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.
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.
It is hard to avoid the feeling these days that the future is behind us. It’s
not so much that time has stopped, but rather that the sense of promise and
purpose that once drove historical progress has become impossible to sustain.
On the one hand, the faith in modernist, nationalist, or universalist utopias
continues to retreat, while on the other, a more immediate crisis of faith has
accompanied the widespread sense of diminishing economic prospects felt in so
many places. Not to mention...
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...
Metahaven
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part-i/)
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governments we did not elect. Wael Ghonim, Google's Egyptian executive, said:
“If you want to liberate a society just give them the internet.” 1 But how
does one liberate a society that already has the internet? In a society
permanently connected through pervasive broadband networks, the shared
internet is, bit by bit and piece by piece, overshadowed by the “cloud.” The
Coming of the Cloud The cloud,...
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## [There’s Nothing to See Here: Erasing the
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monochrome/)
There was once a typist from Texas named Bette Nesmith Graham, who wasn’t very
good at her job. In 1951 she started erasing her typing mistakes with a white
tempera paint solution she mixed in her kitchen blender. She called her
invention Mistake Out and began distributing small green bottles of it to her
coworkers. In 1956 she founded the delectably named Mistake Out Company.
Shortly after, she was apparently fired from her typist job because she made a
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Nato Thompson
## [The Last Pictures: Interview with Trevor Paglen](/journal/37/61238/the-
last-pictures-interview-with-trevor-paglen/)
In 1963 NASA launched the first communications satellite, Syncom 2, into a
geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, humans have slowly
and methodically added to this space-based communications infrastructure.
Currently, more than 800 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit form a man-made
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the planet. Geostationary satellites...
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## [Carnival to Commons: Pussy Riot, Punk Protest, and the Exercise of
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protest-and-the-exercise-of-democratic-culture/)
Once again, the press has dismissed a popular movement as carnival—this time
not Occupy Wall Street, but the anti-Putin protests. On March 1, 2012, in a
Financial Times article titled “Carnival spirit is not enough to change
Russia,” Konstantin von Eggert wrote, “One cannot sustain [the movement] on
carnival spirit alone.” 1 A little over a week later, Reuters sought to close
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“The carnival is over for Russia’s...
Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood
## [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
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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_.
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.