Publishers have been
searching for new, more flexible, better-illustrated,
and cheaper forms of publication that are better-coordinated with each other. Cataloguing enterprises
on a vast scale have been carried out, such as the
International Catalogue of Scientific Literature and
the Universal Bibliographic Repertory. [2]
Three facts, three ideas, especially merit study
for they represent something really new which in
the future can give us direction in this area. They
are: The Repertory, Classification and the Office of
Documentation.
•••

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2. The Repertory, like the book, has gradually been
increasing in size, and improvements in it suggest
the emergence of something new which will radically modify our traditional ideas.
From the point of view of form, a book can be
defined as a group of pages cut to the same format
and gathered together in such a way as to form a
whole. It was not always so. For a long time the
Book was a roll, a volumen. The substances which
then took the place of paper — papyrus and parchment — were written on continuously from beginning to end. Reading required unrolling. This was
certainly not very practical for the consultation of
particular passages or for writing on the verso. The
codex, which was introduced in the first centuries of
the modern era and which is the basis of our present
book, removed these inconveniences. But its faults
are numerous. It constitutes something completed,
finished, not susceptible of addition. The Periodical
with its successive issues has given science a continuous means of concentrating its results. But, in
its turn, the collections that it forms runs into the
obstacle of disorder. It is impossible to link similar
or connected items; they are added to one another
pell-mell, and research requires handling great masses of heavy paper. Of course indexes are a help and
have led to progress — subject indexes, sometimes
arranged systematically, sometimes analytically,
and indexes of names of persons and places. These
annual indexes are preceded by monthly abstracts
and are followed by general indexes cumulated every
five, ten or twenty-five years. This is progress, but
the Repertory constitutes much greater progress.

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The aim of the Repertory is to detach what the
book amalgamates, to reduce all that is complex to
its elements and to devote a page to each. Pages, here,
are leaves or cards according to the format adopted.
This is the “monographic” principle pushed to its
ultimate conclusion. No more binding or, if it continues to exist, it will become movable, that is to
say, at any moment the cards held fast by a pin or a
connecting rod or any other method of conjunction
can be released. New cards can then be intercalated,
replacing old ones, and a new arrangement made.
The Repertory was born of the Catalogue. In
such a work, the necessity for intercalations was
clear. Nor was there any doubt as to the unitary or
monographic notion: one work, one title; one title,
one card. As a result, registers which listed the same
collections of books for each library but which had
constantly to be re-done as the collections expanded,
have gradually been discarded. This was practical
and justified by experience. But upon reflection one
wonders whether the new techniques might not be
more generally applied.
What is a book, in fact, if not a single continuous line which has initially been cut to the length
of a page and then cut again to the size of a justified
line? Now, this cutting up, this division, is purely
mechanical; it does not correspond to any division
of ideas. The Repertory provides a practical means
of physically dividing the book according to the
intellectual division of ideas.
Thus, the manuscript library catalogue on cards
has been quickly followed by catalogues printed on
cards (American Library Bureau, the Catalogue or

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the Library of Congress in Washington) [3]; then by
bibliographies printed on cards (International Institute of Bibliography, Concilium Bibliographicum)
[4]; next, indices of species have been published on
cards (Index Speciorum) [5]. We have moved from
the small card to the large card, the leaf, and have
witnessed compendia abandoning the old form for
the new (Jurisclasseur, or legal digests in card form).
Even the idea of the encyclopedia has taken this
form (Nelson’s Perpetual Cyclopedia [6]).
Theoretically and technically, we now have in
the Repertory a new instrument for analytically or
monographically recording data, ideas, information. The system has been improved by divisionary cards of various shapes and colours, placed in
such a way that they express externally the outline
of the classification being used and reduce search
time to a minimum. It has been improved further
by the possibility of using, by cutting and pasting,
materials that have been printed on large leaves or
even books that have been published without any
thought of repertories. Two copies, the first providing the recto, the second the verso, can supply
all that is necessary. One has gone even further still
and, from the example of statistical machines like
those in use at the Census of Washington (sic) [7],
extrapolated the principle of “selection machines”
which perform mechanical searches in enormous
masses of materials, the machines retaining from
the thousands of cards processed by them only those
related to the question asked.
•••

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3. But such a development, like the Repertory before it, presupposes a classification. This leads us to
examine the second practical idea that is bringing
about the transformation of the book.
Classification plays an enormous role in scientific thought. If one could say that a science was a
well-made language, one could equally assert that
it is a completed classification. Science is made up
of verified facts which are organised in a structure
of systems, hypotheses, theories, laws. If there is
a certain order in things, it is necessary to have it
also in science which reflects and explains nature.
That is why, since the time of Greek thought until
the present, constant efforts have been made to improve classification. These have taken three principal directions: classification studied as an activity
of the mind; the general classification and sequence
of the sciences; the systematization appropriate to
each discipline. The idea of order, class, genus and
species has been studied since Aristotle, in passing
by Porphyrus, by the scholastic philosophers and by
modern logicians. The classification of knowledge
goes back to the Greeks and owes much to the contributions of Bacon and the Renaissance. It was posed
as a distinct and separate problem by D’Alembert
and the Encyclopédie, and by Ampère, Comte, and
Spencer. The recent work of Manouvrier, Durand
de Cros, Goblot, Naville, de la Grasserie, has focussed on various aspects of it. [8] As to systematics,
one can say that this has become the very basis of
the organisation of knowledge as a body of science.
When one has demonstrated the existence of 28 million stars, a million chemical compounds, 300,000

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vegetable species, 200,000 animal species, etc., it is
necessary to have a means, an Ariadne’s thread, of
finding one’s way through the labyrinth formed by
all these objects of study. Because there are sciences of beings as well as sciences of phenomena, and
because they intersect with each other as we better
understand the whole of reality, it is necessary that
this means be used to retrieve both. The state of development of a science is reflected at any given time
by its systematics, just as the general classification
of the sciences reflects the state of development of
the encyclopedia, of the philosophy of knowledge.
The need has been felt, however, for a practical
instrument of classification. The classifications of
which we have just spoken are constantly changing, at least in their detail if not in broad outline. In
practice, such instability, such variability which is
dependent on the moment, on schools of thought
and individuals, is not acceptable. Just as the Repertory had its origin in the catalogue, so practical
classification originated in the Library. Books represent knowledge and it is necessary to arrange them
in collections. Schemes for this have been devised
since the Middle Ages. The elaboration of grand
systems occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries
and some new ones were added in the 19th century. But when bibliography began to emerge as an
autonomous field of study, it soon began to develop
along the lines of the catalogue of an ideal library
comprising the totality of what had been published.
From this to drawing on library classifications was
but a step, and it was taken under certain conditions
which must be stressed.

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Up to the present time, 170 different classifications
have been identified. Now, no cooperation is possible if everyone stays shut up in his own system. It
has been necessary, therefore, to choose a universal
classification and to recommend it as such in the
same way that the French Convention recognized
the necessity of a universal system of weights and
measures. In 1895 the first International Conference
of Bibliography chose the Decimal Classification
and adopted a complete plan for its development. In
1904, the edition of the expanded tables appeared. A
new edition was being prepared when the war broke
out Brussels, headquarters of the International Institute of Bibliography, which was doing this work,
was part of the invaded territory.
In its latest state, the Decimal Classification has
become an instrument of great precision which
can meet many needs. The printed tables contain
33,000 divisions and they have an alphabetical index consisting of about 38,000 words. Learning is
here represented in its entire sweep: the encyclopedia of knowledge. Its principle is very simple. The
empiricism of an alphabetical classification by subject-heading cannot meet the need for organising
and systematizing knowledge. There is scattering;
there is also the difficulty of dealing with the complex expressions which one finds in the modern terminology of disciplines like medicine, technology,
and the social sciences. Above all, it is impossible
to achieve any international cooperation on such
a national basis as language. The Decimal Classification is a vast systematization of knowledge, “the
table of contents of the tables of contents” of all

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treatises. But, as it would be impossible to find a
particular subject’s relative place by reference to
another subject, a system of numbering is needed.
This is decimal, which an example will make clear.
Optical Physiology would be classified thus:
5 th Class
3rd Group
5th Division
7th Sub-division

Natural Sciences
Physics
Optics
Optical Physiology

or 535.7
This number 535.7 is called decimal because all
knowledge is taken as one of which each science is
a fraction and each individual subject is a decimal
subdivided to a lesser or greater degree. For the sake
of abbreviation, the zero of the complete number,
which would be 0.5357, has been suppressed because
the zero would be repeated in front of each number.
The numbers 5, 3, 5, 7 (which one could call five hundred and thirty-five point seven and which could
be arranged in blocks of three as for the telephone,
or in groups of twos) form a single number when
the implied words, “class, group, division and subdivision,” are uttered.
The classification is also called decimal because
all subjects are divided into ten classes, then each
of these into at least ten groups, and each group
into at least ten divisions. All that is needed for the
number 535.7 always to have the same meaning is
to translate the tables into all languages. All that is
needed to deal with future scientific developments

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in optical physiology in all of its ramifications is to
subdivide this number by further decimal numbers
corresponding to the subdivisions of the subject
Finally, all that is needed to ensure that any document or item pertaining to optical physiology finds
its place within the sum total of scientific subjects
is to write this number on it In the alphabetic index
to the tables references are made from each word
to the classification number just as the index of a
book refers to page numbers.
This first remarkable principle of the decimal
classification is generally understood. Its second,
which has been introduced more recently, is less
well known: the combination of various classification numbers whenever there is some utility in expressing a compound or complex heading. In the
social sciences, statistics is 31 and salaries, 331.2. By
a convention these numbers can be joined by the
simple sign : and one may write 31:331.2 statistics
of salaries.01
This indicates a general relationship, but a subject also has its place in space and time. The subject
may be salaries in France limited to a period such as
the 18th century (that is to say, from 1700 to 1799).
01 The first ten divisions are: 0 Generalities, 1 Philosophy, 2
Religion, 3 Social Sciences, 4 Philology, Language, 5 Pure
Sciences, 6 Applied Science, Medicine, 7 Fine Arts, 8 Literature, 9 History and Geography. The Index number 31 is
derived from: 3rd class social sciences, 1st group statistics. The
Index number 331.2 is derived from 3rd class social sciences,
3rd group political economy, 1st division topics about work,
2nd subdivision salaries.

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The sign that characterises division by place being
the parenthesis and that by time quotation marks
or double parentheses, one can write:
33:331.2 (44) «17» statistics — of salaries — in
France — in the 17th century
or ten figures and three signs to indicate, in terms
of the universe of knowledge, four subordinated
headings comprising 42 letters. And all of these
numbers are reversible and can be used for geographic or chronologic classification as well as for
subject classification:
(44) 31:331.2 «17»
France — Statistics — Salaries — 17th Century
«17» (44) 31:331.2
17th Century — France — Statistics — Salaries
The subdivisions of relation and location explained
here, are completed by documentary subdivisions
for the form and the language of the document (for
example, periodical, in Italian), and by functional
subdivisions (for example, in zoology all the divisions by species of animal being subdivided by biological aspects). It follows by virtue of the law of
permutations and combinations that the present
tables of the classification permit the formulation
at will of millions of classification numbers. Just as
arithmetic does not give us all the numbers readymade but rather a means of forming them as we
need them, so the classification gives us the means

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of creating classification numbers insofar as we have
compound headings that must be translated into a
notation of numbers.
Like chemistry, mathematics and music, bibliography thus has its own extremely simple notations:
numbers. Immediately and without confusion, it
allows us to find a place for each idea, for each thing
and consequently for each book, article, or document and even for each part of a book or document
Thus it allows us to take our bearings in the midst
of the sources of knowledge, just as the system of
geographic coordinates allows us to take our bearings on land or sea.
One may well imagine the usefulness of such a
classification to the Repertory. It has rid us of the
difficulty of not having continuous pagination. Cards
to be intercalated can be placed according to their
class number and the numbering is that of tables
drawn up in advance, once and for all, and maintained with an unvarying meaning. As the classification has a very general use, it constitutes a true
documentary classification which can be used in
various kinds of repertories: bibliographic repertories; catalogue-like repertories of objects, persons,
phenomena; and documentary repertories of files
made up of written or printed materials of all kinds.
The possibility can be envisaged of encyclopedic
repertories in which are registered and integrated
the diverse data of a scientific field and which draw
for this purpose on materials published in periodicals. Let each article, each report, each item of news
henceforth carry a classification number and, automatically, by clipping, encyclopedias on cards can

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be created in which all the results of international
scientific cooperation are brought together at the
same number. This constitutes a profound change
in the technology of the Book, since the repertory
thus formed is simultaneously a constantly up-dated book and a cooperative book in which are found
printed elements produced in all locations.
•••
4. If we can realize the third idea, the Office of Documentation, then reform will be complete. Such an
office is the old library, but adapted to a new function. Hitherto the library has been a museum of
books. Works were preserved in libraries because
they were precious objects. Librarians were keepers.
Such establishments were not organised primarily
for the use of documents. Moreover, their outmoded
regulations if they did not exclude the most modern
forms of publication at least did not admit them.
They have poor collections of journals; collections
of newspapers are nearly nonexistent; photographs,
films, phonograph discs have no place in them, nor
do film negatives, microscopic slides and many other “documents.” The subject catalogue is considered
secondary in the library so long as there is a good
register for administrative purposes. Thus there is
little possibility of developing repertories in the
library, that is to say of taking publications to pieces and redistributing them in a more directly and
quickly accessible form. For want of personnel to
arrange them, there has not even been a place for
the cards that are received already printed.

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The Office of Documentation, on the contrary, is
conceived of in such a way as to achieve all that is
lacking in the library. Collections of books are the
necessary basis for it, but books, far from being
considered as finished products, are simply materials which must be developed more fully. This
development consists in establishing the connections each individual book has with all of the other
books and forming from them all what might be
called The Universal Book. It is for this that we use
repertories: bibliographic repertories; repertories of
documentary dossiers gathering pamphlets and extracts together by subject; catalogues; chronological
repertories of facts or alphabetical ones of names;
encyclopedic repertories of scientific data, of laws,
of patents, of physical and technical constants, of
statistics, etc. All of these repertories will be set up
according to the method described above and arranged by the same universal classification. As soon
as an organisation to contain these repertories is
created, the Office of Documentation, one may be
sure that what happened to the book when libraries
first opened — scientific publication was regularised
and intensified — will happen to them. Then there
will be good reason for producing in bibliographies,
catalogues, and above all in books and periodicals
themselves, the rational changes which technology and the creative imagination suggest. What is
still an exception today will be common tomorrow.
New possibilities will exist for cooperative work
and for the more effective organisation of science.
•••

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5. Repertory, Classification, Office of Documentation are therefore the three related elements of a
single reform in our methods of registering scientific discoveries and making them available to the
greatest number of people. Already one must speak
less of experiments and uncertain trials than of the
beginning of serious achievement. The International Institute of Bibliography in Brussels constitutes
a vast intellectual cooperative whose members are
becoming more numerous each day. Associations,
scientific establishments, periodical publications,
scientific and technical workers of every kind are
affiliating with it. Its repertories contain millions of
cards. There are sections in several countries02 . But
this was before the War. Since its outbreak, a movement in France, England and the United States has
been emerging everywhere to improve the organisation of the Book. The Office of Documentation has
been suggested as the solution for the requirements
that have been discussed.
It is important that the world of science and
technology should support this movement and
above all that it should endeavour to apply the new
methods to the works which it will be necessary to
re-organise. Among the most important of these is
the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature,
that fine and great work begun at the initiative of the
Royal Society of London. Until now, this work has
02 In France, the Bureau Bibliographique de Paris and great
associations such as the Société pour l’encouragement de
l’industrie nationale, l’Association pour l’avancement des
sciences, etc., are affiliated with it.

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been carried on without relation to other works of
the same kind: it has not recognised the value of a
card repertory or a universal classification. It must
recognise them in the future.03 ❧

03 See Paul Otlet, “La Documentation et I’information au service de I’industrie”, Bulletin de la Société d’encouragement
de l’industrie nationale, June 1917. — La Documentation au
service de l’invention. Euréka, October 1917. — L’Institut
International de Bibliographie, Bibliographie de la France,
21 December 1917. — La Réorganisation du Catalogue international de la littérature scientifique. Revue générale des
sciences, IS February 1918. The publications of the Institute,
especially the expanded tables of the Decimal Classification,
have been deposited at the Bureau Bibliographique de Paris,
44 rue de Rennes at the apartments of the Société de l’encouragement. — See also the report presented by General
Sebert (9] to the Congrès du Génie civil, in March 1918 and
whose conclusions about the creation in Paris of a National
Office of Technical Documentation have been adopted.

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Editor’s Notes
[1] “Transformations operées dans l’appareil bibliographique
des sciences,” Revue scientifique 58 (1918): 236-241.
[2] The International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, an enormous work, was compiled by a Central Bureau under the
sponsorship of the Royal Society from material sent in from
Regional Bureaus around the world. It was published annually beginning in 1902 in 17 parts each corresponding to
a major subject division and comprising one or more volumes. Publication was effectively suspended in 1914. By the
time war broke out, the Universal Bibliographic Repertory
contained over 11 million entries.
[3] For card publication by the Library Bureau and Library of
Congress, see Edith Scott, “The Evolution of Bibliographic
Systems in the United States, 1876–1945” and Editor’s Note
36 to the second paper and Note 5 to the seventh paper in
International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected Essays of Paul Otlet, translated and edited by
W. Boyd Rayward. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990: 148–156.
[4] Otlet refers to the Concilium Bibliographicum also in Paper
No. 7, “The Reform of National Bibliographies...” in International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected
Essays of Paul Otlet. See also Editor’s Note 5 in that paper
for the major bibliographies published by the Concilium
Bibliographicum.
[5] A possible example of what Otlet is referring to here is the
Gray Herbarium Index. This was “planned to provide cards
for all the names of vascular plant taxa attributable to the

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Western Hemisphere beginning with the literature of 1886”
(Gray Herbarium Index, Preface, p. iii). Under its first compiler, 20 instalments consisting in all of 28,000 cards were
issued between 1894 and 1903. It has been continued after
that time and was for many years “issued quarterly at the
rate of about 4,000 cards per year.” At the time the cards
were reproduced in a printed catalogue by G. K. Hall in 1968,
there were 85 subscribers to the card sets.
[6] Nelson’s Perpetual Loose-Leaf Encylcopedia was a popular,
12-volume work which went through many editions, its
principle being set down at the beginning of the century.
It was published in binders and the publisher undertook to
supply a certain number of pages of revisions (or renewals)
semi-annually after each edition, the first of which appeared
in 1905. An interesting reference presumably to this work
occurs in a notice, “An Encylcopedia on the Card-Index System,” in the Scientific American 109 (1913): 213. The Berlin
Correspondent of the journal reports a proposal made in
Berlin which contains “an idea, in a sense ... already carried
out in an American loose-leaf encyclopedia, the publishers
of which supply new pages to take the place of those that
are obsolete” (Nelsons, an English firm, set up a New York
branch in 1896. Publication in the U.S. of works to be widely
circulated there was a requirement of the copyright law.)
The reporter observes that the principle suggested “affords
a means of recording all facts at present known as well as
those to be discovered in the future, with the same safety
and ease as though they were registered in our memory, by
providing a universal encyclopedia, incessantly keeping
abreast of the state of human knowledge.” The “bookish”
form of conventional encyclopedias acts against its future
success. “In the case of a mere storehouse of facts the in-

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finitely more mobile form of the card index should however
be adopted, possibly,” the author goes on making a most interesting reference, “in conjunction with Dr. Goldschmidt’s
Microphotographic Library System.” The need for a central
institute, the nature of its work, the advantages of the work
so organised are described in language that is reminiscent
of that of Paul Otlet (see also the papers of Goldschmidt
and Otlet translated in International Organisation and
Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected Essays of Paul Otlet).
[7] These machines were derived from Herman Hollerith’s
punched cards and tabulating machines. Hollerith had
introduced them under contract into the U.S. Bureau of
the Census for the 1890 census. This equipment was later
modified and developed by the Bureau. Hollerith, his invention and his business connections lie at the roots of the
present IBM company. The equipment and its uses in the
census from 1890 to 1910 are briefly described in John H.
Blodgett and Claire K. Schultz, “Herman Hollerith: Data
Processing Pioneer,” American Documentation 20 (1969):
221-226. As they observe, suggesting the accuracy of Otlet’s
extrapolation, “his was not simply a calculating machine,
it performed selective sorting, an operation basic to all information retrieval.”
[8] The history of the classification of knowledge has been treated
in English in detail by E.C. Richardson in his Classification
Theoretical and Practical, the first edition of which appeared
in 1901 and was followed by editions in 1912 and 1930. A
different treatment is given in Robert Flint’s Philosophy as
Scientia Scientarium: a History of the Classification of the
Sciences which appeared in 1904. Neither of these works
deal with Manouvrier, a French anthropologist, or Durand

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de Cros. Joseph-Pierre Durand, sometimes called Durand
de Cros after his birth place, was a French physiologist and
philosopher who died in 1900. In his Traité de documentation,
in the context of his discussion of classification, Otlet refers
to an Essai de taxonomie by Durand published by Alcan. It
seems that this is an error for Aperçus de taxonomie (Alcan,
1899).
[9] General Hippolyte Sebert was President of the Association française pour l’avancement des sciences, and the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale. He had
been active in the foundation of the Bureau bibliographique
de Paris. For other biographical information about him see
Editor’s Note 9 to Paper no 17, “Henri La Fontaine”, in International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge;
Selected Essays of Paul Otlet.

English translation of the Paul Otlet’s text published with the
permission of W. Boyd Rayward. The translation was originally
published as Paul Otlet, “Transformations in the Bibliographical
Apparatus of the Sciences: Repertory–Classification–Office of
Documentation”, in International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected Essays of Paul Otlet, translated and
edited by W. Boyd Rayward, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990: 148–156.

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108

public library

http://aaaaarg.org/

109

McKenzie Wark

Metadata Punk

So we won the battle but lost the war. By “we”, I
mean those avant-gardes of the late twentieth century whose mission was to free information from the
property form. It was always a project with certain
nuances and inconsistencies, but over-all it succeeded beyond almost anybody’s wildest dreams. Like
many dreams, it turned into a nightmare in the end,
the one from which we are now trying to awake.
The place to start is with what the situationists
called détournement. The idea was to abolish the
property form in art by taking all of past art and
culture as a commons from which to copy and correct. We see this at work in Guy Debord’s texts and
films. They do not quote from past works, as to do
so acknowledges their value and their ownership.
The elements of détournement are nothing special.
They are raw materials for constructing theories,
narratives, affects of a subjectivity no longer bound
by the property form.
Such a project was recuperated soon enough
back into the art world as “appropriation.” Richard
Prince is the dialectical negation of Guy Debord,

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in that appropriation values both the original fragment and contributes not to a subjectivity outside of
property but rather makes a career as an art world
star for the appropriating artist. Of such dreams is
mediocrity made.
If there was a more promising continuation of
détournement it had little to do with the art world.
Détournement became a social movement in all but
name. Crucially, it involved an advance in tools,
from Napster to Bitorrent and beyond. It enabled
the circulation of many kinds of what Hito Steyerl
calls the poor image. Often low in resolution, these
détourned materials circulated thanks both to the
compression of information but also because of the
addition of information. There might be less data
but there’s added metadata, or data about data, enabling its movement.
Needless to say the old culture industries went
into something of a panic about all this. As I wrote
over ten years ago in A Hacker Manifesto, “information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.”
It is one of the qualities of information that it is indifferent to the medium that carries it and readily
escapes being bound to things and their properties.
Yet it is also one of its qualities that access to it can
be blocked by what Alexander Galloway calls protocol. The late twentieth century was — among other
things — about the contradictory nature of information. It was a struggle between détournement and
protocol. And protocol nearly won.
The culture industries took both legal and technical steps to strap information once more to fixity
in things and thus to property and scarcity. Inter-

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estingly, those legal steps were not just a question of
pressuring governments to make free information
a crime. It was also a matter of using international
trade agreements as a place outside the scope of de­
mo­­cratic oversight to enforce the old rules of property. Here the culture industries join hands with the
drug cartels and other kinds of information-based
industry to limit the free flow of information.
But laws are there to be broken, and so are protocols of restriction such as encryption. These were
only ever delaying tactics, meant to shore up old
monopoly business for a bit longer. The battle to
free information was the battle that the forces of
détournement largely won. Our defeat lay elsewhere.
While the old culture industries tried to put information back into the property form, there were
other kinds of strategy afoot. The winners were not
the old culture industries but what I call the vulture
industries. Their strategy was not to try to stop the
flow of free information but rather to see it as an
environment to be leveraged in the service of creating a new kind of business. “Let the data roam free!”
says the vulture industry (while quietly guarding
their own patents and trademarks). What they aim
to control is the metadata.
It’s a new kind of exploitation, one based on an
unequal exchange of information. You can have the
little scraps of détournement that you desire, in exchange for performing a whole lot of free labor—and
giving up all of the metadata. So you get your little
bit of data; they get all of it, and more importantly,
any information about that information, such as
the where and when and what of it.

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It is an interesting feature of this mode of exploitation that you might not even be getting paid for your
labor in making this information—as Trebor Scholz
as pointed out. You are working for information
only. Hence exploitation can be extended far beyond
the workplace and into everyday life. Only it is not
so much a social factory, as the autonomists call it.
This is more like a social boudoir. The whole of social
space is in some indeterminate state between public
and private. Some of your information is private to
other people. But pretty much all of it is owned by
the vulture industry — and via them ends up in the
hands of the surveillance state.
So this is how we lost the war. Making information free seemed like a good idea at the time. Indeed, one way of seeing what transpired is that we
forced the ruling class to come up with these new
strategies in response to our own self-organizing
activities. Their actions are reactions to our initiatives. In this sense the autonomists are right, only
it was not so much the actions of the working class
to which the ruling class had to respond in this case,
as what I call the hacker class. They had to recuperate a whole social movement, and they did. So our
tactics have to change.
In the past we were acting like data-punks. Not
so much “here’s three chords, now form your band.”
More like: “Here’s three gigs, now go form your autonomous art collective.” The new tactic might be
more question of being metadata-punks. On the one
hand, it is about freeing information about information rather than the information itself. We need
to move up the order of informational density and

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control. On the other hand, it might be an idea to
be a bit discreet about it. Maybe not everyone needs
to know about it. Perhaps it is time to practice what
Zach Blas calls infomatic opacity.
Three projects seem to embody much of this
spirit to me. One I am not even going to name or
discuss, as discretion seems advisable in that case.
It takes matters off the internet and out of circulation among strangers. Ask me about it in person if
we meet in person.
The other two are Monoskop Log and UbuWeb.
It is hard to know what to call them. They are websites, archives, databases, collections, repositories,
but they are also a bit more than that. They could be
thought of also as the work of artists or of curators;
of publishers or of writers; of archivists or researchers. They contain lots of files. Monoskop is mostly
books and journals; UbuWeb is mostly video and
audio. The work they contain is mostly by or about
the historic avant-gardes.
Monoskop Log bills itself as “an educational
open access online resource.” It is a component part
of Monoskop, “a wiki for collaborative studies of
art, media and the humanities.” One commenter
thinks they see the “fingerprint of the curator” but
nobody is named as its author, so let’s keep it that
way. It is particularly strong on Eastern European
avant-garde material. UbuWeb is the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, and is “a completely independent
resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde,
ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.”
There’s two aspects to consider here. One is the
wealth of free material both sites collect. For any-

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body trying to teach, study or make work in the
avant-garde tradition these are very useful resources.
The other is the ongoing selection, presentation and
explanation of the material going on at these sites
themselves. Both of them model kinds of ‘curatorial’
or ‘publishing’ behavior.
For instance, Monoskop has wiki pages, some
better than Wikipedia, which contextualize the work
of a given artist or movement. UbuWeb offers “top
ten” lists by artists or scholars which give insight
not only into the collection but into the work of the
person making the selection.
Monoskop and UbuWeb are tactics for intervening in three kinds of practices, those of the artworld, of publishing and of scholarship. They respond to the current institutional, technical and
political-economic constraints of all three. As it
says in the Communist Manifesto, the forces for social change are those that ask the property question.
While détournement was a sufficient answer to that
question in the era of the culture industries, they try
to formulate, in their modest way, a suitable tactic
for answering the property question in the era of
the vulture industries.
This takes the form of moving from data to metadata, expressed in the form of the move from writing
to publishing, from art-making to curating, from
research to archiving. Another way of thinking this,
suggested by Hiroki Azuma would be the move from
narrative to database. The object of critical attention
acquires a third dimension, a kind of informational
depth. The objects before us are not just a text or an
image but databases of potential texts and images,
with metadata attached.

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The object of any avant-garde is always to practice the relation between aesthetics and everyday
life with a new kind of intensity. UbuWeb and
Monoskop seem to me to be intimations of just
such an avant-garde movement. One that does not
offer a practice but a kind of meta-practice for the
making of the aesthetic within the everyday.
Crucial to this project is the shifting of aesthetic
intention from the level of the individual work to the
database of works. They contain a lot of material, but
not just any old thing. Some of the works available
here are very rare, but not all of them are. It is not
just rarity, or that the works are available for free.
It is more that these are careful, artful, thoughtful
collections of material. There are the raw materials here with which to construct a new civilization.
So we lost the battle, but the war goes on. This
civilization is over, and even its defenders know it.
We live in among ruins that accrete in slow motion.
It is not so much a civil war as an incivil war, waged
against the very conditions of existence of life itself.
So even if we have no choice but to use its technologies and cultures, the task is to build another way
of life among the ruins. Here are some useful practices, in and on and of the ruins. ❧

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public library

http://midnightnotes.memoryoftheworld.org/

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Tomislav Medak

The Future After the Library
UbuWeb and Monoskop’s
Radical Gestures

The institution of the public library has crystallized,
developed and advanced around historical junctures
unleashed by epochal economic, technological and
political changes. A series of crises since the advent
of print have contributed to the configuration of the
institutional entanglement of the public library as
we know it today:01 defined by a publicly available
collection, housed in a public building, indexed and
made accessible with a help of a public catalog, serviced by trained librarians and supported through
public financing. Libraries today embody the idea
of universal access to all knowledge, acting as custodians of a culture of reading, archivists of material
and ephemeral cultural production, go-betweens
of information and knowledge. However, libraries have also embraced a broader spirit of public
service and infrastructure: providing information,
01 For the concept and the full scope of the contemporary library
as institutional entanglement see Shannon Mattern, “Library
as Infrastructure”, Places Journal, accessed April 9, 2015,
https://placesjournal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/.

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education, skills, assistance and, ultimately, shelter
to their communities — particularly their most vulnerable members.
This institutional entanglement, consisting in
a comprehensive organization of knowledge, universally accessible cultural goods and social infrastructure, historically emerged with the rise of (information) science, social regulation characteristic
of modernity and cultural industries. Established
in its social aspect as the institutional exemption
from the growing commodification and economic
barriers in the social spheres of culture, education
and knowledge, it is a result of struggles for institutionalized forms of equality that still reflect the
best in solidarity and universality that modernity
had to offer. Yet, this achievement is marked by
contradictions that beset modernity at its core. Libraries and archives can be viewed as an organon
through which modernity has reacted to the crises
unleashed by the growing production and fixation
of text, knowledge and information through a history of transformations that we will discuss below.
They have been an epistemic crucible for the totalizing formalizations that have propelled both the
advances and pathologies of modernity.
Positioned at a slight monastic distance and indolence toward the forms of pastoral, sovereign or
economic domination that defined the surrounding world that sustained them, libraries could never
close the rift or between the universalist aspirations
of knowledge and their institutional compromise.
Hence, they could never avoid being the battlefield
where their own, and modernity’s, ambivalent epis-

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temic and social character was constantly re-examined and ripped asunder. It is this ambivalent
character that has been a potent motor for critical theory, artistic and political subversion — from
Marx’s critique of political economy, psychoanalysis
and historic avant-gardes, to revolutionary politics.
Here we will examine the formation of the library
as an epistemic and social institution of modernity
and the forms of critical engagement that continue
to challenge the totalizing order of knowledge and
appropriation of culture in the present.
Here Comes the Flood02
Prior to the advent of print, the collections held in
monastic scriptoria, royal courts and private libraries
typically contained a limited number of canonical
manuscripts, scrolls and incunabula. In Medieval
and early Renaissance Europe the canonized knowledge considered necessary for the administration of
heavenly and worldly affairs was premised on reading and exegesis of biblical and classical texts. It is
02 The metaphor of the information flood, here incanted in the
words of Peter Gabriel’s song with apocalyptic overtones, as
well as a good part of the historic background of the development of index card catalog in the following paragraphs
are based on Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About
Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929 (MIT Press, 2011). The organizing idea of Krajewski’s historical account, that the index
card catalog can be understood as a Turing machine avant
la lettre, served as a starting point for the understanding
of the library as an epistemic institution developed here.

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estimated that by the 15th century in Western Europe
there were no more than 5 million manuscripts held
mainly in the scriptoria of some 21,000 monasteries and a small number of universities. While the
number of volumes had grown sharply from less
than 0.8 million in the 12th century, the number of
monasteries had remained constant throughout that
period. The number of manuscripts read averaged
around 1,000 per million inhabitants, with the total
population of Europe peaking around 60 million.03
All in all, the book collections were small, access was
limited and reading culture played a marginal role.
The proliferation of written matter after the invention of mechanical movable type printing would
greatly increase the number of books, but also the
patterns of literacy and knowledge production. Already in the first fifty years after Gutenberg’s invention, 12 million volumes were printed, and from
this point onwards the output of printing presses
grew exponentially to 700 million volumes in the
18th century. In the aftermath of the explosion in
book production the cost of producing and buying
books fell drastically, reducing the economic barriers to literacy, but also creating a material vector
for a veritable shift of the epistemic paradigm. The
03 For an economic history of the book in the Western Europe
see Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, “Charting
the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in
Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through
Eighteenth Centuries”, The Journal of Economic History 69,
No. 02 (June 2009): 409–45, doi:10.1017/S0022050709000837,
particularly Tables 1-5.

