Blum tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the Internet can be thought of as three separate entities: data centers that store information, Internet exchange points where networks meet to exchange data with each other, and fiber-optic cables that connect all of the information traveling between cities and continents... "They're about the thickness of a garden hose, and they're filled with a handful of strands of fiber-optic cable," he says. "And light goes in one end of the ocean and out the other end of the ocean. And that light is accelerated along its journey by repeaters that look like bluefin tuna underwater."... In the States, many of the trans-Atlantic cables coming from Europe terminate in an art deco-style office building at 60 Hudson St. in New York City. More than 100 telecommunications companies have offices in the building, which contains more than 70 million feet of cable wire. "It's essentially a building-sized jumble of wires," says Blum. "It's been [a very important building] for the telephone as well. So there's this mix of very high-tech, high-capacity, brand-new machines, and then these old banks of copper wires and switches. ... And the contrast is incredible. It's amazing that we think of the Internet as a high-tech, sterile place, and this place is the complete opposite."

With the New City Reader, we sought to return to an older practice of reading newspapers, posting them in public and, in so doing, taking advantage of the newspaper as a graphic surface. Posting newspapers on walls was common in New York outside of newspaper offices in the nineteenth century and still exists in many countries which have either government run newspapers and large populations of poor people who cannot afford to purchase newspapers outright. We thought that the sharing that such newspapers created was worth investigating in depth. We set out to to find some two dozen sites in which we could publicly hang the papers. Unfortunately, we found this easier said than done. New York city levels $35,000 in fines for posting materials in public with a permit—and these proved difficult to obtain—and our original plan to post papers on temporary walls around construction sites turned out to risk angering those organized crime entities with connections to the construction industry. Posting in public, it turned out, already had an agenda, one of money and danger. Thus, the first New City Reader inadvertently wound up reinforcing our own niche, being posted in the façades of the New Museum and Storefront for Art and Architecture, as well as on the walls of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Pratt, and even the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick.

HOT: Complicated, unexpected media: e.g. crushed champagne bottles with appaloosa pony and chop-stick; Camera obscuras; Lemons; Sticks leaning on walls; Sticks with faces on them; Collages using triangle shapes; Vintage photographs of horses; Unfired clay bearing imprint
of fingers; Bad painting (figurative); Bad painting (abstract); 1980s Postmodern painting; Getting engaged; Growing vegetables; Guinea pigs; Famous actors in low-budget art films; Artists directing Hollywood films; Michael Fassbender; Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Obscure British Modernists; Mothers and children; Sellotape and pins; Putting on plays; Poodles; Doing a reading (as in: ‘I’m doing a reading at ...’); Gustav Klimt; The abstract photography backlash; Art critiquing ‘the market’ doing very well on ‘the market’; Pretending you’ve always been into West Coast art; Being concerned about ‘the crisis’; Shelves; Revolution; Referencing Occupy; Deleuze & Guattari (wha?!?); ‘Performatively’ installing the work; Last Year at Marienbad; Animal paintings, especially of cats; Upside down photographs of people; London’s West End

HOLDING STEADY: Genius; Most galleries showing mainly male artists; Susan Sontag; Pseudo-archeological fragments arranged on a table; Fake movie posters; Dressage; The Princess Bride; Lying; Jean Genet; Sculptures leaning against walls; Dance; Adultery; Despair; Picpoul de Pinet; Loneliness; David Bowie; Virginia Woolf; Science fiction; Writing a novel/play/poems as a conceptual statement; Making work using a fake identity; Taxidermy; Slide projections; Modified film projectors; John Cage; Plywood constructions; Jorge Luis Borges; Pliny the Elder; Long nonsensical titles; Failure; Bronze sculptures of everyday objects, painted to look like everyday objects; Canada; Old Dead White Male Artists; Old Living White Male Artists; Beards; The Wild West

NOT: Heaven and Hell; Institutional critique; Eggs; Fidelity; Lightboxes; Earnest titles that reveal the work’s meaning (or lack thereof); Le Corbusier; Performance involving blood; Getting married; Croatian Modernism; The late 1980s; Marina Abramović; James Franco; Marina Abramović making work with James Franco; Time-lapse footage; Ponderous soundtracks; The high/low divide; Apathy; Biennials; Action painting; Digital painting; Boastfulness; Bossiness; Pâté de fois gras; Post-surrealist history pastiche painting; Referencing Jacques Lacan; Reductive politics; Overblown claims; ‘Bad boy’ art; Multi-channel video installations; Portrait photos with eyes punched/cut/burned out; Western hegemony

As White notes, “these railroads formed a lever that in less than a generation turned western North America on its axis so that what had largely moved north–south now moved east–west.” The shift wasn’t only in the movement of goods, but also in the picture of America that its citizens carried in their minds. In recognition of the Pacific Railway Act’s anniversary, “The Permanent Way” considers the centrality of railroads to Americans’ understanding of the country’s landscape. Today, trains are a “natural” component of that picture, as essential as broad, grassy plains and mountain peaks in the distance.... Photography was itself a new invention in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and as a technology it grew up alongside railroads—especially in America, where the first accurate representations of a given place were often made by photographers working on behalf of railroad expansion. Surveys of this vast, largely uncharted territory were commissioned by the government and by the railroad companies themselves, and sent photographers like A.J. Russell, Timothy O’Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson out into the field. Their images, widely distributed through government documents, news-media reproductions, and tourist publications, played an especially important role in refashioning the imagined American landscape.

This exhibition includes a small selection of such materials, encompassing railroad maps, lithographs taken from illustrated magazines, other prints, and turn-of-the-twentieth-century photo-postcards. From them, one can discover how quickly fresh observation gave way to visual convention. Axial views quickly become a stock-in-trade, whether depicting tracks receding to a single vanishing point in the distance or bisecting the frame parallel to the picture plane. So, too, one can repeatedly witness railroad engines, marvels of human ingenuity, overcoming adverse natural elements, as in the two nearly identical prints, from separate publications, depicting a train struggling through snowdrifts, its headlamp a beacon of progress.

Artist Stephen Walter has found and documented the city's underground complexion in a hand-drawn map of subterranean London. Part of a new exhibition running at the London Transport Museum, Walter's map reveals the buried history of the city, and also the underground infrastructure that keeps it running. From the underground transportation network to homicides to World War II underground shelters, the map bring the under-recognized and maybe even forgotten parts of the city to the surface.... The space under our feet reveals the history of the world and us as a species. Its can be read like a layer-cake book. It holds secrets and offers a huge amount of untapped space.

“Changing Waters” looks at the meteorological and oceanic interactions within the Gulf of Maine. Using data from NOAA and GOMOSS buoys within the Gulf of Maine, as well as weather stations along the coast, I am translating data that explores the seasonal variations of marine life by looking at the interactions of atmospheric and marine data. Elements of the rich New England fishing history are also included. This large-scale installation consists of a large wall installation (33 feet wide) that plots information through the geographic anchors of a map of the Gulf of Maine, as well as a series of large, hanging structures (10 feet high) that look at more specific biological, chemical or geophysical relationships between marine ecosystems and weather patterns.

John Cage showed that in framing ‘nothing’ everything is revealed; the world is sucked into the work and signed off as ones own... Beyond however boring Cage’s infamous framing of noise and ‘non-sound’ may now appear, this is primarily an aesthetic complaint... Nevertheless, the sense of stalled catharsis, the aura of banality, stagnation and boredom that clings to performances of 4’33”—beyond kitschy repetitions that have so successfully withered any power this piece may once have had for listeners—comes not from the extent to which it presents ‘nothing’ to the listener. In attempting to frame everything and anything, in opening the door and letting it all in, 4’33” presents too much, it is overcrowded, saturated, a “botched attempt”... On a train up to Edinburgh I checked to see why the music hadn’t started playing. I had recently purchased copy of Richard Chartier’s Of Surfaces, an album that, if you’re not paying close attention, sounds like almost nothing. The low rumbles, faint crackles and gentle yet piercing high pitch buzzes easily blur with the background noise of the train carriage. The sounds of Chartier’s composition seem to seep in and out of the train carriage’s ambiance, existing in an ambiguous space somewhere between what I think I’m supposed to be listening to and that background noise that I would ordinarily block out in this kind of listening situation... Of Surfaces becomes a magnet for exteriority, drawing the sounds of what remains outside the work within, situating the elements of the composition within an ambiguous listening space that is easily—although not entirely—confused with background noise. The relative ‘simplicity’ of these sounds grants them an enhanced mobility, allowing them to slip outside of the work itself into the environment in which listening takes place. These are sounds that do not easily signify, nor do they entirely seem bound to the work itself. The sounds appear slippery and easily confused, leaking from headphonic interiority into the world without... This enfolding of exteriority within the work establishes what Michael Fried called ‘theatricality’, a label with which he derided minimalist works—such as Robert Morris’s mirrored cubes—for drawing the viewer’s attention not only to the work but to the viewer’s relation to it, to their own presence within the space and the space within which the viewing experience or situation takes place. This contextual and relational orientation, in detracting from the autonomous consistency of the work itself, establishes a theatricality in which the work is only one ‘actor’... What the sound work gains—expanding upon the possibilities of sculptural and installation based work—is an enhanced portability, being able to be transported on computers, ipods, mobile phones and so on, allowing the work to take place anywhere, pulling sonic elements from any given listening situation into the composition of the piece... In framing nothing Cage pulled in too much. Chartier’s minimal degree of resistance to this oversaturation establishes a more subtle theatre, perfectly suited to the banality of the everyday, to non-places such as the interior of a Virgin ‘Pendolino’, wherein one cannot be entirely certain where the composition ends and the world ordinarily shut out through headphone use begins.

via New Yorker: "The subjects of Wiley’s color photographs are the sort of urban spaces and objects your eye usually slides right past: a concrete stairwell, a badly painted door, a pile of discarded junk, buckling tiles. Seen isolated and tightly cropped, these fragments of cityscape are dead ends—sites so anonymous and uninviting that paying close attention to them feels almost perverse. But Wiley’s a sharp-eyed observer, alert to texture, incongruity, and the way sunlight butters weathered things. His pictures don’t transcend their mundane subject matter, they embody it: a wasteland without poetry, sentiment, or illusions."

