"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?”

Will the mixture of readers who take home books and researchers who work inside the library, of premodern and postmodern architecture, of old and new functions, desecrate a building that embodies the finest strain in New York’s civic spirit?... By directing the flow of users through a separate entrance to a separate collection on the ground floor, it avoids disturbing the readers doing research on the second and third floors. But the space could be used differently. Another plan could devote less room to the general public and more for storing books. This objection lies at the heart of the critics’ case, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Could a simpler plan retain the current stacks under the Rose Main Reading Room and still leave space for the Mid-Manhattan Library? Almost certainly not... Trucking as an answer to twenty-first-century problems of delivering books to readers? The time, expense, gas consumption, and environmental pollution make the current policy look short-sighted. We should find a way to take advantage of digital communication, despite the opposition of publishers and the obstacles of copyright laws.

The telephone, once it began to penetrate the household (at first just the wealthiest homes), moved from front hallway to living room to kitchen to bedroom and then, finally, into the pocket. It is quite likely that the closest clock to you is now your phone.

During that trajectory, the phone went from a crafted piece of furniture to mass-produced icon of standardized industrial design to anonymous commodity object—with only a few memorable detours into “design” along the way

A parody of TED talks 11:20 --> 16:30-ish

Kazys Varnelis: One of your most remarked-upon statements is "curating is the new criticism." How do you set about this in curating?
Pedro Gadanho: There are several critical issues in that phrase.
One is the demise of criticism itself. Now that we spend our time reading over the Internet, criticism faces a visual culture and has trouble getting its messages across.
Curating uses the same tools as the Internet and television to communicate. An exhibition is an audiovisual operation. We can mobilize materials to which the general public can react to more effectively than criticism can.
Criticism is a matter of getting the critical function of architecture, of how architects reflect on the world, to a wider public while also bringing critical ideas to bear on the discipline. As an activity, curating can be layered to include both, communicating about a practice like that of architecture at a surface level at the same time as it provides deeper levels of critical content through the texts it originates, either in the space of the exhibition or in the catalog. I am influenced by Umberto Eco's notion of the "open work" in which he suggests that in one work you can address different audiences with differing cultural baggage, allowing them to respond to what is there in their own ways. In MoMA most of the audience is not architectural but you still have to respond to the discipline. So here there are two levels, one with regards to the discipline and one directed at the function of architecture within society.

The main building currently houses around 5 million books. About 3 million reside in an extensive series of stacks that occupy the center of the building. They are made up of structural steel, some of it created by the Carnegie steelworks—as originally built, these stacks held about sixty-three miles of shelves. An additional 1.2 million books are held in “compact shelving” beneath Bryant Park, with the stacks on rollers; the rest are scattered through various parts of the building.... The entire world library system holds about 6 million editions that were published before 1923, the rough cut-off date for copyright in the US, and Google has already digitized more than 2 million of them. Once all of these books are digitized, the history of the 19th century, or at least how it’s researched, will begin to look rather different. (Books published prior to the 19th century are generally too fragile for Google to scan, and many have already been scanned by companies like Gale and ProQuest and made available in subscription databases such as “Early English Books Online.”)...

according to a former staff member who has seen the initial plans, Foster’s design may well call for the demolition of not just the stacks but of much of the marble facade that currently stands on the Bryant Park side of the building, and whose windows and marble pillars are exactly aligned with the rows of steel stacks inside. If the stacks go, the facade is likely to go as well. In the facade’s place, we will likely see some kind of ambitious new glass entrance; Foster’s designs are distinguished by their commitment to bringing natural light into interior spaces, and Foster will no doubt try to brighten up a building that is, in spots, a little gloomy....

Beyond that, it appears that the library inside the new glass entrance will be a compromise between huge open spaces like the main reading room and smaller meeting rooms where groups can congregate and talk and work—the activities the library’s administrators, following the latest trends among education visionaries, believe will be the main way people will learn in our post-book, post-sustained-silent-reading world. It will not be a giant internet cafe, exactly, as the Nation’s Scott Sherman and others have suggested. But much of the renovation will look more like what university administrators like to call a “learning commons” than what we tend to think of today as a library. In response to the question “What will replace the stacks?” the library’s website says, “Books!” That’s just not true, and it’s certainly not true in the long term. Micah May stated to me plainly: “We can’t build the new renovation around circulating books.” The new library will retain the circulating collection for a little while, but it will be designed for the digital future. As for the research-level books, most of them are leaving. Of the 5 million books currently housed at the main building, only 2 million will remain....