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emerging reading public was gaining access to the
new works of a nascent Enlightenment movement,
ushering in the modern age of science. In parallel
with those larger epochal transformations, the explosion of print also created a rising tide of new books
that suddenly inundated the libraries. The libraries
now had to contend both with the orders-of-magnitude greater volume of printed matter and the
growing complexity of systematically storing, ordering, classifying and tracking all of the volumes
in their collection. An once almost static collection
of canonical knowledge became an ever expanding
dynamic flux. This flood of new books, the first of
three to follow, presented principled, infrastructural and organizational challenges to the library that
radically transformed and coalesced its functions.
The epistemic shift created by this explosion of
library holdings led to a revision of the assumption
that the library is organized around a single holy
scripture and a small number of classical sources.
Coextensive with the emergence and multiplication of new sciences, the books that were entering
the library now covered an ever diversified scope
of topics and disciplines. And the sheer number of
new acquisitions demanded the physical expansion of libraries, which in turn required a radical
rethinking of the way the books were stored, displayed and indexed. In fact, the flood caused by the
printing press was nothing short of a revolution in
the organization, formalization and processing of
information and knowledge. This becomes evident
in the changes that unfolded between the 16th and
the early 20th in the cataloging of library collections.

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125

The initial listings of books were kept in bound
volumes, books in their own right. But as the number of items arriving into the library grew, the constant need to insert new entries made the bound
book format increasingly impractical for library
catalogs. To make things more complicated still,
the diversification of the printed matter demanded
a richer bibliographic description that would allow
better comprehension of what was contained in the
volumes. Alongside the name of the author and the
book’s title, the description now needed to include
the format of the volume, the classification of the
subject matter and the book’s location in the library.
As the pace of new arrivals accelerated, the effort to
create a library catalog became unending, causing a
true crisis in the emerging librarian profession. This
would result in a number of physical and epistemic
innovations in the organization and formalization
of information and knowledge. The requirement
to constantly rearrange the order of entries in the
listing lead to the eventual unbinding of the bound
catalog into separate slips of paper and finally to the
development of the index card catalog. The unbound
index cards and their floating rearrangement, not
unlike that of the movable type, would in turn result in the design of filing cabinets. From Conrad
Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis, a three-volume
book-format catalog of around 3,000 authors and
10,000 texts, arranged alphabetically and topically,
published in the period 1545–1548; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s proposals for a universal library
during his tenure at the Wolfenbüttel library in the
late 17th century; to Gottfried van Swieten’s catalog

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Tomislav Medak

of the Viennese court library, the index card catalog and the filing cabinets would develop almost to
their present form.04
The unceasing inflow of new books into the library
prompted the need to spatially organize and classify
the arrangement of the collection. The simple addition of new books to the shelves by size; canonical
relevance or alphabetical order, made little sense
in a situation where the corpus of printed matter
was quickly expanding and no individual librarian
could retain an intimate overview of the library’s
entire collection. The inflow of books required that
the brimming shelf-space be planned ahead, while
the increasing number of expanding disciplines required that the collection be subdivided into distinct
sections by fields. First the shelves became classified
and then the books individually received a unique
identifier. With the completion of the Josephinian
catalog in the Viennese court library, every book became compartmentalized according to a systematic
plan of sciences and assigned a unique sequence of
a Roman numeral, a Roman letter and an Arabic
numeral by which it could be tracked down regardless of its physical location.05 The physical location
of the shelves in the library no longer needed to be
reflected in the ordering of the catalog, and the catalog became a symbolic representation of the freely
re-arrangeable library. In the technological lingo of
today, the library required storage, index, search
and address in order to remain navigable. It is this
04 Krajewski, Paper Machines, op. cit., chapter 2.
05 Ibid., 30.

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127

formalization of a universal system of classification
of objects in the library with the relative location of
objects and re-arrangeable index that would then in
1876 receive its present standardized form in Melvil
Dewey’s Decimal System.
The development of the library as an institution of
public access and popular literacy did not proceed
apace with the development of its epistemic aspects.
It was only a series of social upheavals and transformations in the course of the 18th and 19th century
that would bring about another flood of books and
political demands, pushing the library to become
embedded in an egalitarian and democratic political culture. The first big step in that direction came
with the decision of the French revolutionary National Assembly from 2 November 1789 to seize all
book collections from the Church and aristocracy.
Million of volumes were transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale and local libraries across France.
In parallel, particularly in England, capitalism was
on the rise. It massively displaced the impoverished rural population into growing urban centers,
propelled the development of industrial production and, by the mid-19th century, introduced the
steam-powered rotary press into the book business.
As books became more easily, and mass produced,
the commercial subscription libraries catering to the
better-off parts of society blossomed. This brought
the class aspect of the nascent demand for public
access to books to the fore. After the failed attempts
to introduce universal suffrage and end the system
of political representation based on property entitlements in 1830s and 1840s, the English Chartist

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Tomislav Medak

movement started to open reading rooms and cooperative lending libraries that would quickly become
a popular hotbed of social exchanges between the
lower classes. In the aftermath of the revolutionary
upheavals of 1848, the fearful ruling classes heeded
the demand for tax-financed public libraries, hoping
that the access to literature and edification would
ultimately hegemonize the working class for the
benefits of capitalism’s culture of self-interest and
competition.06
The Avant-gardes in the Library
As we have just demonstrated, the public library
in its epistemic and social aspects coalesced in the
context of the broader social transformations of
modernity: early capitalism and processes of nation-building in Europe and the USA. These transformations were propelled by the advancement of
political and economic rationalization, public and
business administration, statistical and archival
procedures. Archives underwent a corresponding and largely concomitant development with the
libraries, responding with a similar apparatus of
classification and ordering to the exponential expansion of administrative records documenting the
social world and to the historicist impulse to capture the material traces of past events. Overlaying
the spatial organization of documentation; rules
06 For the social history of public library see Matthew Battles,
Library: An Unquiet History (Random House, 2014) chapter
5: “Books for all”.

The Future After the Library

129

of its classification and symbolic representation of
the archive in reference tools, they tried to provide
a formalization adequate to the passion for capturing historical or present events. Characteristic
of the ascendant positivism of the 19th century, the
archivists’ and librarians’ epistemologies harbored
a totalizing tendency that would become subject to
subversion and displacement in the first decades of
the 20th century.
The assumption that the classificatory form can
fully capture the archival content would become
destabilized over and over by the early avant-gardist
permutations of formal languages of classification:
dadaist montage of the contingent compositional
elements, surrealist insistence on the unconscious
surpluses produced by automatized formalized language, constructivist foregrounding of dynamic and
spatialized elements in the acts of perception and
cognition of an artwork.07 The material composition
of the classified and ordered objects already contained formalizations deposited into those objects
by the social context of their provenance or projected onto them by the social situation of encounter
with them. Form could become content and content
could become form. The appropriations, remediations and displacements exacted by the neo-avantgardes in the second half of the 20th century pro07 Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (MIT
Press, 2008) provides a detailed account of strategies that
the historic avant-gardes and the post-war art have developed toward the classificatory and ordering regime of the
archive.

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Tomislav Medak

duced subversions, resignifications and simulacra
that only further blurred the lines between histories
and their construction, dominant classifications and
their immanent instabilities.
Where does the library fit into this trajectory? Operating around an uncertain and politically embattled universal principle of public access to knowledge
and organization of information, libraries continued being sites of epistemic and social antagonisms,
adaptations and resilience in response to the challenges created by the waves of radical expansion of
textuality and conflicting social interests between
the popular reading culture and the commodification of cultural consumption. This precarious position is presently being made evident by the third
big flood — after those unleashed by movable type
printing and the social context of industrial book
production — that is unfolding with the transition
of the book into the digital realm. Both the historic
mode of the institutional regulation of access and
the historic form of epistemic classification are
swept up in this transformation. While the internet
has made possible a radically expanded access to
digitized culture and knowledge, the vested interests of cultural industries reliant on copyright for
their control over cultural production have deepened the separation between cultural producers and
their readers, listeners and viewers. While the hypertextual capacity for cross-reference has blurred
the boundaries of the book, digital rights management technologies have transformed e-books into
closed silos. Both the decommodification of access
and the overcoming of the reified construct of the

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131

self-enclosed work in the form of a book come at
the cost of illegality.
Even the avant-gardes in all their inappropriable
and idiosyncratic recalcitrance fall no less under
the legally delimited space of copyrightable works.
As they shift format, new claims of ownership and
appropriation are built. Copyright is a normative
classification that is totalizing, regardless of the
effects of leaky networks speaking to the contrary.
Few efforts have insisted on the subverting of juridical classification by copyright more lastingly than
the UbuWeb archive. Espousing the avant-gardes’
ethos of appropriation, for almost 20 years it has
collected and made accessible the archives of the
unknown; outsider, rare and canonized avant-gardes and contemporary art that would otherwise remained reserved for the vaults and restricted access
channels of esoteric markets, selective museological
presentations and institutional archives. Knowing
that asking to publish would amount to aligning itself with the totalizing logic of copyright, UbuWeb
has shunned the permission culture. At the level of
poetical operation, as a gesture of displacing the cultural archive from a regime of limited, into a regime
of unlimited access, it has created provocations and
challenges directed at the classifying and ordering
arrangements of property over cultural production.
One can only assume that as such it has become a
mechanism for small acts of treason for the artists,
who, short of turning their back fully on the institutional arrangements of the art world they inhabit,
use UbuWeb to release their own works into unlimited circulation on the net. Sometimes there might

132

Tomislav Medak

be no way or need to produce a work outside the
restrictions imposed by those institutions, just as
sometimes it is for academics impossible to avoid
the contradictory world of academic publishing,
yet that is still no reason to keep one’s allegiance to
their arrangements.
At the same time UbuWeb has played the game
of avant-gardist subversion: “If it doesn’t exist on
the internet, it doesn’t exist”. Provocation is most
effective when it is ignorant of the complexities of
the contexts that it is directed at. Its effect starts
where fissures in the defense of the opposition start
to show. By treating UbuWeb as massive evidence
for the internet as a process of reappropriation, a
process of “giving to all”, its volunteering spiritus
movens, Kenneth Goldsmith, has been constantly rubbing copyright apologists up the wrong way.
Rather than producing qualifications, evasions and
ambivalences, straightforward affirmation of copy­
ing, plagiarism and reproduction as a dominant
yet suppressed mode of operation of digital culture re-enacts the avant-gardes’ gesture of taking
no hostages from the officially sanctioned systems
of classification. By letting the incumbents of control over cultural production react to the norm of
copying, you let them struggle to dispute the norm
rather than you having to try to defend the norm.
UbuWeb was an early-comer, starting in 1996
and still functioning today on seemingly similar
technology, it’s a child of the early days of World
Wide Web and the promissory period of the experimental internet. It’s resolutely Web 1.0, with
a single maintainer, idiosyncratically simple in its

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133

layout and programmatically committed to the
eventual obsolescence and sudden abandonment.
No platform, no generic design, no widgets, no
kludges and no community features. Only Beckett
avec links. Endgame.
A Book is an Index is an Index is an Index...
Since the first book flood, the librarian dream of
epistemological formalization has revolved around
the aspiration to cross-reference all the objects in
the collection. Within the physical library the topical designation has been relegated to the confines of
index card catalog that remained isolated from the
structure of citations and indexes in the books themselves. With the digital transition of the book, the
time-shifted hypertextuality of citations and indexes
became realizable as the immediate cross-referentiality of the segments of individual text to segments
of other texts and other digital artifacts across now
permeable boundaries of the book.
Developed as a wiki for collaborative studies of
art, media and the humanities, Monoskop.org took
up the task of mapping and describing avant-gardes and media art in Europe. In its approach both
indexical and encyclopedic, it is an extension of
the collaborative editing made possible by wiki
technology. Wikis rose to prominence in the early
2000s allowing everyone to edit and extend websites running on that technology by mastering a
very simple markup language. Wikis have been the
harbinger of a democratization of web publishing
that would eventually produce the largest collabo-

134

Tomislav Medak

rative website on the internet — the Wikipedia, as
well as a number of other collaborative platforms.
Monoskop.org embraces the encyclopedic spirit of
Wikipedia, focusing on its own specific topical and
topological interests. However, from its earliest days
Monoskop.org has also developed as a form of index
that maps out places, people, artworks, movements,
events and venues that compose the dense network
of European avant-gardes and media art.
If we take the index as a formalization of cross-referential relations between names of people, titles
of works and concepts that exist in the books and
across the books, what emerges is a model of a relational database reflecting the rich mesh of cultural
networks. Each book can serve as an index linking
its text to people, other books, segments in them.
To provide a paradigmatic demonstration of that
idea, Monoskop.org has assembled an index of all
persons in Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks,
with each index entry linking both to its location
in the digital version of the book displayed on the
aaaaarg.org archive and to relevant resources for
those persons on the Monoskop.org and the internet. Hence, each object in the library, an index
in its own right, potentially allows one to initiate
the relational re-classification and re-organization
of all other works in the library through linkable
information.
Fundamental to the works of the post-socialist
retro-avant-gardes of the last couple of decades has
been the re-writing of a history of art in reverse.
In the works of IRWIN, Laibach or Mladen Stilinović, or comparable work of Komar & Melamid,

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135

totalizing modernity is detourned by re-appropriating the forms of visual representation and classification that the institutions of modernity used to
construct a linear historical narrative of evolutions
and breaks in the 19th and 20th century. Genealogical
tables, events, artifacts and discourses of the past
were re-enacted, over-affirmed and displaced to
open up the historic past relegated to the archives
to an understanding that transformed the present
into something radically uncertain. The efforts of
Monoskop.org in digitizing of the artifacts of the
20th century avant-gardes and playing with the
epistemic tools of early book culture is a parallel
gesture, with a technological twist. If big data and
the control over information flows of today increasingly naturalizes and re-affirms the 19th century
positivist assumptions of the steerablity of society,
then the endlessly recombinant relations and affiliations between cultural objects threaten to overflow
that recurrent epistemic framework of modernity’s
barbarism in its cybernetic form.
The institution of the public library finds itself
today under a double attack. One unleashed by
the dismantling of the institutionalized forms of
social redistribution and solidarity. The other by
the commodifying forces of expanding copyright
protections and digital rights management, control
over the data flows and command over the classification and order of information. In a world of
collapsing planetary boundaries and unequal development, those who control the epistemic order

136

Tomislav Medak

control the future.08 The Googles and the NSAs run
on capturing totality — the world’s knowledge and
communication made decipherable, organizable and
controllable. The instabilities of the epistemic order
that the library continues to instigate at its margins
contributes to keeping the future open beyond the
script of ‘commodify and control’. In their acts of
re-appropriation UbuWeb and Monoskop.org are
but a reminder of the resilience of libraries’ instability that signals toward a future that can be made
radically open. ❧

08 In his article “Controlling the Future—Edward Snowden and
the New Era on Earth”, (accessed April 13, 2015, http://www.
eurozine.com/articles/2014-12-19-altvater-en.html), Elmar
Altvater makes a comparable argument that the efforts of
the “Five Eyes” to monitor the global communication flows,
revealed by Edward Snowden, and the control of the future
social development defined by the urgency of mitigating the
effects of the planetary ecological crisis cannot be thought
apart.

The Future After the Library

137

138

public library

http://kok.memoryoftheworld.org

139

Public Library
www.memoryoftheworld.org

Publishers
What, How & for Whom / WHW
Slovenska 5/1 • HR-10000 Zagreb
+385 (0) 1 3907261
whw@whw.hr • www.whw.hr
ISBN 978-953-55951-3-7 [Što, kako i za koga/WHW]
Multimedia Institute
Preradovićeva 18 • HR-10000 Zagreb
+385 (0)1 4856400
mi2@mi2.hr • www.mi2.hr
ISBN 978-953-7372-27-9 [Multimedijalni institut]
Editors
Tomislav Medak • Marcell Mars • What, How & for Whom / WHW
Copy Editor
Dušanka Profeta [Croatian]
Anthony Iles [English]
Translations
Una Bauer
Tomislav Medak
Dušanka Profeta
W. Boyd Rayward
Design & layout
Dejan Kršić @ WHW
Typography
MinionPro [robert slimbach • adobe]

English translation of the Paul
Otlet’s text published with the permission of W. Boyd
Rayward. The translation was originally published as
Paul Otlet, “Transformations in the Bibliographical
Apparatus of the Sciences: Repertory–Classification–Office
of Documentation”, in International Organisation and
Dissemination of Knowledge; Selected Essays of Paul Otlet,
translated and edited by W. Boyd Rayward, Amsterdam:
Elsevier, 1990: 148–156. ❧
format / size
120 × 200 mm
pages
144
Paper
Agrippina 120 g • Rives Laid 300 g
Printed by
Tiskara Zelina d.d.
Print Run
1000
Price
50 kn
May • 2015

This publication, realized along with the exhibition
Public Library in Gallery Nova, Zagreb 2015, is a part of
the collaborative project This Is Tomorrow. Back to Basics:
Forms and Actions in the Future organized by What, How
& for Whom / WHW, Zagreb, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm
and Latvian Center for Contemporary Art / LCCA, Riga, as a
part of the book edition Art As Life As Work As Art. ❧

Supported by
Office of Culture, Education and Sport of the City of Zagreb
Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia
Croatian Government Office for Cooperation with NGOs
Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.
National Foundation for Civil Society Development
Kultura Nova Foundation

This project has been funded with support
from European Commision. This publication reflects
the views only of the authors, and the Commission
cannot be held responsible for any use which may be
made of the information contained therein. ❧
Publishing of this book is enabled by financial support of
the National Foundation for Civil Society Development.
The content of the publication is responsibility of
its authors and as such does not necessarily reflect
the views of the National Foundation. ❧
This project is financed
by the Croatian Government Office for Cooperation
with NGOs. The views expressed in this publication
are the sole responsibility of the publishers. ❧

This book is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0
International License. ❧

Public Library

may • 2015
price 50 kn

Medak, Sekulic & Mertens
Book Scanning and Post-Processing Manual Based on Public Library Overhead Scanner v1.2
2014


PUBLIC LIBRARY
&
MULTIMEDIA INSTITUTE

BOOK SCANNING & POST-PROCESSING MANUAL
BASED ON PUBLIC LIBRARY OVERHEAD SCANNER

Written by:
Tomislav Medak
Dubravka Sekulić
With help of:
An Mertens

Creative Commons Attribution - Share-Alike 3.0 Germany

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
3
I. Photographing a printed book
7
I. Getting the image files ready for post-processing
11
III. Transformation of source images into .tiffs
13
IV. Optical character recognition
16
V. Creating a finalized e-book file
16
VI. Cataloging and sharing the e-book
16
Quick workflow reference for scanning and post-processing
18
References
22

INTRODUCTION:
BOOK SCANNING - FROM PAPER BOOK TO E-BOOK
Initial considerations when deciding on a scanning setup
Book scanning tends to be a fragile and demanding process. Many factors can go wrong or produce
results of varying quality from book to book or page to page, requiring experience or technical skill
to resolve issues that occur. Cameras can fail to trigger, components to communicate, files can get
corrupted in the transfer, storage card doesn't get purged, focus fails to lock, lighting conditions
change. There are trade-offs between the automation that is prone to instability and the robustness
that is prone to become time consuming.
Your initial choice of book scanning setup will have to take these trade-offs into consideration. If
your scanning community is confined to your hacklab, you won't be risking much if technological
sophistication and integration fails to function smoothly. But if you're aiming at a broad community
of users, with varying levels of technological skill and patience, you want to create as much timesaving automation as possible on the condition of keeping maximum stability. Furthermore, if the
time of individual members of your scanning community can contribute is limited, you might also
want to divide some of the tasks between users and their different skill levels.
This manual breaks down the process of digitization into a general description of steps in the
workflow leading from the printed book to a digital e-book, each of which can be in a concrete
situation addressed in various manners depending on the scanning equipment, software, hacking
skills and user skill level that are available to your book scanning project. Several of those steps can
be handled by a single piece of equipment or software, or you might need to use a number of them your mileage will vary. Therefore, the manual will try to indicate the design choices you have in the
process of planning your workflow and should help you make decisions on what design is best for
you situation.
Introducing book scanner designs
The book scanning starts with the capturing of digital image files on the scanning equipment. There
are three principle types of book scanner designs:
 flatbed scanner
 single camera overhead scanner
 dual camera overhead scanner
Conventional flatbed scanners are widely available. However, given that they require the book to be
spread wide open and pressed down with the platen in order to break the resistance of the book
binding and expose sufficiently the inner margin of the text, it is the most destructive approach for
the book, imprecise and slow.
Therefore, book scanning projects across the globe have taken to custom designing improvised
setups or scanner rigs that are less destructive and better suited for fast turning and capturing of
pages. Designs abound. Most include:
•
•
•

one or two digital photo cameras of lesser or higher quality to capture the pages,
transparent V-shaped glass or Plexiglas platen to press the open book against a V-shape
cradle, and
a light source.

The go-to web resource to help you make an informed decision is the DIY book scanning
community at http://diybookscanner.org. A good place to start is their intro
(http://wiki.diybookscanner.org/ ) and scanner build list (http://wiki.diybookscanner.org/scannerbuild-list ).
The book scanners with a single camera are substantially cheaper, but come with an added difficulty
of de-warping the distorted page images due to the angle that pages are photographed at, which can
sometimes be difficult to correct in the post-processing. Hence, in this introductory chapter we'll
focus on two camera designs where the camera lens stands relatively parallel to the page. However,
with a bit of adaptation these instructions can be used to work with any other setup.
The Public Library scanner
In the focus of this manual is the scanner built for the Public Library project, designed by Voja
Antonić (see Illustration 1). The Public Library scanner was built with the immediate use by a wide
community of users in mind. Hence, the principle consideration in designing the Public Library
scanner was less sophistication and more robustness, facility of use and distributed process of
editing.
The board designs can be found here: http://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2012/10/28/ourbeloved-bookscanner. The current iterations are using two Canon 1100 D cameras with the kit lens
Canon EF-S 18-55mm 1:3.5-5.6 IS. Cameras are auto-charging.

Illustration 1: Public Library Scanner
The scanner operates by automatically lowering the Plexiglas platen, illuminating the page and then
triggering camera shutters. The turning of pages and the adjustments of the V-shaped cradle holding

the book are manual.
The scanner is operated by a two-button controller (see Illustration 2). The upper, smaller button
breaks the capture process in two steps: the first click lowers the platen, increases the light level and
allows you to adjust the book or the cradle, the second click triggers the cameras and lifts the platen.
The lower button has
two modes. A quick
click will execute the
whole capture process in
one go. But if you hold
it pressed longer, it will
lower the platen,
allowing you to adjust
the book and the cradle,
and lift it without
triggering cameras when
you press again.

Illustration 2: A two-button controller

More on this manual: steps in the book scanning process
The book scanning process in general can be broken down in six steps, each of which will be dealt
in a separate chapter in this manual:
I. Photographing a printed book
I. Getting the image files ready for post-processing
III. Transformation of source images into .tiffs
IV. Optical character recognition
V. Creating a finalized e-book file
VI. Cataloging and sharing the e-book
A step by step manual for Public Library scanner
This manual is primarily meant to provide a detailed description and step-by-step instructions for an
actual book scanning setup -- based on the Voja Antonić's scanner design described above. This is a
two-camera overhead scanner, currently equipped with two Canon 1100 D cameras with EF-S 1855mm 1:3.5-5.6 IS kit lens. It can scan books of up to A4 page size.
The post-processing in this setup is based on a semi-automated transfer of files to a GNU/Linux
personal computer and on the use of free software for image editing, optical character recognition
and finalization of an e-book file. It was initially developed for the HAIP festival in Ljubljana in
2011 and perfected later at MaMa in Zagreb and Leuphana University in Lüneburg.
Public Library scanner is characterized by a somewhat less automated yet distributed scanning
process than highly automated and sophisticated scanner hacks developed at various hacklabs. A
brief overview of one such scanner, developed at the Hacker Space Bruxelles, is also included in
this manual.
The Public Library scanning process proceeds thus in following discrete steps:

1. creating digital images of pages of a book,
2. manual transfer of image files to the computer for post-processing,
3. automated renaming of files, ordering of even and odd pages, rotation of images and upload to a
cloud storage,
4. manual transformation of source images into .tiff files in ScanTailor
5. manual optical character recognition and creation of PDF files in gscan2pdf
The detailed description of the Public Library scanning process follows below.
The Bruxelles hacklab scanning process
For purposes of comparison, here we'll briefly reference the scanner built by the Bruxelles hacklab
(http://hackerspace.be/ScanBot). It is a dual camera design too. With some differences in hardware functionality
(Bruxelles scanner has automatic turning of pages, whereas Public Library scanner has manual turning of pages), the
fundamental difference between the two is in the post-processing - the level of automation in the transfer of images
from the cameras and their transformation into PDF or DjVu e-book format.
The Bruxelles scanning process is different in so far as the cameras are operated by a computer and the images are
automatically transferred, ordered and made ready for further post-processing. The scanner is home-brew, but the
process is for advanced DIY'ers. If you want to know more on the design of the scanner, contact Michael Korntheuer at
contact@hackerspace.be.
The scanning and post-processing is automated by a single Python script that does all the work
http://git.constantvzw.org/?
p=algolit.git;a=tree;f=scanbot_brussel;h=81facf5cb106a8e4c2a76c048694a3043b158d62;hb=HEAD
The scanner uses two Canon point and shoot cameras. Both cameras are connected to the PC with USB. They both run
PTP/CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit). The scanning sequence is the following:
1. Script sends CHDK command line instructions to the cameras
2. Script sorts out the incoming files. This part is tricky. There is no reliable way to make a distinction between the left
and right camera, only between which camera was recognized by USB first. So the protocol is to always power up the
left camera first. See the instructions with the source code.
3. Collect images in a PDF file
4. Run script to OCR a .PDF file to plain .TXT file: http://git.constantvzw.org/?
p=algolit.git;a=blob;f=scanbot_brussel/ocr_pdf.sh;h=2c1f24f9afcce03520304215951c65f58c0b880c;hb=HEAD

I. PHOTOGRAPHING A PRINTED BOOK
Technologically the most demanding part of the scanning process is creating digital images of the
pages of a printed book. It's a process that is very different form scanner design to scanner design,
from camera to camera. Therefore, here we will focus strictly on the process with the Public Library
scanner.
Operating the Public Library scanner
0. Before you start:
Better and more consistent photographs lead to a more optimized and faster post-processing and a
higher quality of the resulting digital e-book. In order to guarantee the quality of images, before you
start it is necessary to set up the cameras properly and prepare the printed book for scanning.
a) Loosening the book
Depending on the type and quality of binding, some books tend to be too resistant to opening fully
to reveal the inner margin under the pressure of the scanner platen. It is thus necessary to “break in”
the book before starting in order to loosen the binding. The best way is to open it as wide as
possible in multiple places in the book. This can be done against the table edge if the book is more
rigid than usual. (Warning – “breaking in” might create irreversible creasing of the spine or lead to
some pages breaking loose.)
b) Switch on the scanner
You start the scanner by pressing the main switch or plugging the power cable into the the scanner.
This will also turn on the overhead LED lights.

c) Setting up the cameras
Place the cameras onto tripods. You need to move the lever on the tripod's head to allow the tripod
plate screwed to the bottom of the camera to slide into its place. Secure the lock by turning the lever
all the way back.
If the automatic chargers for the camera are provided, open the battery lid on the bottom of the
camera and plug the automatic charger. Close the lid.
Switch on the cameras using the lever on the top right side of the camera's body and place it into the
aperture priority (Av) mode on the mode dial above the lever (see Illustration 3). Use the main dial
just above the shutter button on the front side of the camera to set the aperture value to F8.0.

Illustration 3: Mode and main dial, focus mode switch, zoom
and focus ring
On the lens, turn the focus mode switch to manual (MF), turn the large zoom ring to set the value
exactly midway between 24 and 35 mm (see Illustration 3). Try to set both cameras the same.
To focus each camera, open a book on the cradle, lower the platen by holding the big button on the
controller, and turn on the live view on camera LCD by pressing the live view switch (see
Illustration 4). Now press the magnification button twice and use the focus ring on the front of the
lens to get a clear image view.

Illustration 4: Live view switch and magnification button

d) Connecting the cameras
Now connect the cameras to the remote shutter trigger cables that can be found lying on each side
of the scanner. They need to be plugged into a small round port hidden behind a protective rubber
cover on the left side of the cameras.
e) Placing the book into the cradle and double-checking the cameras
Open the book in the middle and place it on the cradle. Hold pressed the large button on the
controller to lower the Plexiglas platen without triggering the cameras. Move the cradle so that the
the platen fits into with the middle of the book.
Turn on the live view on the cameras' LED to see if the the pages fit into the image and if the
cameras are positioned parallel to the page.
f) Double-check storage cards and batteries
It is important that both storage cards on cameras are empty before starting the scanning in order
not to mess up the page sequence when merging photos from the left and the right camera in the
post-processing. To double-check, press play button on cameras and erase if there are some photos
left from the previous scan -- this you do by pressing the menu button, selecting the fifth menu from
the left and then select 'Erase Images' -> 'All images on card' -> 'OK'.
If no automatic chargers are provided, double-check on the information screen that batteries are
charged. They should be fully charged before starting with the scanning of a new book.

g) Turn off the light in the room
Lighting conditions during scanning should be as constant as possible, to reduce glare and achieve
maximum quality remove any source of light that might reflect off the Plexiglas platen. Preferably
turn off the light in the room or isolate the scanner with the black cloth provided.

1. Photographing a book
Now you are ready to start scanning. Place the book closed in the cradle and lower the platen by
holding the large button on the controller pressed (see Illustration 2). Adjust the position of the
cradle and lift the platen by pressing the large button again.
To scan you can now either use the small button on the controller to lower the platen, adjust and
then press it again to trigger the cameras and lift the platen. Or, you can just make a short press on
the large button to do it in one go.
ATTENTION: When the cameras are triggered, the shutter sound has to be heard coming
from both cameras. If one camera is not working, it's best to reconnect both cameras (see
Section 0), make sure the batteries are charged or adapters are connected, erase all images
and restart.
A mistake made in the photographing requires a lot of work in the post-processing, so it's
much quicker to repeat the photographing process.
If you make a mistake while flipping pages, or any other mistake, go back and scan from the page
you missed or incorrectly scanned. Note down the page where the error occurred and in the postprocessing the redundant images will be removed.
ADVICE: The scanner has a digital counter. By turning the dial forward and backward, you
can set it to tell you what page you should be scanning next. This should help you avoid
missing a page due to a distraction.
While scanning, move the cradle a bit to the left from time to time, making sure that the tip of Vshaped platen is aligned with the center of the book and the inner margin is exposed enough.

II. GETTING THE IMAGE FILES READY FOR POST-PROCESSING
Once the book pages have been photographed, they have to be transfered to the computer and
prepared for post-processing. With two-camera scanners, the capturing process will result in two
separate sets of images -- odd and even pages -- coming from the left and right cameras respectively
-- and you will need to rename and reorder them accordingly, rotate them into a vertical position
and collate them into a single sequence of files.
a) Transferring image files
For the transfer of files your principle process design choices are either to copy the files by
removing the memory cards from the cameras and copying them to the computer via a card reader
or to transfer them via a USB cable. The latter process can be automated by remote operating your
cameras from a computer, however this can be done only with a certain number of Canon cameras
(http://bit.ly/16xhJ6b) that can be hacked to run the open Canon Hack Development Kit firmware
(http://chdk.wikia.com).
After transferring the files, you want to erase all the image files on the camera memory card, so that
they would not end up messing up the scan of the next book.
b) Renaming image files
As the left and right camera are typically operated in sync, the photographing process results in two
separate sets of images, with even and odd pages respectively, that have completely different file
names and potentially same time stamps. So before you collate the page images in the order how
they appear in the book, you want to rename the files so that the first image comes from the right
camera, the second from the left camera, the third comes again from the right camera and so on.
You probably want to do a batch renaming, where your right camera files start with n and are offset
by an increment of 2 (e.g. page_0000.jpg, page_0002.jpg,...) and your left camera files start with
n+1 and are also offset by an increment of 2 (e.g. page_0001.jpg, page_0003.jpg,...).
Batch renaming can be completed either from your file manager, in command line or with a number
of GUI applications (e.g. GPrename, rename, cuteRenamer on GNU/Linux).
c) Rotating image files
Before you collate the renamed files, you might want to rotate them. This is a step that can be done
also later in the post-processing (see below), but if you are automating or scripting your steps this is
a practical place to do it. The images leaving your cameras will be positioned horizontally. In order
to position them vertically, the images from the camera on the right will have to be rotated by 90
degrees counter-clockwise, the images from the camera on the left will have to be rotated by 90
degrees clockwise.
Batch rotating can be completed in a number of photo-processing tools, in command line or
dedicated applications (e.g. Fstop, ImageMagick, Nautilust Image Converter on GNU/Linux).
d) Collating images into a single batch
Once you're done with the renaming and rotating of the files, you want to collate them into the same
folder for easier manipulation later.

Getting the image files ready for post-processing on the Public Library scanner
In the case of Public Library scanner, a custom C++ script was written by Mislav Stublić to
facilitate the transfer, renaming, rotating and collating of the images from the two cameras.
The script prompts the user to place into the card reader the memory card from the right camera
first, gives a preview of the first and last four images and provides an entry field to create a subfolder in a local cloud storage folder (path: /home/user/Copy).
It transfers, renames, rotates the files, deletes them from the card and prompts the user to replace the
card with the one from the left camera in order to the transfer the files from there and place them in
the same folder. The script was created for GNU/Linux system and it can be downloaded, together
with its source code, from: https://copy.com/nLSzflBnjoEB
If you have other cameras than Canon, you can edit the line 387 of the source file to change to the
naming convention of your cameras, and recompile by running the following command in your
terminal: "gcc scanflow.c -o scanflow -ludev `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0`"
In the case of Hacker Space Bruxelles scanner, this is handled by the same script that operates the cameras that can be
downloaded from: http://git.constantvzw.org/?
p=algolit.git;a=tree;f=scanbot_brussel;h=81facf5cb106a8e4c2a76c048694a3043b158d62;hb=HEAD

III. TRANSFORMATION OF SOURCE IMAGES INTO .TIFFS
Images transferred from the cameras are high definition full color images. You want your cameras
to shoot at the largest possible .jpg resolution in order for resulting files to have at least 300 dpi (A4
at 300 dpi requires a 9.5 megapixel image). In the post-processing the size of the image files needs
to be reduced down radically, so that several hundred images can be merged into an e-book file of a
tolerable size.
Hence, the first step in the post-processing is to crop the images from cameras only to the content of
the pages. The surroundings around the book that were captured in the photograph and the white
margins of the page will be cropped away, while the printed text will be transformed into black
letters on white background. The illustrations, however, will need to be preserved in their color or
grayscale form, and mixed with the black and white text. What were initially large .jpg files will
now become relatively small .tiff files that are ready for optical character recognition process
(OCR).
These tasks can be completed by a number of software applications. Our manual will focus on one
that can be used across all major operating systems -- ScanTailor. ScanTailor can be downloaded
from: http://scantailor.sourceforge.net/. A more detailed video tutorial of ScanTailor can be found
here: http://vimeo.com/12524529.
ScanTailor: from a photograph of a page to a graphic file ready for OCR
Once you have transferred all the photos from cameras to the computer, renamed and rotated them,
they are ready to be processed in the ScanTailor.
1) Importing photographs to ScanTailor
- start ScanTailor and open ‘new project’
- for ‘input directory’ chose the folder where you stored the transferred and renamed photo images
- you can leave ‘output directory’ as it is, it will place your resulting .tiffs in an 'out' folder inside
the folder where your .jpg images are
- select all files (if you followed the naming convention above, they will be named
‘page_xxxx.jpg’) in the folder where you stored the transferred photo images, and click 'OK'
- in the dialog box ‘Fix DPI’ click on All Pages, and for DPI choose preferably '600x600', click
'Apply', and then 'OK'
2) Editing pages
2.1 Rotating photos/pages
If you've rotated the photo images in the previous step using the scanflow script, skip this step.
- Rotate the first photo counter-clockwise, click Apply and for scope select ‘Every other page’
followed by 'OK'
- Rotate the following photo clockwise, applying the same procedure like in the previous step
2.2 Deleting redundant photographs/pages
- Remove redundant pages (photographs of the empty cradle at the beginning and the end of the
book scanning sequence; book cover pages if you don’t want them in the final scan; duplicate pages
etc.) by right-clicking on a thumbnail of that page in the preview column on the right side, selecting
‘Remove from project’ and confirming by clicking on ‘Remove’.