On May 22, 2012, magazine n+1 hosted a public forum on NYPL's Central Library Plan at the New School. National Book Critics Circle President Eric Banks moderated the discussion, and panelists included NYPL President Anthony Marx, NYPL Trustee Robert Darnton, n+1 associate editor Charles Petersen, Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton Joan Wallach Scott, architect and preservationist Mark Alan Hewitt and CUNY Graduate Center Professor of History David Nasaw.

I believe that architecture expresses ideas and values, and so the fact that much of what I found was so undesigned indicated to me our broader denial about the complex systems that support our digital lives. We don’t read Terms of Service (we just click “accept”), and we don’t care where our Internet comes from. The design of these buildings explicitly said that: they are anti-monuments. As places unto themselves they declare their unimportance—even if, technically, they are essential. But this is changing. Two of the most architecturally impressive buildings are the newest: Facebook’s data center in Oregon, and a building called Telehouse West in London. They each try to express their function, in the modernist sense.... The Internet is perhaps the greatest example ever of a human-made “emergent” system. There is no master plan. But the urban planning implications are difficult to consider. The Internet operates physically at multiple scales, which often collapse into each other: the machine, the building, the city, the region, and the globe. But it’s also an incredibly complex thing in logical and algorithm terms. That makes it difficult to draw an analogy with urban planning. Cities are certainly multivalent—physical, economic, social—but in different ways.

There's something very personal about books, so to have inanimate objects reading specific titles seemed like a pretty amusing idea worth exploring.

Strelka Videos

On the background of a computer screen we can also see 'all of Paris.' ...The pixels are a bit granular and packets of bauds struggle along tortuous modems but, at last, that's it! We clearly recognize the landmarks of Paris in this interactive computer game... When we move on from bureaucratic inscriptions to geographic data, we shift to another medium, institution, graphic representation and scale - not from the inside of the social to its outside... In this web site we simply take advantage of the continuous underscoring through which the most minute connections seem to be marked with a highlighter. Owing to files and print-outs, each relation, even microscope, becomes the drosophila of the social sciences, expressing in enormous dimensions that which has hitherto been to complex... Water, electricity, telephony, traffic, metereology, geography, town planning: all have their oligopticon, a huge control panel in a closed control room. From there very little can be seen at any one time, but everything appears with great precision owing to a dual network of signs, coming and going, rising and descending, watching over Parisian life night and day...

We've just rolled out a new way for you to make atlases of the world, called Field Papers. Field Papers allows you to print a multipage paper atlas of anywhere in the world and take it outside, offline, into the field. You can scribble on it, add features, or make notes about the area, all without a GPS or complicated GIS software... Once you've annotated your atlas, you can upload photographs of each page back into the system to transcribe your notes into digital form. Each atlas gets its own page on Field Papers, and a simple history of edits and activity which you can share with friends or colleagues, and download for later analysis.

There are 5,393 carceral facilities in the United States, places where people are held in local jails, state prisons, federal corrections facilities, immigration detention centers – “anywhere where an individual can be sort of confined and locked up,” explains Josh Begley, “and, in some of the bigger instances, warehoused in one place.” Begley is a master’s student in the Interactive Telecommunications program at New York University. He wanted to graphically represent what all of this means, to communicate not just the sheer quantity of prisons in America (a number that has been booming for decades), but their volume on our landscape. As part of a class project, he created the oddly beautiful website Prison Map, which offers a mashed-up birds-eye view of all of these places, taken from Google Satellite images.... One group in particular, the Prison Policy Initiative, and its project Prisoners of the Census, has done much of the work of cataloging all of these facilities and their geographic locations. By translating that data into an almost artistic rendering, Begley’s project makes visible an element of our communities that’s seldom seen. Some of the most striking images are those of rural prisons, which project intricate patterns onto otherwise empty landscapes... “The takeaway, at least for me, is really about this notion of space,” he says. “The amount of sheer materials that have had to go into building these buildings for the purposes of essentially warehousing people is really impossible for me to wrap my head around. We’re used to aerial images of nation-states overseas, and we’ll see a diagram of some compound that is going to be bombed or something. But rarely do we look at these spaces in our backyard and think critically about them.”

Currently, I track my bookmarks with Pinboard. I export my bookmarks from Pinboard to Twitter via IfThisThenThat. (My Twitter is then imported into my journal, the hub of my online life. Since it's a question that comes up: [twitter.com profile] semanticist wrote the import script and graciously hosts it for me; it requires a server with Ruby to run.)

Since every now and then I go on the sort of bookmarking spree that is neither neighborly nor useful when automatically shipped to Twitter, I decided that I'd do something about that.

I tweaked my IfThisThenThat task to only export the bookmarks tagged 'twitter', which will take care of most of the future situations where I might be dealing with an asston of bookmarks which I know that only I will care about.

For in The Witness, Blow aims to do justice to the video game as an artistic medium, fully independent from all of its predecessors.

Blow’s refusal to explain the meaning of his games, after all, stems from a profound respect for his art. Ever since modern technology first made sophisticated video games possible, developers have assumed that the artistic fate of the video game is to become “film with interactivity”—game-play interwoven with scenes based on the vernacular of movies. And not just any movies. “The de facto reference for a video game is a shitty action movie,” Blow said during a conversation in Chris Hecker’s dining room one sunny afternoon. “You’re not trying to make a game like Citizen Kane; you’re trying to make Bad Boys 2.” But questions of movie taste notwithstanding, the notion that gaming would even attempt to ape film troubles Blow. As Hecker explained it: “Look, film didn’t get to be film by trying to be theater. First, they had to figure out the things they could do that theater couldn’t, like moving the camera around and editing out of sequence—and only then did film come into its own.” This was why Citizen Kane did so much to put filmmaking on the map: not simply because it was well made, but because it provided a rich experience that no other medium before it could have provided.

And so Blow, ever loyal to his code, feels it is his responsibility to defend his calling by not reducing video games to the terms we use in dissecting movies and books. This means, somewhat incredibly, that Blow doesn’t believe in even trying to communicate a game’s central message in words; the medium itself, he argues, is the message. “If games are just movies with interactivity, if they don’t have anything that’s their core competency, then you can’t really use them effectively,” he explained. “Now, one of those core competencies for games is a certain kind of nonverbal complex communication, right? You play a game for hours, and at the end of it, you hopefully have this somewhat sublime complex understanding of something that’s hard to verbalize, because you got it nonverbally.”

To Blow, the puzzles and environments of both Braid and The Witness function as a “long-form stream of nonverbal communication”—which is why he won’t bastardize them by expressing their messages in words.

Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary collective and non-profit organization working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures, education, and creative practice leading towards civic change.

Our projects, events, workshops, performances, and interventions offer a sometimes momentary, sometimes extended, injection of creativity into a situation, surface, place, or community. These projects continually connect various disciplines through research and social practice, generating works and interventionist tactics that adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the city that we encounter.

Much of our activity has been focused on Windsor, Ontario, a once-collapsing, now gradually stabilizing post-industrial city at the edge of Canada. We believe that Windsor provides an exemplary vantage point from which to consider the role of artists in challenged communities, but we have also worked on various interventions, installations, and other creative endeavours in cities across Canada. Our work has been created across media – from temporary interventions to large-scale community events and from gallery exhibitions to various workshops and publications – but we also often take on the role of organizing and facilitating the activity of other artists and creative practitioners through residencies, conferences, and writing projects. We aim to creatively respond to the issues we directly experience in a community, while also negotiating the ways in which other community members experience the same issues, differently.

If you think about how grand the concept/movement/idea of Art & Social Practice really is, it can be quite overwhelming. What started out as a grass-roots movement has also begun to infiltrate academia, creating even more ways in which people are thinking, researching and writing about the topic. With that in mind, I decided to create a reading list of 50 hand-selected titles that form a cohesive and well-rounded collection designed to reach a wide audience and aimed to define and understand the multifaceted field Broken City Lab’s engaged with.

Range: Local, Distant, Fringe is a three-part, location-based series of radio transmissions that explores the phenomenon of signal strength. The series seeks to break, bend, and highlight the economic, political, and technical dimensions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Range uses the criteria found in proprietary mapping software that plots radio station coverage areas to analyze the importance of place for radio broadcasts. This software takes into account transmitter power, antenna height, frequency, antenna pattern, and etc. Commercial and community stations use this data to determine potential listeners.

The coverage areas are defined as:

Local: areas with very clear reception
Distant: areas with weak signal
Fringe: areas with very weak or no signal

A station’s signal strength broadly delimits that station’s territories. These territories further impact policy (i.e. FCC regulation, spectrum licensing), station-specific power (i.e. advertising, tower-space rentals), and public affairs (i.e. community programming, emergency alert systems). Range seeks to challenge these issues of signal accessibility, and question radio’s role as a distribution tool.

Milwaukee is one of an increasing number of cities around the country — just under 70 to date, including some in the New York area — that are using a gunshot detection system called ShotSpotter to pinpoint the location of gunfire seconds after it occurs. Last year, the company that developed ShotSpotter began offering a more affordable system, and that has brought in new clients and led other cities to consider trying it.

The detection system, which triangulates sound picked up by acoustic sensors placed on buildings, utility poles and other structures, is part of a wave of technological advances that is transforming the way police officers do their jobs.

Its images, videos, and quotes were summarily collected, attributed, and uploaded with little by way of commentary. Drones, mapping, mirror worlds, machine vision, surveillance infrastructure, conspicuous augmentation, pixelation, fetishizing obsolescence, render ghosts, nostalgia for the glitch, 8-bit reveries, #botiliciousness, souvenir postcards from the robot-readable world, reality media, and the haptic revolution all featured prominently. The New Aesthetic cataloged visual by-products of the increasingly symbiotic relationships between humans, machines, and other possibly sentient objects... The New Aesthetic was undeniably about looking and is itself a thing to be looked at. Yet thus far, with few exceptions, it was a whole lot of men doing the looking, talking, and writing about the New Aesthetic. The Wired essay was followed by several men responding to Sterling, a man, writing about a concept put forward by Bridle, another man. But there are exceptions, including Joanne McNeil of Rhizome.org, and Madeline Ashby, who invoked feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey with a post on the New Aesthetic of the male gaze. Ashby alludes to something seemingly basic but as yet unacknowledged: These new ways of watching are unavoidably gendered technologies of control and domination. <<Apparently, it took the preponderance of closed-circuit television cameras for some men to feel the intensity of the gaze that women have almost always been under … It took Facebook. It took geo-location. That spirit of performativity you have about your citizenship now? That sense that someone’s peering over your shoulder, watching everything you do and say and think and choose? That feeling of being observed? It’s not a new facet of life in the 21st century. It’s what it feels like for a girl.>>

The New Aesthetic is about being looked at by humans and by machines — by drones, surveillance cameras, people tagging you on Facebook — about being the object of the gaze. It’s about looking through the eyes of a machine and seeing the machine turn its beady LEDs on you. It’s about the dissolution of privacy and reproductive rights, and the monitoring, mapping, and surveillance of the (re)gendered (re)racialised body, and building our own super-pervasive panopticon.... The attraction of the New Aesthetic for these men may then lie in the chance to briefly experience a traditionally feminized, objectified subjectivity....