There was, for a time at least, a stronger alternative vision of what the research library could become. In 2007, the administration hired Josh Greenberg, a thirtysomething digital guru with a PhD in Science and Technology Studies, to help guide the transition to digital. Greenberg had been one of the principle creators of Zotero, a leading tool in the “digital humanities” movement which allows dissertation writers and others to easily embed and keep track of references to scholarly articles in their texts. At the New York Public Library, he was supposed to set up a research and development center to figure out what a public research library could do online that academic libraries and circulating libraries couldn’t. This center was to be called NYPL Labs, modeled on Google Labs, and it was supposed to create experimental beta projects that took on important research questions and involved the wider public in their solution—“crowdsourcing” at a high level. ...Private companies can undertake such a project, but not for the public good; private universities can do it, because they have the money and the map collections, but they would not likely involve the public; an open-source collective of map enthusiasts could do it, but they might have trouble getting the old maps. The New York Public Library, by contrast, is uniquely well-positioned for exactly this kind of project: the library has the resources necessary to create new knowledge, in the form of millions of old books, maps, images, and so forth, and it also “has more surface area than any other institution of its kind,” as Josh Greenberg put it to me, “touching communities from the broadly public to the highly specific academic.”... As Greenberg’s successor, Ben Vershbow, told a reporter at the Atlantic, NYPL Labs is “more an idea than a real unit.” The group’s other projects include a site that animates old stereograms, small collections of librettos and theatrical lighting plans, and a tie-in for an exhibition. Learning about these developments, I was troubled that the library seemed not to be doing enough in a field they claim to want to embrace; I was troubled too by the degree to which the communications department had become involved in these projects, and by their insistence that the library’s online exhibition on Voltaire’s Candide, mostly designed to be used by school-age children, represented a genuine contribution to scholarship.

... This new breed of trustee is more data-driven and results-oriented.... According to staffers, Offensend has been instrumental in the shift toward a “business and metrics” sort of thinking. He told the Princeton alumni website in 2009, “If an organization is receptive, the application of business world experiences can have a huge positive impact.” But what kind of business and what kind of metrics? It was under Offensend that Booz Allen was brought in; it was under Offensend, and in the wake of the Schwarzman gift, that the ambitious plan to fundamentally reconfigure the library took shape....

But the New York Public Library has since its founding been democratic in a more than simply numeric sense.... Given the possibilities for learning online, it can be hard to see why the public would support a marble mausoleum to what can seem like a dying ideal, the independent scholar, or why philanthropists would donate to an institution that serves impoverished researchers, rather than the illiterate. The typical user at the research library is “well educated but poor,” as Heike Kordish put it to me. That’s not a demographic that anyone, politician or philanthropist, is desperate to serve. But that’s what the library was set up to do, and that is what it has done for the past hundred years—and while I certainly don’t begrudge the administration’s decision to devote resources to the users of its branch libraries, it is simply absurd to suggest that providing the best possible resources to anyone who walks through the door is somehow undemocratic because not every member of the public happens to make use of them. The people who do go to the library make the trek to Midtown precisely because they can’t get access to its resources elsewhere. Many of the heaviest users are students at City University and City College...

visitors to the library’s website are invited to “join the conversation” by submitting comments. The comments, however, do not appear on the website and there is no space for public discussion. The “conversation” goes one way. Similarly, when the administration, in response to growing criticism of the plan, convened a panel of scholars and writers to serve as an advisory board of sorts in the spring of 2012, it almost immediately vitiated whatever legitimacy the board could have by disinviting the respected essayist Caleb Crain, who had written about the advisory board, quite circumspectly, on his blog. This, unfortunately, is the way it was always meant to go. In a slideshow that presented the renovation plans to staff in 2008, there was a single box for how the administration would involve the public: “Communicate and market the strategy to key internal and external stakeholders.” Communicate and market—this is what “managed democracy” looks like.

Whenever I asked the administration about the direction they had chosen, I was told the plan was fundamentally democratic because it gave the people what they want—and what the people want could be determined through the endless surveys and focus groups conducted by the library’s consultants and its own internal strategy department.

When librarians expressed concerns about the renovation, they got the same response. This constituted a huge shift in the library’s decision-making process. Where before members of the library’s staff were involved in an open process at almost all levels, with an internal committee of librarians parallel to a faculty senate at a university, now a few librarians are interviewed by consultants, and senior management makes virtually all large-scale decisions on its own...

Of all the justifications for the renovation, none is more disingenuous and misleading than the claim that the library is simply trying to make the main building more “democratic.” This is a facility that has stood for over a century and provided unparalleled service to a public that no other institution gives a damn about. It is the most democratic research library in the world, far more welcoming to the average user than the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Museum, or the Library of Congress, let alone the libraries at Harvard and Yale....

Oligarchs acting in the people’s name (with the people’s money) is not democratic; selling off New York’s cultural patrimony to out-of-town heiresses, closing down treasured divisions and branches, pushing out expert staff, and shipping books to a war[…]

Keynote by Graham Harman (us)
Moderated by Christopher Salter (ca/de)

The idea that everything is interconnected has become a staple of intellectual life. As a related phenomenon, “contextualisation” is now the method of first resort throughout the humanities. This lecture opposes the general trend of emphasising systems and wholes over autonomous individuals. Among the greatest drawbacks of holistic ontology is its inability to explain disruptions and surprises in any system it studies. At best, one posits some sort of “materiality” lying outside all formatted systems that serves as their underground source of change, a theory that fails for a variety of reasons. The only alternative is to adopt an object-oriented model of fully formatted entities lying beyond the grasp of the human mind and even of each other. After providing some theoretical background for this claim, I will consider several recent political phenomena that are better understood by an object-oriented approach than a holistic one.