# If you by accident remove a wrong page, you can re-insert it by right-clicking on a page
before/after the missing page in the sequence, selecting 'insert after/before' (depending on which
page you selected) and choosing the file from the list. Before you finish adding, it is necessary to
again go through the procedure of fixing DPI and Rotating.
2.3 Adding missing pages
- If you notice that some pages are missing, you can recapture them with the camera and insert them
manually at this point using the procedure described above under 2.2.
3) Split pages and deskew
Steps ‘Split pages’ and ‘Deskew’ should work automatically. Run them by clicking the ‘Play’ button
under the 'Select content' function. This will do the three steps automatically: splitting of pages,
deskewing and selection of content. After this you can manually re-adjust splitting of pages and deskewing.
4) Selecting content
Step ‘Select content’ works automatically as well, but it is important to revise the resulting selection
manually page by page to make sure the entire content is selected on each page (including the
header and page number). Where necessary, use your pointer device to adjust the content selection.
If the inner margin is cut, go back to 'Split pages' view and manually adjust the selected split area. If
the page is skewed, go back to 'Deskew' and adjust the skew of the page. After this go back to
'Select content' and readjust the selection if necessary.
This is the step where you do visual control of each page. Make sure all pages are there and
selections are as equal in size as possible.
At the bottom of thumbnail column there is a sort option that can automatically arrange pages by
the height and width of the selected content, making the process of manual selection easier. The
extreme differences in height should be avoided, try to make selected areas as much as possible
equal, particularly in height, across all pages. The exception should be cover and back pages where
we advise to select the full page.
5) Adjusting margins
For best results select in the previous step content of the full cover and back page. Now go to the
'Margins' step and set under Margins section both Top, Bottom, Left and Right to 0.0 and do 'Apply
to...' → 'All pages'.
In Alignment section leave 'Match size with other pages' ticked, choose the central positioning of
the page and do 'Apply to...' → 'All pages'.
6) Outputting the .tiffs
Now go to the 'Output' step. Ignore the 'Output Resolution' section.
Next review two consecutive pages from the middle of the book to see if the scanned text is too
faint or too dark. If the text seems too faint or too dark, use slider Thinner – Thicker to adjust. Do
'Apply to' → 'All pages'.
Next go to the cover page and select under Mode 'Color / Grayscale' and tick on 'White Margins'.
Do the same for the back page.
If there are any pages with illustrations, you can choose the 'Mixed' mode for those pages and then

under the thumb 'Picture Zones' adjust the zones of the illustrations.
Now you are ready to output the files. Just press 'Play' button under 'Output'. Once the computer is
finished processing the images, just do 'File' → 'Save as' and save the project.

IV. OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION
Before the edited-down graphic files are finalized as an e-book, we want to transform the image of
the text into an actual text that can be searched, highlighted, copied and transformed. That
functionality is provided by Optical Character Recognition. This a technically difficult task dependent on language, script, typeface and quality of print - and there aren't that many OCR tools
that are good at it. There is, however, a relatively good free software solution - Tesseract
(http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) - that has solid performance, good language data and can
be trained for an even better performance, although it has its problems. Proprietary solutions (e.g.
Abby FineReader) sometimes provide superior results.
Tesseract supports as input format primarily .tiff files. It produces a plain text file that can be, with
the help of other tools, embedded as a separate layer under the original graphic image of the text in
a PDF file.
With the help of other tools, OCR can be performed also against other input files, such as graphiconly PDF files. This produces inferior results, depending again on the quality of graphic files and
the reproduction of text in them. One such tool is a bashscript to OCR a ODF file that can be found
here: https://github.com/andrecastro0o/ocr/blob/master/ocr.sh
As mentioned in the 'before scanning' section, the quality of the original book will influence the
quality of the scan and thus the quality of the OCR. For a comparison, have a look here:
http://www.paramoulipist.be/?p=1303
Once you have your .txt file, there is still some work to be done. Because OCR has difficulties to
interpret particular elements in the lay-out and fonts, the TXT file comes with a lot of errors.
Recurrent problems are:
- combinations of specific letters in some fonts (it can mistake 'm' for 'n' or 'I' for 'i' etc.);
- headers become part of body text;
- footnotes are placed inside the body text;
- page numbers are not recognized as such.

V. CREATING A FINALIZED E-BOOK FILE
After the optical character recognition has been completed, the resulting text can be merged with
the images of pages and output into an e-book format. While increasingly the proper e-book file
formats such as ePub have been gaining ground, PDFs still remain popular because many people
tend to read on their computers, and they retain the original layout of the book on paper including
the absolute pagination needed for referencing in citations. DjVu is also an option, as an alternative
to PDF, used because of its purported superiority, but it is far less popular.
The export to PDF can be done again with a number of tools. In our case we'll complete the optical
character recognition and PDF export in gscan2pdf. Again, the proprietary Abbyy FineReader will
produce a bit smaller PDFs.
If you prefer to use an e-book format that works better with e-book readers, obviously you will have
to remove some of the elements that appear in the book - headers, footers, footnotes and pagination.

This can be done earlier in the process of cropping down the original .jpg image files (see under III)
or later by transforming the PDF files. This can be done in Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com) by
converting the PDF into an ePub, where it can be further tweaked to better accommodate or remove
the headers, footers, footnotes and pagination.
Optical character recognition and PDF export in Public Library workflow
Optical character recognition with the Tesseract engine can be performed on GNU/Linux by a
number of command line and GUI tools. Much of those tools exist also for other operating systems.
For the users of the Public Library workflow, we recommend using gscan2pdf application both for
the optical character recognition and the PDF or DjVu export.
To do so, start gscan2pdf and open your .tiff files. To OCR them, go to 'Tools' and select 'OCR'. In
the dialog box select the Tesseract engine and your language. 'Start OCR'. Once the OCR is
finished, export the graphic files and the OCR text to PDF by selecting 'Save as'.
However, given that sometimes the proprietary solutions produce better results, these tasks can also
be done, for instance, on the Abbyy FineReader running on a Windows operating system running
inside the Virtual Box. The prerequisites are that you have both Windows and Abbyy FineReader
you can install in the Virtual Box. If using Virtual Box, once you've got both installed, you need to
designate a shared folder in your Virtual Box and place the .tiff files there. You can now open them
from the Abbyy FineReader running in the Virtual Box, OCR them and export them into a PDF.
To use Abbyy FineReader transfer the output files in your 'out' out folder to the shared folder of the
VirtualBox. Then start the VirtualBox, start Windows image and in Windows start Abbyy
FineReader. Open the files and let the Abbyy FineReader read the files. Once it's done, output the
result into PDF.

VI. CATALOGING AND SHARING THE E-BOOK
Your road from a book on paper to an e-book is complete. If you want to maintain your library you
can use Calibre, a free software tool for e-book library management. You can add the metadata to
your book using the existing catalogues or you can enter metadata manually.
Now you may want to distribute your book. If the work you've digitized is in the public domain
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain), you might consider contributing it to the Gutenberg
project
(http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Volunteers'_FAQ#V.1._How_do_I_get_started_as_a_Pr
oject_Gutenberg_volunteer.3F ), Wikibooks (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Help:Contributing ) or
Arhive.org.
If the work is still under copyright, you might explore a number of different options for sharing.

QUICK WORKFLOW REFERENCE FOR SCANNING AND
POST-PROCESSING ON PUBLIC LIBRARY SCANNER
I. PHOTOGRAPHING A PRINTED BOOK
0. Before you start:
- loosen the book binding by opening it wide on several places
- switch on the scanner
- set up the cameras:
- place cameras on tripods and fit them tigthly
- plug in the automatic chargers into the battery slot and close the battery lid
- switch on the cameras
- switch the lens to Manual Focus mode
- switch the cameras to Av mode and set the aperture to 8.0
- turn the zoom ring to set the focal length exactly midway between 24mm and 35mm
- focus by turning on the live view, pressing magnification button twice and adjusting the
focus to get a clear view of the text
- connect the cameras to the scanner by plugging the remote trigger cable to a port behind a
protective rubber cover on the left side of the cameras
- place the book into the crade
- double-check storage cards and batteries
- press the play button on the back of the camera to double-check if there are images on the
camera - if there are, delete all the images from the camera menu
- if using batteries, double-check that batteries are fully charged
- switch off the light in the room that could reflect off the platen and cover the scanner with the
black cloth
1. Photographing
- now you can start scanning either by pressing the smaller button on the controller once to
lower the platen and adjust the book, and then press again to increase the light intensity, trigger the
cameras and lift the platen; or by pressing the large button completing the entire sequence in one
go;
- ATTENTION: Shutter sound should be coming from both cameras - if one camera is not
working, it's best to reconnect both cameras, make sure the batteries are charged or adapters
are connected, erase all images and restart.
- ADVICE: The scanner has a digital counter. By turning the dial forward and backward,
you can set it to tell you what page you should be scanning next. This should help you to
avoid missing a page due to a distraction.

II. Getting the image files ready for post-processing
- after finishing with scanning a book, transfer the files to the post-processing computer
and purge the memory cards
- if transferring the files manually:
- create two separate folders,
- transfer the files from the folders with image files on cards, using a batch
renaming software rename the files from the right camera following the convention
page_0001.jpg, page_0003.jpg, page_0005.jpg... -- and the files from the left camera
following the convention page_0002.jpg, page_0004.jpg, page_0006.jpg...
- collate image files into a single folder
- before ejecting each card, delete all the photo files on the card
- if using the scanflow script:
- start the script on the computer
- place the card from the right camera into the card reader
- enter the name of the destination folder following the convention
"Name_Surname_Title_of_the_Book" and transfer the files
- repeat with the other card
- script will automatically transfer the files, rename, rotate, collate them in proper
order and delete them from the card
III. Transformation of source images into .tiffs
ScanTailor: from a photograph of page to a graphic file ready for OCR
1) Importing photographs to ScanTailor
- start ScanTailor and open ‘new project’
- for ‘input directory’ chose the folder where you stored the transferred photo images
- you can leave ‘output directory’ as it is, it will place your resulting .tiffs in an 'out' folder
inside the folder where your .jpg images are
- select all files (if you followed the naming convention above, they will be named
‘page_xxxx.jpg’) in the folder where you stored the transferred photo images, and click
'OK'
- in the dialog box ‘Fix DPI’ click on All Pages, and for DPI choose preferably '600x600',
click 'Apply', and then 'OK'
2) Editing pages
2.1 Rotating photos/pages
If you've rotated the photo images in the previous step using the scanflow script, skip this step.
- rotate the first photo counter-clockwise, click Apply and for scope select ‘Every other
page’ followed by 'OK'
- rotate the following photo clockwise, applying the same procedure like in the previous
step

2.2 Deleting redundant photographs/pages
- remove redundant pages (photographs of the empty cradle at the beginning and the end;
book cover pages if you don’t want them in the final scan; duplicate pages etc.) by rightclicking on a thumbnail of that page in the preview column on the right, selecting ‘Remove
from project’ and confirming by clicking on ‘Remove’.
# If you by accident remove a wrong page, you can re-insert it by right-clicking on a page
before/after the missing page in the sequence, selecting 'insert after/before' and choosing the file
from the list. Before you finish adding, it is necessary to again go the procedure of fixing DPI and
rotating.
2.3 Adding missing pages
- If you notice that some pages are missing, you can recapture them with the camera and
insert them manually at this point using the procedure described above under 2.2.
3)

Split pages and deskew
- Functions ‘Split Pages’ and ‘Deskew’ should work automatically. Run them by
clicking the ‘Play’ button under the 'Select content' step. This will do the three steps
automatically: splitting of pages, deskewing and selection of content. After this you can
manually re-adjust splitting of pages and de-skewing.

4)

Selecting content and adjusting margins
- Step ‘Select content’ works automatically as well, but it is important to revise the
resulting selection manually page by page to make sure the entire content is selected on
each page (including the header and page number). Where necessary use your pointer device
to adjust the content selection.
- If the inner margin is cut, go back to 'Split pages' view and manually adjust the selected
split area. If the page is skewed, go back to 'Deskew' and adjust the skew of the page. After
this go back to 'Select content' and readjust the selection if necessary.
- This is the step where you do visual control of each page. Make sure all pages are there
and selections are as equal in size as possible.
- At the bottom of thumbnail column there is a sort option that can automatically arrange
pages by the height and width of the selected content, making the process of manual
selection easier. The extreme differences in height should be avoided, try to make
selected areas as much as possible equal, particularly in height, across all pages. The
exception should be cover and back pages where we advise to select the full page.

5) Adjusting margins
- Now go to the 'Margins' step and set under Margins section both Top, Bottom, Left and
Right to 0.0 and do 'Apply to...' → 'All pages'.
- In Alignment section leave 'Match size with other pages' ticked, choose the central

positioning of the page and do 'Apply to...' → 'All pages'.
6) Outputting the .tiffs
- Now go to the 'Output' step.
- Review two consecutive pages from the middle of the book to see if the scanned text is
too faint or too dark. If the text seems too faint or too dark, use slider Thinner – Thicker to
adjust. Do 'Apply to' → 'All pages'.
- Next go to the cover page and select under Mode 'Color / Grayscale' and tick on 'White
Margins'. Do the same for the back page.
- If there are any pages with illustrations, you can choose the 'Mixed' mode for those
pages and then under the thumb 'Picture Zones' adjust the zones of the illustrations.
- To output the files press 'Play' button under 'Output'. Save the project.
IV. Optical character recognition & V. Creating a finalized e-book file
If using all free software:
1) open gscan2pdf (if not already installed on your machine, install gscan2pdf from the
repositories, Tesseract and data for your language from https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/)
- point gscan2pdf to open your .tiff files
- for Optical Character Recognition, select 'OCR' under the drop down menu 'Tools',
select the Tesseract engine and your language, start the process
- once OCR is finished and to output to a PDF, go under 'File' and select 'Save', edit the
metadata and select the format, save
If using non-free software:
2) open Abbyy FineReader in VirtualBox (note: only Abby FineReader 10 installs and works with some limitations - under GNU/Linux)
- transfer files in the 'out' folder to the folder shared with the VirtualBox
- point it to the readied .tiff files and it will complete the OCR
- save the file

REFERENCES
For more information on the book scanning process in general and making your own book scanner
please visit:
DIY Book Scanner: http://diybookscannnner.org
Hacker Space Bruxelles scanner: http://hackerspace.be/ScanBot
Public Library scanner: http://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2012/10/28/our-belovedbookscanner/
Other scanner builds: http://wiki.diybookscanner.org/scanner-build-list
For more information on automation:
Konrad Voeckel's post-processing script (From Scan to PDF/A):
http://blog.konradvoelkel.de/2013/03/scan-to-pdfa/
Johannes Baiter's automation of scanning to PDF process: http://spreads.readthedocs.org
For more information on applications and tools:
Calibre e-book library management application: http://calibre-ebook.com/
ScanTailor: http://scantailor.sourceforge.net/
gscan2pdf: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gscan2pdf/
Canon Hack Development Kit firmware: http://chdk.wikia.com
Tesseract: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
Python script of Hacker Space Bruxelles scanner: http://git.constantvzw.org/?
p=algolit.git;a=tree;f=scanbot_brussel;h=81facf5cb106a8e4c2a76c048694a3043b158d62;hb=HEA
D

Murtaugh
A bag but is language nothing of words
2016


## A bag but is language nothing of words

### From Mondotheque

#####

(language is nothing but a bag of words)

[Michael Murtaugh](/wiki/index.php?title=Michael_Murtaugh "Michael Murtaugh")

In text indexing and other machine reading applications the term "bag of
words" is frequently used to underscore how processing algorithms often
represent text using a data structure (word histograms or weighted vectors)
where the original order of the words in sentence form is stripped away. While
"bag of words" might well serve as a cautionary reminder to programmers of the
essential violence perpetrated to a text and a call to critically question the
efficacy of methods based on subsequent transformations, the expression's use
seems in practice more like a badge of pride or a schoolyard taunt that would
go: Hey language: you're nothin' but a big BAG-OF-WORDS.

## Bag of words

In information retrieval and other so-called _machine-reading_ applications
(such as text indexing for web search engines) the term "bag of words" is used
to underscore how in the course of processing a text the original order of the
words in sentence form is stripped away. The resulting representation is then
a collection of each unique word used in the text, typically weighted by the
number of times the word occurs.

Bag of words, also known as word histograms or weighted term vectors, are a
standard part of the data engineer's toolkit. But why such a drastic
transformation? The utility of "bag of words" is in how it makes text amenable
to code, first in that it's very straightforward to implement the translation
from a text document to a bag of words representation. More significantly,
this transformation then opens up a wide collection of tools and techniques
for further transformation and analysis purposes. For instance, a number of
libraries available in the booming field of "data sciences" work with "high
dimension" vectors; bag of words is a way to transform a written document into
a mathematical vector where each "dimension" corresponds to the (relative)
quantity of each unique word. While physically unimaginable and abstract
(imagine each of Shakespeare's works as points in a 14 million dimensional
space), from a formal mathematical perspective, it's quite a comfortable idea,
and many complementary techniques (such as principle component analysis) exist
to reduce the resulting complexity.

What's striking about a bag of words representation, given is centrality in so
many text retrieval application is its irreversibility. Given a bag of words
representation of a text and faced with the task of producing the original
text would require in essence the "brain" of a writer to recompose sentences,
working with the patience of a devoted cryptogram puzzler to draw from the
precise stock of available words. While "bag of words" might well serve as a
cautionary reminder to programmers of the essential violence perpetrated to a
text and a call to critically question the efficacy of methods based on
subsequent transformations, the expressions use seems in practice more like a
badge of pride or a schoolyard taunt that would go: Hey language: you're
nothing but a big BAG-OF-WORDS. Following this spirit of the term, "bag of
words" celebrates a perfunctory step of "breaking" a text into a purer form
amenable to computation, to stripping language of its silly redundant
repetitions and foolishly contrived stylistic phrasings to reveal a purer
inner essence.

## Book of words

Lieber's Standard Telegraphic Code, first published in 1896 and republished in
various updated editions through the early 1900s, is an example of one of
several competing systems of telegraph code books. The idea was for both
senders and receivers of telegraph messages to use the books to translate
their messages into a sequence of code words which can then be sent for less
money as telegraph messages were paid by the word. In the front of the book, a
list of examples gives a sampling of how messages like: "Have bought for your
account 400 bales of cotton, March delivery, at 8.34" can be conveyed by a
telegram with the message "Ciotola, Delaboravi". In each case the reduction of
number of transmitted words is highlighted to underscore the efficacy of the
method. Like a dictionary or thesaurus, the book is primarily organized around
key words, such as _act_ , _advice_ , _affairs_ , _bags_ , _bail_ , and
_bales_ , under which exhaustive lists of useful phrases involving the
corresponding word are provided in the main pages of the volume. [1]

[![Liebers
P1016847.JPG](/wiki/images/4/41/Liebers_P1016847.JPG)](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016847.JPG)

[![Liebers
P1016859.JPG](/wiki/images/3/35/Liebers_P1016859.JPG)](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016859.JPG)

[![Liebers
P1016861.JPG](/wiki/images/3/34/Liebers_P1016861.JPG)](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016861.JPG)

[![Liebers
P1016869.JPG](/wiki/images/f/fd/Liebers_P1016869.JPG)](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016869.JPG)

> [...] my focus in this chapter is on the inscription technology that grew
parasitically alongside the monopolistic pricing strategies of telegraph
companies: telegraph code books. Constructed under the bywords “economy,”
“secrecy,” and “simplicity,” telegraph code books matched phrases and words
with code letters or numbers. The idea was to use a single code word instead
of an entire phrase, thus saving money by serving as an information
compression technology. Generally economy won out over secrecy, but in
specialized cases, secrecy was also important.[2]

In Katherine Hayles' chapter devoted to telegraph code books she observes how:

> The interaction between code and language shows a steady movement away from
a human-centric view of code toward a machine-centric view, thus anticipating
the development of full-fledged machine codes with the digital computer. [3]

[![Liebers
P1016851.JPG](/wiki/images/1/13/Liebers_P1016851.JPG)](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016851.JPG)
Aspects of this transitional moment are apparent in a notice included
prominently inserted in the Lieber's code book:

> After July, 1904, all combinations of letters that do not exceed ten will
pass as one cipher word, provided that it is pronounceable, or that it is
taken from the following languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish,
Portuguese or Latin -- International Telegraphic Conference, July 1903 [4]

Conforming to international conventions regulating telegraph communication at
that time, the stipulation that code words be actual words drawn from a
variety of European languages (many of Lieber's code words are indeed
arbitrary Dutch, German, and Spanish words) underscores this particular moment
of transition as reference to the human body in the form of "pronounceable"
speech from representative languages begins to yield to the inherent potential
for arbitrariness in digital representation.

What telegraph code books do is remind us of is the relation of language in
general to economy. Whether they may be economies of memory, attention, costs
paid to a telecommunicatons company, or in terms of computer processing time
or storage space, encoding language or knowledge in any form of writing is a
form of shorthand and always involves an interplay with what one expects to
perform or "get out" of the resulting encoding.

> Along with the invention of telegraphic codes comes a paradox that John
Guillory has noted: code can be used both to clarify and occlude. Among the
sedimented structures in the technological unconscious is the dream of a
universal language. Uniting the world in networks of communication that
flashed faster than ever before, telegraphy was particularly suited to the
idea that intercultural communication could become almost effortless. In this
utopian vision, the effects of continuous reciprocal causality expand to
global proportions capable of radically transforming the conditions of human
life. That these dreams were never realized seems, in retrospect, inevitable.
[5]

[![Liebers
P1016884.JPG](/wiki/images/9/9c/Liebers_P1016884.JPG)](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016884.JPG)

[![Liebers
P1016852.JPG](/wiki/images/7/74/Liebers_P1016852.JPG)](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016852.JPG)

[![Liebers
P1016880.JPG](/wiki/images/1/11/Liebers_P1016880.JPG)](/wiki/index.php?title=File:Liebers_P1016880.JPG)

Far from providing a universal system of encoding messages in the English
language, Lieber's code is quite clearly designed for the particular needs and
conditions of its use. In addition to the phrases ordered by keywords, the
book includes a number of tables of terms for specialized use. One table lists
a set of words used to describe all possible permutations of numeric grades of
coffee (Choliam = 3,4, Choliambos = 3,4,5, Choliba = 4,5, etc.); another table
lists pairs of code words to express the respective daily rise or fall of the
price of coffee at the port of Le Havre in increments of a quarter of a Franc
per 50 kilos ("Chirriado = prices have advanced 1 1/4 francs"). From an
archaeological perspective, the Lieber's code book reveals a cross section of
the needs and desires of early 20th century business communication between the
United States and its trading partners.

The advertisements lining the Liebers Code book further situate its use and
that of commercial telegraphy. Among the many advertisements for banking and
law services, office equipment, and alcohol are several ads for gun powder and
explosives, drilling equipment and metallurgic services all with specific
applications to mining. Extending telegraphy's formative role for ship-to-
shore and ship-to-ship communication for reasons of safety, commercial
telegraphy extended this network of communication to include those parties
coordinating the "raw materials" being mined, grown, or otherwise extracted
from overseas sources and shipped back for sale.

## "Raw data now!"

From [La ville intelligente - Ville de la connaissance](/wiki/index.php?title
=La_ville_intelligente_-_Ville_de_la_connaissance "La ville intelligente -
Ville de la connaissance"):

Étant donné que les nouvelles formes modernistes et l'utilisation de matériaux
propageaient l'abondance d'éléments décoratifs, Paul Otlet croyait en la
possibilité du langage comme modèle de « [données
brutes](/wiki/index.php?title=Bag_of_words "Bag of words") », le réduisant aux
informations essentielles et aux faits sans ambiguïté, tout en se débarrassant
de tous les éléments inefficaces et subjectifs.


From [The Smart City - City of Knowledge](/wiki/index.php?title
=The_Smart_City_-_City_of_Knowledge "The Smart City - City of Knowledge"):

As new modernist forms and use of materials propagated the abundance of
decorative elements, Otlet believed in the possibility of language as a model
of '[raw data](/wiki/index.php?title=Bag_of_words "Bag of words")', reducing
it to essential information and unambiguous facts, while removing all
inefficient assets of ambiguity or subjectivity.


> Tim Berners-Lee: [...] Make a beautiful website, but first give us the
unadulterated data, we want the data. We want unadulterated data. OK, we have
to ask for raw data now. And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? Can
you say "raw"?

>

> Audience: Raw.

>

> Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "data"?

>

> Audience: Data.

>

> TBL: Can you say "now"?

>

> Audience: Now!

>

> TBL: Alright, "raw data now"!

>

> [...]

>

> So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this -- the people who think
it's a great idea. And all the people -- and I think there's a lot of people
at TED who do things because -- even though there's not an immediate return on
the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has
done it -- they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does
things which would be good if everybody else did them. OK, so it's called
linked data. I want you to make it. I want you to demand it. [6]

## Un/Structured

As graduate students at Stanford, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page had an
early interest in producing "structured data" from the "unstructured" web. [7]

> The World Wide Web provides a vast source of information of almost all
types, ranging from DNA databases to resumes to lists of favorite restaurants.
However, this information is often scattered among many web servers and hosts,
using many different formats. If these chunks of information could be
extracted from the World Wide Web and integrated into a structured form, they
would form an unprecedented source of information. It would include the
largest international directory of people, the largest and most diverse
databases of products, the greatest bibliography of academic works, and many
other useful resources. [...]

>

> **2.1 The Problem**
> Here we define our problem more formally:
> Let D be a large database of unstructured information such as the World
Wide Web [...] [8]

In a paper titled _Dynamic Data Mining_ Brin and Page situate their research
looking for _rules_ (statistical correlations) between words used in web
pages. The "baskets" they mention stem from the origins of "market basket"
techniques developed to find correlations between the items recorded in the
purchase receipts of supermarket customers. In their case, they deal with web
pages rather than shopping baskets, and words instead of purchases. In
transitioning to the much larger scale of the web, they describe the
usefulness of their research in terms of its computational economy, that is
the ability to tackle the scale of the web and still perform using
contemporary computing power completing its task in a reasonably short amount
of time.

> A traditional algorithm could not compute the large itemsets in the lifetime
of the universe. [...] Yet many data sets are difficult to mine because they
have many frequently occurring items, complex relationships between the items,
and a large number of items per basket. In this paper we experiment with word
usage in documents on the World Wide Web (see Section 4.2 for details about
this data set). This data set is fundamentally different from a supermarket
data set. Each document has roughly 150 distinct words on average, as compared
to roughly 10 items for cash register transactions. We restrict ourselves to a
subset of about 24 million documents from the web. This set of documents
contains over 14 million distinct words, with tens of thousands of them
occurring above a reasonable support threshold. Very many sets of these words
are highly correlated and occur often. [9]

## Un/Ordered

In programming, I've encountered a recurring "problem" that's quite
symptomatic. It goes something like this: you (the programmer) have managed to
cobble out a lovely "content management system" (either from scratch, or using
any number of helpful frameworks) where your user can enter some "items" into
a database, for instance to store bookmarks. After this ordered items are
automatically presented in list form (say on a web page). The author: It's
great, except... could this bookmark come before that one? The problem stems
from the fact that the database ordering (a core functionality provided by any
database) somehow applies a sorting logic that's almost but not quite right. A
typical example is the sorting of names where details (where to place a name
that starts with a Norwegian "Ø" for instance), are language-specific, and
when a mixture of languages occurs, no single ordering is necessarily
"correct". The (often) exascerbated programmer might hastily add an additional
database field so that each item can also have an "order" (perhaps in the form
of a date or some other kind of (alpha)numerical "sorting" value) to be used
to correctly order the resulting list. Now the author has a means, awkward and
indirect but workable, to control the order of the presented data on the start
page. But one might well ask, why not just edit the resulting listing as a
document? Not possible! Contemporary content management systems are based on a
data flow from a "pure" source of a database, through controlling code and
templates to produce a document as a result. The document isn't the data, it's
the end result of an irreversible process. This problem, in this and many
variants, is widespread and reveals an essential backwardness that a
particular "computer scientist" mindset relating to what constitutes "data"
and in particular it's relationship to order that makes what might be a
straightforward question of editing a document into an over-engineered
database.

Recently working with Nikolaos Vogiatzis whose research explores playful and
radically subjective alternatives to the list, Vogiatzis was struck by how
from the earliest specifications of HTML (still valid today) have separate
elements (OL and UL) for "ordered" and "unordered" lists.

> The representation of the list is not defined here, but a bulleted list for
unordered lists, and a sequence of numbered paragraphs for an ordered list
would be quite appropriate. Other possibilities for interactive display
include embedded scrollable browse panels. [10]

Vogiatzis' surprise lay in the idea of a list ever being considered
"unordered" (or in opposition to the language used in the specification, for
order to ever be considered "insignificant"). Indeed in its suggested
representation, still followed by modern web browsers, the only difference
between the two visually is that UL items are preceded by a bullet symbol,
while OL items are numbered.

The idea of ordering runs deep in programming practice where essentially
different data structures are employed depending on whether order is to be
maintained. The indexes of a "hash" table, for instance (also known as an
associative array), are ordered in an unpredictable way governed by a
representation's particular implementation. This data structure, extremely
prevalent in contemporary programming practice sacrifices order to offer other
kinds of efficiency (fast text-based retrieval for instance).

## Data mining

In announcing Google's impending data center in Mons, Belgian prime minister
Di Rupo invoked the link between the history of the mining industry in the
region and the present and future interest in "data mining" as practiced by IT
companies such as Google.

Whether speaking of bales of cotton, barrels of oil, or bags of words, what
links these subjects is the way in which the notion of "raw material" obscures
the labor and power structures employed to secure them. "Raw" is always
relative: "purity" depends on processes of "refinement" that typically carry
social/ecological impact.

Stripping language of order is an act of "disembodiment", detaching it from
the acts of writing and reading. The shift from (human) reading to machine
reading involves a shift of responsibility from the individual human body to
the obscured responsibilities and seemingly inevitable forces of the
"machine", be it the machine of a market or the machine of an algorithm.

From [X = Y](/wiki/index.php?title=X_%3D_Y "X = Y"):

Still, it is reassuring to know that the products hold traces of the work,
that even with the progressive removal of human signs in automated processes,
the workers' presence never disappears completely. This presence is proof of
the materiality of information production, and becomes a sign of the economies
and paradigms of efficiency and profitability that are involved.


The computer scientists' view of textual content as "unstructured", be it in a
webpage or the OCR scanned pages of a book, reflect a negligence to the
processes and labor of writing, editing, design, layout, typesetting, and
eventually publishing, collecting and cataloging [11].

"Unstructured" to the computer scientist, means non-conformant to particular
forms of machine reading. "Structuring" then is a social process by which
particular (additional) conventions are agreed upon and employed. Computer
scientists often view text through the eyes of their particular reading
algorithm, and in the process (voluntarily) blind themselves to the work
practices which have produced and maintain these "resources".

Berners-Lee, in chastising his audience of web publishers to not only publish
online, but to release "unadulterated" data belies a lack of imagination in
considering how language is itself structured and a blindness to the need for
more than additional technical standards to connect to existing publishing
practices.

Last Revision: 2*08*2016

1. ↑ Benjamin Franklin Lieber, Lieber's Standard Telegraphic Code, 1896, New York;
2. ↑ Katherine Hayles, "Technogenesis in Action: Telegraph Code Books and the Place of the Human", How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, 2006
3. ↑ Hayles
4. ↑ Lieber's
5. ↑ Hayles
6. ↑ Tim Berners-Lee: The next web, TED Talk, February 2009
7. ↑ "Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception." from Brin's [Stanford webpage](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/)
8. ↑ Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web, Sergey Brin, Proceedings of the WebDB Workshop at EDBT 1998,
9. ↑ Dynamic Data Mining: Exploring Large Rule Spaces by Sampling; Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998; p. 2
10. ↑ Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): "Internet Draft", Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel Connolly, June 1993,
11. ↑

Retrieved from

[https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php?title=A_bag_but_is_language_nothing_of_words&oldid=8480](https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php?title=A_bag_but_is_language_nothing_of_words&oldid=8480)

Sekulic
Legal Hacking and Space
2015


# Legal hacking and space

## What can urban commons learn from the free software hackers?

* [Dubravka Sekulic](https://www.eurozine.com/authors/sekulic-dubravka/)

4 November 2015

There is now a need to readdress urban commons through the lens of the digital
commons, writes Dubravka Sekulic. The lessons to be drawn from the free
software community and its resistance to the enclosure of code will likely
prove particularly valuable where participation and regulation are concerned.

> Commons are a particular type of institutional arrangement for governing the
use and disposition of resources. Their salient characteristic, which defines
them in contradistinction to property, is that no single person has exclusive
control over the use and disposition of any particular resource. Instead,
resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone among some
(more or less defined) number of persons, under rules that may range from
"anything goes" to quite crisply articulated formal rules that are effectively
enforced.
> (Benkler 2003: 6)

The above definition of commons, from the seminal paper "The political economy
of commons" by Yochai Benkler, addresses any type of commons, whether analogue
or digital. In fact, the concept of commons entered the digital realm from
physical space in order to interpret the type of communities, relationships
and production that started to appear with the development of the free as
opposed to the proprietary. Peter Linebaugh charted in his excellent book
_Magna Carta Manifesto_ , how the creation and development of the concept of
commons were closely connected to constantly changing relationships of people
and communities to the physical space. Here, I argue that the concept was
enriched when it was implemented in the digital field. Readdressing urban
space through the lens of digital commons can enable another imagination and
knowledge to appear around urban commons.