The New Aesthetic reflected a broader turn from commentary (say, blogging) to curation (microblogging). And within microblogging, a turn from the purely textual (say, Twitter) to the visual blend (Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest). As suggested by writer Shaj Mathew at The Millions, Tumblr has more than a whiff of the commonplace book — the personal notebooks filled with references, phrases, and choice bon mots — favored by writers and orators of centuries past. Visual microblogging more broadly can, in turn, be seen as the spiritual heir of the cut, pasted, and glued zine that brings together text, images and quotes. Rather than simply creating as an artisan might, the microblogger-ascurator brings objects together, contextualizing and co-producing the space at hand — be it in a physical gallery or online — with the help of various network technologies.

...As a final analogue, think of Gossip Girl. The popular TV show has done more to crypto-normalize the New Aesthetic than any explanatory article ever can. Through surveillance, identification, geo-located tracking on maps, SMSed tips and “blasts,” and cunning social curation, she turns the Upper East Side into a dangerously coded space.

Enjoy this interesting footage captured by Tomas Koolhaas – son of Rem Koolhaas – in February 2012 of the recently completed China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters in Beijing.

As derived from its Latin source, forensics is the art of the forum; the practice and skill of presenting an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering.

Forensics includes not only the speech acts of humans, but also the interpreted speech of things, mediated by an expert or a set of technologies. The art of forensics thus includes both field-work and forum-work. Although forensics is generally understood as the application of science in service to the law, that is to say, as an investigative tool within the field, forensics is also a tool of persuasion that uses science rhetorically to speak within public and legal forums.

The project of Forensic Architecture brings different modes of technical modelling and analysis to bear upon violations of human rights and the laws of war as they are registered in and by space. We go on field studies to examine architectural, urban or infrastructure damage, but we also examine the remnants of violence as captured by different media – satellite imagery and other remote sensing technologies, GPS mapping, photography, activist and media footage, ground penetrating radar, mobile phone videos, CCTV footage, maps, and eyewitness reports.

Through the synthesis of these acts of human and technological witnessing we seek to recreate a chain of events and elaborate upon their consequences; making legible the multiple forces at play within sites of violence. Once this data is compiled and cross-referenced it can be used by courts, tribunals, and human rights organisations — the multiple forums of international justice.

Chris Milk’s imagery and the Arcade Fire’s lyrics suggest a take on modernism and (sub)urbanism more ambivalent than Bachelard, whose critical bifurcation of nature and culture is either supported or (my preference) radically undermined by the video, depending on one’s interpretation.

But the film is also undeniably progressive. The project is enabled and inspired by a productive connection between modern technology and experiences of suburbia, the ultiamte meaning of which only emerges through their collaboration here. The interactive interface, like the suburbs, is partly about disconnection and the growing divide between people, spaces and time, between social interlocutors and participants in the creation of meaning. However, the content of the video, like Bachelard’s house, reconnects us temporally to the space and time of the past, a personal and subjective past enabled by the most communal of media.

In light of such black box theater, this essay considers Les Immatériaux, the 1985 multi-media installation curated by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput at the Centre Pompidou, as a dramaturgy of information theory and the post-modern condition. While Lyotard’s exhibition often runs aground into extremes, suggesting a total loss of control or complete assimilation in the face of technicization, it also evinces moments of black box beauty, dramatizing issues and highlighting the performative nature of art and technology, turning objects into instruments, and understanding that incorporeal materiality is materiality nonetheless. The classic hylomorphic model is challenged to the extent that images and artifacts attain meaning immanently, revealing a process of excess, rather than serving a predetermined end or a specific purpose.

As a constructive rather than exegetical means of informing Lyotard’s work, the essay considers Jack Burnham’s earlier curatorial and written work, which introduced systems theory, as well as the relationship between art and technology to the gallery, and, like Lyotard’s foray into techno-scientific artistic curation, elicited a melancholy and sense of distanciation, even failure, on the part of the author. Burnham’s “unobjects” and Lyotard’s “immaterials” remain distinct from the dematerialization of art associated with conceptual movements and institutional critique and serve as a valid critique of the myopia of these purely discursive practices. Where discursive and administrative aesthetics divorce materiality from message and content from expression, reinforcing philosophical divides between mind and body, form and matter, episteme and techne, Burnham and Lyotard both stage dramas of information in which software, as distinct from hardware in Burnham’s work, and immateriality for Lyotard no longer serve to free concepts from their materiality but shift materiality away from familiar objects to the techno-sciences and post-modern notions of space.

We've taken the curatorial process of Christian Marclay's Ensemble, recently at the ICA, and created a parallel textual installation. Twenty-seven sound sculptures selected, arranged and set on timers by Marclay have been replaced with twenty-seven works of literature, each converted into the descriptions of sound that it contains. As each of these textual sound-generators interjects a sound on its own regular interval, the soup of sounds swells to fill the space.

Demilit scours landscapes for mundane, everyday connections between spaces, objects, individuals, and authority.

An experimental collective, Demilit was founded in 2010 by Bryan Finoki, Nick Sowers, and Javier Arbona. The trio also works with various collaborators on specific projects, performances, and playful improvisations.

Demilit opportunistically draws from architecture, sound art, creative writing, geography and other fields to produce work that encompasses events, texts, web memes, and more.

A Utah-based startup company called Chamtech Operations is claiming that its Spray On Antenna Kit can turn any surface into a high-powered antenna.

As explained by Anthony Sutera in the video below of his presentation at Google's Solve for X event, “Our material uses thousands of nano-capacitors that we can spray paint on in the right pattern. All of these little capacitors charge and discharge extremely quickly in real time and they don't create any heat. When we hook up our material to a radio, the signal hops from capacitor to capacitor very quickly, finds its happy spot, and launches into space.”

Paju is a model of an architectural utopia, which is to say that architectural design, on a building-by-building basis, is given free reign. There are no external factors such as context, urbanism, spatial relationships, etc that one must consider when making design decisions. Because of this, the city is read as a collection of objects, each unique and unrelated. In an architect’s eye, this can be a dream come true. Carte blanche to build whatever you want. Many get recognized here, if they can secure a lot on which to design a potential career-changing project. However, even with the plethora of individually successful designs, our group quickly became desensitized to this unconnected fabric, and overall uninterested. The place lacked any sign of life. The streets were vacant, the people hidden, the activity absent. An eerie quiet to each block, only the architecture remained...

Paju was missing the multiple layers of human engagement and only used the ground plane to “connect” all its buildings. Paju’s greatest asset of being a designed city became its greatest flaw by not being fully designed.

There was too much uniformity of being unique, which made it all the more ordinary. On paper, it seemed that having a wholly designed area would be great! But actually walking and experiencing the reality of Paju completely changed my perception. If there were only a few well designed buildings, I would be able to appreciate each one as I came across it. Obviously each building had its own individual expression, but as a collective, the imperfection disappeared. Now that each building has its own individual identity, does a cluster of unique buildings still give each building the same individuality?

Why did Paju leave me desensitized while Tokyo and Seoul always kept me engaged? First of all, the city was inaccessible by the subway other than transferring part of the way there from one. Also, I had to take a bus to reach it. Lacking infrastructure diminishes a great amount of people flow to the city, which is why it felt so empty. However, if it was the intention of the publishers to keep Paju isolated from Seoul, they seemed to have gotten the right effect, but as a consequence eliminated the humanistic qualities found in a REAL city... The buildings did not respond to each other and if they did, the city would have had an additional level of cohesiveness that could be appreciated... Paju was missing the multiple layers of human engagement and only used the ground plane to “connect” all its buildings. Paju’s greatest asset of being a designed city became its greatest flaw by not being fully designed.

Paju was originally only allowed to include industrial buildings (for publishing). However, the government later agreed to allow apartments on the two upper levels of buildings, a small but useful concession meaning more integration of workplace and living was made possible.

A group of RIBA Part II Architecture students are embarking on an exchange programme between ASD London Metropolitan University and the Korea National University of Arts. As part of a satellite group of the Free Unit, we will be based in Seoul, South Korea from October to December 2010. Here, our projects will begin, and will continue when we return to London. This blog will be a record and platform for discussion of my discoveries..

My initial interest lies in Seoul's social and political history, how these systems manifest themselves in its architecture, and what the city represents today.

To some urban dwellers, the ascetic minimalism of Paju Book City may make it seem like a stylish but sterile place without much to do. But to the bibliophiles, cinephiles, and design enthusiasts, Paju Book City offers more substantial pleasures than just exclusivity.

Instead of department stores and Internet cafés, there are art galleries and book cafés, and bookstores loaded with books in Korean, Japanese or English.

There is no heavy traffic, and the widely spaced buildings and lack of taxis force you to walk along artfully unkempt strip of wetland that runs through the neighborhood.

The following is a brief history of Korean readership and overview of some of the more important literary trends within South Korea today... Korea had a rich storytelling tradition but it did not get a start on literature and print culture till about the 12th century. Korean tales were not written down until the age of Hanja characters. Korean literature began sometime around the 12th century but much of what was written in the early years was lost during wars and invasions... Korea boasts the rights to the creation of the Mu-gu-jeong-gwang-dae-da-ra-ni-gyeong (the pure light Dharani sutra) which is the world’s oldest example of woodblock printing and the jik-ji-sim-che-yo-jeol, which is the true original movable metal type printing... just over 90% of Korean children are literate and overall the country’s reading performance stands well above, second only to shanghai... Paju Book City houses more than 200 publishers and printers and is committed to keeping reading and literature alive in South Korea.

Paju Book City is 160 modern buildings spaced out over 385 acres of land, all of which houses designers, bookbinders and distribution facilities creating a veritable “city”.