Now imagine a central clearinghouse for those records, an online hub researchers could consult to find archival materials.... "So if I'm interested in a particular person," Mr. Pitti says, "I can find where all the records are that would be required to understand them." For instance, a search for Robert Oppenheimer turns up a link to a collection of the physicist's papers housed at the Library of Congress, plus links to other collections in which he is referenced, a biographical timeline, and a list of occupations and subjects related to his life and work.

A researcher can explore a person's social and cultural environment with SNAC's radial-graph feature. It creates a web, which can be manipulated, of a subject's connections as revealed in archival records. The radial graph of Oppenheimer's network, for instance, includes George Kennan, Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Schweitzer, among many other names represented as nodes on the graph.

The SNAC project is addressing a longstanding research challenge: discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records. Scholars use these records as primary evidence for the lives and work of historical persons and the events in which they participated. These records are held in archives and manuscript libraries, large and small, around the world, and scholars may need to search scores of different archives, following clues, hunches, and leads to find the records relevant to their topic (and it is likely that at least some records will remain undiscovered). SNAC aims to not only make the records more easily discovered and accessed but also, and at the same time, build an unprecedented resource that provides access to the socio-historical contexts (which includes people, families, and corporate bodies) in which the records were created.

The project uses a recently released Society of American Archivists communication standard for encoding information about persons, corporate bodies, and families, Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). EAC-CPF standardizes descriptions of people and groups who are documented in archival records.

The opportunity that Mr. Powers had in Germany to merge artistic practice with doctoral-level scholarship is something that increasing numbers of artists in academe want to see duplicated in the United States, where the master of fine arts has long reigned as the discipline's terminal degree.

Many leaders of schools of art and design and of arts programs at universities describe the spread of visual-arts doctorates—whether practice-based, scholarly, or some combination—as being "inevitable" in the United States. The doctorate, they say, will very likely displace the M.F.A. They cite as evidence a growing body of scholarship on the subject, developments abroad, and recent sessions exploring the visual-arts doctorate at scholarly associations and at colleges.

Meanwhile, critics of arts doctorates raise economic, philosophical, and ethical concerns about the degree. Many of the concerns are similar to those raised in other academic fields: Is it acceptable to enroll students in graduate programs with uncertain futures and employment prospects? What is the real value of a doctorate? What is the nature of advanced study in a practical discipline? And how wise is it for American universities to duplicate the programs of foreign universities, which operate under different economic models?...

About 40 doctoral programs in studio art are available abroad, most of them in Britain, Europe, and New Zealand, says George E. Smith, president of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. In 2007 the institute, in , in Portland, Me., admitted its first cohort of visual artists seeking Ph.D.'s in philosophy and art theory, and they are finishing their dissertations. A handful of programs in the United States offer studio-based, practical doctorates, more scholarly focused Ph.D.'s, or some combination....

The intensity of the debate and the level of scholarly attention to the arts doctorate have continued to rise: 2011 marked the first year that it became impossible for one person to read all the scholarship on visual-arts doctorates, says Mr. Elkins, of Chicago.

In recent months, the College Art Association, the chief disciplinary society dedicated to the scholarship and teaching of the visual arts and art history, hosted a two-part workshop, "Ph.D. for Artists: Sense or Nonsense?" The School of Visual Arts, in New York City, sponsored a panel discussion last year that was titled, "The Reluctant Doctorate: Ph.D. Programs for Artists?"

Making the M.F.A. Useless?...

Leaving the production of knowledge and the interpretation of works to historians of the discipline, as has traditionally been the case in the visual arts, is no longer satisfactory, says Joel E. Towers, executive dean of Parsons the New School for Design. A committee there is exploring starting doctoral programs in the visual arts and design.

"It would be kind of a crime if we were to get caught in a traditional mode of production of a Ph.D. and say, 'The only way it'll work is if you give me 500 pages,'" he says.... Elevating the profile of the visual arts in academe may have other benefits, says Lisa H. Grocott, dean of academic initiatives at Parsons. Artistic and design processes and thinking may exert some influence over more empirical disciplines, such as the natural sciences.

Research does not always need to be methodical and purposeful, Ms. Grocott says. Artists and, particularly, designers use a different method, in which truth and empirical knowledge are not the ultimate goal; instead, the aim of design is to find the solution that offers the most appropriate remedy to a problem. "It'll change the way we might think about research and the way research presents itself," she says.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the most relevant features of qualitative research in order to show how, from the Epistemology of the Known Subject perspective I propose, it is necessary to review first the ontological and then the epistemological grounds of this type of inquiry. I begin by following the path that leads from the Epistemology of the Knowing Subject to the Epistemology of the Known Subject, proposed as a new and non exclusive way of knowing. I pass on to describe the primary and secondary characteristics of qualitative research, expressing the need for an ontological rupture. Finally, cognitive interaction and cooperative knowledge construction are considered as two fundamental features in the process of qualitative research grounded on the Epistemology of the Known Subject.