[](http://www.derive.at/)The
notion of commons in (urban) space is often complicated by archaic models of
organization and management - "the pasture we knew how to share". There is a
tendency to give the impression that the solution is in reverting to the past
models. In the realm of digital though, there is no "pasture" from the Middle
Ages to fall back on. Digital commons had to start from scratch and define its
own protocols of production and reproduction (caring and sharing). Therefore,
the digital commons and free software community can be the one to turn to, not
only for inspiration and advice, but also as a partner when addressing
questions of urban commons. Or, as Marcell Mars would put it "if we could
start again with (regulating and defining) land, knowing what we know now
about digital networks, we could come up with something much better and
appropriate for today's world. That property wouldn't be private, maybe not
even property, but something else. Only then can we say we have learned
something from the digital" (2013).

## Enclosure as the trigger for action

The moment we turn to commons in relation to (urban) space is the moment in
which the pressure to privatize public space and to commodify every aspect of
urban life has become so strong that it can be argued that it mirrors a moment
in which Magna Carta Libertatum was introduced to protect the basic
reproduction of life for those whose sustenance was connected to the common
pastures and forests of England in the thirteenth century. At the end of the
twentieth century, urban space became the ultimate commodity, and increasing
privatization not only endangered the reproduction of everyday life in the
city; the rent extraction through privatized public space and housing
endangered bare life itself. Additionally, the cities' continuous
privatization of its amenities transformed almost every action in the city, no
matter how mundane - as for example, drinking a glass of water from a tap -,
into an action that creates profit for some private entity and extracts it
from the community. Thus every activity became labour, which a citizen-worker
is not only alienated from, but also unaware of. David Harvey's statement
about the city replacing the factory as a site of class war seems to be not
only an apt description of the condition of life in the city, but also a cry
for action.

When Richard Stallman turned to the foundational gesture of the creation of
free software, GNU/GPL (General Public Licence) was his reaction to the
artificially imposed logic of scarcity on the world of code - and the
increasing and systematic enclosure that took place in the late 1970s and
1980s as "a tidal wave of commercialization transformed software from a
technical object into a commodity, to be bought and sold on the open market
under the alleged protection of intellectual property law" (Coleman 2012:
138). Stallman, who worked as a researcher at MIT's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, detected how "[m]any programmers are unhappy about the
commercialization of system software. It may enable them to make more money,
but it requires them to feel in conflict with other programmers in general
rather than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among
programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically
used essentially forbid programmers to treat others as friends. The purchaser
of software must choose between friendship and obeying the law. Naturally,
many decide that friendship is more important. But those who believe in law
often do not feel at ease with either choice. They become cynical and think
that programming is just a way of making money" (Stallman 2002: 32).

In the period between 1980 and 1984, "one man [Stallman] envisioned a crusade
to change the situation" (Moglen 1999). Stallman understood that in order to
subvert the system, he would have to intervene in the protocols that regulate
the conditions under which the code is produced, and not the code itself;
although he did contribute some of the best lines of code into the compiler
and text editor - the foundational infrastructure for any development. The
gesture that enabled the creation of a free software community that yielded
the complex field of digital commons was not a perfect line of code. The
creation of GNU General Public License (GPL) was a legal hack to counteract
the imposing of intellectual property law on code. At that time, the only
license available for programmers wanting to keep the code free was public
domain, which gave no protection against the code being appropriated and
closed. GPL enabled free codes to become self-perpetuating. Everything built
using a free code had to be made available under the same condition, in order
to secure the freedom for programmers to continue sharing and not breaking the
law. "By working on and using GNU rather than proprietary programs, we can be
hospitable to everyone and obey the law. In addition, GNU serves as an example
to inspire and as a banner to rally others to join in sharing. This can give
us a feeling of harmony, which is impossible if we use software, which is not
free. For about half the programmers I talk to, this is an important happiness
that money cannot replace" (Stallman 2002: 33).

Architects and planners as well as environmental designers have for too long
believed the opposite, that a good enough design can subvert the logic of
enclosure that dominates the production and reproduction of space; that a good
enough design can keep space open and public by the sheer strength of spatial
intervention. Stallman rightfully understands that no design is strong enough
to keep private ownership from claiming what it believes belongs to it.
Digital and urban commons, despite operating in completely different realms
and economies, are under attack from the same threat of "market processes"
that "crucially depend upon the individual monopoly of capitalists (of all
sorts) over ownership of the means of production, including finance and land.
All rent, recall, is a return to the monopoly power of private ownership of
some crucial asset, such as land or a patent. The monopoly power of private
property is therefore both the beginning-point and the end-point of all
capitalist activity" (Harvey 2012: 100). Stallman envisioned a bleak future
(2003: 26-28) but found a way to "relate the means to the ends". He understood
that the emancipatory task of a struggle "is not only what has to be done, but
also how it will be done and who will do it" (Stavrides & De Angelis: 7).
Thus, to produce the necessary requirements - both for a community to emerge,
but also for the basis of future protocols - tools and methodologies are
needed for the community to create both free software and itself.

## Renegotiating (undoing) property, hacking the law, creating community

Property, as an instrument of allocation of resources, is a right that is
negotiated within society and by society and not written in stone or given as
such. The digital, more than any other field, discloses property as being
inappropriate for contemporary relationships between production and
reproduction and, additionally, proves how it is possible to fundamentally
rethink it. The digital offers this possibility as it is non-material, non-
rival and non-exclusive (Meretz 2013), unlike anything in the physical world.
And Elinor Ostrom's lifelong empirical researches give ground to the belief
that eschewing property, being the sole instrument of allocation, can work as
a tool of management even for rival, excludable goods.
The value of information in digital form is not flat, but property is not the
way to protect that value, as the music industry realized during the course of
the last ten years. Once the copy is _out there_ , the cost of protecting its
exclusivity on the grounds of property becomes too high in relation to the
potential value to be extracted. For example, the value is extracted from
information through controlling the moment of its release and not through
subsequent exploitation. Stallman decided to tackle the imposition of the
concept of property on computer code (and by extension to the digital realm as
a whole) by articulating it in another field: just as property is the product
of constant negotiations within a society, so are legal regulations. After
some time, he was joined by "[m]any free software developers [who] do not
consider intellectual property instruments as the pivotal stimulus for a
marketplace of ideas and knowledge. Instead, they see them as a form of
restriction so fundamental (or poorly executed) that they need to be
counteracted through alternative legal agreements that treat knowledge,
inventions, and other creative expressions not as property but rather as
speech to be freely shared, circulated, and modified" (Coleman 2012: 26).

The digital sphere can give a valid example of how renegotiating regulation
can transform a resource from scarce to abundant. When the change from
analogue signal to packet switching begun to take effect, the distribution of
finite territory and the way the radio frequency spectrum was managed got
renegotiated and the amount of slots of space to be allocated grew by an order
of magnitude while the absolute size of the spectrum stayed the same. This
shift enabled Brecht's dream of a two-sided radio to become reality, thus
enabling what he had suggested: "change this apparatus over from distribution
to communication".1

According to Lawrence Lessig, what regulates behavior in cyberspace is an
interdependence of four constraints: market, law, architecture and norms
(Lessig 2012: 121-25). Analogously, space can be put in place of cyberspace,
as the regulation of space is the sum of these four constraints. These four
constraints are in a dynamic relationship in which the balance can be tilted
towards one, depending on how much each of these categories puts pressure on
the other three. Changes in any one reflect the regulation of the whole.
"Architecture" in Lessig's theory should be understood broadly as the "built
environment" that regulates behaviour in (cyber)space. In the last few decades
we have experienced the domination of the market reconfiguring the basis of
norms, law and architecture. In order to counteract this, the other three
constraints need to be re-negotiated. In digital space, this reconfiguration
happened by declaring the code - that is, the set of instructions written as
highly formalized text in a specific programming language to be executed
(usually) by the computer - to be considered as speech in front of the law,
and by hacking the law in order to disrupt the way that property relationships
are formed.

To put it simply, in order to create a change in dynamics between the
architecture, norms and the market, the law had to be addressed first. This is
not a novel procedure, "legal hacking is going on all the time, it is just
that politics is doing it under the veil of legality because they are the
parliament, they are Microsoft, which can hire a whole law firm to defend them
and find all the legal loopholes. Legal hacking is the norm actually" (Bailey
2013). When it comes to physical space, one of the most obvious examples of
the reconfiguration of regulations under the influence of the market is to
create legal provisions, norms and architecture to sustain the concept of
developing (and privatizing) public space through public-private partnerships.
The decision of the Italian parliament that the privatization of services
(specifically of water management) is legal and does not obstruct one's access
to water as a human right, is another example of a crude manipulation of the
law by the state in favour of the market. Unlike legal hacks by corporations
that aim to create a favourable legal climate for another round of
accumulation through dispossession, Stallman's hack tries to limit the impact
of the market and to create a space of freedom for the creation of a code and
of sharable knowledge, by questioning one of the central pillars of liberal
jurisprudence: (intellectual) property law.

Similarly, translated into physical space, one of the initiatives in Europe
that comes closest to creating a real existing urban commons, Teatro Valle
Occupato in Rome, is doing the same, "pushing the borders of legality of
private property" by legally hacking the institution of a foundation to "serve
a public, or common, purpose" and having "notarized [a] document registered
with the Italian state, that creates a precedent for other people to follow in
its way" (Bailey 2013). Sounds familiar to Stallman's hack as the fundamental
gesture by which community and the whole eco-system can be formed.

It is obvious that, in order to create and sustain that type of legal hack, it
is a necessity to have a certain level of awareness and knowledge of how
systems, both political and legal, work, i.e. to be politically literate.
"While in general", says Italian commons-activist and legal scholar Saki
Bailey, "we've become extremely lazy [when it comes to politics]. We've
started to become a kind of society of people who give up their responsibility
to participate by handing it over to some charismatic leaders, experts of [a]
different type" (2013). Free software hackers, in order to understand and take
part in a constant negotiation that takes place on a legal level between the
market that seeks to cloister the code and hackers who want to keep it free,
had to become literate in an arcane legal language. Gabriella Coleman notes in
_Coding Freedom_ that hacker forums sometimes tend to produce legal analysis
that is just as serious as one would expect to find in a law office. Like the
occupants of Teatro Valle, free software hackers understand the importance of
devoting time and energy to understand constraints and to find ways to
structurally divert them.

This type of knowledge is not shared and created in isolation, but in
socialization, in discussions in physical or cyber spaces (such as #irc chat
rooms, forums, mailing lists…), the same way free software hackers share their
knowledge about code. Through this process of socializing knowledge, "the
community is formed, developed, and reproduced through practices focused on
common space. To generalize this principle: the community is developed through
commoning, through acts and forms of organization oriented towards the
production of the common" (Stavrides 2012: 588). Thus forming a community is
another crucial element of the creation of digital commons, but even more
important are its development and resilience. The emerging community was not
given something to manage, it created something together, and together devised
rules of self-regulation and decision-making.

The prime example of this principle in the free software community is the
Debian Project, formed around the development of the Debian Linux
distribution. It is a volunteer organization consisting of around 3,000
developers that since its inception in 1993 has defined a set of basic
principles by which the project and its members conduct their affairs. This
includes the introduction of new people into the community, a process called
Debian Social Contract (DSC). A special part of the DSC defines the criteria
for "free software", thus regulating technical aspects of the project and also
technical relations with the rest of a free software community. The Debian
Constitution, another document created by the community so it can govern
itself, describes the organizational structure for formal decision-making
within the project.

Another example is Wikipedia, where the community that makes the online
encyclopedia also takes part in creating regulations, with some aspects
debated almost endlessly on forums. It is even possible to detect a loose
community of "Internet users" who took to the streets all over the world when
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats to
Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) threatened to
enclose the Internet, as we know it; the proposed legislation was successfully
contested.

Free software projects that represent the core of the digital commons are most
of the time born of the initiative of individuals, but their growth and life
cycle depend on the fact that they get picked up by a community or generate
community around them that is allowed to take part in their regulation and in
decisions about which shape and forms the project will take in the future.
This is an important lesson to be transferred to the physical space in which
many projects fail because they do not get picked up by the intended
community, as the community is not offered a chance to partake in its creation
and, more importantly, its regulation.

## Building common infrastructure and institutions

"The expansion of intellectual property law" as the main vehicle of the trend
to enclose the code that leads to the act of the creation of free software
and, thus, digital commons, "is part and parcel of a broader neoliberal trend
to privatize what was once under public or under the state's aegis, such as
health provision, water delivery, and military services" (Coleman 2012: 16).
The structural fight headed by the GNU/GPL against the enclosure of code
"defines the contractual relationship that serves to secure the freedom of
means of production and to constitute a community of those participating in
the production and reproduction of free resources. And it is this constitutive
character, as an answer to an every time singular situation of appropriation
by the capital, that is a genuine political emancipation striving for an equal
and free collective production" (Mars & Medak 2004). Thus digital commons "is
based on the _communication_ among _singularities_ and emerges through
collaborative social processes of production " (Negri & Hardt 2005: 204).

The most important lesson urban commons can take from its digital counterpart
is at the same time the most difficult one: how to make a structural hack in
the moment of the creation of an urban commons that will enable it to become
structurally self-perpetuating, thus creating fertile ground not only for a
singular spatialization of urban commons to appear, but to multiply and create
a whole new eco-system. Digital commons was the first field in which what
Negri and Hardt (2009: 3-21) called the "republic of property" was challenged.
Urban commons, in order to really emerge as a spatialization of a new type of
relationship, need to start undoing property as well in order to socially re-
appropriate the city. Or in the words of Stavros Stavrides "the most urgent
and promising task, which can oppose the dominant governance model, is the
reinvention of common space. The realm of the common emerges in a constant
confrontation with state-controlled 'authorized' public space. This is an
emergence full of contradictions, perhaps, quite difficult to predict, but
nevertheless necessary. Behind a multifarious demand for justice and dignity,
new roads to collective emancipation are tested and invented. And, as the
Zapatistas say, we can create these roads only while walking. But we have to
listen, to observe, and to feel the walking movement. Together" (Stavrides
2012: 594).

The big task for both digital and urban commons is "[b]uilding a core common
infrastructure [which] is a necessary precondition to allow us to transition
away from a society of passive consumers buying what a small number of
commercial producers are selling. It will allow us to develop into a society
in which all can speak to all, and in which anyone can become an active
participant in political, social and cultural discourse" (Benkler 2003: 9).
This core common infrastructure has to be porous enough to include people that
are not similar, to provide "a ground to build a public realm and give
opportunities for discussing and negotiating what is good for all, rather than
the idea of strengthening communities in their struggle to define their own
commons. Relating commons to groups of "similar" people bears the danger of
eventually creating closed communities. People may thus define themselves as
commoners by excluding others from their milieu, from their own privileged
commons." (Stavrides 2010). If learning carefully from digital commons, urban
commons need to be conceptualized on the basis of the public, with a self-
regulating community that is open for others to join. That socializes
knowledge and thus produces and reproduces the commons, creating a space for
political emancipation that is capable of judicial arguments for the
protection and extension of regulations that are counter-market oriented.

## References

Bailey, Saki (2013): Interview by Dubravka Sekulic and Alexander de Cuveland.

Benkler, Yochai (2003): "The political economy of commons". _Upgrade_ IV, no.
3, 6-9, [www.benkler.org/Upgrade-
Novatica%20Commons.pdf](http://www.benkler.org/Upgrade-
Novatica%20Commons.pdf).

Benkler, Yochai (2006): _The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom_. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Brecht, Bertolt (2000): "The radio as a communications apparatus". In: _Brecht
on Film and Radio_ , edited by Marc Silberman. Methuen, 41-6.

Coleman, E. Gabriella (2012): _Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of
Hacking_. Princeton University Press / Kindle edition.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2005): _Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire_. Penguin Books.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2011): _Commonwealth_. Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.

Harvey, David (2012): The Art of Rent. In: _Rebel Cities: From the Right to
the City to the Urban Revolution_ , 1st ed. Verso, 94-118.

Hill, Benjamin Mako (2012): Freedom for Users, Not for Software. In: Bollier,
David & Helfrich, Silke (Ed.): _The Wealth of the Commons: a World Beyond
Market and State_. Levellers Press / E-book.

Lessig, Lawrence (2012): _Code: Version 2.0_. Basic Books.

Linebaugh, Peter (2008): _The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for
All_. University of California Press.

Mars, Marcell (2013): Interview by Dubravka Sekulic.

Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak (2004): "Both devil and gnu",
[www.desk.org:8080/ASU2/newsletter.Zarez.N5M.MedakRomicTXT.EnGlish](http://www.desk.org:8080/ASU2/newsletter.Zarez.N5M.MedakRomicTXT.EnGlish).

Martin, Reinhold (2013): "Public and common(s): Places: Design observer",
[placesjournal.org/article/public-and-
commons](https://placesjournal.org/article/public-and-commons).

Meretz, Stefan (2010): "Commons in a taxonomy of goods", [keimform.de/2010
/commons-in-a-taxonomy-of-goods](http://keimform.de/2010/commons-in-a
-taxonomy-of-goods/).

Mitrasinovic, Miodrag (2006): _Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space_ ,
1st ed. Ashgate.

Moglen, Eben (1999): "Anarchism triumphant: Free software and the death of
copyright", First Monday,
[firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594](http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594).

Stallman, Richard and Joshua Gay (2002): _Free Software, Free Society:
Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman_. GNU Press.

Stallman, Richard and Joshua Gay (2003): "The Right to Read". _Upgrade_ IV,
no. 3, 26-8.

Stavrides, Stavros (2012) "Squares in movement". _South Atlantic Quarterly_
111, no. 3, 585-96.

Stavrides, Stavros (2013): "Contested urban rhythms: From the industrial city
to the post-industrial urban archipelago". _The Sociological Review_ 61,
34-50.

Stavrides, Stavros, and Massimo De Angelis (2010): "On the commons: A public
interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides". _e-flux_ 17, 1-17,
[www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-
angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/](http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a
-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/).

1

"[...] radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus
for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion:
change this apparatus over from distribution to communication". See "The radio
as a communications apparatus", Brecht 2000.

Published 4 November 2015
Original in English
First published by derive 61 (2015)

Contributed by dérive © Dubravka Sekulic / dérive / Eurozine

[PDF/PRINT](https://www.eurozine.com/legal-hacking-and-space/?pdf)

Sekulic
On Knowledge and Stealing
2018


# Dubravka Sekulic: On Knowledge and 'Stealing'

This text was originally published in [The
Funambulist](https://thefunambulist.net/) - Issue 17, May-June 2018
"Weaponized Infrastructure".

__

In 2003 artist Jackie Summell started a correspondence with Herman Wallace,
who at the time was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement in the
Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, by asking him “What kind of a house
does a man who has lived in a 6′ x 9′ cell for over thirty years dream of?”
(1) The Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security prison in
the US, besides inmate quarters and among other facilities includes a prison
plantation, Prison View Golf Course, and Angola Airstrip. The nickname Angola
comes from the former slave plantation purchased for a prison after the end of
the Civil War – and where Herman Wallace became a prisoner in 1971 upon
charges of armed robbery. He became politically active in the prison's chapter
of the Black Panther and campaigned for better conditions in Angola,
organizing petitions and hunger strikes against segregation, rape, and
violence. In 1973, together with Albert Woodfox, he was convicted of murder of
a prison guard and both were put in solitary confinement. Together with Robert
King, Wallace and Woodfox would become known as the Angola 3, the three prison
inmates who served the longest period in solitary confinement – 29, 41, and 43
years respectively. The House that Herman Built, Herman's virtual and
eventually physical dream house in his birth city of New Orleans grew from the
correspondence between Jackie and Herman. At one point, Jackie asked Herman to
make a list of the books he would have on the book shelf in his dream house,
the books which influenced his political awakening. At the time Jackie was a
fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, which supported acquisition
of the books and became the foundation of Herman's physical library on its
premises, waiting for his dream home to be built to relocate.

In 2013 the conviction against Herman Wallace was thrown out and he was
released from jail. Three days later he passed away. He never saw his dream
house built, nor took a book from a shelf in his library in Solitude, which
remained accessible to fellows and visitors until 2014. In 2014 Public
Library/Memory of the World (2) digitized Herman's library to place it online
thus making it permanently accessible to everyone with an Internet
connection(3). The spirit of Herman Wallace continued to live through the
collection shaping him – works by Marxists, revolutionaries, anarchists,
abolitionists, and civil rights activists, some of whom were also prisoners
during their lifetime. Many books from Herman's library would not be
accessible to those serving time, as access to knowledge for the inmate
population in the US is increasingly being regulated. A peak into the list of
banned books, which at one point included Michelle Alexander's The New Jim
Crow (The New Press, 2010), reveals the incentive of the ban was to prevent
access to knowledge that would allow inmates to understand their position in
society and the workings of the prison-industrial complex. It is becoming
increasingly difficult for inmates to have chance encounters with a book that
could change their lives; given access to knowledge they could see their
position in life from another perspective; they could have a moment of
revelation like the one Cle Sloan had. Sloan, a member of the Los Angeles gang
Bloods encountered his neighborhood Athens Park on a 1972 Los Angeles Police
Department 'Gang Territories' map in Mike Davis' book City of Quartz, which
made him understand gang violence in L.A. was a product of institutional
violence, structural racism, and systemic dispersal of community support
networks put in place by the Black Panther Party.

The books in Herman's library can be seen as a toolbox of “really useful
knowledge” for someone who has to conceive the notion of freedom. The term
“really useful knowledge” originated with workers' awareness of the need for
self-education in the early-19th century, describing a body of 'unpractical'
knowledge such as politics, economics, and philosophy, workers needed to
understand and change their position in society, and opposed 'useful
knowledge' – knowledge of 'practical' skills which would make them useful to
the employer. Like in the 19th century, sustaining the system relies on
continued exploitation of a population prevented from accessing, producing and
sharing knowledges needed to start to understand the system that is made to
oppress and to articulate a position from which they can act. Who controls the
networks of production and distribution to knowledge is an important issue, as
it determines which books are made accessible. Self-help and coloring books
are allowed and accessible to inmates so as to continue oppression and pacify
resistance. The crisis of access persists outside the prison walls with a
continuous decline in the number of public libraries and the books they offer
due to the double assault of austerity measures and a growing monopoly of the
corporate publishing industry.

Digital networks have incredible power to widely distribute content, and once
the (digital) content is out there it is relatively easy to share and access.
Digital networks can provide a solution for enclosure of knowledge and for the
oppressed, easier access to channels of distribution. At least that was the
promise – the Internet would enable a democratization of access. However,
digital networks have a significant capacity to centralize and control within
the realm of knowledge distribution, one look at the oligopoly of academic
publishing and its impact on access and independent production shows its
contrary.

In June 2015 Elsiver won an injunction against Library Genesis and its
subsidiary platform sci-hub.org, making it inaccessible in some countries and
via some commercial internet providers. Run by anonymous scientists mostly
from Eastern Europe, these voluntary and non-commercial projects are the
largest illegal repository of electronic books, journals, and articles on the
web (4). Most of the scientific articles collected in the repository bypassed
the paywalls of academic publishers using the solidary network of access
provided by those associated with universities rich enough to pay the
exuberant subscription fees. The only person named in the court case was
Alexandra Elbakyan, who revealed her identity as the creator of sci-hub.org,
and explained she was motivated by the lack of access: “When I was working on
my research project, I found out that all research papers I needed for work
were paywalled. I was a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university
was not subscribed to anything.”(5) The creation of sci-hub.org made
scientific knowledge accessible to anyone, not just to members of wealthy
academic institutions. The act of acknowledging responsibility for sci-hub
transformed what was seen as the act of illegality (piracy) into the act of
civil disobedience. In the context of sci-hub and Library Genesis, both
projects from the periphery of knowledge production, “copyright infringement
opens on to larger questions about the legitimacy of the historic compromise –
if indeed there ever even was one – between the labor that produces culture
and knowledge and its commodification as codified in existing copyright
regulations.”(6) Here, disobedience and piracy have an equalizing effect on
the asymmetries of access to knowledge.

In 2008, programmer and hacktivist Aaron Swartz published Guerilla Open
Access Manifesto triggered by the enclosure of scientific knowledge production
of the past, often already part of public domain, via digitization. “The
world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in
books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful
private corporations […] We need to download scientific journals and upload
them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”(7)
On January 6, 2011, the MIT police and the US Secret Service arrested Aaron
Swartz on charges of having downloaded a large number of scientific articles
from one of the most used and paywalled database. The federal prosecution
decided to show the increasingly nervous publishing industry the lengths they
are willing to go to protect them by indicting Swartz on 13 criminal counts.
With a threat of 50 years in prison and US$1 million fine, Aaron committed
suicide on January 11, 2013. But he left us with an assignment – if you have
access, you have a responsibility to share with those who do not; “with enough
of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join
us?” (8) He pointed to an important issue – every new cycle of technological
development (in this case the move from paper to digital) brings a new threat
of enclosure of the knowledge in the public domain.

While “the core and the periphery adopt different strategies of opposition to
the inequalities and exclusions [digital] technologies start to reproduce”
some technologies used by corporations to enclose can be used to liberate
knowledge and make it accessible. The existence of projects such as Library
Genesis, sci-hub, Public Library/Memory of the World, aaaarg.org, monoskop,
and ubuweb, commonly known as shadow libraries, show how building
infrastructure for storing, indexing, and access, as well as supporting
digitization, can not only be put to use by the periphery, but used as a
challenge to the normalization of enclosure offered by the core. The people
building alternative networks of distribution also build networks of support
and solidarity. Those on the peripheries need to 'steal' the knowledge behind
paywalls in order to fight the asymmetries paywalls enforce – peripheries
“steal” in order to advance. Depending on the vantage point, digitization of a
book can be stealing, or liberating it to return the knowledge (from the dusty
library closed stacks) back into circulation. “Old” knowledge can teach new
tricksters a handful of tricks.

In 2015 I realized none of the architecture students of the major European
architecture schools can have a chance encounter with Architecture and
Feminisms or Sexuality and Space, nor with many books on similar topics
because they were typically located in the library’s closed stacks. Both books
were formative and in 2005, as a student I went to great lengths to gain
access to them. The library at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade, was
starved of books due to permanent financial crisis, and even bestsellers such
as Rem Koolhaas' S, M, L, XL were not available, let alone books that were
focused on feminism and architecture. At the time, the Internet could inform
that edited volumes such as Architecture and Feminism and Sexuality and Space
existed but nothing more. To satisfy my curiosity, and help me write a paper,
a friend sent – via another friend – her copies from London to Belgrade, which
I photocopied, and returned. With time, I graduated to buying my own second
hand copies of both books, which I digitized upon realizing access to them
still relied on access to a well-stocked specialist library. They became the
basis for my growing collection on feminism/gender/space I maintain as an
amateur librarian, tactically digitizing books to contribute to the growing
struggle to make architecture more equitable as both a profession and an
effect in space.

At the end, a confession, and an anecdote – since 2015, I have tried to
digitize a book a week and every year, I manage to digitize around 20 books,
so one can say I am not particularly good at meeting my goals. The books I do
digitize are related to feminism, space, race, urban riots, and struggle, and
I choose them for their (un)availability and urgency. Most of them are
published in the 1970s and 1980s, though some were published in the 1960s and
1990s. Some I bought as former library books, digitized on a DIY book scanner,
and uploaded to the usual digital repositories. It takes two to four hours to
make a neat and searchable PDF scan of a book. As a PDF, knowledge production
usually under the radar or long out of print becomes more accessible. One of
the first books I digitized was Robert Goodman's After the Planners, a
critique of urban planning and the limits of alternate initiatives in cities
written in the late 1960s. A few years after I scanned it, online photos from
a conference drew my attention –the important, white male professor was
showing the front page of After the Planners on his slide. I realized fast the
image had a light signature of the scanner I had used. While I do not know if
this act of digitization made a dent or was co-opted, seeing the image was a
small proof that digitization can bring books back into circulation and access
to them might make a difference – or that access to knowledge can be a weapon.



[Dubravka Sekulic](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/sekulic/) writes
about the production of space. She is an amateur-librarian at Public
Library/Memory of the World, where she maintains feminist, and space/race
collections. During Making Futures School, Dubravka will be figuring out the
future of education (on all things spatial) together with [Elise
Hunchuck](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/hunchuck/), [Jonathan
Solomon](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/solomon/) and [Valentina
Karga](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/karga/).

__

This text was originally published in The Funambulist - Issue 17, May-June
2018 "Weaponized Infrastrucuture".  [A pdf version of it can be downloaded
here.](https://www.making-futures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05
/Dubravka_Sekulic-On_Knowledge_and_Stealing.pdf)

__

Notes:

(1) For more on the project Herman’s House. Accessed 6 April 2018.


(2) Public Library is a project which has been since 2012 developing and
publicly supporting scenarios for massive disobedience against the current
regulation of production and circulation of knowlde and culture in the digital
realm. See: ‘Memory of the World’. Accessed 7 April 2018.


(3) Herman's library can be accessed at[
http://herman.memoryoftheworld.org/](http://herman.memoryoftheworld.org/) More
on the context of digitization see: ‘Herman’s Library’. Memory of the World
(blog), 28 October 2014. /hermans-library/>, and ‘Public Library. Rethinking the Infrastructures of
Knowledge Production’. Memory of the World (blog), 30 October 2014.
the-infrastructures-of-knowledge-production/.>

(4) For more on shadow libraries and library genesis see: Bodo, Balazs.
‘Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era’. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY:
Social Science Research Network, 10 June 2015.


(5) ‘Sci-Hub Tears Down Academia’s “Illegal” Copyright Paywalls’. TorrentFreak
(blog), 27 June 2015. illegal-copyright-paywalls-150627/.>

(6) For the schizophrenia of the current model of the corporate enclosure of
the scientific knowledge see: Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak, The System of
a Takedown, forthcoming, 2018

(7) Aaron Swartz. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. Accessed 7 April 2018.[
http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto.](http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto.)

(8) Ibid.

(9) Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak, The System of a Takedown, forthcoming,
2018.

(10) See ‘In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’.
http://custodians.online. Accessed 7 April 2018.

Sollfrank
The Surplus of Copying
2018


## essay #11

The Surplus of Copying
How Shadow Libraries and Pirate Archives Contribute to the
Creation of Cultural Memory and the Commons
By Cornelia Sollfrank

Digital artworks tend to have a problematic relationship with the white
cube—in particular, when they are intended and optimized for online
distribution. While curators and exhibition-makers usually try to avoid
showing such works altogether, or at least aim at enhancing their sculptural
qualities to make them more presentable, the exhibition _Top Tens_ featured an
abundance of web quality digital artworks, thus placing emphasis on the very
media condition of such digital artifacts. The exhibition took place at the
Onassis Cultural Center in Athens in March 2018 and was part of the larger
festival _Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens_ ,1 an event to introduce the
online archive UbuWeb2 to the Greek audience and discuss related cultural,
ethical, technical, and legal issues. This text takes the event—and the
exhibition in particular—as a starting point for a closer look at UbuWeb and
the role an artistic approach can play in building cultural memory within the
neoliberal knowledge economy.

_UbuWeb—The Cultural Memory of the Avant-Garde_

Since Kenneth Goldsmith started Ubu in 1997 the site has become a major point
of reference for anyone interested in exploring twentieth-century avant-garde
art. The online archive provides free and unrestricted access to a remarkable
collection of thousands of artworks—among them almost 700 films and videos,
over 1000 sound art pieces, dozens of filmed dance productions, an
overwhelming amount of visual poetry and conceptual writing, critical
documents, but also musical scores, patents, electronic music resources, plus
an edition of vital new literature, the /ubu editions. Ubu contextualizes the
archived objects within curated sections and also provides framing academic
essays. Although it is a project run by Goldsmith without a budget, it has
built a reputation for making all the things available one would not find
elsewhere. The focus on “avant-garde” may seem a bit pretentious at first, but
when you look closer at the project, its operator and the philosophy behind
it, it becomes obvious how much sense this designation makes. Understanding
the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde as “a history of subversive
takes on creativity, originality, and authorship,”3 such spirit is not only
reflected in terms of the archive’s contents but also in terms of the project
as a whole. Theoretical statements by Goldsmith in which he questions concepts
such as authorship, originality, and creativity support this thesis4—and with
that a conflictual relationship with the notion of intellectual property is
preprogrammed. Therefore it comes as no surprise that the increasing
popularity of the project goes hand-in-hand with a growing discussion about
its ethical justification.

At the heart of Ubu, there is the copy! Every item in the archive is a digital
copy, either of another digital item or, in fact, it is the digitized version
of an analog object.5 That is to say, the creation of a digital collection is
inevitably based on copying the desired archive records and storing them on
dedicated media. However, making a copy is in itself a copyright-relevant act,
if the respective item is an original creation and as such protected under
copyright law.6 Hence, “any reproduction of a copyrighted work infringes the
copyright of the author or the corresponding rights of use of the copyright
holder”.7 Whether the existence of an artwork within the Ubu collection is a
case of copyright infringement varies with each individual case and depends on
the legal status of the respective work, but also on the way the rights
holders decide to act. As with all civil law, there is no judge without a
plaintiff, which means even if there is no express consent by the rights
holders, the work can remain in the archive as long as there is no request for
removal.8 Its status, however, is precarious. We find ourselves in the
notorious gray zone of copyright law where nothing is clear and many things
are possible—until somebody decides to challenge this status. Exploring the
borders of this experimental playground involves risk-taking, but, at the same
time, it is the only way to preserve existing freedoms and make a case for
changing cultural needs, which have not been considered in current legal
settings. And as the 20 years of Ubu’s existence demonstrate, the practice may
be experimental and precarious, but with growing cultural relevance and
reputation it is also gaining in stability.

_Fair Use and Public Interest_

At all public appearances and public presentations Goldsmith and his
supporters emphasize the educational character of the project and its non-
commercial orientation.9 Such a characterization is clearly intended to take
the wind out of the sails of its critics from the start and to shift the
attention away from the notion of piracy and toward questions of public
interest and the common good.