According to Ki-ung Yi, chairman of Paju Book City Culture foundation, the publishing industry is not necessarily the most important industry in Korea but it is certainly the most beautiful and the one that houses the most important cultural artifacts and traditions.... Publishing and Printing Promotion Bill. Since February 2003, indication of the fixed price on a publication became mandatory to combat the deep discounting and online resale that led to the collapse of the wholesale companies in 1997.

A group of archivists and other interested parties gathered at the National Archives here on Monday and Tuesday to talk about what a National Archival Authorities Cooperative, or NAAC, would look like, and how to get there from here... The idea is to bring together archival records in standardized form so that users can navigate among them and see the biographical and cultural contexts that disparate collections document. Mr. Pitti told the audience that SNAC shows how “archival authority, as we have been able to dig it out of traditional archival finding aids, is full of interesting treasures.”

The Little Magazine Coalition Is a network of independent magazine makers.

Through gatherings, workshops and the fostering of business partnerships, The LCM strives to make small magazines more visible and professionally viable.

The question posed by Wang’s Pritzker selection could be articulated like this: If you provide a particularly humane or humanist built environment within the context of occasionally inhumane political or economic conditions, to what extent are you reinforcing or resisting those conditions? Are you offering a tangible alternative or a mere respite? The answers aren’t easy, but the questions are necessary.  “Architecture or Revolution” was the attention-grabbing title of an essay in Corbusier’s epochal Toward an Architecture (1926). The revolution in question was Industrial, but the drift of Corbusier’s argument was that through the correct deployment of high-tech materials and contemporary manufacturing procedures, architects could avert or divert the spiritual or social discord that result from technological change so that “revolution can be avoided.” There’s much that’s slippery in Corbusier’s own framing of the question—elsewhere in the very same essay he evokes, “the modern era, gleaming and radiant . . . on the other side of the barricades”—but his phrase reinforces the necessity of asking whether any architecture’s contribution is substantially palliative or transformative...

What is the relationship between architecture and people’s basic rights? By the standards of human rights held to be universal by those who believe in them, much of what prevails in China falls short. What are the possibilities and responsibilities of design in such a context? We can see, perhaps latently, one possible answer in the language the Pritzker citation uses to describe Wang’s work: “frank,” “collaborative,” “message-sending,” “unpredictable,” “careful,” “spontaneous,” “responsible”—these are all qualities that one would want in, say, the lively and free citizenry of a functional democratic republic....

One of the vital contributions of the notable architect (and longtime Pritzker candidate) Peter Eisenman, informed by his conception of the architect as a public intellectual, is the notion of a critical practice. In Eisenman’s case, that intense criticality has been mostly internal to architectural discourse and production, expressed in formal raptures and ruptures (as in a famous early house that expressed its own Cartesian matrix and conceptual syntax as a series of actual physical incisions through its walls and floors, even straight down the middle of the master bedroom). What would constitute an architecture whose cultural or social, economic or political criticality goes beyond intricate and intimate self-reference? In singling out the work of Wang Shu, the Pritzker jury may have started a conversation about what, within any architectural practice, would materialize such an ambition.

What will happen to the books at 42nd Street? Marx said that there are now about 3 million books in the stacks, 1.2 million in the Bryant Park Stack Extension (BPSE), and 300,000 to 400,000 stored elsewhere in the building. He said that 4 million volumes are now stored offiste. After the CLP, at least 2 million books would remain onsite, mostly in BPSE.

Charles Petersen: Petersen doubted that the CLP would serve all users well, and was skeptical of Marx's claim that 90 percent of the books requested would remain onsite. Petersen asked where the statistic had come from, and wondered whether consultants hired by the library had undertaken market segmentation analysis—that is, whether they had tried to find out how different subgroups of library users would fare under the CLP. Did the 90 percent figure apply only to the average visitor, who asks for a book or two?

Joan Scott: The real threat to the library's democratic mission, Scott charged, came from the reduction of the library's expert curatorial staff, who alone can make its treasures accessible to anyone who walks in the door. Scott quoted a recent essay in The American Conservative that urged the library's leaders not to confuse popularity with democracy. Democratic access to research, she concluded, is a "public good, not honored by a glitzy and overpriced reconstruction."

David Nasaw: Nasaw noted that he teaches at CUNY, which depends on the NYPL as a research library—a dependence that the state legislature recognizes by giving the library $1.1 million a year. "Now we're being told," Nasaw said, "that the only way to save the library is to rip out its innards." To supporters of the CLP who pointed out that offsite storage had been going on for a decade already, he answered, "That's what frightens us." He didn't think the administrators could plausibly claim that service would improve. Was traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike suddenly going to decrease? He wouldn't believe the library's claims unless he was given many specifics, down to the details of the van schedules. "If it's going to work tomorrow, why doesn't it work today?"

Mark Hewitt: When the 42nd Street building was completed in 1911, Hewitt said, it was considered a marvel, centered around a new piece of technology: the elevator. The librarian John Shaw Billings, after a tour of the world's best libraries, came up with the idea of putting the reading room on top of the stacks, and as a preservationist, Hewitt felt that the stacks ought to be first on the list of what to landmark in the building. He considered them as important to the library, architecturally, as the steel train sheds were to the old Penn Station. Because of the sturdiness of their construction, Hewitt thought it would take an "engineering marvel" to dismantle them. For their day, they were considered fire-resistant, because closely packed books were expected to burn slowly, like timber, allowing fire rescue teams to put fires out before they could spread.

Despite such efforts, avoiding high roaming charges requires attention and vigilance. Here are a few ways to control costs. Use Wi-Fi; Rent a Wi-Fi Bubble; Consider a Data Package...

There are fewer bookstores. Less shelves. And therefore more competition around attention. This results in an ever escalating shouting match between covers. But with the present digital inflection, the role of the cover is changing radically; disappearing in some cases. It doesn't need to shout anymore because it doesn't serve the same purpose.

This shift presents a wonderful chance for designers to break from thinking of a cover as an individual asset, and certainly a chance to break from a tight coupling with the marketing department. In a sense, it's a chance to play again. To hack. And I can't help but feel that elements of the design of our future digital books should take to heart the craftsmanship and metered rationality embedded in so much Japanese book design....

The covers here on Amazon.com are tiny on the search results page. Minuscule on new books page. And they're all but lost in the datum slush of the individual item pages. Great covers like Mendelsund's design for The Information disappear entirely. Why? Because — What do we now hunt when buying books? Data.

One of the primary challenges in this work is getting data describing
books and periodicals (catalog records) to relate to data from
non-library sources, such as data about book talks on YouTube or to NPR broadcasts of author interviews or to archival collections. It’s all about connections in the data. The barer the data, the less described it is, the more it falls flat.

On the bibliographic side, every new Library of Congress subject heading a cataloger adds to a record creates a rich set of connective
possibilities downstream for people like me. Likewise, every uniform
title entry inserted into a record allows us to show users of our
software another edition of a given work in the context of all its
editions — a crucial feature for any discovery service in the library
materials space.

No software can create these connections if the underlying data hasn’t
been carefully composed into richly structured records, based on solid
analysis and comprehensive description....

But also: the expertise which catalogers bring to the task of
comprehensive bibliographic description has proven crucial to me as a
reference resource in my work of designing software to harvest and
process bibliographic information.

"A unique historical documentation of Sound Art from the early 20th century to the present day. This temporary installation represents an in-depth retrospective into the craft of sound and its development as an art form. The composition weaves together sound works throughout the past two centuries including narratives and ideas from prominent artists working in this field.

Artists works and interviews included:

Sleep Research Facility, Cathy Lane, John Cage, Charlie Fox, Ros Bandt, Janet Cardiff, Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Edison, Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, Leon Theremin, Marinetti, Walter Ruttmann, Kurt Schwitters, Harry Partch, Antonin Artaud, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, Iannis Xenakis, Louis and Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Feldman, George Brecht, Richard Maxfield, Dick Higgins, Group Ongaku, Brion Gysin, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tod Dockstader, La Monte Young, Luc Ferrari, Alvin Lucier, Bruce Nauman, Bernard Parmegiani, Francoise Bayle, R Murray Schafer, Trevor Wishart, Hildegard Westerkamp, Terry Fox, David Dunn, Nam June Paik, Max Neuhaus, Throbbing Gristle, Barry Truax, Limpe Fuchs, John Oswald, Bill Fontana, Warren Burt, David Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Gregory Whitehead, Lee Renaldo, Gordon Monahan, Christian Marclay, William Burroughs, Paul DeMarinis, Denis Smalley, Dan Lander, Gilles Gobeil, Christof Migone, Negativland, Trimpin, Jonty Harrison, Kim Cascone, Jodi Rose, Francisco Lopez, Bernard Leitner, Peter Vogel, Steve Roden, Pamela Z, Terre Thaemlitz, Chris Watson, David Toop, Disinformation, Atau Tanaka, Dan Lander, Philip Jeck, Carsten Nicolai, Justin Bennett, David Toop, Project Dark, Steve Vitiello, Maryanne Amacher, Christina Kubisch, John Bischoff, Andres Bosshard, Iris Garrelfs, Peter Cusack, Steve Barsotti, Andrea Polli, James Webb, Nic Collins, DJ Spooky, Rainer Linz, Salomé Voegelin, David Lee Myers, David Chesworth and Sonia Leiber, Karlheinz Essl, Dallas Simpson, FM3, Matthew Mullane, Ultra-Red, Tony Herrington, Dan Senn, John Wynne, Susan Philipsz."

"Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker began smARThistory in 2005 by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images.

We are interested in delivering the narratives of art history using the read-write web's interactivity and capacity for authoring and remixing. Publishers are adding multimedia to their textbooks, but unfortunately they are doing so in proprietary, password-protected adjunct websites. These are weak because they maintain an old model of closed and protected content, eliminating Web 2.0 possibilities for the open collaboration and open communities that our students now use and expect."

Viewshare is a free platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections.

The Noun Project is a seemingly infinite collection of black-and-white symbols put into the public domain. As the founders put it, it is an attempt to organize the world’s visual language into one online database. Edward Boatman, one of the project’s founders, is also its sole gatekeeper. Each symbol on the database was either collected off the Internet or created by designers around the world...

By stripping away all color, texture, and embellishment from the design, all that’s left is the bare essence of the object or idea, and this creates a more effective communication tool.