In March 2008, the New York Public Library announced a $100 million gift from private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and a sweeping plan to radically remake its landmark main building on 42nd Street. Six months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed; the plan, to no one’s surprise, was put on hold. Now, the administration has announced that the renovation, its budget increased from $250 to $350 million, is back on track. The proposed designs developed by British architect Norman Foster have not yet been made public, but the basic scheme remains the same: to tear out the steel stacks that occupy almost half of the main building—and that literally hold up the famed Rose Reading Room on the top floor—and replace them with a new circulating library. This library will offer plenty of books, DVDs, and other materials, which any patron will be allowed to take out of the building, unlike the current research collection. The plan will be financed through the sale of two of the library’s nearby branches—the Mid-Manhattan Library across the street and the Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) at Madison and 34th—and through a $150 million grant from the City of New York. The new super-library will also be designed for a time when the idea of physically circulating books becomes a thing of the past and practically all library “materials” will be available exclusively through digital devices.

...By its nature, a research library is a conservative institution. It is constrained from reevaluating its commitments and embarking in new directions by the sheer amount of capital it has sunk into its collections. Even if fewer people used the Slavic collection over time, the fact that the library had one of the world’s greatest Slavic collections meant that it had little choice but to go on buying Slavic materials. The library couldn’t, for example, respond to shifting immigration patterns by reducing its budget for Slavic books and shifting to Hispanic books, because it would then be left with a Slavic collection that didn’t cover present scholarship and an Hispanic collection that didn’t cover past scholarship. A great research collection could be created only by starting early, as the New York Public Library did by buying pretty much everything in its specialties from the late 19th century onward, and then by continuing to buy in those same fields, basically forever.... The advent of digital scholarship has begun to change this equation. Within a few decades it is likely that any reasonably well-endowed institution, the Abu Dhabi Public Library, say, will be able to subscribe to databases that will include more books than are held in the New York Public Library’s entire research collection. Large archives of unpublished material will still distinguish individual institutions—the more than 10 billion items held by the United States National Archives aren’t going to be digitized any time soon—but with most published books, it won’t matter whether a library became interested in the subject a hundred years ago or yesterday.... Most research libraries will still be constrained in how they shift their budgets, because the audience for most research libraries is determined by the institution they primarily exist to serve—their universities. Whether students are checking out French books or not, the library will buy French books, or their digital equivalents, for as long as the university has a French department. At the New York Public Library, by contrast, the decline in requests for research books has allowed the administration to question the very purpose of the research library, because there are no academic departments to tell the library what to do. The administration sees this as a virtue.

History of the NYPL collection -- history of fundraising -- rise of digital books and databases -- NYPL's use of consultants -- licensing -- budgets

Through webinars, installations, power points, performances, audio meditations and videos, Andrew Norman Wilson's interventions into the brands and infrastructures of Silicon Valley and other worldwide tech corporations question the roles of labor, power and capital; instigations, integral to understanding the movement of information economies in the global marketplace as well as the power relations that emerge from within them.  

ScanOps, titled after the internal department for Google's onsite book scanning contractors, is Wilson's latest series of works that reveal the software distortions and hands of ScanOps employees found in the photographic scanning site....

LD: Workers Leaving the Googleplex, responded to two versions of the film Workers Leaving the Factory: one by Harun Farocki and the other, the original by the Lumière brothers. The premise of your own video of course was to make a work that captured the shift in labor from the industrial proletariat into the informational proletariat...

The photographs that I chose are Google Books images in which software distortions, the imaging site, and the hands of ScanOps employees are visible. They’re both indexical, and medium-specific. Their processes, digital manipulations, and material supports are folded within them. Because of the speed and volume with which Google is executing the Books project, they can't possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface....

Someone has to turn a page and press a button. The workers compose part of the photographic apparatus, which, conceived in a broad sense includes not only the machinery, but the social systems within which photography operates. The anonymous workers, electrons, Sergey and Larry, the pink finger condoms, infrared cameras, the auto-correction software, the ink on my rag paper prints, me, the capital required to fund the project - we're all in it. It's not a dematerialized image world....


Everyone who uses the free Google perks - gmail, cloud-storage, Google Books, Blogger, YouTube - becomes a knowledge worker for the company. We’re performing freestyle data entry. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value in this process. Google, as we know it and use it, is a factory.

The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (CITE) will be the first of its kind, in scale and scope, fully integrated test, evaluation and certification facility dedicated to enabling and facilitating the commercialization of new and emerging technologies....

CITE will represent a 20th century American city with a population of approximately 35,000 people and be built on roughly 15 square acres. CITE’s test city will be unpopulated. This unique feature will allow for a true laboratory without the complication and safety issues associated with residents.

CITE will be a catalyst for the acceleration of research into applied, market-ready products by providing “end to end” testing and evaluation of emerging technologies and innovations from the world’s public laboratories, universities and the private sector.