From a cultural point of view, the project unquestionably is of inestimable
value; a legal defense, however, would be a difficult undertaking. Copyright
law, in fact, has a built-in opening, the so-called copyright exceptions or
fair use regulations. They vary according to national law and cultural
traditions and allow for the use of copyrighted works under certain, defined
provisions without permission of the owner. The exceptions basically apply to
the areas of research and private study (both non-commercial), education,
review, and criticism and are described through general guidelines. “These
defences exist in order to restore the balance between the rights of the owner
of copyright and the rights of society at large.”10

A very powerful provision in most legislations is the permission to make
“private copies”, digital and analog ones, in small numbers, but they are
limited to non-commercial and non-public use, and passing on to a third party
is also excluded.11 As Ubu is an online archive that makes all of its records
publicly accessible and, not least, also provides templates for further
copying, it exceeds the notion of a “private copy” by far. Regarding further
fair use provisions, the four factors that are considered in a decision-making
process in US copyright provisions, for instance, refer to: 1) the purpose and
character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or
is for non-profit educational purposes; 2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
copyrighted work as a whole; and 4) the effect of the use upon the potential
market for the value of the copyrighted work (US Copyright Act, 1976, 17 USC.
§107, online, n.pag.). Applying these fair use provisions to Ubu, one might
consider that the main purposes of the archive relate to education and
research, that it is by its very nature non-commercial, and it largely does
not collide with any third party business interests as most of the material is
not commercially available. However, proving this in detail would be quite an
endeavor. And what complicates matters even more is that the archival material
largely consists of original works of art, which are subject to strict
copyright law protection, that all the works have been copied without any
transformative or commenting intention, and last but not least, that the
aspect of the appropriateness of the amount of used material becomes absurd
with reference to an archive whose quality largely depends on
comprehensiveness: the more the merrier. As Simon Stokes points out, legally
binding decisions can only be made on a case-by-case basis, which is why it is
difficult to make a general evaluation of Ubu’s legal situation.12 The ethical
defense tends to induce the cultural value of the archive as a whole and its
invaluable contribution to cultural memory, while the legal situation does not
consider the value of the project as a whole and necessitates breaking it down
into all the individual items within the collection.

This very brief, when not abridged discussion of the possibilities of fair use
already demonstrates how complex it would be to apply them to Ubu. How
pointless it would be to attempt a serious legal discussion for such a
privately run archive becomes even clearer when looking at the problems public
libraries and archives have to face. While in theory such official
institutions may even have a public mission to collect, preserve, and archive
digital material, in practice, copyright law largely prevents the execution of
this task, as Steinhauer explains.13 The legal expert introduces the example
of the German National Library, which was assigned the task since 2006 to make
back-up copies of all websites published within the .de sublevel domain, but
it turned out to be illegal.14 Identifying a deficiently legal situation when
it comes to collecting, archiving, and providing access to digital cultural
goods, Steinhauer even speaks of a “legal obligation to amnesia”.15 And it is
particularly striking that, from a legal perspective, the collecting of
digitalia is more strictly regulated than the collecting of books, for
example, where the property status of the material object comes into play.
Given the imbalance between cultural requirements, copyright law, and the
technical possibilities, it is not surprising that private initiatives are
being founded with the aim to collect and preserve cultural memory. These
initiatives make use of the affordability and availability of digital
technology and its infrastructures, and they take responsibility for the
preservation of cultural goods by simply ignoring copyright induced
restrictions, i.e. opposing the insatiable hunger of the IP regime for
control.

_Shadow Libraries_

Ubu was presented and discussed in Athens at an event titled _Shadow
Libraries: UbuWeb in Athens_ , thereby making clear reference to the ecosystem
of shadow libraries. A library, in general, is an institution that collects,
orders, and makes published information available while taking into account
archival, economic, and synoptic aspects. A shadow library does exactly the
same thing, but its mission is not an official one. Usually, the
infrastructure of shadow libraries is conceived, built, and run by a private
initiative, an individual, or a small group of people, who often prefer to
remain anonymous for obvious reasons. In terms of the media content provided,
most shadow libraries are peer-produced in the sense that they are based on
the contributions of a community of supporters, sometimes referred to as
“amateur librarians”. The two key attributes of any proper library, according
to Amsterdam-based media scholar Bodo Balazs, are the catalog and the
community: “The catalogue does not just organize the knowledge stored in the
collection; it is not just a tool of searching and browsing. It is a critical
component in the organisation of the community of librarians who preserve and
nourish the collection.”16 What is specific about shadow libraries, however,
is the fact that they make available anything their contributors consider to
be relevant—regardless of its legal status. That is to say, shadow libraries
also provide unauthorized access to copyrighted publications, and they make
the material available for download without charge and without any other
restrictions. And because there is a whole network of shadow libraries whose
mission is “to remove all barriers in the way of science,”17 experts speak of
an ecosystem fostering free and universal access to knowledge.

The notion of the shadow library enjoyed popularity in the early 2000s when
the wide availability of digital networked media contributed to the emergence
of large-scale repositories of scientific materials, the most famous one
having been Gigapedia, which later transformed into library.nu. This project
was famous for hosting approximately 400,000 (scientific) books and journal
articles but had to be shut down in 2012 as a consequence of a series of
injunctions from powerful publishing houses. The now leading shadow library in
the field, Library Genesis (LibGen), can be considered as its even more
influential successor. As of November 2016 the database contained 25 million
documents (42 terabytes), of which 2.1 million were books, with digital copies
of scientific articles published in 27,134 journals by 1342 publishers.18 The
large majority of the digital material is of scientific and educational nature
(95%), while only 5% serves recreational purposes.19 The repository is based
on various ways of crowd-sourcing, i.e. social and technical forms of
accessing and sharing academic publications. Despite a number of legal cases
and court orders, the site is still available under various and changing
domain names.20

The related project Sci-Hub is an online service that processes requests for
pay-walled articles by providing systematic, automized, but unauthorized
backdoor access to proprietary scholarly journal databases. Users requesting
papers not present in LibGen are advised to download them through Sci-Hub; the
respective PDF files are served to users and automatically added to LibGen (if
not already present). According to _Nature_ magazine, Sci-Hub hosts around 60
million academic papers and was able to serve 75 million downloads in 2016. On
a daily basis 70,000 users access approximately 200,000 articles.

The founder of the meta library Sci-Hub is Kazakh programmer Alexandra
Elbakyan, who has been sued by large publishing houses and was convicted twice
to pay almost 20 million US$ in compensation for the losses her activities
allegedly have caused, which is why she had to go underground in Russia. For
illegally leaking millions of documents the _New York Times_ compared her to
Edward Snowden in 2016: “While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a
stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just
about every scientific paper ever published, ranging from acoustics to
zymology.” 21 In the same year the prestigious _Nature_ magazine elected her
as one of the ten most influential people in science. 22 Unlike other
persecuted people, she went on the offensive and started to explain her
actions and motives in court documents and blog posts. Sci-Hub encourages new
ways of distributing knowledge, beyond any commercial interests. It provides a
radically open infrastructure thus creating an inviting atmosphere. “It is a
knowledge infrastructure that can be freely accessed, used and built upon by
anyone.”23

As both projects LibGen and Sci-Hub are based in post-Soviet countries, Balazs
reconstructed the history and spirit of Russian reading culture and brings
them into connection.24 Interestingly, the author also establishes a
connection to the Kolhoz (Russian: колхо́з), an early Soviet collective farm
model that was self-governing, community-owned, and a collaborative
enterprise, which he considers to be a major inspiration for the digital
librarians. He also identifies parallels between this Kolhoz model and the
notion of the “commons”—a concept that will be discussed in more detail with
regards to shadow libraries further below.

According to Balazs, these sorts of libraries and collections are part of the
Guerilla Open Access movement (GOA) and thus practical manifestations of Aaron
Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”.25 In this manifesto the American
hacker and activist pointed out the flaws of open access politics and aimed at
recruiting supporters for the idea of “radical” open access. Radical in this
context means to completely ignore copyright and simply make as much
information available as possible. “Information is power” is how the manifesto
begins. Basically, it addresses the—what he calls—“privileged”, in the sense
that they do have access to information as academic staff or librarians, and
he calls on their support for building a system of freely available
information by using their privilege, downloading and making information
available. Swartz and Elbakyan both have become the “iconic leaders”26 of a
global movement that fights for scientific knowledge to be(come) freely
accessible and whose protagonists usually prefer to operate unrecognized.
While their particular projects may be of a more or less temporary nature, the
discursive value of the work of the “amateur librarians” and their projects
will have a lasting impact on the development of access politics.

_Cultural and Knowledge Commons_

The above discussion illustrates that the phenomenon of shadow libraries
cannot be reduced to its copyright infringing aspects. It needs to be
contextualized within a larger sociopolitical debate that situates the demand
for free and unrestricted access to knowledge within the struggle against the
all-co-opting logic of capital, which currently aims to economize all aspects
of life.

In his analysis of the Russian shadow libraries Balazs has drawn a parallel to
the commons as an alternative mode of ownership and a collective way of
dealing with resources. The growing interest in the discourses around the
commons demonstrates the urgency and timeliness of this concept. The
structural definition of the commons conceived by political economist Massimo
de Angelis allows for its application in diverse fields: “Commons are social
systems in which resources are pooled by a community of people who also govern
these resources to guarantee the latter’s sustainability (if they are natural
resources) and the reproduction of the community. These people engage in
‘commoning,’ that is a form of social labour that bears a direct relation to
the needs of the people, or the commoners”.27 While the model originates in
historical ways of sharing natural resources, it has gained new momentum in
relation to very different resources, thus constituting a third paradigm of
production—beyond state and private—however, with all commoning activities
today still being embedded in the surrounding economic system.

As a reason for the newly aroused interest in the commons, de Angelis provides
the crisis of global capital, which has maneuvered itself into a systemic
impasse. While constantly expanding through its inherent logic of growth and
accumulation, it is the very same logic that destroys the two systems capital
relies on: non-market-shaped social reproduction and the ecological system.
Within this scenario de Angelis describes capital as being in need of the
commons as a “fix” for the most urgent systemic failures: “It needs a ‘commons
fix,’ especially in order to deal with the devastation of the social fabric as
a result of the current crisis of reproduction. Since neoliberalism is not
about to give up its management of the world, it will most likely have to ask
the commons to help manage the devastation it creates. And this means: if the
commons are not there, capital will have to promote them somehow.”28

This rather surprising entanglement of capital and the commons, however, is
not the only perspective. Commons, at the same time, have the potential to
create “a social basis for alternative ways of articulating social production,
independent from capital and its prerogatives. Indeed, today it is difficult
to conceive emancipation from capital—and achieving new solutions to the
demands of _buen vivir_ , social and ecological justice—without at the same
time organizing on the terrain of commons, the non-commodified systems of
social production. Commons are not just a ‘third way’ beyond state and market
failures; they are a vehicle for emerging communities of struggle to claim
ownership to their own conditions of life and reproduction.”29 It is their
purpose to satisfy people’s basic needs and empower them by providing access
to alternative means of subsistence. In that sense, commons can be understood
as an _experimental zone_ in which participants can learn to negotiate
responsibilities, social relations, and peer-based means of production.

_Art and Commons_

Projects such as UbuWeb, Monoskop,30 aaaaarg,31 Memory of the World,32 and
0xdb33 vary in size, they have different forms of organization and foci, but
they all care for specific cultural goods and make sure these goods remain
widely accessible—be it digital copies of artworks and original documents,
books and other text formats, videos, film, or sound and music. Unlike the
large shadow libraries introduced above, which aim to provide access to
hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mainly academic papers and books,
thus trying to fully cover the world of scholarly and academic works, the
smaller artist-run projects are of different nature. While UbuWeb’s founder,
for instance, also promotes a generally unrestricted access to cultural goods,
his approach with UbuWeb is to build a curated archive with copies of artworks
that he considers to be relevant for his very context.34 The selection is
based on personal assessment and preference and cared for affectionately.
Despite its comprehensiveness, it still can be considered a “personal website”
on which the artist shares things relevant to him. As such, he is in good
company with similar “artist-run shadow libraries”, which all provide a
technical infrastructure with which they share resources, while the resources
are of specific relevance to their providers.

Just like the large pirate libraries, these artistic archiving and library
practices challenge the notion of culture as private property and remind us
that it is not an unquestionable absolute. As Jonathan Lethem contends,
“[culture] rather is a social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly
revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.”35 Shadow libraries, in
general, are symptomatic of the cultural battles and absurdities around access
and copyright within an economic logic that artificially tries to limit the
abundance of digital culture, in which sharing does not mean dividing but
rather multiplying. They have become a cultural force, one that can be
represented in Foucauldian terms, as symptomatic of broader power struggles as
well as systemic failures inherent in the cultural formation. As Marczewska
puts it, “Goldsmith moves away from thinking about models of cultural
production in proprietary terms and toward paradigms of creativity based on a
culture of collecting, organizing, curating, and sharing content.”36 And by
doing so, he produces major contradictions, or rather he allows the already
existing contradictions to come to light. The artistic archives and libraries
are precarious in terms of their legal status, while it is exactly due to
their disregard of copyright that cultural resources could be built that
exceed the relevance of most official archives that are bound to abide the
law. In fact, there are no comparable official resources, which is why the
function of these projects is at least twofold: education and preservation.37

Maybe UbuWeb and the other, smaller or larger, shadow libraries do not qualify
as commons in the strict sense of involving not only a non-market exchange of
goods but also a community of commoners who negotiate the terms of use among
themselves. This would require collective, formalized, and transparent types
of organization. Furthermore, most of the digital items they circulate are
privately owned and therefore cannot simply be transferred to become commons
resources. These projects, in many respects, are in a preliminary stage by
pointing to the _ideal of culture as a commons_. By providing access to
cultural goods and knowledge that would otherwise not be available at all or
inaccessible for large parts of the general public, they might even fulfill
the function of a “commons fix”, to a certain degree, but at the same time
they are the experimental zone needed to unlearn copyright and relearn new
ways of cultural production and dissemination beyond the property regime. In
any case, they can function as perfect entry points for the discussion and
investigation of the transformative force art can have within the current
global neoliberal knowledge society.

_Top Tens—Showcasing the Copy as an Aesthetic and Political Statement_

The exhibition _Top Tens_ provided an experimental setting to explore the
possibilities of translating the abundance of a digital archive into a “real
space”, by presenting one hundred artworks from the Ubu archive. 38 Although
all works were properly attributed in the exhibition, the artists whose works
were shown neither had a say about their participation in the exhibition nor
about the display formats. Tolerating the presence of a work in the archive is
one thing; tolerating its display in such circumstances is something else,
which might even touch upon moral rights and the integrity of the work.
However, the exhibition was not so much about the individual works on display
but the archiving condition they are subject to. So the discussion here has
nothing to do the abiding art theory question of original and copy.
Marginally, it is about the question of high-quality versus low-quality
copies. In reproducible media the value of an artwork cannot be based on its
originality any longer—the core criterion for sales and market value. This is
why many artists use the trick of high-resolution and limited edition, a kind
of distributed originality status for several authorized objects, which all
are not 100 percent original but still a bit more original than an arbitrary
unlimited edition. Leaving this whole discussion aside was a clear indication
that something else was at stake. The conceptual statement made by the
exhibition and its makers foregrounded the nature of the shadow library, which
visitors were able to experience when entering the gallery space. Instead of
viewing the artworks in the usual way—online—they had the opportunity to
physically immerse themselves in the cultural condition of proliferated acts
of copying, something that “affords their reconceptualization as a hybrid
creative-critical tool and an influential aesthetic category.”39

Appropriation and copying as longstanding methods of subversive artistic
production, where the reuse of existing material serves as a tool for
commentary, social critique, and a means of making a political statement, has
expanded here to the art of exhibition-making. The individual works serve to
illustrate a curatorial concept, thus radically shifting the avant-garde
gesture which copying used to be in the twentieth century, to breathe new life
in the “culture of collecting, organizing, curating, and sharing content.”
Organizing this conceptually concise exhibition was a brave and bold statement
by the art institution: The Onassis Cultural Centre, one of Athens’ most
prestigious cultural institutions, dared to adopt a resolutely political
stance for a—at least in juridical terms—questionable project, as Ubu lives
from the persistent denial of copyright. Neglecting the concerns of the
individual authors and artists for a moment was a necessary precondition in
order to make space for rethinking the future of cultural production.

________________
Special thanks to Eric Steinhauer and all the artists and amateur librarians
who are taking care of our cultural memory.

1 Festival program online: Onassis Cultural Centre, “Shadow Libraries: UbuWeb
in Athens,” (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
2 _UbuWeb_ is a massive online archive of avant-garde art created over the
last two decades by New York-based artist and writer Kenneth Goldsmith.
Website of the archive: (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
3 Kaja Marczewska, _This Is Not a Copy. Writing at the Iterative Turn_ (New
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 22.
4 For further reading: Kenneth Goldsmith, _Uncreative Writing: Managing
Language in the Digital Age_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
5 Many works in the archive stem from the pre-digital era, and there is no
precise knowledge of the sources where Ubu obtains its material, but it is
known that Goldsmith also digitizes a lot of material himself.
6 In German copyright law, for example, §17 and §19a grant the exclusive right
to reproduce, distribute, and make available online to the author. See also:
(accessed on Sept. 30,
2018).
7 Eric Steinhauer, “Rechtspflicht zur Amnesie: Digitale Inhalte, Archive und
Urheberrecht,” _iRightsInfo_ (2013), /rechtspflicht-zur-amnesie-digitale-inhalte-archive-und-urheberrecht/18101>
(accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
8 In particularly severe cases of copyright infringement also state
prosecutors can become active, which in practice, however, remains the
exception. The circumstances in which criminal law must be applied are
described in §109 of German copyright law.
9 See, for example, “Shadow Libraries” for a video interview with Kenneth
Goldsmith.
10 Paul Torremans, _Intellectual Property Law_ (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010), 265.
11 See also §53 para. 1–3 of the German Act on Copyright and Related Rights
(UrhG), §42 para. 4 in the Austrian UrhG, and Article 19 of Swiss Copyright
Law.
12 Simon Stokes, _Art & Copyright_ (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003).
13 Steinhauer, “Rechtspflicht zur Amnesie”.
14 This discrepancy between a state mandate for cultural preservation and
copyright law has only been fixed in 2018 with the introduction of a special
law, §16a DNBG.
15 Steinhauer, “Rechtspflicht zur Amnesie”.
16 Bodo Balazs, “The Genesis of Library Genesis: The Birth of a Global
Scholarly Shadow Library,” Nov. 4, 2014, _SSRN_ ,
, (accessed on
Sept. 30, 2018).
17 Motto of Sci-Hub: “Sci-Hub,” _Wikipedia_ , /Sci-Hub> (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
18 Guillaume Cabanac, “Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text-sharing
platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing,” _Journal of the Association
for Information Science and Technology_ , 67, 4 (2016): 874–884.
19 Ibid.
20 The current address is (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
21 Kate Murphy, “Should All Research Papers Be Free?” _New York Times Sunday
Review_ , Mar. 12, 2016, /should-all-research-papers-be-free.html> (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
22 Richard Van Noorden, “Nature’s 10,” _Nature_ , Dec. 19, 2016,
(accessed on Sept. 30,
2018).
23 Bodo Balazs, “Pirates in the library – an inquiry into the guerilla open
access movement,” paper for the 8th Annual Workshop of the International
Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property, CREATe,
University of Glasgow, UK, July 6–8, 2016. Online available at: https
://adrien-chopin.weebly.com/uploads/2/1/7/6/21765614/2016_bodo_-_pirates.pdf
(accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
24 Balazs, “The Genesis of Library Genesis”.
25 Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” _Internet Archive_ , July
2008,

(accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
26 Balazs, “Pirates in the library”.
27 Massimo De Angelis, “Economy, Capital and the Commons,” in: _Art,
Production and the Subject in the 21st Century_ , eds. Angela Dimitrakaki and
Kirsten Lloyd (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 201.
28 Ibid., 211.
29 Ibid.
30 See: (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
31 Accessible with invitation. See:
[https://aaaaarg.fail/](https://aaaaarg.fail) (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
32 See: (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
33 See: (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
34 Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation with Cornelia Sollfrank, _The Poetry of
Archiving_ , 2013, (accessed on Sept. 30, 2018).
35 Jonathan Lethem, _The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc._ (London:
Vintage, 2012), 101.
36 Marczewska, _This Is Not a Copy_ , 2.
37 The research project _Creating Commons_ , based at Zurich University of the
Arts, is dedicated to the potential of art projects for the creation of
commons: “creating commons,” (accessed on
Sept. 30, 2018).
38 One of Ubu’s features online has been the “top ten”, the idea to invite
guests to pick their ten favorite works from the archive and thus introduce a
mix between chance operation and subjectivity in order to reveal hidden
treasures. The curators of the festival in Athens, Ilan Manouach and Kenneth
Goldsmith, decided to elevate this principle to the curatorial concept of the
exhibition and invited ten guests to select their ten favorite works. The
Athens-based curator Elpida Karaba was commissioned to work on an adequate
concept for the realization, which turned out to be a huge black box divided
into ten small cubicles with monitors and seating areas, supplemented by a
large wall projection illuminating the whole space.
39 Marczewska, _This Is Not a Copy_ , 7.

This text is under a _Creative Commons_ license: CC BY NC SA 3.0 Austria

Sollfrank & Dockray
Expanded Appropriation
2013


Sean Dockray
Expanded Appropriation

Berlin, 4 January 2013

[00:13]
Public School [00:17]
We decided to give up doing a gallery because… Well, for one, the material
conditions weren’t so great for it. But I think people who open up galleries
do it in really challenging conditions, so there is no reason why we couldn’t
have done a gallery in that basement. [00:37] I think we were actually
disinterested in exhibition as a format. After a few years – I mean, we did
something like 35 things that could easily be called exhibitions, in a span of
5 years leading up to that. [00:55] I think we just wanted to try something
else. And so we already had started a project called The Public School a year
prior, so we decided that we would use our space primarily as a school.
[01:10] At that time those two things happened. We eliminated the gallery and
then ended up with two new galleries and a school instead!

[01:20] What The Public School is… it’s been going now for five fears. It
began just as a structure or even a diagram, or an idea or something. [01:43]
And the idea is that people would propose things that they wanted to learn
about, or to teach to other people. And then there would be a kind of process
where we use our space or the Internet to allow people to sign up to say they
are also interested in this idea. And then the School’s job would be to turn
those ideas into real meetings of people, real classes where people got
together. [02:15] So in that sense the curriculum would be developed in
public. It wouldn't be public just simply in the sense that anyone could go to
it, but it’d be public in the sense that anyone could produce the form of it.
[02:32] And again, I need a lot more time, I think, to talk about all the
dimensions to it, but in broad strokes that’s kind of what it is. [02:43]
Although we started in Los Angeles, in the basement of our original gallery
five years ago, it’s now been in around a dozen cities around the world, where
people are operating according to the same process, and then sometimes in
conversation with one another. And there’ve been 500-600 classes, and 2000 or
so proposals made in that time.

[03:18]
Motivation

[03:22]
It was in the air at the time already, so I don’t think it’d be an entirely
independent impulse – number one. But I had actually tried to start a couple
of things that had failed. [03:41] Like Aaaaarg – I tried to set up some
physical reading groups that would complement the online archive. So, in Los
Angeles the idea would be that we’d meet and talk about things that were being
posted to the website. So, yes, reading groups. But they never really went
anywhere. They were always really small, and they kind of run out of steam
quite quickly because no one was interested. [04:10] So in a way The Public
School was a later iteration of something that I’d already been trying for a
while. But the other thing was that by doing these reading groups,
intuitively, I knew what was wrong. [04:31] Although I like to read, that is
not all of what education is to me. To me learning and education is something
that is more inclusive of a lot more of what we experience in life, than
simply theoretical discussions. The structures didn’t really allow that in a
way. [04:56] The Public School came out of just trying to imagine what kind of
structure would be inclusive to overcome some of those self-imposed
limitations. [05:14] I’m very interested in technology in a hands-on way. I
like to code and electronics – hacking around with electronics. And at the
same time, I like to read and I like to write. And then once you go down that
line then you think, well, I like music a lot and I like to play chess as
well. [05:46] I think about all these things that I like to do, and I just
thought about how a lot of these gestures towards education that I tried to do
previously, in no way embraced me as a whole person. So in that sense, it was
based in personal interest. [06:22] But the other personal interest had to do
with personal motivation, it had to do with running an art space for, at that
point, four years. And actually seeing the way that that happened, because I’m
not a curator. [06:38] And so the act of putting on exhibitions for me was
less about making value judgments, and more about trying to contribute to the
cultural life of my city, and also provide opportunities that didn’t exist in
Los Angeles. [06:57] For example, no one really knew how to show work with
technology, and we were able to, because, for instance I knew how to set up
projectors, fix electronics or get things to start and stop, and that kind of
stuff. [07:13] But over the course of running it, because it is an exhibition
space, I found myself put into the role of being a curator – Fiona and I both
did. And it was kind of an uncomfortable role to be deciding what became
visible and what wouldn’t be. [07:32] And one thing that was never visible was
the sort of mechanisms by which an institution made certain things visible.
[07:40] So the public in The Public School actually in a way is trying to
eliminate that whole apparatus, or at least, put that apparatus as something
that we didn’t want to be solely the ones interacting with. We wanted that
apparatus to be… that our entire community, the community of people who is
participating in the programme – that they were the ones responsible for it.
[08:14] So that would shift programming, but also accountability and all these
things, to the people who are actually participating in the life of the space.

[08:28]
Technical Infrastructure

[08:32]
The technical infrastructure is incredibly important because at the moment
that’s people’s primary experience of the project. They make proposals on the
website, and then the classes are actually organised by people through the
website. So the website, the entire technical infrastructure becomes the
engine for getting events to happen. [09:01] It’s not an essential part. At
the very beginning we did it on paper, and we had the website and the paper
kind of simultaneously. And we’d print things out onto paper that would be
accessible by coming into the space, and vice versa, we'd enter things from
the paper back into the website. [09:26] But at the moment it’s mostly
orchestrated through the website. And it’s been three versions of it, like
three separate pieces of software, and the last two it’s been Kayla Waldorf
and myself who have been programming it. And we have… [09:45] Number one,
we’ve organised lots of classes, so we’re very involved in the life of the
school. And in a way we try to programme the site according to (A) what would
make things work, but (B), like you say, in a way that expresses the politics,
as we see them, of the site. [10:14] And so almost at every level, at every
design decision that Kayla might be making, or every kind of code or database
decision, you know, interactive decision that I might be making – those
conversations and those ideas are finding their way into that. [10:45] And
vice versa, that you see code, in a certain way, as not determining politics,
but certainly influencing what people see as possible and also choices that
they see available to them, and things like that. [11:09] I guess as users of
the site, as organisers of The Public School and as programmers, this kind of
relationship between the project and the software is quite intertwined.
[11:28] And I don’t think that… I think that typically art institutions use a
website as a kind of publicity vehicle, as a kind of postcard or something
that fits into their broadcasting of a programme, as something as a glue
between their space and their audience. [11:49] And I think for us the website
is actually integral to the space and to the audience. There is more of a
continuum between the space, programme, website and audience.

[12:04]
Aaaaarg.org

[12:08]
It started out small. In a way, it was an extension of what I think as a
practice that all of us are familiar with, which is sharing books that we’ve
read, or sharing articles that we’ve read, especially if your work is somehow
in relationship to things that you might be reading. [12:41] In my
architecture school, for instance, we would read lots and lots, and then we’d
be making work in parallel. It wouldn’t be that either would determine the
other, but in the end, there is a strong relationship between the ideas that
you have and what you see as possible, and the things that you are reading.
[13:07] So as part of the student culture, especially among my friends, the
people that I identified with in school, we’d be discovering different parts
of the library independently. And then when we found something that was quite
moving in whatever way then we would photocopy it to keep it for ourselves
later. [13:34] And we’d also give it to each other as a kind of secret tool,
or something like that, you know, like you have the sense that when you found
something that is really good – and specially if other people aren’t even
interested – then you feel really empowered by having access to that, by being
able to read it and reread it. [14:02] And then you feel more empowered when
there is a community of other people. It may be a small one, but who have read
that thing as well, because then you start building a kind of shared frame of
reference, a shared vocabulary and a shared way of seeing the world, and
seeing what you’re working on. [14:22] And I think out of that comes projects,
like you actually work on projects together, you collaborate, you correspond
with other people or you actually share the work. And that’s what happened.
[14:41] I started Aaaaarg.org after I moved from New York to Los Angeles, so I
was quite far away from some of the people that I was working with – and just
continuing with that very basic activity of sharing reading material in order
to have that shared vocabulary to be able to work together.

[15:08]
Content

[15:12]
It turned out to be architecture at the very beginning. But we all had really
broad understandings of what architecture meant and what it included, so there
was a lot of media theory, art history and philosophy, and occasionally some
architecture too. [15:38] And so that became the initial kind of seed. And I
think everything has, as the site expanded from there, to be not just me and
some collaborators, or then collaborators of collaborators, and then friends
of those people, and so on. [16:03] It’s kind of a ripple effect outwards.
What happened was something that is quite common to almost any platform, which
is this kind of feedback. Even in an open structure, it's never truly open.
There’re always rules in place, there’s always a past history, and those two
things go a long way to influence what happens in the future. [16:33] I’m sure
a lot of people will come to the site who are interested in one thing, and
then find nothing in the site that speaks to them, and then disappear. Whereas
other people, the site really spoke to them, and so what they would contribute
can also fit according to that sense, to that inclination.

[16:59]
Dynamics of growth and community-building

[17:04]
Especially when I’m involved in this kind of projects, I don’t like being
alone. Obviously it contributes a lot to the work, not only because there’s
more people, but actually the kind of relationships and negotiations that
happen in that work are interesting in themselves. [17:29] So anyway, it was
never all that interesting for it to be a private library. I mean, we all have
private libraries, but there is this potential as well, which I think wasn’t
part of the project at the beginning, it really was a tool for sharing in a
particular kind of context. [17:56] But I think, obviously, you know, once
people saw it then they saw a sort of potential in it, because you see what
happens on the Internet and you know that in certain cases you can read from
it and you can write to it. [18:18] And you also know that, although there
still [are] various forms of digital exclusion, that it's quite accessible
relative to other forms, other libraries, like university libraries, for
instance.

[18:37]
Cornelia Sollfrank: It’s not just about having access to certain material, but
what is related to it, and what’s really important, is the dynamics of
building a community and the context, and even smaller discourses around
certain issues, which you don’t have necessarily if you just download a text.
Then you have the text but you don’t have somebody to talk to, or you don’t
write your opinion about it to someone. So that’s, I think, what comes with
the project, which makes it very valuable to a lot of people.

[19:13]
Yes. That’s going back to what I was saying about some of the failures before
The Public School, which was... As the site was growing, as Aaaaarg was
growing, all of a sudden there would be things in there that I didn’t know
about before, that someone felt it was important to share. [19:37] And because
someone felt that it was important to share it, I felt it was important to
read it. And I did, but then I wanted to read it with other people. [19:51]
So, some of those reading groups were always attempts to produce some social
context for the theory.
[20:06] Having a library as if the archive itself is the library – but having
that isn't really that interesting to me. What's interesting is having some
social context that I can feel involved in (not that I ‘have’ to be involved
in it), but having some social context to make use of that reading material.

[20:42]
Copyright

[20:47]
At the beginning it was never a component of the project, because of that sort
of natural extension between what I see as a perfectly… something that I think
that we all do already. And especially in architecture and art, if you are
involved in reading you give books to people. Like you gave me your book…  And
I’ve passed on a number of books. [21:34] If I print out something to read and
I’m done with it, then I’m more likely to pass it on than I’m to shred it – I
have to keep it in my closet forever, what do I do with it? If I think I’m
truly done with it, even for a moment, then I’m more likely to pass it on.
[22:00] So at the beginning it had nothing to do with piracy, it had
everything to do with wanting to share things with other people. And a lot of
times it's not just in this abstract “I kind of like to share,” but it was
project-based, and I think it became a little bit more abstract. [22:24] But I
think actually over time, when people were sharing things, sometimes they did
it with this sort of abstract recipient of that sharing, and that they would
think, “I have access to this and I know that other people want access to it,
and so that’s going to be why I share it.” [22:46] In other cases, I know that
people were trying to organise a reading group, and this is quite common,
which is that people would be organising something and then how are they going
to distribute the reading material. Yes, they could give everyone a link to
Amazon so they all order their own book, maybe that would be better for
Amazon. [23:13] But there are another ways that they would organise the
reading material there. A lot of times the stuff they wanted to read was
already on Aaaaarg. Sometimes they had to upload a few new things. [23:26] And
so that’s how a lot of it grew and that’s why people are involved. And I think
sharing was what drove the project. And then it really wasn’t for 3 years that
even there was anything even relating to copyright issues. No one complained
for all that time. [23:53] And then when complains came in then, you know, we
responded by taking it down. It was quite simple. [24:05] But then later in
the life of the project, the copyright problems sort of, in a way,
retroactively made the project more about piracy than about sharing.

[24:22]
Attempts to control file-sharing

[24:26]
Either through making activity which used to be legal, illegal, or which used
to be in a kind of grey area because there wasn’t a framework in place for it,
that sort of draw hard lines to say that something in now illegal. [24:46] And
then there is the technological forms of negation, I think, which is to
actually make it impossible for people to do something that they used to be
able to do – signing copies of a file and not allowing it to open if it’s not
opening in the right place, or through the cloud, through this kind of new
marketing opportunities of centralising a lot of files in one place, and then
sort of governing the access through sites like Spotify. [25:29] Amazon does
the same thing, you know, also with their e-books, where they own the device,
the distribution network and the servers. And so by controlling the entire
pipeline, there’s a lot more control over what people do. [25:51] For
instance, you have to jailbreak the Kindle in to order to share a book. Again,
something that we used to be able to do, now we actually have to break the law
or break our devices. [26:05] So these two things, I think, are how it gets
dealt with. And of course, there’s always responses to those things. [26:12] I
think the technological one is a big [one] ... to me that’s the more
challenging one, especially now, because what’s been produced is much more
miniaturised and a lot more difficult to...

C.S.: Hack?

[26:30] Yes. And also you can’t hack the server farm that’s located in, you
know, this really remote part of some country that you’ve never been to.
Shouldn’t say never. In fact, I’ll say never, just to see if someone can.
[26:50] Positive things would be to say, if we take a more expansive view of
the economy, look at who is making money, and then make an appeal for that.
Because there are people who are making money, like Apple is making a lot of
money, and other people who aren’t making money. [27:15] And I don’t think you
can blame the readers, for instance, for the fact that writers and publishers
aren’t making money, because the readers are going into that too, because of
the same forces. [27:28] So you look at who is making the money, and I think
that is a political argument that needs to be made, that this money is
actually being kind of hoarded by some of these companies, because they are
sort of gaming the system and the restructuring of the economy, but also how
we consume entertainment, and all this kind of things, and the restructuring
of production around the globe.
[27:59] I don’t think sites like Aaaaarg do anything more than point out a
kind of dynamic that is existing in the world – to think that somehow you can
sort of turn that into something positive, you know, in a way that gets
capitalism to stop exploiting people – like it seems silly to me, capitalism
exploits people...