This Eephus League online magazine is a further commemoration of baseball’s beauty, oddities and wonderful fans. Through this publication I hope to delve deeper into the nooks and crannies of our game, and preserve these small pieces of triviality lovingly and permanently. It is as much a tribute to the game itself as to its enormous and diverse group of fans. Much of the content inside was generated by passionate and talented fans, expressing their love of the game in infinitely unique and personal ways. Baseball touches each of us in different ways, and in turn the manners in which we express our connection are incomparable.

I hope the magazine proves to be full of things familiar, fresh and uplifting, and that I do justice to the fans who are truly devoted to making baseball the wonderful cornerstone that it is.

Some writers and researchers who use the Schwarzman building have said that the plan severely diminishes the library's position as a research institution.

David Nasaw, a writer and history professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, has been critical of the plan for that reason. He said one of the reasons CUNY’s Graduate Center center is located on Fifth Avenue was its proximity to the research halls of the Schwarzman library, "not because we very much want to be in Midtown."...

"If for the past ten years, the library has not been able to provide reliable 24-hour service, why are we to believe that with additional books moved there it will be able to do this? Is the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike going to decrease? Is congestion on the bridges and tunnels going to decrease?"...

One of the most vocal panelists was n+1 associate editor Charles Petersen, who wrote a lengthy piece criticizing the library's plans. He wondered whether the investment wouldn't be revealed to be short-sighted in a few years, when the technology needs of library users could be much clearer. The library has had a history of making expensive and ultimately faulty moves with respect to technology....

Darnton, who also wrote an article defending the plan, admitted expansions and attempts to predict the future of library technology in the 1970s and '80s were misguided. Specifically, money spent on the Mid-Manhattan branch is thought now, retrospectively, to have been largely wasted. "We are not trying to predict the future now and asserting that everything will be digital," he said. "We are trying to meet our commitments in the present where the printed book and digital source coexist and to make sure that we can handle to demands of readers into the future. So, I agree that that expansion in retrospect was a mistake. We cannot maintain three large libraries in mid-Manhattan and this extremely valuable real estate."...

The New York Public Library came under fire Tuesday night during a panel discussion held to debate its $300 million plan to remake its flagship Fifth Avenue branch. “We’re being told that the only way to save the library is to rip out its innards,” said David Nasaw, a panelist and a history professor at the City University Graduate Center, who called the plan “fatally flawed.”...

Critics on the panel said that the changes would diminish the library’s role as a leading reference center, that the money should be directed instead toward rejuvenating dilapidated branch libraries and that the retrieval of books was likely to take too long. “I’d rather have books available,” Mr. Nasaw said, “than a nice place to read.”

Mr. Nasaw also questioned the library’s promise that off-site volumes would be available in 24 hours, since, he said, there are currently delays with those already in storage. “If it’s going to work tomorrow, why doesn’t it work today?” he asked...

Charles Petersen, an associate editor at the magazine n+1, called the project shortsighted, given the uncertainty about the future of research. “There is good reason to be skeptical about doing something this drastic right now,” he said.

Joan Scott, a social science professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, was the final panelist. She helped draft the petition, given to Mr. Marx this month, which was signed by more than 1,000 writers, scholars and artists protesting the plan.

Shannon Mattern, a faculty member of the New School’s School of Media Studies, has a new and wonderfully wide-ranging article about “little libraries” that gets into a number of issues about public space, community involvement, and the essence of librarianship. (Disclosure: I’m quoted in the piece, but that’s not why I like it.) “Little Libraries in the Urban Margins” is published in Places, “an interdisciplinary journal of contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism,” but I think that she “gets” the human aspects of librarianship in an important way (I mean, not that architects and planners don’t think about people, too). And if you’ve been trying to keep all these DIY library projects straight, this is the resource for you. Of course there’s discussion of the OWS libraries (with quotes from the excellent OWS librarians as well as one of my heroes, Barbara Fister).

Apple’s Cupertino-destined Campus 2 has already raised some architectural eyebrows. It is a heavenly disc of perfection for sure, but some have also criticized the plan for being rather, well modernist, in its relationship with the surrounding community. But Apple does play nice and so here is the material that the company has sent to its… neighbors. I guess this would be participatory planning, Cupertino style.

Snapchat is an iPhone app that, fascinatingly and maybe even usefully, lets you apply a time limit to the photos you share with friends... Since Snapchat allows users to send pictures to each other with minimal slightly less fear of those pictures being seen by the wrong people, its most obvious use, Nick Bilton pointed out today, is -- yep -- sending suggestive photos... Snapchat is a silly entry in a burgeoning genre: products that harness the power not of memory, but of forgetting... Anti-archival tools provide a countervailing force to one of the defining features of the Internet: that, with its nearly infinite space, "save all" is its default setting. Without even trying, the Internet remembers... It also means that the web, as a broad space, operates on both an assumption and an architecture of continuity. Within it, and all around it, archive is assumed. Even when we die ... there, still, we are. So when we talk about the Internet, we talk about feeds and flows and rivers and currents -- things determined by their dynamism and their lack of obvious containers... The only problem, however, is that constant flux-and-flow is not actually how we humans are programmed to move through the world. We live in fits and starts, in cycles and phases, and we divide our time not just socially, in shared minutes and hours, but physically... Which means that, to the extent that the web is a realization of Wells's World Brain, it suffers from a congenital defect. Its capacities and ours are misaligned. We little humans are defined by our (sometimes painfully) selective memories; the web is defined by its promiscuity. It doesn't sleep; it doesn't process; it never, never rests... When we disparage the digital environment as "overwhelming," what we're also faulting it for is its lack of a narrative. The Internet moves, but it doesn't necessarily move forward. It expands, but it doesn't necessarily follow any particular trajectory. It lacks, in that sense, a purpose. It lacks a plot...

What we're beginning to realize, though, is that the World Brain, like our own comparatively fragile version, can be subject to neuroplasticity. We can change the web's wiring. We can make it more hospitable to the way our minds are programmed to work. The proposed legal principle of le droit à l'oubli -- the "right to be forgotten," but also, tellingly, the "right of oblivion" -- will likely find its replication in the U.S., if not through the courts, then through the architecture of the web itself. Silly little products like Snapchat are part of that -- not just because they give us new filters to help us grow and make sense of the digital world, but because they help us to reclaim the productive limitations of the analog... And those products won't just become increasingly common; they'll also become increasingly valuable. Just as limitation itself -- through social filters, through editorial filters, through acts of extreme curation -- will likely become increasingly valuable. Just as the textual limitations of lists and the visual limitations of memes hold sway, organically, over the sharing economy of the web, we'll keep coming up with creative ways to curtail the web's impulses toward continuity. And that, in turn, will allow us to re-appropriate remembering -- not just as a passive assumption, but as a deliberative choice.

When Joseph Stalin came to power in 1924, he heightened censorship and manipulation of the Soviet Union’s state-controlled media, including printed matter, photography, radio broadcasts, and television. Samizdat—the reproduction and distribution of censored literature via self-publication—emerged throughout the USSR in the 1950s and was a key component of dissident activity well after Stalin’s death in 1953. Samizdat was both material and system, its networks composed of a committed body of people who published, distributed, and circulated human rights bulletins, literature, art, and poetry. Being an “author” was risky; obfuscatory terms like “editors,” “typists,” and “readers” often marked the pages of samizdat publications... While production remained plural and anonymous, the samizdat object was individualized: Each copy of a copy bears a record of its life among readers...

In the Soviet Union, most samizdat texts were typewritten. People used whatever paper they could get; often the paper was cheap and did not hold up well in the long term. Though not always available, thin onionskin paper offered significant advantages: When used with carbon paper, it enabled the production of several typed copies at once. It was also easily concealed... The designation typist tends to be used for those people, mostly women, who were asked (and sometimes paid) by samizdat authors or editors to produce exact copies of a text. In these cases, fidelity to the original was paramount. But in scenarios where a reader retyped a text independently, motivated solely by his or her own enthusiasm, edits could be made at will. Similarly, works in foreign languages were often altered when translated for samizdat circulation...

You write about the typescript as a dissident symbol, a concept embraced and fetishized first by the West and later by Soviet dissidents themselves. When did the shift between typescript as practical medium and typescript as symbol of dissidence occur?...
Amnesty International took the highly unusual step of endorsing the Chronicle and publishing its English version. Circulation was also facilitated by Radio Liberty, the Cold War anticommunist propaganda channel funded by the US Congress. Personnel would read issues aloud on air and broadcast them back to the Soviet Union. In addition, the Western press and radio relied on the Chronicle for their own reporting...

In principle, samizdat distribution happened in a spontaneous and rhizomatic way. In practice, the distribution of particular journals depended on networks of acquaintance and interest. For example, samizdat rock zines were distributed at music festivals and through the mail. For example, samizdat rock zines were distributed at music festivals and through the mail. Number (Nomer, Sverdlovsk and Rostov, 1965–74), an “open” journal by the neo-futurist group led by Ry Nikonova and Sergei Sigei (the pseudonyms used by Anna Tarshis and Sergei Sigov), is a special case. For each issue there was only one copy; readers were limited to friends of the editors and were invited to contribute to the discussion by writing, painting, or pasting in their own contribution. The success of the dialogue depended in large measure on the tightly circumscribed network of reader-contributors. The editors then went on to do a larger edition, Transponans (1979–87), which circulated to dozens of readers.

Nikonova and Sigei stood out among samizdat authors and editors in their cultivation of the samizdat text as an open and collaborative space. Their work challenges myths around individual authorial genius often otherwise associated with samizdat texts. In a certain sense, they continued the collaborative investigations of Russian futurist books from the early twentieth century but added to them an inquiry into the evolution of a text.

Opening tomorrow, May 23: Museum, a new free museum that preserves the often overlooked, unseen, and forgotten treasures from the streets, stores, and people of the world, most prominently New York City. It's located in what was once a freight elevator in the back of a Broadway building in Cortlandt Alley, between Franklin and White Streets. Museum is an immaculate, 80-square-foot space that displays odd collections, hundreds of found and vernacular objects, and items of curiosity from around the world.

"We try to make one really understand each object through its history and context," explains Benny Safdie, one of Museum's three curator-directors. (The others are his brother, Josh Safdie; and Alex Kalman.) "Sometimes barbed wire is just barbed wire, but when it comes from a concentration camp, the whole thing transforms."

"We wanted to create a space that gives respect and shows off what we find beautiful, beauty that is often forgotten or overlooked," Kalman says. "It is a reminder that you can find beauty and magic in the everyday."