CITE will be modeled after a mid-sized modern American city, integrating real-world urban and suburban environments along with all the typical working infrastructure elements that make up today’s cities. This will provide customers the unique opportunity to test and evaluate technologies in conditions that most closely simulate real-world applications.

In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our teaching practices and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration. The work we do as hybrid and critical pedagogues, digital humanists, and alternative academic publishers depends on our sharing ideas as part of a much larger project or conversation.
1. Attribute: "We attribute not just for rhetorical effect, but for intertextual familiarity. Sources no longer deliver merely arguments or data; they create an interactive critical network."
2. Defer: "In digital discourse, however, an article has less claim to such authority because it is in such immediate contiguity with parallel scholarship -- the Burkian conversation metaphor brought to fruition. Rather than everyone talking over one another, the best digital texts talk in turn, express appreciation and connection, and are honest about their indebtedness to related works."
3. Curate: "...the best curatorial practice is more overtly intertextual, bringing those links and web objects (and the people behind them) into meaningful conversation, making explicit and implicit connections between them."
4. Engage: "The hyperlink (both as a literal device in digital texts and as a metaphor) draws a direct line between things at a conceptual distance, pushing them (no matter how disparate) into direct (metonymic) contact. The hyperlink is a call-to-action in at least two ways. It asks the reader to venture off the page and into a sourced work. It also invites the author of the sourced work into the conversation, through the trackback that tells them when and where they’ve been cited."

rogram: To remodel an existing 7,000 sq.ft. 1930’s Art deco Masonry Building Art Gallery into office and work space for production of TV commercials and music videos... In essence, it exhibits a spatial biography, its surfaces and voids charged with fragments of memory etched into it over time. The surrounding interior space was conceived as a fluid surface wrapper rotating asymetrically around the centroid of the container. This surface wrapper alternately pushes close to and peels away from the walls and structure of the existing building. This push and pull or concealing and revealing formal strategy suggests a dynamic relationship between the new and old while indicating a design attitude that respects the integrity of the old while maintaining a commitment to the generation of an inventive and thoughtful new.

"Cementimental is the name under which I currently make all my experimental noises, using 'circuit bent' electronic sound-toys and basically whatever and whoever I can get my hands on. The project becomes more or less of a 'band' when I team up with various other noisy types to produce and perform deranged music and noise of many genres."

Carol Willis, the museum’s founder, says newspapers concentrated on Park Row in the mid-19th century to be close to City Hall, the courts and the main post office, which was important for mailing papers countrywide.

Some papers remodeled buildings and others built them, but none were particularly distinctive until the elevator made tall structures feasible. By the time he died in 1872, The Tribune’s founder, the abolitionist and reformer Horace Greeley, had made it into a national powerhouse, and had conceived of a way to advertise like no other paper, with a skyscraping billboard. On completion in 1875, the 260-foot-high Tribune Building was taller than anything else in New York, except for the spire of Trinity Church on Wall Street.

Not far from the paper’s shiny headquarters, the Times still keeps its morgue, the clippings archive that in the olden days was Google before Google, and where now newspaper clippings and photos – actual, physical things – go to die. Or to get resurrected on the Times photo blog, or on the morgue’s Tumblr site, http://livelymorgue.tumblr.com.

...it expands into an experimental set of questioning about time, obsolescence, and alternative histories as well. In one way, it is about analyzing the conditions of existence of media cultural objects, processes and phenomena. It picks up on some strands of “German media theory”, but connects that to other debates in cultural theory too.I like what Bernhard Siegert has said about the early ethos of media archaeology being that of Nietzschean gay science — experimental, exploratory, radical. Perhaps in this vein, media archaeology is one answer to the need to think transdiscplinary questions of art, science, philosophy and technology... how media archaeology can contribute to media historical inquiry as well as to thinking about archives and cultural memory.

"Silent World" suggests life would not be so peaceful in a completely silent city. It's unnatural and threatening; as fun as it'd be to climb all the sculptures at MoMa, the uneasy feeling of being the last person on earth could build and build until one goes mad.

Lucie & Simon create these vacuumed-up cityscapes by using a neutral density filter that allows for extra-long exposures, which removes moving objects like people and cars. The fact that the filter is "normally used by NASA for analyzing stars," according to art professor Klaus Honnef, ramps up the alien vibes of "Silent World." Here's Honnef explaining his attraction to the series:

The silence of the world, like a quotation, is suddenly endowed with an oppressive eloquence. Small intrusions are the true sparks here, because their disconcerting presence disrupts the majestic calm of the streets and squares.

Lucie & Simon, a French/German duo of photographers, recently put together a series of humbling photographs of huge urban spaces completely devoid of activity. The photographs (also with an accompanying video that ably mixes in Philip Glass and Daft Punk) show some of the busiest places in the world (Tiananmen Square, Times Square, Place Montparnasse) almost entirely empty, save for the built forms that contain the spaces.