[28:31]
Publishing landscape

[28:35]
I think that the role of the publishers [is] already changing, because of the
Internet and because of companies like Amazon, who changed not only selling
books. They changed not only the bookstore, but also changed the entire
distribution model, which then changes the way publishers work – and more and
more, even the entire life cycle of a book, you know, from the writing to the
sort of organisation and communication, to the distribution to the
consumption. [29:09] The entire life cycle of a book is happening through
these networks, from the software that we write it on, and where is that stuff
stored, you know – is a Google Docs or some other thing? –, and our e-mails
that are circulating, and the accounting software. [29:31] A lot of it is
changing through the entire pipeline anyway, so to me, it’s really difficult
to say how publishing is changing because the entire flow, the entire
apparatus is changing.
[29:48] At the beginning, Aaaaarg was a way of bringing readers together, and
to allow readers to sort of give value to certain things that they were
reading. And I think that’s always been a form of publishing to me. [30:09]
Yes, someone is responsible for having the book edited, having it printed it,
distributing it, there’s a huge material expense in all of that. [30:21] But
then you also have the life of the book after it gets to the store. And it
continues to have a life, like sometimes it lives for decades and decades, and
it goes between readers, it goes through sidewalk vendors, and used book
stores, and sits on people’s libraries, and goes to public libraries. [30:44]
And I would say that Aaaaarg is sort of in that part of the life cycle.
[30:54] These platforms become sort of new publishers themselves, but I
haven’t really thought that kind of statement through enough. In a way, if
publishing is to make something public and to create publics, then of course,
that’s something that Aaaaarg has done since the beginning. [31:22] It made
things public to people who maybe didn’t exist for before, and it also
produced communities of people around books – I mean, if that’s what a
publication and a publisher does, then, of course, it kind of does that within
the context of the Internet, and it does that by both using and producing
social relations between people.

[31:50]
Reading / books

[31:54]
I have lots of books, and I buy them from anywhere. I buy them, as much as it
pains me to admit it, I buy them from Amazon, I buy them from bookstores, I
buy them from used books stores, I buy them on the street, I find them in
trash, I’ve photocopied so many parts of books at the library, because they
didn’t circulate or something, or because I only had four hours to look at the
book; I’ve gotten things for my friends, I’ve gotten things from classes that
I used to take when I was a student but I still have. [32:37] And then with
the Internet, then I'd see it on a screen, sometimes I print that out, you
know. I’m not a purist in any way about reading or about books, I’m not
particularly sentimental about ‘the book.’ Even though I love books and I see
what’s nice about them, I think that every sort of form a book takes has its
own kind of… there’s something unique about it. [33:11] Honestly, this kind
of, let’s say, increase in e-Pubs and PDFs hasn’t really changed my
relationship to books at all. It’s the same as it’s always been, which is,
I’ll read it, how I can get it. And maybe there’s slightly now forms, and
sometimes I read on a little… I bought a touchpad when they had a fire sale a
while ago, so I read on that.

[33:44] And maybe I’m making an obvious argument here, but you see, if you've
ever scanned a book you know that it takes time, and you know that you screw
up quite a lot, and sometimes those screw ups find their way in, and the
labour that goes into making a scan finds its way in. [34:02] And it’s only
through really good scans that you can manage to sort of eliminate a lot of
that, a lot of the traces of that labour. But I know that, in the entire
history of Aaaaarg, the files will always show the labour of the person who is
trying to get something up to share it with other people. It’s not a
frictionless easy activity, there is work that’s involved in it. [34:31] And I
find some of the scans were quite beautiful in that way, even when they
weren’t necessarily so good to read.
[34:41] There’s actually, if we go to scale… Again, I have way more books that
I could possibly read, physical books. And I’m going to continue buying more,
acquiring more through my entire life, I’m sure of it. And I think that’s just
part of loving books and loving to read, you have more than you can possibly
deal with. [35:11] And I think, on a level of scale, maybe, with the Internet
we find ourselves, in orders of magnitude, [with] more than we could possibly
deal with. But in a way, it’s the same kind of anxiety, and the limits are
more or less the same. [35:29] But then there are maybe even new opportunities
for new ways of reading that weren’t available before. I could flip through a
book in a certain way, but maybe now with the possibility of indexing the
whole content of a book, and doing searches, and creating ways of visually
displaying books and relationships between books, and between parts of books,
and this kind of things, and also making lists, and making lists with other
people – all of these maybe provide new ways of reading which weren't
available. [36:13] And of course it means that then other ways of reading that
get sort of buried and, you know, lost. And I’m sure that that's true too,
that slow deep reading maybe isn’t as prevalent as different types of
referencing and stuff. [36:32] Not to say that it’s totally identical, but
certainly an evolution. I don’t think that progression is so linear, that it’s
pure loss, or anything like that.

[36:44]
Form and content

[36:49] For me what’s interesting is to try and examine how structure and
form, or structure and content, form and content – I mean, that’s kind of
another on-going question, how structure is not divorced from content.
Structure is not simply a container for the content, any more than the mind
and body are distinct entities – but that the structure that something takes
influences the shape that content takes, and also the ways that people might
approach that context, or use it in this kind of things. And likewise, the
content begins to affect the structure as well. [37:47] Why I’m interested in
structures is because they aren’t deterministic, they don’t determine what’s
going to happen. And all the projects that you mention are things that I think
of, let’s say, as platforms or something, in the sense that they have… they
involve a lot of people quite often, more than just me, and they also have…
the duration is not specified in advance, and what’s going to happen in them
is not specified in advance. [38:30] So they’re experimental in that way, and
they have that in common. And that is what’s interesting to me, is the
production of situations where we don’t know what’s going to happen. [38:51]
And sometimes when focusing on a work you have vision for what that work is
going to be, and then all your work goes into realising that, and, of course,
you have surprises along the way, but then you get something that surprisingly
ends up like what you kind of imagined at the beginning – that way of working
doesn’t really interest me. I sort of become bored pretty early on in that
process. [39:23] Whereas the kind of longer term thing where the initial
conditions actually produce a situation that’s a little unstable, and
therefore what happens is also kind of unpredictable and unstable, to me this
is about opening up other possibilities for things as small as being together
for a short time, but also as big as ways of living.

[40:00] On the one level, these are structural projects, but on another level
they are all kind of structural appropriations in a way, or appropriations of
structures, like from a gallery, a library, a school, another gallery. [40:23]
And I was actually thinking about that I kind of wish that (and I imagine
soon, maybe in the next decade or two) an art historian will make this kind of
argument for evolving the concept of appropriation, to go beyond objects to…
Because in a way appropriation enters into the discourse when reproduction…
[40:52] I think appropriation it’s been something, let’s say, that maybe is a
historical concept. So at certain point in history maybe it even has a
different name, there’s different ways that it happens, there are different
cultural responses to it. [41:09] And I think that in the twentieth century,
especially with mechanical reproduction, appropriation becomes quite clear
what it is, because images or sounds, you know, things became distributed and
available for people to actually materially use. [41:30] And the tools that
people have available to make work as well allow for this type of reuse of
what’s being circulated through the world. [41:45] And I guess what I’m sort
of saying is, if that’s appropriation of objects, then there might even be a
time now, especially as the economy sort of shifted from being simply about
commodity – the production, and sale and consumption of commodities) – to now,
if we try to understand critically the economy now, it’s something that’s much
more complicated – it involves financialization, debt and derivative trading,
and all this kind of things. [42:25] And so, perhaps also if appropriation is
a historical idea, then appropriation also needs to be updated, and this would
mean – for me this would mean appropriation of systems. [42:46] So rather than
the appropriation of what’s been distributed, it’s the appropriation of the
system of distribution. And to me these are also projects that I get excited
about at the moment. [43:04] In a way it also makes sense, because if
photographs were circulating around the world, and that was, you know, a new
thing, to see that sort of imagery circulating in that way, at a certain point
in time a century ago; then now I think we are even having a similar reaction
to something like Facebook, which to me kind comes out of nowhere, and
suddenly it exists in the world as a structure that is organising a certain
part of the activity of, you know, hundreds of millions of people. [43:47] And
so I think, in a way, that’s the level on which maybe we can start thinking of
appropriation, at a level of this kind of large scale systems. But then that
brings up a whole new set of questions, like what do you call that, number
one. Number two, obviously the legal framework that’s in place, obviously that
will cause problems.

Sollfrank, Francke & Weinmayr
Piracy Project
2013


Giving What You Don't Have

Andrea Francke, Eva Weinmayr
Piracy Project

Birmingham, 6 December 2013

[00:12]
Eva Weinmayr: When we talk about the word piracy, it causes a lot of problems
to quite a few institutions to deal with it. So events that we’ve organised
have been announced by Central Saint Martins without using the word piracy.
That’s interesting, the problems it still causes…

Cornelia Sollfrank: And how do you announce the project without “Piracy”? The
Project?

E. W.: It’s a project about intellectual property.

C. S.: The P Project.

Andrea Francke, Eva Weinmayr: [laugh] Yes.

[00:52]
Andrea Francke: The Piracy Project is a knowledge platform, and it is based
around a collection of pirated books, of books that have been copied by
people. And we use it to raise discussion about originality, authorship,
intellectual property questions, and to produce new material, new essays and
new questions.

[01:12]
E. W.: So the Piracy Project includes several aspects. One is that it is an
act of piracy in itself, because it is located in an art school, in a library,
in an officially built up a collection of pirated books. [01:30] So that’s the
second aspect, it’s a collection of books which have been copied,
appropriated, modified, improved, which live in this library. [01:40] And the
third part is that it is a collection of physical books, which is touring. We
create reading rooms and invite people to explore the books and discuss issues
raised by cultural piracy.
[01:58] The Piracy Project started in an art college library, which was
supposed to be closed down. And the Piracy Project is one project of And
Publishing. And Publishing is a publishing activity exploring print-on-demand
and new modes of production and of dissemination, the immediacy of
dissemination. [02:20] And Publishing is a collaboration between myself and
Lynn Harris, and we were hosted by Central Saint Martins College of Art and
Design in London. And the campus where this library was situated was the
campus we were working at. [02:40] So when the library was being closed, we
moved in the library together with other members of staff, and kept the
library open in a self-organised way. But we were aware that there’s no budget
to buy new books, and we wanted to have this as a lively space, so we created
an open call for submissions and we asked people to select a book which is
really important to them and make a copy of it. [03:09] So we weren’t
interested in piling up a collection of second hand books, we were really
interested in this process: what happens when you make a copy of a book, and
how does this copy sit next to the original authoritative copy of the book.
This is how it started.

[03:31]
A. F.: I met Eva at the moment when And Publishing was helping to set up this
new space in the library, and they were trying to think how to make the
library more alive inside that university. [03:44] And I was doing research on
Peruvian book piracy at that time, and I had found this book that was modified
and was in circulation. And it was a very exciting moment for us to think what
happens if we can promote this type of production inside this academic
library.

[04:05] Piracy Project
Collection / Reading Room / Research

[04:11]
The Collection

[04:15]
E. W.: We asked people to make a copy of a book which is important to them and
send it to us, and so with these submission we started to build up the
collections. Lots of students were getting involved, but also lots of people
who work in this topic, and were interested in these topics. [04:38] So we
received about one hundred books in a couple of months. And then, parallel to
this, we started to do research ourselves. [04:50] We had a residency in
China, so we went to China, to Beijing and Shanghai, to meet illegal
booksellers of pirated architecture books. And we had a residency in Turkey,
in Istanbul, where we did lots of interviews with publishers and artists on
book piracy. [05:09] So the collection is a mix of our own research and cases
from the real book markets, and creative work, artistic work which is produced
in the context of an art college and the wider cultural realm.

[05:29]
A. F.: And it is an ongoing project.

E. W.: The project is ongoing, we still receive submissions. The collection is
growing, and at the moment here we have about 180 books, here at Grand Union
(Birmingham).

[05:42]
A. F.: When we did the open call, something that was really important to us
was to make clear for people that they have a space of creativity when they
are making a copy. So we wrote, please send us a copy of a book, and be aware
that things happen when you copy a book. [05:57] Whether you do it
intentionally or not a copy is never the same. So you can use that space, take
ownership of that space and make something out of that; or you can take a step
back and allow things to happen without having control. And I think that is
something that is quite important for us in the project. [06:12] And it is
really interesting how people have embraced that in different measures, like
subtle things, or material things, or adding text, taking text out, mixing
things, judging things. Sometimes just saying, I just want it to circulate, I
don’t mind what happens in the space, I just want the subject to be in the
world again.

[06:35]
E. W.: I think this is one which I find interesting in terms of making a copy,
because it’s not so much about my own creativity, it’s more about exploring
how technology edits what you can see. It’s Jan van Toorn’s Critical Practice,
and the artist is Hester Barnard, a Canadian artist. [07:02] She sent us these
three copies, and we thought, that’s really generous, three copies. But they
are not identical copies, they are very different. Some have a lot of empty
pages in the book. And this book has been screen-captured on a 3.5 inch
iPhone, whereas this book has been screen-captured on a desktop, and this one
has been screen-captured with a laptop. [07:37] So the device you use to
access information online determines what you actually receive. And I find
this really interesting, that she translated this back into a hardcopy, the
online edited material. [07:53] And this is kind of taught by this book,
standard International Copyright. She went to Google Books, and screen-
captured all the pages Google Books are showing. So we are all familiar with
blurry text pages, but then it starts that you get the message “Page 38 is not
shown in this preview.” [08:18] And then it’s going through the whole book, so
she printed every page basically, omitting the actual information. But the
interesting thing is that we are all aware that this is happening on Google,
on screen online, but the fact that she’s translating this back into an
object, into a printed book, is interesting.

[08:44]
Reading Room

[08:48]
A. F.: We create these reading rooms with the collection as a way to tour the
collection, and meet people and have conversations around the books. And that
is something quite important to us, that we go with the physical books to a
place, either for two or three months, and meet different people that have
different interests in relation to the collection in that locality. We’ve been
doing that for the last two years, I think, three years. [09:12] And it’s
quite interesting because different places have very different experiences of
piracy. So you can go to a country where piracy is something very common, or a
different place where people have a very strong position against piracy, or a
different legal framework. And I feel the type of conversations and the
quality of interactions is quite different from being present on the space and
with the books. [09:36] And that’s why we don’t call these exhibitions,
because we always have places where people can come and they can stay, and
they can come again. Sometimes people come three or four times and they
actually read the books. And a few times they go back to their houses and they
bring books back, and they said, I’m going to contact this friend who has been
to Russia and he told me about this book – so we can add it to the collection.
I think that makes a big difference to how the research in the project
functions.

[10:06]
E. W.: One of the most interesting events we did with the Piracy collection
was at the Show Room where we had a residency for the last year. There were
three events, and one was A Day At The Courtroom. This was an afternoon where
we invited three copyright lawyers coming from different legal systems: the
US, the UK, and the Continental European, Athens. And we presented ten
selected cases from the collection and the three copyright lawyers had to
assess them in the eyes of the law, and they had to agree where to put this
book in a scale from legal to illegal. [10:51] So we weren’t interested really
to say, this is legal and this is illegal, we were interested in all the
shades in between. And then they had to discuss where they would place the
book. But then the audience had the last verdict, and then the audience placed
the book. [11:05] And this was an extremely interesting discussion, because it
was interesting to see how different the legal backgrounds are, how blurry the
whole field is, how you can assess when is the moment where a work becomes a
transformative work, or when it stays a derivative work, and this whole
discussion.
[11:30] When we do these reading rooms – and we had one in New York, for
example, at the New York Art Book Fair – people are coming, and they are
coming to see the physical books in a physical space, so this creates a social
encounter and we have these conversations. [11:47] For example, a woman stood
up to us in New york and she told us about a piracy project she run where she
was working in a juvenile detention centre, and she produced a whole shadow
library of books because the incarcerated kids couldn’t take the books in
their cells, so she created these copies, individual chapters, and they could
circulate. [12:20] I’m telling this because the fact that we are having this
reading room and that we are meeting people, and that we are having these
conversations, really furthers our research. We find out about these projects
by sharing knowledge.

[12:38]
Categories

[12:42]
A. F.: Whenever we set our reading room for the Piracy Project we need to
organise the books in a certain way. What we started to do now is that we’ve
created these different categories, and the first set of categories came from
the legal event. [12:56] So we set up, we organised the books in different
categories that would help us have questions for the lawyers, that would work
for groups of books instead of individual works. [13:07] And the idea is that,
for example, we are going to have our next events with librarians, and a new
set of categories would come. So the categories change as our interest or
research in the project is changing. [13:21] The current categories are:
Pirated Design, so books where the look of the book has been copied but not
the content; recirculation, books that have been copied trying to be
reproduced exactly as they were, because they need to be circulating again;
transformation, books that have been modified; For Sale Doctrine, so we
receive quite a few books where people haven’t actually made a copy but they
have cut the book or drawn inside the book, and legally you are allowed to do
anything with a book except copy it, so we thought that it was quite important
so that we didn’t have to discuss that with the lawyers; [14:03] Public
Domain, which are works that are already out of copyright, again, so whatever
you do with those books is legal; and collation, books gathered from different
sources, and who owns the copyright, which was a really interesting question,
which is when you have a book that has many authors – it’s really interesting.
Different systems in different countries have different ways to deal with who
owns the copyright and what are the rights of the owners of the different
works.

[14:36]
E. W.: Ahmet Şık is a journalist who published a book about the Ergenekon
scandal and the Turkish government, and connects that kind of mafioso
structures. Before the book could be published he was arrested and put in jail
for a whole year without trial, and he sent the PDF to friends, and the PDF
was circulating on many different computers so it couldn’t be taken. [15:06]
They published the PDF, and as authors they put over a hundred different
author names, so there was not just one author who could be taken into
responsibility.

[15:22] We have in the collection this book, it’s Teignmouth Electron by
Tacita Dean. This is the original, it’s published by Book Works and Steidl.
And to this round table, to this event, we invited also Jane Rolo, director of
Book Works (and she published this book). [15:41] And we invited her saying,
do you know that your book has been pirated? So she was really interested and
she came along. This is the pirated version, it’s Alias, [by] Damián Ortega in
Mexico. It’s a series of books where he translates texts and theory into
Spanish, which are not available in Spanish. So it’s about access, it’s about
circulation. [16:07] But actually he redesigned the book. The pirated version
looks very different, and it has a small film roll here, from Tacita Dean’s
book. And it was really amazing that Jane Rolo flipped the pirated book and
she said, well, actually this is really very nice.

[16:31] This is kind of a standard academic publishing format, it’s Gilles
Deleuze’s Proust and Signs, and the contributor, the artist who produced the
book is Neil Chapman, a writer based in London. And he made a facsimile of his
copy of this book, including the binding mistakes – so there’s one chapter
upside down printed in the book. [17:04] But the really interesting thing is
that he scanned it on his home inkjet printer – he scanned it on his scanner
and then printed it on his home inkjet printer. And the feel of it is very
crafty, because the inkjet has a very different typographic appearance than
the official copy. [17:28] And this makes you read the book in quite a
different way, you relate differently to the actual text. So it’s not just
about the information conveyed on this page, it’s really about how I can
relate to it visually. I find this really interesting when we put this book
into the library, in our collection in the library, and it sat next to the
original, [17:54] it raises really interesting questions about what kind of
authority decides which book can access the library, because this is
definitely and obviously a self-made copy – so if this self-made copy can
enter the library, any self-made text and self-published copy could enter the
library. So it was raising really interesting questions about gatekeepers of
knowledge, and hierarchies and authorities.

[18:26]
On-line catalogue

[18:30]
E. W.: We created this online catalogue give to an overview of what we have in
the collection. We have a cover photograph and then we have a short text where
we try to frame and to describe the approach taken, like the strategy, what’s
been pirated and what was the strategy. [18:55] And this is quite a lot,
because it’s giving you the framework of it, the conceptual framework. But
it’s not giving you the book, and this is really important because lots of the
books couldn’t be digitised, because it’s exactly their material quality which
is important, and which makes the point. [19:17] So if I would… if I have a
project which is working about mediation, and then I put another layer of
mediation on top of it by scanning it, it just wouldn’t work anymore.
[19:29] The purpose of the online catalogue isn’t to give you insight into all
the books to make actually all the information available, it’s more to talk
about the approach taken and the questions which are raised by this specific
book.

[19:47]
Cultures of the copy

[19:51]
A topic of cultural difference became really obvious when we went to Istanbul.
A copy shop which had many academic titles on the shelves, copied, pirated
titles... The fact is that in London, where I’m based, you can access anything
in any library, and it’s not too expensive to get the original book. [20:27]
But in Istanbul it’s very expensive, and the whole academic community thrives
on pirated, copied academic titles.

[20:39]
A. F.: So this is the original Jaime Bayly [No se lo digas a nadie], and this
is the pirated copy of the Jaime Bayly. This book is from Peru, it was bought
on the street, on a street market. [20:53] And Peru has a very big pirated
book market, most books in Peru are pirated. And we found this because there
was a rumour that books in Peru had been modified, pirated books. And this
version, the pirated version, has two extra chapters that are not in the
original one. [21:13] It’s really hard to understand the motivation behind it.
There’s no credit, so the person is inhabiting this author’s identity in a
sense. They are not getting any cultural capital from it. They are not getting
extra money, because if they are found out, nobody would buy books from this
publisher anymore. [21:33] The chapters are really well written, so you as a
reader would not realise that you are reading something that has been pirated.
And that was really fascinating in terms of what space you create. So when you
have this technology that allows you to have the book open and print it so
easily – how you can you take advantage of that, and take ownership or inhabit
these spaces that technology is opening up for you.

[22:01]
E. W.: Book piracy in China is really important when it comes to architecture
books, Western architecture books. Lots of architecture studios, but even
university libraries would buy from pirate book sellers, because it’s just so
much cheaper. [22:26] And we’ve found this Mark magazine with one of the
architecture sellers, and it’s supposed to be a bargain because you have six
magazines in one. [22:41] And we were really interested in the question, what
are the criteria for the editing? How do you edit six issues into one? But
basically everything is in here, from advertisement, to text, to images, it’s
all there. But then a really interesting question arises when it comes to
technology, because in this magazine there are pages in Italian language
clearly taken from other magazines.

[23:14]
A. F.: But it was also really interesting to go there, and actually interview
the distributor and go through the whole experience. We had to meet the
distributor in a neutral place, and he interviewed us to see if he was going
to allow us to go into the shop and buy his books. [23:31] And then going
through the catalogue and realising how Rem Koolhaas is really popular among
the pirates, but actually Chinese architecture is not popular, so there’s only
like three pirated books on Chinese architecture; or that from all the
architecture universities in the world only the AA books are copied – the
Architectural Association books. [23:51] And I think those small things are
really things that are worth spending time and reflecting on.

[23:58]
E. W.: We found this pirate copy of Tintin when we visited Beijing, and
obviously compared to the original, it looks different, a different format.
But also it’s black and white, but it’s not a photocopy of the original full-
colour. [24:23] It’s redrawn by hand, so all the drawings are redrawn and
obviously translated into Chinese. This is quite a labour of love, which is
really amazing. I can compare the two. The space is slightly differently
interpreted.

[24:50]
A. F.: And it’s really incredible, because at some point in China there were
14 or 15 different publishers publishing Tintin, and they all have their
versions. They are all hand-drawn by different people, so in the back, in
Chinese, it’s the credit. So you can buy it by deciding which person does the
best drawings of the production of Tintin, which I thought it was really…
[25:14] It’s such a different cultural way to actually give credit to the
person that is copying it, and recognise the labour, and the intention and the
value of that work.

[25:24]
Why books?

[25:28]
E. W.: Books have always been very important in my practice, in my artistic
practice, because lots of my projects culminated in a book, or led into a
book. And publications are important because they can circulate freely, they
can circulate much easier than artworks in a gallery. [25:50] So this question
of how to make things public and how to create an audience… not how to create
an audience – how to reach a reader and how to create a dialogue. So the book
is the perfect tool for this.

[26:04]
A. F.: My interest in books comes from making art, or thinking about art as a
way to interact with the world, so outside art settings, and I found books
really interesting in that. And that’s how I met Eva, in a sense, because I
was interested in that part of her practice. [26:26] When I found the Jaime
Bayly book, for me that was a real moment of excitement, of this person that
was doing this things in the world without taking any credit, but was having
such a profound effect on so many readers. I’m quite fascinated by that.
[26:44] I'm also really interested in research and using events – research
that works with people. So it kind of creates communities around certain
subjects, and then it uses that to explore different issues and to interact
with different areas of knowledge. And I think books are a privileged space to
do that.

[27:11]
E. W.: The books in the Piracy collection, because they are objects you can
grab, and because they need a place, they are a really important tool to start
a dialogue. When we had this reading room in the New York Art Book Fair, it
was really the book that created this moment when you started a conversation
with somebody else. And I think this is a very important moment in the Piracy
collection as a tool to start this discussion. [27:44] In the Piracy
collection the books are not so important to circulate, because they don’t
circulate. They only travel with us, in a way, or they travel here to Grand
Union to be installed in this reading room. But they are not meant to be
printed in a thousands print run and circulated in the world.

C. S.: So what is their function?

[28:08]
E. W.: The functions of the books here in the Piracy collection are to create
a dialogue, debate about these issues they are raising, and they are a tool
for a direct encounter, for a social encounter. As Andrea said, building a
community which is debating these issues which they are raising. [28:32] And I
also find it really interesting – when we where in China we also talked with
lots of publishers and artists, and they said that the book, in comparison to
an online file, is a really important tool in China, because it can’t be
controlled as easily as online communication. [28:53] So a book is an
autonomous object which can be passed on from one hand to the other, without
the state or another authority to intervene. I think that is an important
aspect when you talk about books in comparison with circulating information
online.

[29:13]
Passion for piracy

[29:17]
A. F.: I’m quite interested in enclosures, and people that jump those
enclosures. I’m kind of interested in these imposed… Maybe because I come from
Peru and we have a different relation to rules, and I’m in Britain where rules
seem to have so much strength. And I’m quite interested in this agency of
taking personal responsibility and saying, I’m going to obey this rule, I’m
not going to obey this one, and what does that mean. [29:42] That makes me
really interested in all these different strategies, and also to find a way to
value them and show them – how when you make this decision to jump a rule, you
actually help bring up questions, modifications, and propose new models or new
ways about thinking things. [30:02] And I think that is something that is part
of all the other projects that I do: stating the rules and the people that
break them.

[30:12]
E. W.: The pirate as a trickster who tries to push the boundaries which are
being set. And I think the interesting, or the complex part of the Piracy
Project is that we are not saying, I’m for piracy or I’m against piracy, I’m
for copyright, I’m against copyright. It’s really about testing out these
decisions and the own boundaries, the legal boundaries, the moral limits – to
push them and find them. [30:51] I mean, the Piracy Project as a whole is a
project which is pushing the boundaries because it started in this academic
library, and it’s assessed by copyright lawyers as illegal, so to run such a
project is an act of piracy in itself.

[31:17]
This method of doing or approaching this art project is to create a
collaboration to instigate this discourse, and this discourse is happening on
many different levels. One of them is conversation, debate. But the other one
is this material outcome, and then this material outcome is creating a new
debate.

Sollfrank & Goldsmith
The Poetry of Archiving
2013


Kenneth Goldsmith
The Poetry of Archiving

Berlin, 1 February 2013

[00:12]
Kenneth Goldsmith: The type of writing I do is exactly the same thing that I
do on UbuWeb. And that’s the idea that nothing new needs to be written or
created. In fact, it's the archiving and the gathering and the appropriation
of preexisting materials, that is the new mode of both writing and archiving.
[00:35] So you have a system where writing and archiving have become the
identical situation today.

[00:43]
UbuWeb

[00:47]
It started in 1996, and it began as a site for visual and concrete poetry,
which was a mid-century genre of typographical poetry. I got a scanner, and I
scanned a concrete poem. And I put it up on Ubu, and on those days the images
used to come in as interlaced GIFs, every other line filling in. So really it
was an incredible thing to watch this poem kind of grow organically. [1:21]
And it looked exactly like concrete poetry had always wanted to look – a
little bit of typographical movement. [1:27] And I thought, this is perfect.
And also, because concrete poetry is so flat and modernist, when it was
illuminated from the back by the computer screen it looked beautiful and
graphic and flat and clean. [1:40] And suddenly it was like: this is the
perfect medium for concrete poetry. Which, I do worry still, is very much a
part of Ubu. [1:50] And then, a few years later real audio came, and I began
to put up sound poetry, you know, little sound files of sound poetry. So you
could look at the concrete poetry and listen to the sound poetry. [2:07] And a
few years later we had a little bit more bandwidth, and we began to put on
videos. So this is the way the site grew. [2:16] But also what happened on Ubu
was an odd thing. Because it was concrete poetry, so I put up the poems of
John Cage – the concrete mesostics of John Cage. And then I got a little bit
of sound of John Cage reading some of these things, and suddenly it was Cage
reading a mesostic with an orchestra behind him. [2:40] And I said, wait a
minute, this no longer sound poetry, this is something else. And I thought,
what is this? And I said, ah, this is avant-garde.
[2:50] And so from there, because of Cage and Cage's practice, the whole thing
became a repository and archive for the avant-garde, which it is today. So
that's how it moved from being specifically concrete poetry in 1996, to today
being all avant-garde.

[3:09]
Avantgarde

[3:15]
[3:30] And then something happened in the digital, where it seemed to... All
of that fell off. Because we already knew that. [3:42] So it was an orphan
term. It became detached from its nefarious pre-digital context. And it was an
open term. [3:51] I was like, we can actually use this term again, avant-
garde, and redefine it as a way of, you know, multi-media, impurity,
difference, all sorts of ways that it was never allowed to be used before. So
I've actually inhabited this term, and repurposed it. [4:15] So I don't really
know what avant-garde is, it's always changing. And UbuWeb is an archive that
is not pure avant-garde. You look at it and say, no, things are wrong there.
There's rock musicians, and there's performance artists, and there's
novelists. [4:33] I mean, it doesn't quite look like the avant-garde looked
before the digital. But then, everything looks different after the digital.

[4:41]
Selection / curation

[4:46]
I don't know anything. I am a poet. I'm not a historian, I'm not an academic.
I don't know anything, I've just got a sense: that might be interesting, that
sort of feels avant-garde. I mean, it is ridiculous, it's terrible: I am the
wrong person to do this. But, you know, nobody stopped me, and so I've been
doing it. You know, anybody can do it. [5:11] It's very hard to have something
on Ubu, and that's why it's so good. That's why it's not archive-type of work,
where everything can go, and there're good things there, but there is no one
working as a gatekeeper to say, actually this is better than that. [5:26] And
I think one of the problems with net culture, or the web culture, is that
we've decided to suspend judgment. We can't say that one thing is better than
another thing, because everything is equal. There's a part of me that really
likes that idea, and it creates fabulous chaos. But I think it is a sort of a
curatorial job to go in and make sense of some of that chaos. In a very small
way, that's what I try to do on UbuWeb. [5:52] You know, it's the avant-garde,
it's not a big project. It's a rather small slice of culture that one can have
a point of view. I'm not saying that's right. It's probably very wrong. But
nobody else it's doing it, so I figured, you know… [6:12] But by virtue of the
fact that there's only one UbuWeb, it's become institutional. And the reason
that there is only one UbuWeb is that UbuWeb ignores copyright. And everybody
else, of course, is afraid of copyright. There should be hundreds of UbuWebs.
It is ridiculous that there's only one. But everybody else is afraid of
copyright, so that nobody would put anything on. [6:41] We just act like
copyright doesn't exist. Copyright, what's that? Never heard of it.

[6:48]
Contents

[5:52]
I think that these artifacts that are on UbuWeb are very valuable historically
and culturally, they are very significant. But economically, I don't think
they had that type of value. And I love small labels that try to put these
things out. But they inevitably loose money by trying to put these things out.
So when somebody does put something out, sometimes things on Ubu get released
from a small label, and I take them off the site, because I want to support
those things. [7:28] But it's hard, and people are not doing it for the money.
Nobody ever got into sound poetry or orchestral avant-garde music for the
money. [7:37] So it's kind of a weird lovely grey area that we've been able to
explore, a utopia, really, that we've been able to enact. Simply because the
economics are so sketchy.

[7:55]
Copyright

[7:59]
I am not free of fear, but I've learned over 17 years, to actually have a very
good understanding of copyright. And I have a very good understating of the
way that copyright works. So I can anticipate things. I can usually negotiate
something with somebody who, you know… [8:26] There's so many stories when
copyright is being used as a battering tool. It's not real. I had one instance
when a very powerful literary agency in New York… I received a cease and
desist DMCA Takedown, which I require a proper takedown. It was for William S.
Burroughs, and the list went on for pages and pages and pages. And then, at
the end, it says, "Under the threat of perjury, I state these facts to be
true," signed such and such person. [9:05] Now, what they did, they went into
UbuWeb and they put the words "William S. Burroughs," and they came up with
every instance of William S. Burroughs. If William S. Burroughs is mentioned
in an academic paper: that's our copyright. Nick Currie Momus wrote a song "I
Love You William S. Burroughs.” Now, Nick gave UbuWeb all of his songs. I know
that Nick owns the copyright to that. [9:30] I said, you know, it's
ridiculous! And even the things that they were claiming… It was the most
ridiculous thing. [9:37] So I wrote them back. I said: Look, I get what you're
trying to do here, but you're really going about it the wrong way. It's very
irresponsible just putting his name in the search engine, cutting and pasting,
and damn you own the copyright. You don't own the copyright to almost any of
that! And as a matter of fact, under law you perjured yourself. And I can came
right back and sue you, because this is a complete lie. But I said, look, lets
work together. If there's something that you feel that you really do own and
you really don't want there, let's talk about it, but could you please be a
little bit more reasonable. [10:13] And then of course I got a letter back,
and it's an intern, the college student saying, the state of William S.
Burroughs just asked me… [10:23] I said, look, I get it but, you know… let’s
try to do it the right way and let's see what happens. And then they came back
with another DMCA Takedown, with a much shorter list. But even in that list,
most of the copyrights didn't belong to William S. Burroughs. They belonged to
journal poetry systems, many of them were orphan. [10:45] Because in media,
often if you publish in a publication, often the publisher owns the copyright,
not the artist, you know. You have to look and see where the copyright
resides. [10:59] Finally, I said, look this is getting ridiculous. I said,
please send a note on to the executor of Burroughs' estate, who is James
Grauerholz, and he's a good guy. He's a good guy. And I said, I quoted, and I
said, look Mr. Grauerholz, William S. Burroughs' poetry wants to be free. You
know, and I quoted from Burroughs. And also it's a great thing that Burroughs
said. I said, you know, we're not making any money here. I'm not going to
pirate Naked Lunch. I know where are you making your money, and I swear I
wouldn't want to touch that. That does well on its own. [11:30] But his cut-
ups, his sound collage cut-ups? I mean, came on, no. This is for education.
This is for, you know, art schools, kindergartens and post-graduates use it.
[11:40] So this was a way in which copyright is often used as a threat, that's
not true. And then, a little bit of talking, and you can actually get back to
some logic. And then after that it was fine, and there's all the William S.
Burroughs that's there that it was always there. And everybody seems to be
okay.