Each item is accompanied with a story of its origin and how it has ended up in the Museum. You can read each one in a printed brochure that doubles as a poster, or call a a toll-free phone service, (888) 763-8839. You can punch in any object's number and listen to its stories.

"Giving things a context is what makes anything valuable," Josh Safdie explains. "Diamonds aren't that rare, but everyone talks about them being forever, making them a girl's best friend—and thus they're highly valuable. A handwritten business card advertising a weed service with Jewish stars drawn on it is more valuable than a one-carat SS-V2 diamond."

Read more: A Museum of Things Opens in NYC — Imprint-The Online Community for Graphic Designers
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"Fulcrum is a weekly publication printed on Bedford Press at the Architectural Association. It was founded by Graham Baldwin, Aram Mooradian & Jack Self."

Liz Hynes speaks with Caleb Crain and Charles Petersen about the planned renovations of the NYPL’s main research branch at Bryant Park. A panel discussion about this topic will take place at the New School on Tuesday, May 22, from 6:30 to 8:30pm, at the New School’s Theresa Lang Community Center, 55 West 13th Street, on the second floor. The moderator will be Eric Banks, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, and participants will include Joan Scott, David Nasaw, Charles Petersen, and others. A top administrator from the library has also been invited to participate.

Branch libraries supported by city; research libraries supported by private philanthropy

"they believe books are not as important as they used to be" -- ha!

"it's a research library for anyone, and that's amazing"

The smartphone revolution comes with a hidden cost. A joint investigation by FRONTLINE and ProPublica explores the hazardous work of independent contractors who are building and servicing America’s expanding cellular infrastructure.

Describing the (explicitly Western) architectural production of the last five hundred years, Mario Carpo writes how this output of forms, spaces, and bodies of knowledge was resolutely and irreversibly conditioned by the “Gutenberg Galaxy”, that is, the invention of the printing press and the index of mechanical matrices it inhered. The resultant “typographic architecture”, the buildings and urban forms that we live with to this day, corresponds in content to a print culture that is rapidly passing into extinction, threatening to bring down with it the Western architectural cannon it has sustained for so long a time. According to Carpo’s premonitory argument, this eventuality will cause a social rift so decisive to assure the virtual destruction of these building traditions, despite the desperate attempts of preservationists and reformists alike.

The invocation of Carpo’s work is to contextualize this installation by Korean artist Hong Seon Jang, who has fashioned an entire micro metropolis out of decommissioned movable type. Where the aforementioned argument logically relates the disappearance of familiar Western architectural forms with the removal of its substructure, Jang’s “Type City” does the opposite. Using lead type salvaged from an antiquated technology–an old printing press–the artist builds an entirely new, if not spatially novel urban network of towers, housing, and infrastructure. Jang’s choice of material is anything but unintentional, loaded with historical and material implications that speak to our collective nascent post-print mentality that promises to reenvision our homes, landscapes, and cities.

My claim was that, if we are truly interested in understanding the relation of media and cities, we should not prioritize the analysis of media representations. Speaking specifically about journalism, I suggested we need to pry open the black box that is the journalism-city relation. This would mean fixating less on what is said or is possible to say about cities in representational terms, and worrying much more about the conditions of possibility that govern the conduct and milieus of different practical fields involved in making urban representations, journalism a very important one of these of course.

Here of course I was taking my opportunity to suggest we think about journalism as a form of urban practice in and in relation to cities. First of all ‘in’ cities, because journalism practices are notably positioned in urban settings, including of course international media which often work to conceal their situated bases, at least when it is not symbolically valued. With a Bourdieusian hat on, we might think about the variegated urban habitus of journalists. But journalism might second of all be seen as an urban practice ‘in relation to’ cities. Keeping that Bourdieu hat on, cities are often but not always symbolically valuable for journalists competing to assert their view of the social world.

For his first graphic novel about the Caped Crusader, author and designer Chip Kidd (who worked on Bat-Manga! and oodles of famous book covers) teamed up with illustrator Dave Taylor (2000 AD) for the upcoming Batman: Death By Design.

<<Gotham City is undergoing one of the most expansive construction booms in its history. The most prestigious architects from across the globe have buildings in various phases of completion all over town. As chairman of the Gotham Landmarks Commission, Bruce Wayne has been a key part of this boom, which signals a golden age of architectural ingenuity for the city. And then, the explosions begin. All manner of design-related malfunctions–faulty crane calculations, sturdy materials suddently collapsing, software glitches, walkways giving way and much more–cause casualties across the city. This bizarre string of seemingly random, unconnected catastrophes threaten to bring the whole construction industry down. Fingers are pointed as Batman must somehow solve the problem and find whoever is behind it all.>>

In this love letter to the concrete canyons of Gotham City, suspicious building accidents place Batman at odds with both The Joker and a mystery man named Exacto.

electricity pole, transmission towers, cable - universal icons crossing earth's surface; physical markers helped structure fundamental changes in everyday life - instant comm on global scale; equipment around which cities were built

transportation and telecom infrastructures caused both expansion and contraction

impact of sound transmission of urban theory - telecom engineering absorbed by modernist architects - Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright illustrated assimilation of modern tech landscape - management of suburban sprawl

Mumford: transportation (cars), communication (interpersonal comm -> telephone lines; "the telegraph symbolically follows the railroad..."; "radio is a potentially distributive and decentralizing agency...")

Wright: "all pole and wires overhead [will be] a bad memory of ugliness and danger"; "crude, utilitarian scaffolding...does violence to our own character..."

1890 NY: Bell started laying wire underground

White takes as his subject the data centers and technological infrastructure behind the finger swipes and pop-up notifications of contemporary life, capturing mechanistic environments such as the KSAT Svalbard Ground Station, theMcLaren Technology Centre, and the BMW MINI Factory. Each is rendered in minimalist compositions, white washed tableaux whose near depthless forms are made legible by shadow and line.

A super-library combining five national collections in one building, Paris’s National Library of France was the final Grands travaux of President François Mitterrand. Initially commissioned to house all French production of words, images, and sounds since 1945, its architectural competition captured the confusion and variety of architectural thinking in 1989.

OMA’s proposal was for a 100m tall cube aggressively placed on the banks of the Seine; a building that marks the beginning of the ‘big’ period and the shift from urbanism to conceptual formalism that Rem Koolhaas would retroactively name in his infamous remark on context.

The project begins from a distinction between book storage (solid) and public space (voids), and the logic of separation gives the building its structural form of a “solid cube of information” with specific voids, on top of a plinth.

The building was the first project where OMA used modelling computer software to produce images after the competition was over. Très Grande Bibliothèque (Very Big Library) includes these as well as the final anonymous presentation panels, two giant models whose epic construction will be live streamed from the Octagonal Gallery, and hundreds of working drawings showing design process moving through different media.

The marriage of text and the engraved image marked a new level of fluency in communication via images, which does away with staples of early print day, even though the separation between image and text lasted for many decades later, and can still be traced today. (Think, for example, of the plate pages, where color images were glued onto the paper, so that the book or magazine would be printed in black and white, adding the color pages later in a way that saves money on printing, but also generates a wholly different relationship with images...

Another possible answer to the question of what content online do we actually read is built-in to mobile devices’ interfaces. Ironically enough, even though mobile devices are supposedly designed to keep us company in transit (even considering the fact that Apple now advertises the iPad as a handheld device meant mainly for people who tend to sit on the couch most of the time, and don’t want to walk over to their macbooks), the relatively new idea of apps actually introduces a new sense of undivided attention online. iOS, Apple’s operating system, does not really allow for simultaneous use of two apps. The result is that while on our computer we always have another tab open on the browser, another program open in the background, or another memo blinking on the calendar view, when we use the internet on our mobile devices, we focus on the app we are using. Reading the New York Times on its dedicated app doesn’t allow for a quick change to look at the new email that just came in without leaving the newspaper app and switching to the email one—a decision much more conscious than that of switching tabs, for example. The iPad, iPhone, and other handheld devices also rid themselves of the cursor, so that their users are not really directed anywhere anymore. This is an interaction that designers are apparently much challenged by—a way of looking at a page that is closer to reading print. Where the cursor was a stand-in for the user’s finger, the finger is now used again, and the eye follows a part of the body rather than an element embedded in the screen...

Where do images fall within these design questions? Triple Canopy’s editors attest that, “One issue that came up in the transition between the two formats [the flip box and the horizontal scroll] is that you lose the impact of a photograph when it slides onto the page rather than appearing in an instant. But, we do have a full screen function for those images that require more white space around them.” Most other publications have a vertical design that introduces images as sidebars or directly aligned in the text, mainly without linking the images out or allowing for a full-screen viewing option...

So what does it mean to print out the internet? In the introduction to Invalid Format, the editors of Triple Canopy discuss their initial speculations as to the possible longevity of a web-based publication: “We had a sense of the inevitability of obsolescence—think of cassette tapes, LaserDiscs, Mosaic Netscape 0.9—and of the need to safeguard our work being reduced to so many broken links and 404 errors.” The idea of publishing books based on the online journal came up as a way of “artful archiving.”

Thinking about one’s thinking is not easy. Considering that many of the majors in the social sciences and humanities might be viewed by some as less direct-to-workforce majors, compared to fields such as engineering or business, isn’t it imperative that instructors in the social sciences and humanities work with students to identify and discuss the critical thinking skills they are (one hopes) acquiring? And to discuss how these vital skills might transfer to jobs or other opportunities?

Maybe some instructors assume that students recognize these skills already, as one presumes the faculty member is able to do for herself. And many students probably do recognize their critical thinking skills. But for the students who have trouble realizing these skills (or who statistically have not developed them), the cover letter, resume, or job interview might be the first time they have to acknowledge and apply these skills.

The Living Archive is an online record of John Cage's work and its evolving impact on music and performance. Browse the full archive of work below... examine a collection of manuscript excerpts housed at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts... watch videos of musicians, students, and performers from all walks of life interpreting Cage's music... most important, contribute your own video showing how you interpret Cage's music. Videos will appear on this homepage as the Living Archive grows. Cage believed that, following his detailed directions, anyone could make music from any kind of instrument — and so we welcome your interpretations of his music.