Marc Aronson, a lecturer in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University at New Brunswick and a historian who writes books for young adults, recently suggested that all Ph.D. candidates be required to take a course he calls "Communications." The goal, Aronson explained on his blog, would be to teach Ph.D.'s—both would-be academics and those who will pursue other work—how to talk about what they do to a variety of public audiences... A Ph.D. communications course might bring together students from across a university. Together, they would explore disciplinary and interdisciplinary literacy in their different fields. The instructor might bring in such speakers as a documentary producer, a museum curator, or a book publisher. Those professionals would talk about the needs of their diverse audiences, and how a specialist might respond to them....

Learning how to successfully reach multiple audiences isn't only a skill. It's also a way of looking at the world that enables you to see alternatives to specialization. It's a habit of thinking that provides a necessary counterweight to the default tendency of losing yourself in a narrow field of knowledge.

In the last thirty years, no artistic form has made cultural capital so central to its identity, and no musical genre has better understood how cultural capital works. Disdaining the reserves of actual capital that were available to them through the major labels, indie musicians sought a competitive advantage in acquiring cultural capital instead. As indie’s successes began following one another in increasingly rapid succession, musicians working in other genres began to take notice. Hip-hop is an illustrative foil. As indie bands in the ’90s did everything they could to avoid the appearance of selling out, rappers tried to get as rich as possible. The really successful ones stopped rapping—or at least outsourced the work of writing lyrics—and opened clothing lines and record labels. But for all their corporate success, rappers knew where the real cultural capital lay. When Jay-Z decided, as an obscenely wealthy entertainment mogul, that he wanted finally to leave his drug-dealer persona behind, he got himself seen at a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg. “What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring,” he said to a reporter. One year later, his memoirs were published by Spiegel & Grau. 

Pitchfork has fully absorbed and adopted indie rock’s ideas about the uses of cultural capital, and the results have been disastrous.

In his iconic essay of 1784, "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant put it thus:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!...

The sentimental pathology of the American middle-class family—not to mention the mind-warping digitalization of everyday life—usually militates against such ruthless candor. But what the Life of the Orphan teaches—has taught me at least—is that it is indeed the self-conscious abrogation of one's inheritance, the "making strange" of received ideas, the cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one's parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom.

Some time in the Stone Age, probably between 6,000 and 12,000 years ago, high-status individuals in some cultures began to sit on small raised platforms, just large enough to hold a single person and with a backrest to support or frame the sitter. This was an effective way to designate elevated status among people who otherwise sat on the ground – much more so than stools, which lacked a back, and benches, which accommodated more than one person. The earliest evidence of these primitive thrones comes from figurines excavated in southeastern Europe, but single-person seats with a back were important status symbols in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well... During the Middle Ages, chairs were not common in the Western world at all. After the Visigoths sacked Rome, their habits of squatting and sitting on the ground became the predominant ways for commoners to sit and until the Renaissance even wealthy feudal households had very little furniture because they had to keep moving around to avoid getting sacked themselves... Eventually life got easier for the rich and lavish furniture became more widespread among the upper class. Style became increasingly important in furniture design through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and chair making, previously the domain of generalist woodworkers, became a specialized trade in its own right. Tellingly, furniture in this period was typically designed based on trends in decorating fashion rather than physiological concerns... That changed with the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly chairs were being made cheaply in factories and more people could afford to sit like the rich. At the same time, labor was being sedentarized: as workers moved en masse from agriculture to factories and offices, laborers spent more and more time sitting in those newly mass-producible chairs. As usual, class aspirations determined what people bought: body-conscious innovations like patent chairs, which were adjustable, and rocking chairs, which encouraged movement, sadly received only marginal acceptance from the wealthy and saw limited use.

And so it was that from the turn of the twentieth century on, chairs had society in their clutches.

The Library of Congress's blog on digital preservation

Our society is divided into castes based upon a supposed division between theoretical knowledge and practical skill. The college professor holds forth on television, as the plumber fumes about detached ivory tower intellectuals. The felt distinction between the college professor and the plumber is reflected in how we think about our own minds... When we reflect, we are guided by our knowledge of truths about the world. By contrast, when we act, we are guided by our knowledge of how to perform various actions... According to the model suggested by this supposed dichotomy, exercises of theoretical knowledge involve active reflection, engagement with the propositions or rules of the theory in question that guides the subsequent exercise of the knowledge. Think of the chess player following an instruction she has learned for an opening move in chess. In contrast, practical knowledge is exercised automatically and without reflection. The skilled tennis player does not reflect on instructions before returning a volley — she exercises her knowledge of how to return a volley automatically.

...There are barriers in our society erected by a false dichotomy between practical work and theoretical reflection. If someone develops early on a skill at repairing cars, she may falsely assume that she will not be adept at literary analysis or theorem proving. This robs not only her of opportunities but also society of a potentially important contributor to literary analysis or mathematics. The reward structure of society also assumes it, reflected in both the pay and the cost of pursuing what are thought of as the theoretical pursuits. The supposed distinction also operates on an everyday level... The distinction between the practical and the theoretical is used to warehouse society into groups. It alienates and divides. It is fortunate, then, that it is nothing more than a fiction.

