book

A “book post” is placed in the UiB Humanities Library during March 2021, consisting of a table/desk with two stools by it, near a wall.

Four books are on the table/desk (left to right, in alphabetical order by title): Articulations (Allison Parrish), Golem (Nick Montfort), A Noise Such as a Man Might Make: A Novel (Milton Läufer), and Travesty Generator (Lillian-Yvonne Bertram). Each has a hole drilled through it in the upper left and is secured to the table with a cable, creating a chained library. The books represent the work of four participants in an SLSAeu panel about computer-generated literature.

A Kodak carousel slide projector is in the middle of the table/desk, projecting small, bright images and texts onto the wall. Slides presenting covers and contents of the five books are shown continually during the exhibition. The selections will be made in consultation with all author/programmers and with their approval.

The stools allow two readers to sit and peruse the books. The table is wide enough to allow readers to do so while socially distanced.

The presence of a functioning “obsolete” slide projector, and the establishment of an “obsolete” chained library within the Humanities library, suggests to visitors that the book is also obsolete — while it is, at the same time, a perfectly functional technology. The dissonance of presenting computer-generated text via film slides and analog projection resonates with the decision that this group of five author/programmers has made: to present our computational writing in codex form.

The chained library is both practical and symbolic. Given that this is a library exhibit, the cables prevent people from relocating the books as one typically does in a library. They also emphasize that while we value ubiquity and portability in the digital age, at the same time we want things tethered, grounded, and available at the expected location. This suggestion will be strengthened by the similarity between the way these books are tethered and the way computer equipment is secured to a desk.

The projection of course alerts visitors to the availability of the books. Even if visitors do not choose to sit and peruse these books, the projected texts allow them to see and read computer-generated writing from recent years. Those who only view the projections nevertheless get a sense of the wide variety of approaches and the many textures of language that are seen in this sort of experimental digital writing.

It is a philosophy book by the French philosopher Gilles Deluze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. The authors draw upon and discuss the work of a number of authors, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Wilhelm Reich. A Thousand Plateaus is written in a non-linear fashion, and the reader is invited to move among plateaux in any order. It is the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and the successor to Anti-Oedipus (1972). Before the full English translation by social theorist Brian Massumi appeared in 1987, the twelfth "plateau" was published separately as Nomadology: The War Machine (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). Though influential, and considered a major statement of post-structuralism and postmodernism, the book has been criticized on many grounds.

The book was first published in 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, in French and later translated to english in 1987 and published by University of Minnesota Press.

The Poetry Machine was developed in 2012 as a way for libraries to exhibit electronic literature.52 The installation consists of three sensor-equipped books through which (up to) three simultaneous users can compose poems on a screen, and then get them printed on small receipts and stored on a website. When seizing a book, the user is assigned a sentence from this book out of approximately a hundred different sentences. Each sentence exists in three variations, which the user can choose to drag into the writing space. After a limit (e.g., 350 characters) is reached, by combining the books and sentences, the poem is finished, printed, and stored online.

The Poetry Machine was designed as a collaborative project between librarians, authors, and researchers, and the design has focused on critically addressing the digiti- zation of literary culture—that is, on the tendency of the literary apparatus. The Poetry Machine allows users to experience digitization through the composition of poems and interaction with the installation. In this way the installation seeks to make the apparatus of digitization sensible. Apart from making a usable and meaningful literary installation, it proposes that digitization does not just make the book disappear into virtual libraries but instead on a more fundamental level changes writing itself. Furthermore, it suggests a tactic to comprehend and act against the disappearance (“burning”) of the book that has happened at many libraries. As not-just-art, it explores how tactics from electronic literature challenge traditional literary understanding through three interconnected levels.

(Source: The Metainterface by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold)

The Gathering Cloud collates research into the history and language of meteorology with current thinking about data storage and climate change. Archival material from the Met Office Archive and Library in Exeter has been studied and sifted, along with classical, medieval, and Victorian sources, including, in particular, Luke Howard’s classic essay On the Modifications of Clouds, first published in 1803.

This research material is presented as a sequence of texts and images, acting both as a primer to the ideas behind the project and as a document of its movement between formats, from the data centre to the illuminated screen, from the live performance to the printed page. In his foreword media theorist Jussi Parikka describes the work as “a series of material transformations made visible through a media history executed as digital collage and print publication, hendecasyllabic verse, and critical essay”.

This work won the New Media Writing Prize 2016.

source: http://www.uniformbooks.co.uk/thegatheringcloud.php

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed, quit Facebook in 2013 because “it does things on our behalf when we’re not even there. It actively misrepresents us to our friends, and worse misrepresents those who have befriended us to still others.” Using MySocialBook – an online platform that allows to print books from both personal Facebook profiles and the ones of friends and pages – I made a book out of the fan page that Rushkoff abandoned in 2013, selecting the period of time in which he was actively using it. (Source: http://silviolorusso.com/douglas-rushkoffs-new-book/ )