In the exhibition “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language,” which opened on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, words are treated as tools and as totems. Gathering text-based work by artists from Marcel Duchamp to Tauba Auerbach alongside contemporary designers like Paul Elliman and Dexter Sinister, the show offers varied takes on how to make meaning out of language, and also how to make a beautiful mess of it—sometimes at the same time... Pick up one of three black telephones sitting on a shelf, and you’ll suddenly be on the line with Frank O’Hara or John Giorno or Robert Creeley, who generously recite a poem just for you (or in Allen Ginsberg’s case, chant incoherently in your ear)... But the conceptual heart of the show, and the highlight, is Found Fount, by the London-based designer Paul Elliman. Elliman has long been experimenting with deconstructions of language and objects—creating alphabets from photobooth portraits, for example. Whereas some artists in the show disassemble language into its physical forms or turn it into sculptures drained of immediate linguistic meanings, Elliman conjures words from ordinary objects. “Dead Scissors,” for example, collects broken-off scissor handles that look like the letter P.

NYPL, by contrast, will change not only its appearance but its functions. Millions of books will move from its stacks to the Recap facility it shares with Princeton and Columbia, out here in suburban New Jersey. Readers who want to consult a book will often have to order it in advance — and may find, as readers sometimes do here, that real delivery times are slower than advertised ones. More recent books, in some cases at least, will circulate.

Instead of offering books, in the first instance, NYPL will offer banks of computers, fast Wi-Fi and lots of places designed for individuals and groups to work together: a big, and probably beautiful, digital commons, with a cafe and circulating collection. The starchitect Norman Foster will design the new spaces. If he does his job well — and he usually does — the new space will attract students and writers and ordinary citizens from all over the city and become a hub of literary,intellectual and social life for a new generation.

...Will the new NYPL keep up its world-class collections of books in dozens of languages — Slavic, Semitic, and African — and the staff of specialists needed to keep finding and cataloguing them — books, most of them, that won’t be available in digital form in the foreseeable future?... Will the new NYPL still support scholars — especially the independent scholars who need it most — and give students a chance to know and love real books as well as their digital shadows? Can public library budgets support the constant upgrading needed to keep a digital workspace usable?...My stomach hurts when I think about NYPL, the first great library I ever worked in, turned into a vast internet cafe where people can read the same Google Books, body parts and all, that they could access at home or Starbucks. And my head tells me that I can’t predict a thing because we’re living through a great revolution, and we don’t yet know what lies on the other side.

Opposition to the CLP has been spearheaded by Joan Wallach Scott, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study. In a protest letter to NYPL President Anthony Marx, Scott noted the downsizing of the NYPL’s Slavic and Baltic Division; the deterioration of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem; and the weakening of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (at Lincoln Center Plaza), which has seen a significant reduction in specialty librarians who, for decades, catered to students and scholars of dance, music, recorded sound and theater. Scott also took aim at NYPL’s argument that “democratization” of the 42nd street library is a necessary goal under the CLP. “That seems to be a misunderstanding of what that word means,” Scott wrote. “The NYPL is already among the most democratic institutions of its kind.” As of April 18, Scott’s letter, which is still circulating, has garnered nearly two hundred signatures, including those of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Concern about the NYPL’s future has also come from the distinguished Princeton historian (and library expert) Anthony Grafton, who wrote in the Daily Princetonian on April 2: “My stomach hurts when I think about NYPL, the first great library I ever worked in, turned into a vast internet cafe where people can read the same Google Books, body parts and all, that they could access at home or Starbucks.” (In addition to Grafton, several other professors and writers have recently been asked by the NYPL to serve on an advisory panel; they include David Nasaw, Andre Aciman and Annette Gordon-Reed.)

Amongst the most critically acclaimed offices of the last two decades, OMA has consistently produced innovate architectural ideas, methods, and as we will see below, organizational models. This much is undeniable. The question at hand is whether the almost contagious ability of OMA to replicate itself in the habits of other offices is the result of duplication by admiration, a legitimate response to the challenges of globalized architecture practice which OMA may have pioneered, or the charismatic quirk of OMA’s success overshadowing other possibilities...

[This post is] largely a mythology of the habits of organization, production, and decision making that one office has pursued, written from the outside, aided by accumulated anecdotes. If the OMA style of working has become a popular drug, this is an attempt to figure out what we’re all taking, why, and what other options may exist...

Decades after Alan Turing and others who made Bletchley Park a famous mansion of mathematics, the same methods were being put to in another industry altogether.

Through the unlikely combination of innovations in drawing and model making techniques, combined with a new theoretical understanding of architecture, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) rewired their office of the late 1990s into a brute force computational device whose efficiency would become wildly contagious.

OMA has been one of the most consistently interesting offices during the past couple decades but we’re more concerned with the how than the what....

Architecture can be a hard thing to discuss because it’s an art of integration. The difficulty of separating the overall design task into smaller units of work is at least part of the reason that the stereotype of the architect is one of obsessive detail-oriented control, the Maestro, the creative genius... The factors that go into an architectural proposition run the gamut from calculable aspects such as structural performance under gravity loads, financial constraints under a given budget, and the practical realities of human ergonomics as much as they rely on the cultural and symbolic meaning of forms and materials, or even the individual whims of the client. Looking at any of these elements in isolation leads to woe, yet integrating all of them all of the time leads to paralysis... OMA’s invention was to turn lead designers into grand editors. For an office who had global aspirations and highly mobile directors, a more efficient way of working was needed that would allow idea generation phases to happen without extensive indoctrination of young designers to the office’s philosophy and stylistic interests, and without constant supervision of the frenetic leaders. Diversity within any design cycle would be maximized and the ‘time cost’ of decision making would be lowered... Koolhaas describes buildings as related collections of ideas rather than integrated wholes. If previously a building’s outside and inside were meant to add up to one coherent thing, in Koolhaas’ logic they are free to be separate, each with their own logics. This essential cleavage was levied against all aspects of the building. The old model of seeing a building as one integrated design task was now shattered into a family of many individual tasks... Koolhaas’ writing made it OK for designers—especially those in his office—to treat the design of a building as many separate, smaller design tasks and the outcome of each did not necessarily need to bear clear resemblance to the others. On the contrary, buildings that displayed multiple ideas, forms, and materials became central to the aesthetic of OMA. Koolhaas’ radically dis-integrated approach to architecture relieved junior designers from having to understand the full nuance of the overall project and freed the lead designer from the burden of providing constant ongoing feedback to keep their team on track with the big picture. Instead, feedback need be applied only at specific points (such as internal reviews) where a range of options are evaluated for their intrinsic value more than than their appropriateness to an external, overriding logic. In this operational model the lead designer need not play the role of Maestro. Rather, they initiate the design process with a provocation and continually curate the results. It’s more like editing a live broadcast than it is painting an image... The phases of production and evaluation were allowed to become distinct and extreme. Production phases could involve maximum divergence, and evaluations could be viciously binary. Here we find the basic mechanism of brute force hacking: find success by exhausting failure...

OMA is famous for its use of blue foam as a model making material, a technique that uses polystyrene foam cut into desired shapes with a heated wire. Whereas working with cardboard requires planning ahead and some translation of ideas into a workflow of making, with foam the workflow and ideas are collapsed into one. Making is thinking... Working with foam instead of more traditional materials allowed the design teams at OMA to model their ideas quicker, which in turn allowed more ideas to be considered in the same span of time. The adoption of this new technique was akin to upgrading the processor speed of the office... The time required for each cycle of development is reduced as much as possible such that a maximum number of iterations are seen, tested, and discarded on the way to finalizing a design proposal.

What blue foam did for model making, the diagram did for drawings. Traditional architectural drawings are laden with detail whereas the diagram is all punch...

This is the essence of brute force architecture. To test and discard as many ideas, produced as quickly as possible, is a luxury that is only afforded to an office that has a theoretical framework allowing design tasks to be simplified and separated, the right tools to do so, and a large pool of able and willing hands to put those tools in motion...

Like Turing 60 years prior, OMA’s operations are based on brute forcing through the search space. Whereas Turing relied on something that would later come to be known as computing power, OMA relies on employees who willfully work long hours to be part of the magical machine... The simplification of the way in which ideas were presented through models and diagrams smoothed over the difficulties of running an office with many different mother tongues by giving preference to image over language, in effect turning a potential hurdle into a mechanism to bolster the brute force production system... the specific tactics of OMA are contagious: sections with oversized text stuffed into different programmatic zones, barcode diagrams, unrolled plans, renderings collaged with glib inhabitants, etc. The pervasiveness of OMA’s habits in other offices are so extreme that one is tempted to ask whether this way of working is a logical outcome of globalized practice, but the dearth of competing operational models hints that perhaps this is not the case...

When thinking about the future of practice after Brute Force, one wonders what models we may employ to develop not only the next generation of architectural ideas, but the next generation of architectural offices as well. How does an office represent ideas to itself?... How do offices effectively divide tasks? How do they honor a commitment to both community and client? How do they contribute both hard and soft value to the world?

It is a very big day for Rem Koolhaas and the entire OMA team, as their iconic CCTV building in Beijing—OMA's largest project so far—is being officially completed today.

The basic challenge for humanists comes from adopting visualizations that don’t suit our fundamental epistemological values. Obviously humanism is not monolithic. But methods of statistical analysis and empirical observation are grafted onto the humanities, they were not created from within the traditions of textual analysis and study. Put simply, the distinction between humanistic and empirical methods is the difference between interpretation and scientific positivism. I have no quarrel with the latter, only with the ways visualization techniques from the natural and social sciences have been adopted for use in the humanities. The result is reductive, and in most instances, produces a reification of misinformation. Exceptions exist...

Nicolas Felton’s work is a performance, nearly parodic, of the process with which I take issue... what gives his work a humanistic spin is the way it activates the reader/viewer into consideration of how one is or is not like Felton. The gap of critical thought is the space for production of interpretation as an generative, recognized, substantive part of the activity of a text or image....

Yannis Loukassis, a designer/scholar I met recently, has produced some remarkable visualizations of urban geography in a course he developed on SurfaceCities. These maps are humanistic. They are built as an expression of spatial experience, rather than assuming space as a given that can be shown on a Google map. The difference between putting humanistic information into a pre-set convention – e.g. using a standard metric timeline to show experiential or relativistic records—and using these experiential foundations to build the basic model is enormous. I could cite other examples. Stuart Dunn’s work with modelling experience in prehistoric structures in Britain, Leif Isaksen’s work on Ptolemaic mapping, Chris Johansson’s work on point of view systems within the Roman Forum—each has engaged humanistic experience in the content model of their digital projects in interesting ways.