Only a handful of born-again Theorists will refuse to acknowledge that the fundamental problem with Theory did not lie so much with the original works themselves (which is not to say they do not have their own problems), but with the ways in which they were used. Derrida can be annoying and mystifying, yet is usually a far more stimulating read than most Derrideans. In other words, the fundamental problem with Theory is that it stopped being theory. Derrida, or Lacan, or Deleuze, were not invoked to question, but to answer. The result was that the research always ended up validating the Theory, in an eternal, feedback-loop return. Theory always won...

If Theory is to survive, it must fall off its pedestal, and loose the capital. Foucault, Deleuze, and others will always remain a source of intellectual thrills, and should not be packed off to some new Enfer. But they, like every other theorist, should be read against the grain; only in this manner can they sharpen, rather than blunt, the mind. At the same time, the doors of theory must be opened wider: it is a curious parallel that at the very moment humanities professors were exploding the literary canon, they were cementing a most exclusive canon of Theory.

...like many others, I learned how to fake it.

Theory became a kind of confidence trick: a means of reducing the impossible workload to a few catchphrases: "Puhleese, the author's intentions are irrelevant here." "Everything is political." "There is nothing but the text." They were like the applause lines used by politicians. And they always seemed to work in seminars. All that was required, ultimately, was conformity with a set of political beliefs...

For all its avowed radicalism, Theory seemed to stifle the possibility of dialogue at the time in my life when I most needed it. When anyone can take offense at anything, the safest thing to be is silent or incomprehensible.

What graduate student has not felt the chill of failing to grasp someone's theoretical allusion in a seminar? Of a growing awareness that you are, by process of elimination, being coerced into offering some comment of support on a complex concept about which you know almost nothing? But you must say something...

Theory with a capital T grew up with the expansion of graduate programs and the adjunctification of higher education during the last 30 years. It was a ticket to success for a charmed circle of insiders: a few people at elite institutions with the connections and advance knowledge to get in and out of the game before the general rush...

And now it seems like everyone is rushing to get out with what's left of their devalued stock. Famous scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Homi Bhabha, and Terry Eagleton have announced that "theory is dead."...

I believe that literary and cultural theory can be subtle, learned, passionate, and aesthetically pleasing. And, of course, on a basic level, it is impossible to be a critic without some kind of theory. To claim to have no theory is like pretending to have perfect objectivity. We're all theorists now, and, ultimately, my grievance with theory has more to do with the credulousness of some secondhand practitioners than with the judicious application of various theories themselves.

I want my students to see theory as a means of shedding partial light on texts -- not a set of self-righteous dogmas that make literature irrelevant except as grist for the political mill. I want them to question the fundamental assumptions of everything, including theory itself. I want my students to know how to talk the talk, so that they will not have to be intimidated by the cynical use of jargon. I want them to avoid the tendency of Theory -- as it is too often practiced -- to define in painstaking detail the mote in thy brother's eye while ignoring the beam in thine own.

And, in the process, I am trying to teach myself not to care about the "Next Big Thing."

"Twig Terrariums is a verdant, Brooklyn, New York based venture, sprung from the minds of two old friends, Michelle Inciarrano and Katy Maslow. We create moss terrariums and other small worlds in antique, vintage, and new glass containers, apothecary jars, science glass, kitchenware, and any odd glass objects we find on our travels."

ha!

A study of three similar but distinct microcultures: the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge. Their soundscapes interrogated through the use of contact microphones, allowing us to listen to the physical infrastructure of the bridges and reveal their inherent macroacoustics. The film aims to treat the bridge as an anthropological body for discourse, as a physiology of limbs, organs, eyes and ears moving in time.

Yes is More remains effectively anchored to the book form but does lend itself to dynamic solutions (videos, 360-degree images) that enhance it and make good use of the iPad's capabilities. The result is a work that reflects the inspired and dynamic personality of its author and is bursting with content, but presents a few non-intuitive navigational obstacles and requires a certain dose of user receptiveness and patience.

Fuksas. A Journey through Architecture is a different matter. It is published by Encyclomedia, which has unquestionable historic credentials and was one of the first houses in Italy to work with multimedia. The work's structure is clear from the outset. An illustrated index allows you to browse through the app's 40 projects, which can be viewed via 10 lists that range from year of completion to city, structural design and consultants.

I should start by saying that my larger research project focuses primarily on the nineteenth-century NYC bookstore. But the Networked NY conference was a great opportunity to begin to think about the relationship between yesterday’s bookstore and the status (often described as the “plight”) of today’s bookstore—point here being that I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on the modern bookstore. It seems an obvious point to us today to say that the bookstore isn’t just about selling books—it’s about a lifestyle, about values, about community, literacy, culture. ... But with the rise of the dedicated retail bookstore—increasingly, though not always, separate from publishers—in the 19th century, we have the opportunity to consider how the bookstore imagined and produced itself as a venue for books in an urban landscape that had libraries, reading rooms, and street-corner book peddlers, among other book spaces. I focus on New York specifically because by the mid-19th century, it had become the national center for the book industry and had a lively, diverse bookselling trade.

