monoskop in Hamerman 2015
, 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-le
s, 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 proj
erate
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
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 too
monoskop in Mars & Medak 2017
mbergischer 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).
243
CHAPTER 12
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 presentati
owledge 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. P
ese 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 ti
ich (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. Ho
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 instit
n
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, gend
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