[11:57]
Opt-out System

[0:12]
Things get taken down all the time. People send an email saying, you know, I
don't want that there. And I try to convince them that we don't touch any
money. Ubu runs on zero money, we don't touch any. I try to tell them that is
good, it's all feeling good, positive. [12:19] But sometimes people really
don't want their work up. And if they don't want their work up, I take it
down. An opt-out system. Why should I keep their work up if they really don't
want it there? [12:30] So it's an unstable archive. What's there today may not
be there tomorrow. And I kind of like that too.

[12:38]
Permission culture

[12:42]
I understand people get nervous. They would prefer me to ask. But if I ask, I
couldn't have built this archive. Because if you ask, you start negotiations,
you make a contract, you need lawyers, you need permissions. And if something
has... a film has music in the background by the Rolling Stones, you have to
clear the right for the Rolling Stones and pay that a little bit of money. And
you know, licenses... I couldn't do that. I do this with no money. That would
take millions… [13:14] To do UbuWeb permission, the right way, correctly,
would take millions of millions of euros. And I built this whole thing from
nothing. Zero money. [13:26] So, you know... I think I'd love to be able to
ask for permission, do things the right way. It is the right way to do things.
But it wouldn't be possible to make an archive like this, that way.

[13:40]
Cornelia Sollfrank: How much does it happen that you are approached by artists
who say, please put my work down?

[13:47]
Almost never, almost never. It's usually the estates, art dealers, the
business people, you know, who are circling around an artist. But it's almost
never artists themselves. Artists, you know... I don't know, I just think
that… [14:07] For example, we have the music concrete of Jean Dubuffet on
UbuWeb. Fantastic experimental music. And it's so great that many people now
know of a composer named Jean Dubuffet, and later they hear: he's also a
painter. Which is really very beautiful. [14:33] Now, the paintings of Jean
Dubuffet, of course, sell for millions. And the copyright, you know... You can
make a T-shirt with a Jean Dubuffet painting, they're going to want a license
for that. [14:44] But the music of Jean Dubuffet, the estate doesn't quite
understand the value of it, or what to do with it. And this is also what
happened with my Warhol book. [14:56] Before I did my Warhol book, I went to
the Warhol Foundation, because it's big money, and you don't want to get in
trouble with those guys. And I said to them, I want to do a book of Andy's
interviews. I know that they don't own the copyright, I just wanted their
blessing, from them. And they were really sweet. They laughed at me. They
said, you want Warhol's words? Take them! We are so busy dealing with
forgeries, well, you know, exactly what your piece was about. And they laughed
at me. They were like, have fun, it's all yours, glad, go away. [15:32] So I
kind of feel, if you ask Jean Dubuffet, I would assume that Dubuffet
understood that his music production was as serious as his paintings. And this
is the sort of beautiful revisionism of the avant-garde. This is a perfect
example of the revisionism of the avant-garde that I'm talking about. You say,
oh, you know, he was actually as good of a composer as he was a painter.
[15:58] So, you know, this is the kind of weird thing that's happened on
UbuWeb, I think. [16:04] But what's even better, is that UbuWeb, you know... I
care about Jean Dubuffet, or I care about Art Brut, and the history of all
that. [16:14] But usually what happens is, kids come into UbuWeb and they know
nothing about the history. And they’re usually kids that are making dance
music. But they go, oh, all these weird sounds at this place, lets take them.
And so they plunder the archive. So you have Bruce Nauman, you know, "Get out
of my life!" on dance floors in São Paulo, mixed in with the beat. And that to
me is the misuse of the archive that I think is really fantastic.

[16:48]
Technical infrastructure

[16:53]
It's web 1.0. I write everything in HTML, by hand. Hand-coded like I did in
1996, the same BBEdit, the same program.

[17:04]>
C.S.: But it's searchable.

[17:06]
Yea, it's got like a dumb, you know, a little free search engine on it, but I
don't do anything. You see, this is the thing. [17:15] For many, many years
people would always come up to me and say, we'd like to put UbuWeb in a
database. And I said no. It’s working really well as it is. And, you know,
imagine if Ubu had been locked up in some sort of horrible SQL database. And
the administrator of the database walks away, the guy that knows all that
stuff walks away with the keys – which always happens. No… [17:39] This way it
is free, is open, is simple, is backwardly compatible – it always works.
[17:45] I like the simplicity of it. It's not different than it was 17 years
ago. It's really dumb, but it does what it does very well.

[17:54]
Search engines

[17:58]
I removed it from Google. Because, you know, people would have set a Google
alert. And it was mostly the agents, or the estates that would set a kind of
an alert for their artists. And they didn't understand, they think we're
selling it. And it creates a lot of correspondence. [18:20] This is a lot of
work for me. I never get paid any money. There's no money. So, there's
nothing, you know... It's my free time that I'm spending corresponding with
people. And once I took it off from Google it got much better.

[18:33]
Copyright practice

[18:37]
Nobody seemed to care until I started to put film on, and then the filmmakers
went crazy. And so, that was something. [18:47] There was a big blow-up on the
FrameWorks film list. Do you know FrameWorks? It's the biggest avant-garde
film list – Listserv. And a couple of years ago Ubu got hacked, and went down
for a little while. And there was a big celebration on the FrameWorks list.
They said, the enemy is finally gone! We can return to life as normal. So I
responded to them. [19:14] I wrote an open letter to FrameWorks (which you can
actually find on UbuWeb) challenging them, saying, actually Ubu is a friend of
yours. I'm actually promoting your work for no money. I love what you do. I'm
a fan. There's no way I'm an enemy. [19:31] And I said, by the way, if you are
celebrating Ubu being down, I think it's a perfect time for you to now built
Ubu the way it should have been. You guys have all the materials. You are the
artists, you have all the knowledge. Go ahead and do it right, that would be
great. You have my blessing, please do it... Shut them down. Nobody ever
responded. Suddenly the thread died. [20:00] Nobody wants to do anything. It's
kind of, they considered it right to complain, but when asked to... They have
the tools to do it right. I'm a poet, what do I know about avant-garde film?
They know everything. But when I told them, please, you know, nobody's going
to lift a finger. [20:18] It's easier for people to complain and hate it. But
in fact, to make something better is something that people are not going to
do. So life went on. It went up and we moved on.

[20:32]
Un/stable archives

[20:36]
If you work on something for an hour a day for 17 years – 2 hours, 3 hours –
you come up with something really substantial. [20:45] The web is very
ephemeral, and UbuWeb is just as ephemeral. It’s amazing that it's been there
for as long as it has, but tomorrow it could vanish. I could get sued. I could
get bored. Maybe I just walk away and blow it up, I don't know! Why do I need
to keep doing all this work for? [21:03] So if you find something on the
Internet that you loved, don't assume it's going to be there forever. Download
it. Always make your own archive. Don't ever assume that it's waiting there
for you, because it won't be there when you look for it.

C.S.: In the cloud…

Fuck the cloud. I hate the cloud.

Sollfrank & Kleiner
Telekommunisten
2012


Dmytri Kleiner
Telekommunisten

Berlin, 20 November 2012

[00:12]
My name is Dmytri Kleiner. I work with Telekommunisten, which is an art
collective based in Berlin that investigates the social relations in bettering
communication technologies.

[00:24]
Peer-To-Peer Communism

[00:29]
Cornelia Sollfrank: I would like to start with the theory, which I think is
very strong, and which actually informs the practice that you are doing. For
me it's like the background where the practice comes from. And I think the
most important and well-known book or paper you've written is The
Telekommunist Manifesto. This is something that you authored personally,
Dmytri Kleiner. It's not written by the Telekommunisten. And I would like to
ask you what the main ideas and the main principles are that you explain, and
maybe you come up with a few things, and I have some bullet points here, and
then we can discuss.

[01:14]
The book has two sections. The first section is called "Peer-To-Peer Communism
Vs. The Client-Server Capitalist State," and that actually explains – using
the history of the Internet as a sort of a basis – it explains the
relationship between modes of production on one hand, like capitalism and
communism, with network topologies on the other hand, mesh networks and star
networks. [01:39] And it explains why the original design of the Internet,
which was supposed to be a decentralised system where everybody could
communicate with everybody without any kind of mediation, or control or
censorship – why that has been replaced with centralised, privatised
platforms, from an economic basis. [02:00] So that the need for capitalist
capture of user data, and user interaction, in order to allow investors to
recoup profits, is the driving force behind centralisation, and so it explains
that.

[02:15]
Copyright Myth

[02:19]
C.S.: The framework of these whole interviews is the relation between cultural
production, artistic production in particular, and copyright, as a regulatory
mechanism. In one of your presentations, you mention, or you made the
assumption or the claim, that the fact that copyright is there to protect, or
to foster or enable artistic cultural production is a myth. Could you please
elaborate a bit on that?

[02:57]
Sure. That's the second part of the manifesto. The second part of the
manifesto is called "A Contribution to the Critique of Free Culture." And in
that title I don't mean to be critiquing the practice of free culture, which I
actively support and participate in. [03:13] I am critiquing the theory around
free culture, and particularly as it's found in the Creative Commons
community. [03:20] And this is one of the myths that you often see in that
community: that copyright somehow was created in order to empower artists, but
it's gone wrong somehow, at some point it's got wrong. [03:34] It went in the
wrong direction and now it needs to be corrected. This is a kind of a
plotline, so to speak, in a lot of creative commons oriented community
discussion about copyright. [03:46] But actually, of course, the history of
copyright is the same as the history of labour and capital and markets in
every other field. So just like the kind of Lockean idea of property
attributes the product of the worker's labour to the worker, so that the
capitalist can appropriate it, so it commodifies the products of labour,
copyright was created for exactly the same reasons, at exactly the same time,
as part of exactly the same process, in order to create a commodity form of
knowledge, so that knowledge could play in markets. [04:21] That's why
copyright was invented. That was the social reason why it needed to exist.
Because as industrial capitalism was manifesting, they required a way to
commodify knowledge work in the same way they commodified other kinds of
labour. [04:37] So the artist was only given the authorship of their work in
exactly the same way as the factory worker supposedly owns the product of
their labour. [04:51] Because the artist doesn't have the means of production,
so the artist has to give away that product, and actually legitimizes the
appropriation of the product of labour from the labourer, whether it's a
cultural labourer or a physical labourer.

[05:07]
(Intellectual) Labour

[05:10]
C.S.: And why do you think that this myth is so persistent? Or, who created
it, and for what reasons?

[05:18]
I think that a lot of kind of liberal criticism sort of starts that way. I
mean, I haven't really researched this, so that's kind of an open question
that you are asking, I don’t really have a specific position. [05:30] But my
impression is always that people that come at things from a liberal critique,
not a critical critique, sort of assume that things were once good and now
they’re bad. That’s kind of a common sort of assumption. [05:42] So instead of
looking at the core structural origin of something, they sort of have an
assumption that at some point this must have served a useful function or it
wouldn’t exist. And so therefore it must have been good and now it’s bad.
[05:57] And also because of the rhetoric, of course, just like the Lockean
rhetoric of property: give the ownership of the product of labour to the
worker. Ideologically speaking, it’s been framed this way since the beginning.
[06:14] But of course, everybody understands that in the market system the
worker is only given the rights to own their labour if they can sell it.

[06:22]
Author Function

[06:26]
C.S.: Based on this assumption, developed a certain function of the author.
Could you please elaborate on this a bit more? The invention of the individual
author.

[06:39]
The author – in a certain point of history, in line of the development of, you
know, as modern society – capitalist industrial society – began to emerge, so
did with it the author. [06:53] Previous to this, the concept of the author
was not nearly so engrained. So the author hasn't always existed in this
static sense, as unique source of new creativity and new knowledge, creating
work ex nihilo from their imagination. [07:10] Previous to this there was
always a more social understanding of authorship, where authors were in a
continuous cultural dialogue with previous authors, contemporary authors,
later authors. [07:20] And authors would frequently reuse themes, plots,
characters, from other authors. For instance, Goethe’s Faust is a good example
that has been used by authors before and after Goethe, in their own stories.
And just like the Homeric traditions of ancient literature. [07:42] Culture
was always seen to be much about dialogue, where each generation of authors
would contribute to a common creative stock of characters, plots, ideas. But
that, of course, is not conducive to making knowledge into a commodity that
can be sold in the market. [08:00] So as we got into a market-based society,
in order to create this idea of intellectual property, of copyright, creating
something that can be sold on the market, the artist and the author had to
become individuals all of a sudden. [08:16] Because this kind of iterative
social dialogue doesn’t work well in a commodity form, because how do you
properly buy it and sell it?

[08:28]
Anti-Copyright

[08:33]
C.S.: The Next concept I would like to talk about is the anti-copyright. Could
you please explain a little bit what it actually is, and where it comes from?

[08:46]
From the very beginning of copyright many artists and authors rejected it from
ideological grounds, right from the beginning. [08:35] Because, of course,
what was now plagiarism, what was now illegal, and a violation of intellectual
property had been in many cases traditional practices that writers took for
granted forever. [09:09] The ability to reuse characters; the ability to take
plots, themes and ideas from other authors and reuse them. [09:16] So many
artists rejected this idea from the beginning. And this was the idea of
copyright. But, of course, because the dominant system that was emerging – the
market capitalist system – required the commodity form to make a living, this
was always a marginal community. [09:37] So it was radical artists, like the
Situationist International, or artists that had strong political beliefs, the
American folk musicians like Woody Guthrie – another famous example. [09:47]
And all of this people were not only against intellectual property. They were
not only against the commodification of cultural work. They were against the
commodification of work, period. [09:57] There was a proletarian movement.
They were very much against capitalism as well as intellectual property.

[10:04]
Examples of Anti-Copyright

[10:08]
C.S.: Could you give also some examples in the artworld for this
anti-copyright, or in the cultural world?

[10:15]
DK: Well, you know Lautréamont’s famous text, “plagiarism is necessary: it
takes a wrong idea and replaces it with the right idea.” [10:29] And
Lautréamont was a huge influence on a bunch of radical French artists
including, most famously, the Situationist International, who published their
journal with no copyright, denying copyright. [10:44] I guess that Woody
Guthrie has a famous thing that I quote in some article or other, maybe even
in the [Telekommunist] Manifesto, I don’t remember if it made it in – where he
expressly says, he openly supports people performing, copying, modifying his
songs. That was a note that he made in a song book of his. [11:11] And many
others – the whole practice is associated with communises, from Dada to
Neoism. [11:18] Much later, up to the mid-1990s, this was the dominant form.
So from the birth of copyright, up to the mid-1990s, the intellectual property
was being questioned on the radical fringes of artists. [11:34] For me
personally, as an artist, I started to become involved with artists like
Negativland and Plunderpalooza – sorry, Plunderpalooza was an act we did;
Plunderphonics is an album by John Oswald – the newest movements and the
festival of plagiarism. [11:51] This was the area that I personally
experienced in the 1990s, but it has a long history going back to Lautréamont,
if not earlier.

[12:01]
On the Fringe

[12:05]
C.S.: But you already mentioned the term fringe, so this kind of
anti-copyright attitude automatically implied that it could only happen on the
fringe, not in the actual cultural world.

[12:15]
Exactly. It is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism, because it denies
the value-form of culture. [12:22] And without the commodity form, it can’t
make a living, it has nothing to sell in the market. Because it’s not allowed
to sell on the market, it’s necessarily marginal. [12:34] So it’s necessarily
people who support themselves through “non-art” income, by other kinds of
work, or the small percentage of artists that can be supported by cultural
funding or universities, which is, you know, a relatively small group compared
to the proper cultural industries that are supported by copyright licensing.
[12:54] That includes the major movie houses, the major record labels, the
major publishing houses. Which is, you know, in orders of magnitude, a larger
number of artists.

[13:05]
Anti-Copyright Attitude

[13:10]
C.S.: So what would you say are the two, three, main characteristics of the
anti-copyright attitude?

[13:16]
Well, it completely rejects copyright as being legitimate. That’s a complete
denial of copyright. And usually it’s a denial of the existence of a unique
author as well. [13:28] So one of the things that is very characteristic is
the blurring of the distinction between producer and consumer. [13:37] So that
art is considered to be a dialogue, an interactive process where every
producer is also a consumer of art. So everybody is an artist in that sense,
everybody potentially can be. And it’s an ongoing process. [13:52] There’s no
distinction between producer and consumer. It’s just a transient role that one
plays in a process.

[13:59]
C.S.: And in that sense it relates back to the earlier ideas of cultural
production.

[14:04]
Exactly, to the pre-commodity form of culture.

[14:11]
Copyleft

[14:15]
C.S.: Could you please explain what copyleft is, where it comes from.

[14:20]
Copyleft comes out of the software community, the hacker community. It doesn’t
come out of artistic practice per se. And it comes out of the need to share
software. [14:30] Famously, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation
started this project called GNU (GNU’s Not Unix), which is the, kind of, very
famous and important project. [14:44] And they publish the license called the
GPL, which sort of defined the copyleft idea. And copyleft is a very clever
kind of a hack, as they say in the hacker community. [14:53] What it does is
that it asserts copyright, full copyright, in order to provide a public
license, a free license. And it requires that any derivative work also carries
the same license. That’s what is different about it to anti-copyright. It’s
that, rather than denying copyright outright, copyleft is a copyright license
– it is a copyright – but then the claim is used in order to publicly make the
work available to anybody that wants it under very open terms. [15:28] The key
requirement, the distinctive requirement, is that any derivative work must
also be licenced under the same terms, under the copyleft terms. [15:38] This
is what we call viral, in that it perpetuates license. This is very clever,
because it takes copyright law, and it uses copyright law to create
intellectual property freedom, within a certain context. [15:55] But the
difference is, of course, that we are talking about software. And software,
economically speaking, from the point of view of the way software developers
actually make a living, is very different. [16:11] Because within the
productive cycle – the productive cycle can be said to have two phases,
sometimes called "department one" and "department two" in Marxian language or
in classical political economics. Producer’s goods and consumer’s goods; or
capital’s goods and consumer's goods models. [16:17] The idea is that some
goods are produced not for consumers but for producers. And these goods are
called capital. So they are goods that are used in production. And because
they are used in production, it’s not as important for capitalists to make a
profit on their circulation because they are input to production. [16:47] They
make their profits up stream, by actually using those goods in production, and
then creating goods that can be sold to the masses, circulated to the masses.
[16:56] And so because culture – art and culture – is normally a “department
two” good, consumer’s good, it’s completely, fundamentally incompatible with
capitalism because capitalism requires the capture of profits and the
circulation of consumer’s goods. But because software is largely a “department
one” good, producer’s good, it has no incompatibility with capitalism at all.
[17:18] In fact, capitalists very much like having their capital costs
reduced, because the vast majority of capitalists do not make commercial
software – license it. That’s only a very small class of capitalists. For the
vast majority of capitalists, the availability of free software as an input to
their production is a wonderful thing. [17:39] So this creates a sort of a
paradox, where under capitalism, only capital can be free. And because
software is capital, free software, and the GNU project, the Linux and the
vanilla projects exploded and became huge. [17:39] So, unlike the marginal-by-
necessity anti-copyright, free software became a mass movement, that has a
billion dollar industry, that has conferences all over the world that are
attended by tens of thousands of people. And everybody is for it. It’s this
really great big thing. [18:26] So it’s been rather different than
anti-copyright in term of its place in society. It’s become very prominent, very
successful. But, unfortunately – and I guess this is where we have to go next
– the reason why it is successful is because software is a producer’s good,
not a consumer’s good.

[18:38]
Copyleft Criticism

[18:42]
C.S.: So what is your basic criticism of copyleft?

[18:47]
I have no criticism of copyleft, except for the fact that some people think
that the model can be expanded into culture. It can’t be, and that’s the
problem. It's that a lot people from the arts community then kind of came back
to this original idea of questioning copyright through free software. [19:12]
So they maybe had some relationship with the original anti-copyright
tradition, or sometimes not at all. They are fresh out of design school, and
they never had any relationship with the radical tradition of anti-copyright.
And they encounter free software – they are like, yeah, that's great. [19:29]
And the spirit of sharing and cooperation inspires them. And they think that
the model can be taken from free software and applied to art and artists as
well, just like that. [19:41] But of course, there is a problem, because in a
capitalist society there has to be some economic sustainability behind the
practice, and because free culture modelled out of the GPL can’t work, because
the artists can’t make a living that way. [20:02] While capital will fund free
software, because they need free software – it’s a producer’s good, it’s input
to their production – capital has no need for free art. So they have also no
need to finance free art. [20:15] So if they can’t be financed by capital,
that automatically gives them a very marginal role in today’s society. [20:19]
Because that means that it has to be funded by something other than capital.
And those means are – back to the anti-copyright model – those are either non-
art income, meaning you do some other kind of work to self-finance your
artistic production, or the relatively small amount of public cultural
financing that is available – or now we have new things, like crowd funding –
all these  kinds of things that create some opportunities. But still
marginally small compared to the size of the capitalist economy. [20:52] So
the only criticism of copyleft is that it is inapplicable to cultural
production.

[21:00]
Copy-left and cultural production

[21:04]
C.S.: Why this principle of free software production, GPL principles, cannot
be applied to cultural production? Just again, to really point this out.

[21:20]
The difference is really the difference between “department one” goods,
producer's goods, and “department two” goods, consumer’s goods. [21:27] It’s
that capitalists, which obviously control the vast majority of investment in
this economy – so the vast majority of money that is spent to allow people to
realise projects of any kind. The source of this money is capital investment.
[21:42] And capital is happy to invest in producer’s goods, even if they are
free. Because they need these goods. So they have no requirement to seek these
goods. [21:53] If you are running a company like Amazon, you are not making
any money selling Linux, you are making money selling web services, books and
other kinds of derivative products. You need free software to run your data
centre, to run your computer. [22:08] So the cost of software to you is a
cost, and so you're happy to have free software and support it. Because it
makes a lot more sense for you to contribute to some project that it’s also
used by five other companies. [22:21] And in the end all of you have this tool
that you can run on your computer, and run your business with, than actually
either buying a license from some company, which can be expensive, inflexible,
and you can't control it, and if it doesn't work the way you want, you cannot
change it. [22:36] So free software has a great utility for producers. That's
why it's a capital good, a producer's good, a "department one" good. [22:45]
But art and culture do not have the same economic role. Capital is not
interested in developing free culture and free art. They don't need it, they
don't do anything with it. And the capitalist that produces art and culture
requires it to have a commodity form, which is what copyright is. [23:00] So
they require a form that they can sell on the market, which requires it to
have the exclusive, non-reproducible commodity form – that copyright was
developed in order to commodify culture. [23:14] So that is why the copyleft
tradition won't work for free culture – because even though free culture and
anti-copyright predates it, it predates it as a radical fringe. And the
radical fringe isn't supported by capital. It's supported, as we said, by
outside income, non-art income, and other kind of things like small cultural
funds.

[23:38]
Creative Commons

[23:42]
C.S.: In the last ten years we have seen new business models that very much
depend on free content as well. Could you please elaborate on this a bit?

[23:56]
Well, that’s the thing. Now we have the kind of Web 2.0/Facebook world.
[24:00] The entire copyright law – the so-called "good copyright" that
protected artists – was all based on the idea of the mechanical copy. And the
mechanical copy made a lot of sense in the printing press era where, if you
had some intellectual property, you could license it through mechanical
copies. So every time it was copied, somebody owed you a royalty. Very simple.
[24:26] But in a Web 2.0 world, where we have YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and
things like that, this doesn't really work very well. Because if you post
something online and then you need to get paid a royalty every time it gets
copied (and it gets copied millions of times), this becomes very impractical.
[24:44] And so this is where the Creative Commons really comes in. Because the
Creative Commons comes in just exactly at this time – as the Internet is kind
of bursting out of its original military and NGO roots, and really hitting the
general public. At the same time free software is something that is becoming
better known, and inspiring more people – so the ideas of questioning
copyright are becoming more prominent. [25:16] So Creative Commons seizes on
this kind of principles approach that anti-copyright and copyleft take. And
again, one of the single most important things about anti-copyright and
copyleft is that in both cases the freedom that they are talking about – the
free culture that they represent – is the freedom of the consumer to become
the producer. It's the denial of the distinction between consumer and
producer. [25:41] So even though the Creative Commons has a lot of different
licenses, including some that are GPL compatible – they're approved for free
cultural work, or whatever it's called – there is one license in particular
that makes up the vast majority of the works in the Creative Commons, one
license in particular which is like the signature license of the Creative
Commons – it's the non-commercial license. And this is obviously... The
utility of that is very clear because, as we said, artists can't make a living
in a copyleft sense. [26:18] In order for artists to make a living in the
capitalist system, they have to be able to negotiate non-free rights with
their publishers. And if they can't do that, they simply can't make a living.
At least, not in the mainstream community. There is a certain small place for
artists to make a living in the alternative and fringe elements of the
artworld. [26:42] But if you are talking about making a movie, a novel, a
record, then you at some point are going to need to negotiate a contract with
the publisher. Which means, you're going to have to be able negotiate non-free
terms. [27:00] So what non-commercial [licensing] does, is that it allows
people to share your stuff, making you more famous, getting more people to
know you – building its value, so to speak. But they can't actually do
anything commercial with it. And if they want to do anything commercial with
it, they have to come back to you and they have to negotiate a non-free
license. [27:19] So this is very practical, because it solves a lot of
problems for artists that want to make work available online in order to get
better known, but still want to eventually, at some point in the future,
negotiate non-free terms with a publishing company. [27:34] But while it's
very practical, it fundamentally violates the idea that copyleft and
anti-copyright set out to challenge – and this is distinction between the producer
and the consumer. Because of this, the consumer cannot become the producer.
And that is the criticism of the Creative Commons. [27:52] That's why I want
to talk about this thing, I often say, a tragedy in three parts. The first
part is a tragedy because it has to remain fringe, because of its complete
incompatibility with the dominant capitalism. [28:04] The second part,
copyleft, is a tragedy because while it works great for software, it can't and
it won't work for art. [28:10] And the third part is a tragedy because it
actually undermines the whole idea and brings the author back to the surface,
back from the dead. But the author kind of remerges as a sort of useful idiot,
because the "some rights reserved" are basically the rights to sell your
intellectual property to the publisher in exactly the same way as the early
industrial factory worker would have sold their labour to the factory.

[28:36]
C.S.: And that creates by no means a commons.

[28:41]
It by no means creative a commons, right. Because a primary function of a
commons is that it would be available for use by others producers, and the
Creative Commons isn't because you don't have any right to create your own
work to make a living from the works in the commons – because of the non-
commercial clause that covers a large percentage of the works there.

[29:09]
Peer Production License

[29:13]
C.S.: But you were thinking of an alternative. What is the alternative?

[29:19]
There is no easy alternative. The fact is that, so long as we have a cultural
industry that is dominated by market capitalism, then the majority of artists
working within it will have to work in that form. We can't arbitrarily, as
artists, simply pretend that the industry as it is doesn't exist. [29:41] But
at the same time we can hope that alternatives will develop – that alternative
ways of producing and sharing cultural works will develop. So that the
copyfarleft license... [29:52] I describe the Creative Commons as
copyjustright. It's not copyright, it's copyjustright – you can tune it, you
can tailor it to your specific interests or needs. But it is still copyright,
just a more fine-tuneable copyright that is better for a Web 2.0 distribution
model. [30:12] The alternative is what I call copyfarleft, which also starts
off with the Creative Commons non-commercial model for the simple reason that,
as we discussed, if you are an actually existing artist in the actually
existing cultural industries of today, you are going to have to make a living,
on the most part, by selling non-free works to publishers, non-free licenses
to publishers. That's simply the way the industry works. [30:37] But in order
not to close the door on another industry developing – a different kind of
industry developing – after denying commercial works blankly (so it has a non-
commercial clause), then it expressly allows commercial usage by non-
capitalist organisations, independent cooperatives, non-profits –
organisations that are not structured around investment capital and wage
labour, and so forth; that are not for-profit organisations that are enriching
private individuals and appropriating value from workers. [31:15] So this
allows you to succeed, at least potentially succeed as a commercial artist in
the commercial world as it is right now. But at the same time it doesn't close
the door on another kind of community from developing, other kind of industry
from developing. [31:35] And we have to understand that we are not going to be
able to get rid of the cultural industries as they exist today, until we have
another set of institutions that can play those same roles. They're not going
to magically vanish, and be magically replaced. [31:52] We have to, at the
same time as those exist, build up new kind of institutions. We have to think
of new ways to produce and share cultural works. And only when we've done
that, will the cultural institutions as they are today potentially go away.
[32:09] So the copyfarleft license tries to bridge that gap by allowing the
commons to grow, but at the same time allowing the commons producers to make a
living as they normally would within the regular cultural industry. [32:25]
Some good examples where you can see something like this – might be clear –
are some of the famous novelists like Wu Ming or Cory Doctorow, people that
have done very well by publishing their works under Creative Commons non-
commercial licenses. [32:42] Wu Ming's books, which are published, I believe,
by Random House or some big publisher, are available under a Creative Commons
non-commercial license. So if you want to download them for personal use, you
can. But if you are Random House, and you want to publish them and put them on
bookstores, and manufacture them in huge supply, you have to negotiate non-
free terms with Wu Ming. And this allows Wu Ming to make a living by licensing
their work to Random House. [33:10] But while it does do that, what it doesn't
do is allow that book to be manufactured any other way. So that means that
this capitalist form of production becomes the only form that you can
commercially produce this book – except for independents, just for their own
personal use. [33:25] Whereas if their book was instead under a copyfarleft
license, what we call the "peer production" licence, then not only could they
continue to work as they do, but also potentially their book could be made
available through other means as well. Like, independent workers cooperatives
could start manufacturing it, selling it and distributing it locally in their
own areas, and make a commercial living out of it. And then perhaps if those
were to actually succeed, then they could grow and start to provide some of
the functions that capitalist institutions do now.

[34:00]
Miscommunication Technology

[34:05]
The artworks that we do are more related to the topologies side of the theory
– the relationship between network topologies, communication topologies, and
the social relations embedded in communication systems with the political
economy and economic ideas, and people's relationships to each other. [34:24]
The Miscommunication Technologies series has been going on for a quite a while
now, I guess since 2006 or so. Most of the works were pretty obscure, but the
more recent works are getting more attention and better known. And I guess
that the ones that we're talking about and exhibiting the most are deadSwap,
Thimbl and R15N, and these all attempt to explore some of the ideas.

[35:01]
deadSwap

[35:06]
deadSwap is a file sharing system. It's playing on the kind of
circumventionist technologies that are coming out of the file sharing
community, and this idea that technology can make us be able to evade the
legal and economic structures. So deadSwap wants to question this by creating
a very extreme parody of what it would actually mean to really be private.
[35:40] It is a file sharing system, that in order to be private it only
exists on one USB stick. And this USB stick is hidden in public space, and its
user send text messages to an anonymous SMS gateway in order to tell other
users where they've hidden the stick. When you have the stick you can upload
and download files to it – it's a file sharing system. It has a Wiki and file
space, essentially. Then you hide the stick somewhere, and you text the system
and it forwards your message to the next person that is waiting to share data.
And this continues like that, so then that person can share data on it, they
hide it somewhere and send an SMS to the system which then it gets forwarded
to the next person. [36:28] This work serves a few different functions at
once. First, it starts to get people to understand networks and all the basic
components. The participants in the artwork actually play a network node – you
are passing on information as if you are part of a network. So this gets
people to start thinking about how networks work, because they are playing the
network. [36:52] But on the other hand, it also tries to get cross the idea
that the behaviour of the user is much important than the technology, when it
comes to security and privacy. So how difficult it is – the system is very
private – how difficult it is to actually use it, not lose the stick, not to
get discovered. [37:11] It's actually very difficult to actually use. Even
though it seems so simple, normally people lose the USB key within like an
hour or two of starting the system. It doesn't... All the secret agent manuals
that say, be a secret agent spy – isn't easy, and it tries to get this across,
that actually it's not nearly as easy to evade the economic and political
dimensions of our society as it should be. [37:45] Maybe it's better that we
politically fight to avoid having to share information only by hiding USB
sticks in public space, sticking around and acting like spies.

[37:57]
Thimbl

[38:02]
Thimbl is another work, and it is completely online. This work in some ways
has become a signature work for us, even though it doesn't really have any
physical presence. It's a purely conceptual work. [38:15] One of the arguments
that the Manifesto makes is that the Internet was a fully distributed social
media platform – that's what the Internet was, and then it was replaced,
because of capitalism and because of the economic logic of the market, with
centralised communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook. [38:40] And
despite that, within the free software community and the hacker community,
there's the opposite myth, just like the copyright myth. There's this idea
that we are moving towards decentralised software. [38:54] You see people like
Eben Moglen making this point a lot, when he says, now we have Facebook, but
because of FreedomBox, Diaspora and a laundry list of other projects, we're
eventually going to reach a decentralised software. [39:07] But this makes two
assumptions that are incorrect. The first is that we are starting with
centralised media and we are going to decentralised media, which actually is
incorrect. We started with a decentralised social media platform and we moved
to a centralised one. [39:40] And the second thing that is incorrect is that
we can move from a centralised platform to a decentralised platform if we just
create the right technology, so the problem is technological. [39:34] With
Thimbl we wanted to make the point that that wasn't true, that the problem was
actually political. The technological problem is trivial. The computer
sciences have been around forever. The problem is political. [39:43] The
problem is that these systems will not be financed by capital, because capital
requires profit in order to sustain itself. In order to capture profit it
needs to have control of user interaction and user's data. [39:57] To
illustrate this, we created a micro-blogging platform like Twitter, but using
a protocol of the 1970s called Finger. So we've used the protocol that has
been around since the 1970s and made a micro-blogging platform out of it –
fully, totally distributed micro-blogging platform. And then promoted it as if
it was a real thing, with videos and website, and stuff like that. But of
course, there is no way to sign up for it, because it's just a concept.
[40:22] And then there are some scripts that other people wrote that actually
made it to a certain degree real. For us it was just a concept, but then
people actually took it and made working implementations of it, and there are
several working implementations of Thimbl. [40:38] But the point remains that
the problem is not technical, the problem is political. So we came up with
this idea of the economic fiction, or the social fiction. [40:47] Because in
science fiction you often have situations where something that eventually
became a real technology was originally introduced in a fictional context as a
science fiction. [40:59] The reason it's fictional is because science at the
time was not able to create the thing, but as science transcends its
limitations, what was once fictional technology became real technology. So we
have this idea of a social or economic fiction. [41:15] Thimbl is not science
fiction. Technologically speaking it demonstrably works – it's a demonstrably
working concept. The problem is economic. [41:23] For Thimbl to become a
reality, society has to transcend its economic limitations – it's social and
economic limitations in order to find ways to create communication systems
that are not simply funded by the capture of user data and information, which
Thimbl can't do because it is a distributive system. You can't control the
users, you can't know who is using it or what they are doing, because it's
fully distributed.