The New York City Department of Records recently made 870,000 photos from its archives available online for the first time, offering a fascinating glimpse into the city's past, and some of the ways that life here has changed over the years.

NPR reported this morning on a traffic jam in California caused by an algorithmic glitch “accidentally summon[ing] 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning”. An excellent reminder of the tendency of algorithmic dysfunction to manifest as physical dysfunction, and (at a relatively small scale) of the potentially disproportionate impact of glitches when they are translated from dataspace into an infrastructural system.

"I think one of the weaknesses of the heavily relational approach of ANT (Actor Network Theory) is that it cannot adequately deal with the parts of the object that exceed its current relations. Latour’s best case studies (Pasteur, for example) are about things that have already happened. All the relations and translations have finally done their work, and we can use Latourian tools to explain how it occurred. …

Yet I’m not sure that ANT is quite as useful at counterfactual cases. What counterfactual cases do is allow us to look at the innate powers of a thing that might not have been expressible in their actual environment, and ask how things might have played out differently. …"

Contrary to what some might assume are imaginary little 1s and 0s, data are actual things that take up space. Microchip technology, according to Turek, is getting heartily outpaced by the amount of data that consumers and corporations are creating and storing. The data have to go somewhere – and those “somewheres” are massive “data centers,” which are actual brick and mortar things.... To avoid the dystopian future of sprawling, steaming piles of data centers (there’s no incentive to make these places nice to look at), we need better storage technology. One potential data storage hero is graphene, which is an atomically razor-thin sheet of bonded carbon atoms. Graphene has been shown to have exceptional qualities of electrical conduction and resistance to heat, and could potentially have a role in data memory devices. (There are stirrings that it could replace silicon, but the jury’s definitely still out on that.) Turek also mentions cloud computing and “new nano materials,” that aid with chip-cooling, as new technologies that can reinvent dated IT methods.

The Amazing Infrastructure That Powers IBM, Microsoft, And GE
CHRISTIAN STOLL CAPTURES SOME OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST CORPORATIONS IN WIDE-ANGLE SPLENDOR.

"Ms. Donovan, 38, who recently won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, has drawn attention over the last decade for her ability to transform huge quantities of prosaic manufactured materials — plastic-foam cups, pencils, tar paper — into sculptural installations that suggest the wonders of nature. The retrospective will include many of the works that made her name, like the series “Bluffs” (2006), which she created by gluing hundreds of thousands of clear shirt buttons together into craggy peaks that recall white coral reefs or stalagmites. "

Canadian wunderkind, David Altmejd, has quickly garnered a reputation for his fantastical chimeras, often realized through Dionysian fusions of synthetic flesh, metal armature, mirror, and fur. Werewolves, half man/half animal hybrids, Paleolithic colossi—all are card-carrying members of the sculptor’s artistic army—divinations culled from the birthing stages of human consciousness, which, had they not been positioned within the white cube of the contemporary gallery, might have found a more proper ancestry on the cave walls of Lascaux. Altmejd’s latest exhibition at Andrea Rosen, however (his third solo endeavor in the space), reveals a break in the artist’s penchant for such raw manifestations of the mind-body. In the wake of Altmejd’s arsenal of fetishistic taxidermied forms, calculatingly precise architectural interventions ensue. Museum-quality dioramas, executed on the sculptural level of history painting, and site-specific evocations and evacuations of space in plaster are only a few of the formal shifts on display.

“The Vessel” (2011) is the overwhelming harbinger of the show, comprised of a series of intricately connected Plexiglas compartments that, when viewed from the front, evoke an eerie illusion of symmetrical precision. Closer inspection reveals the artist’s measured hand at work, as we soon notice the staggering number of “entry points” into and out of the object... This experiment (indeed, the inner sanctum of the scientific lab is repeatedly evoked in Altmejd’s meticulous use of rare materials and Petri-dish displays) of connectedness vs. compartmentalization continues with the second monolithic vitrine, “The Swarm” (2011).

see also http://theidproject.org/blog/matt-jones/2011/04/15/weekly-art-32-altmejd-and-erik-wysocan-andrea-rosen

First, Guyton is a visionary in the mode of George W. Bush. Like Bush, he knows that history is on his side, he doesn’t like to exert too much effort, he knows he’s always absolutely right, and he lacks curiosity of any sort. Second, he appeals to those collectors who either manage or run hedge funds because they work long hours to produce nothing, while he doesn’t have to work very hard to produce a lot. Third, he makes himself both lovable and indispensable to academic theorists because his work can be seen as a series of increasingly perfected Pavlovian responses engendering equally precise Pavlovian praise. Professors and curators—the middle managers of cultural institutions—are happy to chant the mantra of appropriation, post-Duchampian/post-studio practice, and the death of the handmade, because they know he will deliver the goods in the right package.