What’s at stake is the cultural authority of the humanities. If human beings matter, in their individual and collective existence, not as data points in the management of statistical information, but as persons living actual lives, then finding ways to represent them within the digital environment is important. If the value of interpretative approaches to epistemology matters, it is because it undoes the fundamental assumptions of univocal authority, singularity of point of view, and absolute values.

The Stanford document proposes a scenario where students decide on a career plan -- academic or nonacademic -- they want to embark on by the end of their second-year of graduate study, file the plan with their department, and then prepare projects and dissertation work that would support that career. Similarly, departments have to help students make realistic career choices at the end of the second year of graduate study, and advise students regularly. “…[T]hey should aim to balance academic training in a particular discipline and field with the provision of broader professional perspectives that may extend beyond the traditional academic setting,” the document said... According to the document, one way to speed up time to degree would be to include “four-quarter” support for students instead of unfunded summers, currently the standard for many humanities Ph.D. programs...

A two-hour oral exam, meetings each semester with “dissertation-stage” students and their committee members, and clearer feedback for students are part of the graduate program in the comparative literature department now. “We also introduced a monthly forum for students to share and discuss their own work; and an ambitious series of professional development talks, on everything from article submission to dissertation planning to alternative careers,” Damrosch said.

What’s fascinating to me about the LRAD — or “Long Range Acoustic Device” — is the way violence and speech become literally the same thing. To ask the question of whether an LRAD is designed to hurt people or designed to communicate across long distances with people is to mystify its central design function: it is a technology whose purpose is to FORCE you to listen and obey, and one which is less interested in the difference than you’d think. Feature and bug merge. Ideally, perhaps, the “you” it targets will obey the communicated threat, sparing police the need to force you to obey and sparing them the need to produce the spectacle of people running away while holding their ears. But the whole point of having an LRAD is to ensure that one way or another, the police can get the people they address to do what they want them to do....

Communicati0n is a means of making you obey — one cannot, after all, speak back to an LRAD, since it’s simply one-way projection — and the violence of forcing compliance takes up the sonic register, similarly displacing sound as a vector for dialogue. There are simply higher and lower volumes.

More than a gift, the mix tape I considered a document whose unprepossessing, mass-market exterior belied its contents: a high-fidelity analogue of a teen’s deep and complicated interiority.

...Born of its maker’s circumstances, scrimshaw documents for those far away the seagoing life and its particulars — the whaling ship, fish-scented and cold; the white immensity of ice; the dark, dull winter; the crushing isolation. Simple gifts carved from teeth and bone, they exemplify what sociologist Michel de Certeau calls acts of “everyday creativity,” which help to elevate us above adverse circumstances. The creative act, usually some type of unalienated material labor (sewing, drawing, writing, cooking, etc.), frees us from the constraints of a society dependent on incessant getting and spending. Within the context of the whaling ship, the act of scrimshaw allowed sailors to articulate inchoate experience through craft and, by doing so, transcend, at least imaginatively, their isolation. Out of this act came a gift in the truest sense, one which cannot be reciprocated; for in those combs and pipes the giver objectified the contents of his individual experience.

Though life today militates against devoting time to painstaking creative acts, the mix tape stands as a vestige of everyday artistry. Cobbled together from found cultural objects, it like scrimshaw embodies an individual’s experience of the world. As such, it achieves as much authenticity as any carved bit of tooth or bone.

Now, when you search certain things, say, Tom Cruise, a box will pop up in the right column of your search with structured data about the topic. Google can identify 500 million people, places, and things and can serve up a custom selection of data based on the nature of the noun.... this takes us a step closer to Google as a computational engine, something that can do more than find and rank which pages you'd like to see (or show you the weather for your area). Google's been collecting data and data and data for years; now they can start using it to do some very powerful things.

Third, nearly every entry begins with a Wikipedia snippet. It's long been clear that Google's algorithms love Wikipedia, now we can see how valuable the encyclopedia's structured data is to Google's long-term ambitions.

Google knows that you are very likely to want to know certain things about Tom Cruise (e.g. his height) and other things about Bill Gates (his net worth) and other things about astronaut Don Pettit (which Shuttle missions he flew).

"How do we reverse the error of seeing objects as events? We do that through counter-factuals. This is already a known method. You can imagine objects in different situations and imagine what the effects would be.[…]"Imagining Lincoln in ancient Rome. How might he have played out there? Imagine a middle east with an Iranian atomic bomb or imagine an invaded Iraq instead. What are the possible things that would have happened in either of those cases. These help as allude to the thing as a style. Lincoln isn’t something that was confined to that historical period and that country but is something over and above that that could be translated... Counter-factuals would be the first method for getting at the reality of things. The second would be what I call hyperbolic analysis, which I’ve used in three publications. This is reversing the error of impact. This is reversing the tendency to see things in terms of the effects they have... I did this in the article on deLanda; I did this in the book on Latour; and I did this in the book on Meillassoux that hasn’t been published yet. In order to look at the impact of these philosophers what I did is not critique mistakes that they’ve made, but imagine that they have total success. Imagine that they become the dominant philosopher on the planet 20, 30 years from now. And then you imagine what would still be missing. What would still be missing if Meillassoux was the dominant world philosopher in 2050. Don’t fuss around with detailed mistakes that he makes but grant him everything and then see what’s still missing.

The other two are a little harder. What we’re trying to do is talk about the mutual independence of a thing and its pieces where the thing is not reducible to its pieces and the pieces are not reducible to the thing. And we actually do this all the time: we call this simulation – where you’re removing a thing from its pieces and simply trying to treat it as a formal model... And what I’ve realized while thinking about this is that paradoxically a thing is more real the more it can be simulated, the more it can be parodied. You can parody good poet better than bad ones, can’t you? If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then simulation and parody are an even more sincere form. The less real something is the harder it is to simulate...

And that leaves one last feature of pseudo-objects which is reducing them to sets, reducing them to pointing at an extensive number of things and saying that’s just a set it’s not a real thing with a unifying principle... We already saw that Rilke or earthquakes are substantial forms independent of their material components that can be removed and put on a computer and generate effects. What about the reverse? Is there a reverse situation where we can show those material components are real beneath all simulation? Actually yes. The answer to this is accidents: when things happen that weren’t expected. In what sense are accidents a method? Well, all the time. This is what falsification is about in science. You’re finding accidental things that happen to a theory that weren’t expected, things that point to the independence of the material components from the model that you had of them. So that would be the forth method to use.

Text takes time. It takes time to read, it takes time to write, and it takes time to reproduce. Throughout the history of text production, people have been searching for ways to distribute the costs of producing text—financial, temporal—more evenly across a system... As text becomes easier and cheaper to produce, more copies of it get made. While Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in a small edition of 180, Manutius’s books were printed by the thousands. More copies need more readers and most readers like their text to be portable. While Gutenberg’s heavy Bible was best read at a library table, Manutius’s slim editions could be easily slipped in a saddlebag or vest pocket. You went to Gutenberg’s books, but Manutius’s books went with you. As increasingly numerous and increasingly portable copies of texts found their way into the world, they found new readers to buy them and they spread literacy with them... In the next two hundred years, text continued to get swifter, more portable, and more widely distributed, giving rise to a new form by the late 1600s and early 1700s: the newspaper. By now firmly established in Europe and North America, the newspaper’s growth was spurred by a flowering of global trade. Access to time-sensitive political news and financial information was increasingly important, and publishers strived to invent new technologies to meet demand... As the cost of mechanically reproducing text fell, the cost of circulating printed texts fell with it. According to historian N.N. Feltes, the fruits of the industrial revolution—like “paved roads, fast coaches, canals, and, eventually, railways”—made it easier to deliver printed texts to their intended audiences. Around the same time, firms that were known as “booksellers” shifted away from selling each other’s books and instead re-established themselves as something more like the publishers we know today, wholesaling their own books, but not, Feltes points out, “anybody else’s.”... Books were cheaper than ever to print, and they were cheaper, faster, and easier to distribute. Readers were increasingly aware of new books on the market, and, because of the new industrial age, they were increasingly able to find leisure time to read them, all of which set the stage for a flourishing of the Victorian appreciation and consumption of literature. Costs fell, distribution climbed, demand grew, but one variable was not improving. It still took authors a long time to produce a text... When a greedy and disapproving British government levied a tax on the newspaper industry starting in 1712, it grew over the next century to 4 pennies. Printers began producing pamphlets instead. Through a loophole in the tax law, pamphlets, which were larger than newspapers, were not taxed and were only marginally more expensive than newspapers to produce. While few people could afford the daily cost of 6 pennies for a 1- or 2-page newspaper, the occasional cost of a 12-penny (or 1-schilling) pamphlet of 48 pages seemed more justified. Printers naturally gravitated toward pamphlets and began filling the additional space required with more advertising, fiction, and other miscellaneous content... Some printers realized that this new content was more popular than their news coverage and began recruiting proven authors to publish exclusively in the pamphlet format. Generally, these small booklets were called “numbers” or “serials,” but more specifically they evolved into a range of forms including the part-issue, the three-volume, the bimonthly, and the magazine-serial. Effectively, the serial unbound the singular book, reformulating it into a series of installments. In doing so, it instantly appealed to publishers and booksellers by lowering risk.

...the ubiquitous smart phone may even degrade the way we recognize, memorize and move through cities. We will lose many of these benefits when we’re one day all walking around thumbing our Twitter feeds... So why do smart phones change our behavior so much more radically than their simpler cell-phone predecessors did? Smart phones, Hatuka says, combine numerous spheres: your social network, your email, your news source, your live personal conversations. When you’re interacting with each of those spheres while walking through a public park, which social code do you follow? Do you follow the code of the public park (wherein we politely make eye contact with one another), or do you follow the social code of Facebook (wherein you better hurry up and acknowledge all the friends who just “liked” your latest status update)?

As Hatuka and Toch have found, for smart-phone users, the social norms of the physical world are often trumped. They’re becoming less important. All of this means we may need a concerted campaign to keep the “public” in the public sphere, to actively encourage people to observe and interact with each other. We may even need to redesign our public places to do this.

Inspired by the work of Harvard Graduate School of Design students in Biblioteca 2: Library Test Kitchen – who spent the semester inventing and building library innovations ranging from nap carrels to curated collections displayed on book trucks to digital welcome mats – we turned the microphone around and had library expert Matthew Battles ask David, ”When the smartest person in the room is the room, how do we design the room?”