Fantasies of the Library (The MIT Press)
by Anna-Sophie Springer
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A book that acts both as library and exhibition space, selecting, arranging, and housing texts and images, aligning itself with printed matter in the process. Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas--as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both show more throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, "Reading Rooms Reading Machines" further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others. The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book--and this book--"resists the digital," argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, "but not in a nostalgic way." ContributorsErin Kissane, Hammad Nasar, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Rick Prelinger, Anna-Sophie Springer, Charles Stankievech, Katharina Tauer, Etienne Turpin, Andrew Norman Wilson, Joanna Zylinska show lessTags
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intercalations 1 ... an unruly sequence of pages wherein the reader-as-exhibition-viewer learns, rather surprisingly—but with growing conviction—that the library is not only a curatorial space, but that its bibliological imaginary is also a fertile territory for the exploration of paginated affairs in the Anthropocene.
In the inaugural volume of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series, Fantasies of the Library, Anna-Sophie Springer’s book-length feature essay, “Melancholies of the Paginated Mind,” which takes up heterodox approaches to the institutional order and organization of book collections, is virtually stacked alongside the other contributions, including an interview with Rick Prelinger and Megan Prelinger of the show more Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of archives and cultural memory by Hammad Nasar, then Head of Research and Programmes at the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; a conversation with media theorist Joanna Zylinska about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source e-books; and, a discussion between artist and K. co-founder Charles Stankievech and platform developer Adam Hyde on new approaches to open-source publishing in science and academia. The image essay, “Reading Rooms–Reading Machines” (also by Springer), presents views of unusual historical libraries next to works by artists such as Kader Attia, Andrew Beccone, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, Andrew Norman Wilson, and others. show less
In the inaugural volume of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series, Fantasies of the Library, Anna-Sophie Springer’s book-length feature essay, “Melancholies of the Paginated Mind,” which takes up heterodox approaches to the institutional order and organization of book collections, is virtually stacked alongside the other contributions, including an interview with Rick Prelinger and Megan Prelinger of the show more Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of archives and cultural memory by Hammad Nasar, then Head of Research and Programmes at the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; a conversation with media theorist Joanna Zylinska about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source e-books; and, a discussion between artist and K. co-founder Charles Stankievech and platform developer Adam Hyde on new approaches to open-source publishing in science and academia. The image essay, “Reading Rooms–Reading Machines” (also by Springer), presents views of unusual historical libraries next to works by artists such as Kader Attia, Andrew Beccone, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, Andrew Norman Wilson, and others. show less
Good Prelinger interview, rest not particularly interesting.
027.001 F216 2016
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