[41:47]
R15N

[41:52]
The R15N has elements of both of those things. We wanted to create a system
that was basically drawn a little from deadSwap, but I wanted to take out the
secret agent element of it. Because I was really... [42:08] The first place it
was commissioned to be in was actually in Tel Aviv, in Israel, the [Israeli]
Center for Digital Art. And this kind of spy aesthetic that deadSwap had, I
didn't think it would be an appropriate aesthetic in that context. [42:22] The
idea that of trying to convince young people in a poor area in Tel Aviv to act
like spies and hide USB sticks in public space didn't seem like a good idea.
[42:34] So I wanted to go the other way, and I wanted to really emphasise the
collaboration, and create a kind of system that is pretty much totally
impossible to use, but only if you really cooperate you can make it work.
[42:45] So I took another old approach called the telephone tree. I don't know
if you remember telephone trees. Telephone trees existed for years before the
Internet, when schools and army reserves needed to be quickly dispatched, and
it worked with a very simple tree topology. [43:01] You had a few people that
were the top nodes, that then called the list of two or three people, that
then called the list of two or three people, that then called the list of two
or three people... And the message can be sent through the community very
rapidly through a telephone tree. [43:14] It is often used in Canada for
announcing snow days at school, for instance. If the school was closed, they
would call three parents, who would each call three parents, who would each
call three parents, and so forth. So that all the parents knew that the school
was closed. That's one aspect. [43:30] Another aspect of it is that
telephones, especially mobile phones, are really advertised as a very freedom
enabling kind of a thing. Things that you can go anywhere... [43:41] I don't
know if you remember some of the early telephones ads where there are always
businessmen on the beach. I remember this one where this woman's daughter
wants to make an appointment with her because she only has time for her
colleague appointments, and so it's this whole thing about spending more time
with her daughter – so she takes her daughter to the beach, which she is able
to do because she can still conduct business on her mobile phone. So it's this
freedom kind of a thing. [44:04] But in areas like the Jessi Cohen area in Tel
Aviv where we were working, and other areas where the project has been
exhibited, like Johannesburg – other places like that, the telephone has a
very different role, because it's free to receive phone calls, but it costs
much to make phone calls, in most parts of the world, especially in these poor
areas. [44:25] So the telephone is a very asymmetric power relationship based
on your availability of credit. So rather than being a freedom enabling thing,
it's a control technology. So young people and poor people that carry them
can't actually make any calls, they can't call anybody. They can only receive
calls. [44:40] So it's used as a tedder, a control system from their parents,
their teachers, their employers, so they can know where they are at any time
and say, hey why aren't you at work, or where are you, what are you doing.
It's actually a control technology. [44:54] We wanted to invert that too. So
the way the phone tree system work is that, when you have a message you
initiate a phone call, so you initiate a new tree, the system phones you...
[45:05] And you can initiate a new tree in the modern versions by pushing a
button in the gallery. There's a physical button in the gallery, you push the
button, there's a phone beside it, it rings a random person, you tell them
your message, and then it creates an ad hoc telephone tree. It takes all the
subscribers and arranges them in a tree, just like in the old telephone tree,
and each person calls each person, until your message, in theory, gets through
the community. [45:28] But of course in reality nobody answers their phones,
you get voicemail, and then you get voicemail talking to voicemail. Of course,
voice from the Internet is fake to begin with, so calls fail. So it actually
becomes this really frenetic system where people actually don’t know what's
going on, and the message is constantly lost. [45:44] And of course, you have
all of these missed phone calls, this high pressure of the always-on world.
You are always getting these phone calls, and you're missing phone calls, and
actually nobody ever knows what the message is. So it actually creates this
kind of mass confusion. [46:00] This once again demonstrates that the users –
what we call jokingly in the R15N literature, the diligence of the users, is
so much required for these systems to work. Technologically, the system is
actually more or less hindered. [46:21] But they also serve not only to make
that message, which is a more general message – but also, like in the other
ones, in R15N you are a node in the network. So when you don’t answer a call
you know that a message is dropped. [46:36] So you can image how volatile
information is in networks. When you pass your information through a third
party, you realise that they can drop it, they can change it, they can
introduce their own information. [46:50] And that is true in R15N, but is also
true in Facebook, in Twitter, and in any time you send messages through some
third party. That is one of the messages that is core to the series.

Sollfrank & Mars
Public Library
2013


Marcell Mars
Public Library

Berlin, 1 February 2013

[00:13]
Public Library is the concept, the idea, to encourage people to become a
librarian, where a librarian is a person which can allow access to books – and
also which has a catalogue or index, so that it's searchable. [00:32] And the
person, the human being, can communicate, can talk with others who are
interested in that catalogue of books. [00:43] And then when you have a
librarian, and you have a lot of librarians, you have a Public Library,
because we have access to books, we have a catalogue, and we have a librarian.
That's the basic set up. [00:55] And in order to really work, in practice, we
need to introduce a set of tools which are easy to use, like Calibre, for
example, for book management. [01:07] And then also some part of that set up
should be also developed because at the moment, because of the configuration
of the routers, IP addresses and other things, it's not that easy to share
your local library which you have on your laptop with the world. [01:30] So we
also provide... When I say ‘we,’ it's a small team, at the moment, of
developers who try to address that problem. [01:38] We don't need to reinvent
the public library. It's invented, and it should be just maintained. [01:47]
The old-school public libraries – they are in decline because of many reasons.
And when it comes to the digital networks, the digital books, it's almost like
the worst position. [01:59] For example, public libraries in the US, they are
not allowed to buy digital books, for example from Penguin. So even when they
want to buy, it's not that they are getting them, it's that they can't buy the
books. [02:16] By the current legal regulation, it's considered as illegal – a
million of books, or even more, are unavailable, and I think that these books
should be really available. [02:29] And it doesn't really matter how it got on
Internet – did it come from a graphic designer who is preparing that for
print, or if it was uploaded somewhere from the author of the book (that is
also very common, especially in humanities), or if it was digitised anywhere.
[02:50] So these are the books which we have, and we can't be blinded, they
are here. The practice at the moment is almost like trying to find a
prostitute or something, so when you want to get a book online you need to get
onto the websites with advertisements for casinos, for porn and things like
that. [03:14] I don't think that the library should be like that.

[03:18]
Book Management

[03:22]
What we are trying to provide is just suggesting what kind of book management
software they can use, and also what kind of new software tools they can
install in order to easily get the messy directory into the directory of
metadata which Calibre can recognise – and then you can just use Calibre. The
next step is if you can share your local library with the world. [03:52] You
need something like a management software where it's easy to see who are the
authors, what the titles, publishers and all of the metadata – and it's
accessible from the outside.

[04:08]
Calibre

[04:12]
Calibre is a book management software. It's developed by Kovid Goyal, a
software developer. [04:22] It's a free software, open source, and it started
like many other free software projects. It started as a small tool to solve
very particular small problems. [04:31] But then, because it was useful, it
got more and more users, and then Kovid started to develop it more into a
proper, big book management software. At the moment it has more that 10
million registered users who are running that. [04:52] It does so many things
for book management. It's really ‘the’ software tool... If you have an
e-reader, for example, it recognises your e-reader, it registers it inside of
Calibre and then you can easily just transfer the books. [05:08] Also for
years there was a big problem of file formats. So for example, Amazon, in
order to keep their monopoly in that area, they wouldn't support EPUB or PDF.
And then if you got your book somewhere – if you bought it or just downloaded
from the Internet, you wouldn't be able to read it on your reader. [05:31]
Then Calibre was just developing the converter tools. And it was all in one
package, so that Calibre just became the tool for book management. [05:43] It
has a web server as a part of it. So in a local area network – if you just
start that web server and you are running a local area network, it can have a
read-only searchable access to your local library, to your books, and it can
search by any of these metadata.

[06:05]
Tools Around Calibre

[06:09]
I developed a software which I call Let's Share Books, which is super small
compared to Calibre. It just allows you, with one click, to get your library
shared on the Internet. [06:24] So that means that you get a public URL, which
says something like www some-number dot memoryoftheworld dot net, and that is
the temporary public URL. You can send it to anyone in the world. [06:37] And
while you are running your local web server and share books, it would just
serve these books to the Internet. [06:45] I also set up a web chat – kind of
a room where people can talk to each other, chat to each other. [06:54] So
it’s just, trying to develop tools around Calibre, which is mostly for one
person, for one librarian – to try to make some kind of ecosystem for a lot of
librarians where they can meet with their readers or among themselves, and
talk about the books which they love to read and share. [07:23] It’s mostly
like a social networking around the books, where we use the idea and tradition
of the public library. [07:37] In order to get there I needed to set up a
server which only does routing. So with my software I don’t know which books
are transferred, anything. It’s just like a router. [07:56] You can do that
also if you have control of your router, or what we usually call modem, so the
device which you use to get to the Internet. But that is quite hard to hack,
just hackers know how to do that. [08:13] So I just made a server on the
Internet which you can use with one click, and it just routes the traffic
between you, if you’re a librarian, and your users, readers. So that’s that
easy.

[08:33]
Librarians

[08:38] It’s super easy to become a librarian, and that is what we should
celebrate. It’s not that the only librarians which we have were the librarians
who were the only ones wanting to become a librarian. [08:54] So lots of
people want to be a librarian, and lots of people are librarians whenever they
have a chance. [09:00] So you would probably recommend me some books which you
like. I’ll recommend you some books which I like. So I think we should
celebrate that now it’s super easy that anyone can be a librarian. [09:11] And
of course, we will still need professional librarians in order to push forward
the whole field. But that goes, again, in collaboration with software
engineers, information architectes, whatever… [09:26] It’s so easy to have
that, and the benefits of that are so great, that there is no reason why not
to do that, I would say.

[09:38]
Functioning

[09:43]
If you want to share your collection then you need to install at the moment
Calibre, and Let’s Share Books software, which I wrote. But also you can – for
example, there is a Calibre plugin for Aaaaarg, so if you use Calibre… from
Calibre you can search Aaaaarg, you can download books from Aaaaarg, you can
also change the metadata and upload the metadata up to Aaaaarg.

[10:13]
Repositories

[10:17]
At the moment the biggest repository for the books, in order to download and
make your catalogue, is Library Genesis. It’s around 900,000 books. It’s
libgen.info, libgen.org. And it’s a great project. [10:33] It’s done by some
Russian hackers, who also allow anyone to download all of that. It’s 9
Terabytes of books, quite some chunk of hard disks which you need for that.
[10:47] And you can also download PHP, the back end of the website and the
MySQL database (a thumb of the MySQL database), so you can run your own
Library Genesis. That’s one of the ways how you can do that. [11:00] You can
also go and join Aaaaarg.org, where it is also not just about downloading
books and uploading books, it’s also about communication and interpretation of
making, different issues and catalogues. [11:14] It’s a community of book
lovers who like to share knowledge, and who add quite a lot of value around
the books by doing that. [11:26] And then there is… you can use Calibre and
Let’s Share Books. It’s just one of these complimentary tools. So it’s not
really that Calibre and Let’s Share Books is the only way how you can today
share books.

[11:45]
Goal

[11:50]
What we do also has a non-hidden agenda for fighting for the public library. I
would say that most of the people we know, even the authors, they all
participate in the huge, massive Public Library – which we don’t call Public
Library, but usually just trying to hide that we are using that because we are
afraid of the restrictive regime. [12:20] So I don’t see a reason why we
should shut down such a great idea and great implementation – a great resource
which we have all around the world. [12:30] So it’s just an attempt to map all
of these projects and to try to improve them. Because, in order to get it into
the right shape, we need to improve the metadata. [12:47] Open Library, a
project which started also with Aaron Swartz, has 20 millions items, and we
use it. There is a basedata.org which connects the hash files, the MD5 hashes,
with the Open Library ID. And we try to contribute to Open Library as much as
possible. [13:10] So with very few people, around 5 people, we can improve it
so much that it will be for a billion of users a great Public Library, and at
the same time we can have millions of librarians, which we never had before.
So that’s the idea. [13:35] The goal is just to keep the Public Library. If we
didn’t screw up the whole situation with the Public Library, probably we’d
just try to add a little bit of new software, and new ways that we can read
the books. [13:53] But at the moment [it’s] super important actually to keep
this infrastructure running, because this super important infrastructure for
the access to knowledge is now under huge threat.

[14:09]
Copyright

[14:13]
I just think that it’s completely inappropriate – that copyright law is
completely inappropriate for the Public Library. I don’t know about other
cases, but in terms of Public Library it’s absolutely inappropriate. [14:29]
We should find the new ways of how to reward the ones who are adding value to
sharing knowledge. First authors, then anyone who is involved in public
libraries, like librarians, software engineers – so everyone who is involved
in that ecosystem should be rewarded, because it’s a great thing, it’s a
benefit for the society. [15:03] If this kind of things happens, so if the law
which regulates this blocks and doesn’t let that field blossom, it’s something
wrong with that law. [15:16] It’s getting worse and worse, so I don’t know for
how long we should wait, because while we’re waiting it’s getting worse.
[15:24] I don’t care. And I think that I can say that because I’m an artist.
Because all of these laws are made saying that they are representing art, they
are representing the interest of artists. I’m an artist. They don’t really
represent my interests. [15:46] I think that it should be taken over by the
artists. And if there are some artists who disagree – great, let’s have a
discussion.

[15:58]
Civil Disobedience

[16:03]
In the possibilities of civil disobedience – which are done also by
institutions, not just by individuals – and I think that in such clear cases
like the Public Library it’s easy. [16:17] So I think that what I did in this
particular case is nothing really super smart – it’s just reducing this huge
issue to something which is comprehensible, which is understandable for most
of the people. [16:31] There is no one really who doesn’t understand what
public library is. And if you say to anyone in the world, saying, like hey, no
more public libraries, hey, no books anymore, no books for the poor people. We
are just giving up on something which we almost consensually accepted through
the whole world. [16:55] And I think that in such clear cases, I’m really
interested [in] what institutions could do, like Transmediale. I’m now in
[Akademie] Schloss Solitude, I also proposed to make a server with a Public
Library. If you invest enough it’s a million of books, it’s a great library.
[17:16] And of course they are scared. And I think that the system will never
really move if people are not brave. [17:26] I’m not really trying to
encourage people to do something where no one could really understand, you
know, and you need expertise or whatever. [17:37] In my opinion this is the
big case. And if Transmediale or any other art institution is playing with
that, and showing that – let’s see how far away we can support this kind of
things. [17:56] The other issue which I am really interested in is what is the
infrastructure, who is running the infrastructures, and what kind of
infrastructures are happen in between these supposedly avant-garde
institutions, or something. [08:12] So I’m really interested in raising these
issues.

[18:17]
Art Project

[18:21]
Public Library is also an art project where… I would say that just in the same
way that corporations, by their legal status, can really kind of mess around
with different… they can’t be that much accountable and responsible – I think
that this is the counterpart. [18:44] So civil disobedience can use art just
the same way that corporations can use their legal status. [18:51] When I was
invited as a curator and artist to curate the HAIP Festival in Ljubljana, I
was already quite into the topic of sharing access to knowledge. And then I
came up with this idea and everybody liked it and everybody was enthusiastic.
It's one of these ideas where you can see that it’s great, there is no one
really who would oppose to that. [19:28] At the same time there was an
exhibition, Dear Art, curated by WHW, quite established curators. And then it
immediately became an art piece for that exhibition. Then I was invited here
to Transmediale, and have a couple of other invitations. [19:45] I think that
it also shows that art institutions are accepting that, they play with that
idea. And I think that this kind of projects – by having that acceptance it
becomes the issue, it becomes the problem of the whole arts establishment.
[20:10] So I think that if I do this in this way, and if there is a curator
who invites this kind of projects – so who invites Public Library into their
exhibition – it’s also showing their kind of readiness to fight for that
issue. [20:27] And if there are a number of art festivals, a number of art
exhibitions, who are supporting this kind of, lets say, civil disobedience,
that also shows something. [20:38] And I think that that kind of context
should be pushed into the confrontation, so it’s not anymore just playing “oh,
is it is ok, it is not? We should deal with all the complexity…” [20:57] There
is no real complexity here. That complexity is somewhere else, and in some
other step we should take care of that. But this is an art piece, it’s a well
established art piece. [21:11] If you make a Public Library, I'm fine, I’m
sacrificing for taking the responsibility. But you shouldn't melt down that
art piece, I think. [21:26] And I feel super stupid that such a simple concept
should be, in 2013, articulated to whom? In many ways it’s like playing dummy,
I play dummy. It’s like, why should I? [21:50] When we started to play in
Ljubljana like software developers we came up with so many great ideas of how
to use those resources. So it was immediately…  just after couple of hours we
had tools – visualisations of that, a reader of Wikipedia which can embed any
page which is referred, as a reference, a quote. [22:17] It was immediately
obvious for anyone there and for anyone from the outside what a huge resource
is having a Public Library like that – and what’s the huge harm that we don’t
have it. [22:32] But still we need to play dummy, I need to play the artist’s
role, you know.

Sollfrank & Snelting
Performing Graphic Design Practice
2014


Femke Snelting
Performing Graphic Design Practice

Leipzig, 7 April 2014

[00:12]
What is Libre Graphics?

[00:16]
Libre Graphics is quite a large ecosystem of software tools, of people –
people that develop these tools, but also people that use these tools;
practices, like how do you then work with them, not just how you make things
quickly and in an impressive way, but also these tools might change your
practice and the cultural artefacts that result from it. So it’s all these
elements that come together, and we call Libre Graphics. [00:53] The term
“Libre” is chosen deliberately. It’s slightly more mysterious that the term
“free”, especially when it turns up in the English language. It sort of hints
that there’s something different, that there’s something done on purpose.
[01:16] And it is a group of people that are inspired by free software
culture, by free culture, by thinking about how to share both their tools,
their recipes and the outcomes of all this. [01:31] So Libre Graphics is quite
wild, it goes in many directions, but it’s an interesting context to work in,
that for me it has been quite inspiring for a few years now.

[01:46]
The context of Libre Graphics

[01:50]
The context of Libre Graphics is multiple. I think that’s part of why I’m
excited about it, and also part of why it’s sometimes difficult to describe it
in a short sentence. [02:04] The context is design – so people that are
interested in design, in creating visuals, in creating animations, videos,
typography. And that is already a multiple context, because each of these
disciplines have their own histories, and their own sort of types of people
that get touched by them. [02:23] Then there is software, people that are
interested in the digital material – so, let’s say, excited about raw bits and
the way a vector gets produced. So that’s a very, almost formal interest in
how graphics are made. [02:47] Then there’s people that do software, so they
are interested in programming, in programming languages, in thinking about
interfaces and thinking about ways software can become a tool. And then
there’s people that are interested in free software, so how can you make
digital tools that can be shared, but also how can you produce processes that
can be shared. [03:11] So there you have from free software activists to
people that are interested in developing specific tools for sharing design and
software development processes, like Git or [Apache] Subversion, or those
kinds of things. So I think that multiple context is really special and rich
in Libre Graphics.

[03:34]
Free software culture

[03:38]
Free software culture… And I use the term culture because I’m more interested
in, let’s say, the cultural aspect of it, and this includes software, for me
software is a cultural object – but I think it’s important to emphasise this,
because it's easily turned into a very technocentric approach which I think is
important to stay away from. [04:01] So free software culture is the thinking
that, when you develop technology – and I’m using technology in the sense that
is cultural as well, to me, deeply cultural – you need to take care of sharing
the recipes for how this technology has been developed as well. [04:28] And
this produces many different other tools, ways of working, ways of speaking,
vocabularies, because it changes radically the way we make and the way we
produce hierarchies. [04:49] So it means, for example, if you produce a
graphic design artefact, for example, that you share all the source files that
were necessary to make it. But you also share, as much as you can,
descriptions and narrations of how it came to be, which does include, maybe,
how much was paid for it, what difficulties were in negotiating with the
printer, and what elements were included – because the graphic design object
is usually a compilation of different elements –, what software was used to
make it and where it might have resisted. [05:34] So the consequences of
taking free software culture seriously in a graphic design or a design
context, means that you care about all these different layers of the work, all
the different conditions that actually make the work happen.

[05:50]
Free culture

[05:54]
The relationship from Libre Graphics to free culture is not always that
explicit. For some people it’s enough to work with tools that are released
under GPL (GNU General Public License), or like an open content license, and
there it stops. So even their work would be released under proprietary
licenses. [06:18] For others it’s important to make the full circle and to
think about what the legal status is of the work they release. So that’s the
more general one. [06:34] Then free culture – we can use that very loosely, as
in everything that is circulating under conditions that it can be reused and
remade, that would be my position – free culture, of course, also refers to
the very specific idea of how that would work, namely Creative Commons.
[06:56] For myself, Creative Commons is problematic, although I value the fact
that it exists and has really created a broader discussion around licenses in
creative practices, so I value that. [07:11] For me, the distinction Creative
Commons makes, almost for all the licenses they promote, between commercial
and non-commercial work, and as a consequence between professional and amateur
work – I find that very problematic, because I think one of the most important
elements of free software culture, for me, is the possibility of people from
different backgrounds, with different skill sets, to actually engage the
digital artefacts they are surrounded with. [07:47] And so by making this
quite lazy separation between commercial and non-commercial, which, especially
in the context of the web as it is right now, since it’s not very easy to hold
up, seems really problematic, because it creates an illusion of clarity that I
think actually makes more trouble than clarity. [08:15] So I use free culture
licenses, I use licenses that are more explicit about the fact that anyone can
use whatever I produce, in any context, because I think that’s where the real
power is of free software culture. [08:31] For me, free software licenses and
all the licenses around them – because I think there are many different types,
and that’s interesting – is that they have a viral power built in. So if you
apply a free software license to, for example, a typeface, it means that
someone else, even someone else you don’t know, has the permission, and
doesn’t have to ask for the permission to reuse the typeface, to change it, to
mix it with something else, to distribute it and to sell it. [09:08] That’s
one part that is already very powerful. But the real secret of such a license
is that once this person re-releases a typeface, it means that they need to
keep the same license. So it means that it propagates across the network, and
that is where it’s really powerful.

[09:31]
Free tools

[09:35]
It’s important to have tools that are released under conditions that allow me
to look further than its surface, for many reasons. There is an ethical
reason. It’s very problematic, I think, to, as a friend explained last week,
to feel like you are renting a room in a hotel – because that is often the way
practitioners nowadays relate to their tools, they have no right to remove the
furniture, they’ve no right to invite friends to their hotel room, they have
to check out at 11, etc. So it’s a very sterile relationship to your tools. So
that’s one part. [10:24] The other is that there is little way of coming into
contact with the cultural aspects of the tools. Something that I suspected
before I started to use free software tools for my practice, but has been
already for almost ten years continuously exciting, is the whole… let’s say,
all the other elements around it: the way people organise themselves in
conferences, mailing lists, the fact that the kinds of communications that
happens, the vocabularies, the histories, the connections between different
disciplines. [11:07] And all that is available to look at, to work with, to
come into contact with, even to speak to people that do these tools and ask
them, why is like this and not like that. And so to me it seems obvious that
artists want to have that kind of, let’s say, layered relation with their
tools, and not just accept whatever comes out of the next-door shop. [11:36] I
have a very different, almost different physical experience of these tools,
because I can enter on many levels. And that makes them part of my practice
and not just means to an end, I really can take them into my practice, and
that I find interesting as an artist and as a designer.

[11:56] Artefacts

[12:00] The outcomes of this type of practice are different, or at least the
kind of work I make, try to make, and the people I like to work with. There’s
obviously also a group of people that would like to do Hollywood movies with
those tools. And, you know, that’s kind of interesting too, that that happens.
[12:21] For me, somehow the technological context or conditions that made the
work possible will always occur in the final result. So that’s one part.
[12:38] And the other is that the, let’s say, the product is never the end. So
it means that because, in whatever way, source materials would be released,
would be made available, it means that the product is always the beginning of
another project or product, either by me or by other people. [13:02] So I
think that’s two things that you can always see in the kind of works we make
when we do Libre Graphics – my style.

[13:15] Libre Fonts

[13:18] A very exciting part of Libre Graphics is the Libre Font movement,
which is strong, and has been strong for a long time. Fonts are the basic
building block of how a graphic comes to life. I mean, when you type
something, it’s there. [13:40] And the fact that that part of the work is free
is important in many levels. Things that you often don’t think about when we
speak English and we stay within a limited character set, is that when you
live in, let’s say, India, the language you speak is not available as a
digital typeface, meaning that when you want to produce book in the tools that
are available, or publish it online, your language has no way of expressing
itself. [14:26] And so it’s important, and that has to do with commercial
interests, laws, ways that the technical infrastructure has been built. And so
by understanding that it’s important that you can express yourself in the
language and with the characters you need, it’s also obvious that that part
needs to be free. [14:53] Fonts are also interesting because they exist on
many levels. They exist on your system. They are almost software, because they
are quite complicated objects. They appear in your screen, when you print a
document – they are there all the time. [15:17] But at the same time it’s the
alphabet. It’s the most, let’s say… we consider it as a totally accessible,
available and universal right, to have the alphabet at our disposal. [15:29]
So I think, politically and, let’s say, from a sort of interest in that kind
of practice that is very technical but at the same time also very basic, in
the sense that is about “freeing an A,” that’s quite a beautiful energy – I
think that that has made the Libre Font movement very strong.

[15:55] Free artefacts / open standards

[15:59] It took me a while to figure out myself – that for me it was so
obvious that if you do free software, that you would produce free artefacts, I
mean, it seems kind of obvious, but that is not at all the case. [16:12] There
is full-fledged commercial production happening with these tools. But one
thing that sort of keeps the results, the outcomes of these projects, freer
than most commercial tools is that there is really an emphasis on open
document formats. [16:34] And that is extremely important because, first of
all, through this sort of free software thinking it’s very obvious that the
documents that you produce with the tool should not belong to the software
vendor, they are yours. [16:49] And to be able to own your own documents you
need to be able to look, to inspect how they are produced. I know many tragic
stories of designers that with several upgrades of “their” tool set lost
documents, because they could never open them again. [17:12] So there’s really
an emphasis and a lot of work in making sure that the documents produced from
these tools remain inspectable, are documented, so that either you can open
them in another tool, or could develop a tool to open them in, to have these
files available for you. [17:38] So it’s really part and parcel of free
software culture, it’s that you care about that what generates your artefact,
but also about the materiality of your artefact. And so there, open standards
are extremely important – or maybe, let’s say, that file formats are
documented and can be understood. [18:04] And what’s interesting to see is
that in this whole Libre Graphics world there is also a very strong group of
reverse engineers, that are document formants, document activists, I would
say. [18:19] And I think that’s really interesting. They claim, they say,
documents need to be free, and so we would go against… let’s say, we would
risk breaking the law to be able to understand how non-free documents actually
are constructed. [18:37] So they are really working to be able to understand
non-free documents, to be able to read them, and to be able to develop tools
for them, so that they can be reused and remade. [18:54] So the difference
between a free and a non-free document is that, for example, an InDesign file,
which is the result of a commercial product, there’s no documentation
available to how this file works. [19:10] This means that the only way to open
the file is with that particular program. So there is a connection between
that what you’ve made and the software you’ve used to produce it. [19:24] It
also means that if the software updates, or the license runs out, you will not
have access to your own file. It means it’s fixed, you can never change it,
and you can never allow anyone else to change it. [19:39] And open document
format has documentation. That means that not only the software that created
it is available, and so that way you can understand how it was made, but also
there’s independent documentation available. [19:55] So that whenever a
project, like a software, doesn’t work anymore or it’s too old to be run, or
you don’t have it available, you have other ways of understanding the document
and being able to open it, and reuse and remake it. [20:11] Examples of open
document formats are, for example, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), ODT (Open
Document Text format), or OGG, a format for video that allows you to look at
all the elements that are packed into the video format. [20:31] What’s
important is that, around these open formats, you see a whole ecosystem exists
of tools to inspect, to create, to read, to change, to manipulate these
formats. And I think it’s very easy to see how around InDesign files this
culture does not exist at all.

[20:55] Getting started

[20:59] If you would be interested to start using Libre Graphics, you can
enter it in different levels. There’s well-developed tools that look a bit
like commercial photo manipulation tools, or layout tools. [21:19] There’s
something called Gimp, which is a well-developed software for treating photos.
There’s Blender, which is a fast-developing animation software, that’s being
used by thousands of thousands of people, and even it’s being used in
commercial productions, Pixar-style stuff. [21:43] These tools can be
installed on any system, so you don’t have to run a Linux system to be able to
use them. You can install them on a Macintosh or on a Windows, for example. Of
course, they are usually more powerful when you run them on a system that
recognises that power.

[22:09] Sharing practice / re-learn

[22:14] This way of working changes the way you learn, and also therefore the
way you teach. And so, as many of us have understood the relation between
learning and practice, we’ve all been somehow involved in education, many of
us are teaching in formal design or art education. [22:43] And it’s very clear
how those traditional schools are really not fit for the type of learning and
teaching that needs to happen around Libre Graphics. [22:57] So one of the
problems that we run into is the fact that art academies are traditionally
really organised on many levels – so that the validation systems are really
geared towards judging individuals. And our type of practice is always
multiple, it’s always about, let’s say, things that happen with many people.
[23:17] And it’s really difficult to inspire students to work that way, and at
the same time know that at the end of the day, they will be judged on their
own, what they produce as an individual. So that’s one part. [23:31] In
traditional education there’s always like a separation between teaching
technology and practice. So you have, in different ways, let’s say, you have
the studio practice and then you have the workshops. And it’s very difficult
to make conceptual connections between the two, so we end up trying to make
that happen but it’s clearly not made for that. [24:02] And then there is the
problematics of the hierarchies between tutors and students, that are hard to
break in formal education, just because the set up is – even when it’s a very
informal situation – that someone comes to teach and someone else comes to be
taught. [24:28] And there’s no way to truly break that hierarchy because
that’s the way the school works. So since a year we’ve been starting to think
about how to do… Well, no, for years we’ve been thinking about how to do
teaching differently, or how to do learning differently. [24:48] And so last
year for the first time we organised a summer school, just as a kind of
experiment to see if we could learn and teach differently. And the title, the
name of the school is Relearn, because the sort of relearning, for yourself
but also to others, through teaching-learning, has became really a good
methodology, it seems.

[25:15] Affiliations

[25:19] If I say “we”, that’s always a bit uncomfortable, because I like to be
clear about who that is, but when I’m speaking here there’s many “we” in my
mind. So there’s a group of designers called OSP (Opens Source Publishing).
They started in 2006 with the simple decision to not use any proprietary
software anymore for their work. And from that this whole set of questions,
and practices and methods developed. [25:51] So right now that’s about twelve
people working in Brussels having a design practice. And I’m lucky to be an
honorary member of this group, and so I’m in close contact with them, but I’m
not actively working with the design group. [20:11] Another “we”, and
overlapping “we”, is Constant, an association for art and media active in
Brussels since 1996, 1997 maybe. Our interest is more in mixing copyleft
thinking, free software thinking and feminism. And in many ways that
intersects with OSP, but they might phrase it in a different way. [26:42]
Another “we” is the Libre Graphics community, which is even a more
uncomfortable “we” because it includes engineers that would like to conquer
the world, and small hyper-intelligent developers that creep out of their
corner to talk about the very strange world they are creating, or typographers
that care about universal typefaces. [27:16] I mean, there’s many different
people that are involved in that world. So I think, in this conversation the
“we” are Contant, OSP and Libre Graphics community, whatever that is.

[27:29] Libre Graphics annual meeting, Leipzig 2014

[27:34] We worked on a Code of Conduct – which is something that seems to
appear in free software or tech conferences more and more, it comes a bit from
the U.S. context – where we have started to understand that the fact that free
software is free doesn’t mean that everyone feels welcome. [28:02] For long
there still are large problems with diversity in this community. The
excitement about freedom has led people to think that people that were no
there would probably not want to be there, and therefore had no role to be
there. [28:26] And so if you think, for example, the fact that there is very
little, that there’s not a lot of women active in free software, a lot less
than in proprietary software, which is quite painful if you think about it.
[28:41] That has to do with this sort of cyclical effects of: because women
are not there they would probably be not interested, and because they are not
interested they might not be capable, or feel capable of being active, and
they feel they might not belong. So that’s one part. [29:07] The other part is
that there’s a very brutal culture of harassment, of racist and sexist
language, of using imagery that is, let’s say, unacceptable. And that needs to
be dealt with. [29:26] Over the last two years, I think, the documents like
the Code of Conduct have started to come out from feminists active in this
world, like Geek Feminism or the Ada Initiative, as a way to deal with this.
And what it does is it describes, in a bit… let’s say, it’s slightly pompous
in the sense that you describe your values. [29:56] But it is a way to
acknowledge the fact that this communities have a problem with harassment,
first; that they explicitly say, we want diversity, which is important; that
it gives very clear and practical guidelines for what someone that feels
harassed can do, who he or she can speak to, and what will be the
consequences. [30:31] Meaning that it takes away the burden from, well, at
least as much as possible, from someone who is harassed to defend, actually,
the gravity of the case.

[30:43] Art as integrative concept

[30:47] For me, calling myself an artist is useful, it’s very useful. I’m not
so busy, let’s say, with the institutional art context – that doesn’t help me
at all. [31:03] But what does help me is the figure of the artist, the kinds
of intelligences that I sort of project on myself, and I use from others, from
my colleagues (before and contemporary), because it allows me to not have too
many… to be able to define my own context and concepts without forgetting
practice. [31:37] And I think art is one of the rare places that allows this.
Not only it allows it, but actually it rigorously asks for it. It’s really
wanting me to be explicit about my historical connections, my way of making,
my references, my choices, that are part of the situation I build. [32:11] So
the figure of the artist is a very useful toolbox in itself. And I think I use
it more than I would have thought, because it allows me to make these cross-
connections in a productive way.