Despite their ubiquity and relevance, data collection practices remain opaque and their carbon footprint has rarely been investigated. What is more, data collection is a key resource in the global supply chain of AdTech, the primary business model of the data economy system. The Carbolytics project, developed by artist and researcher Joana Moll in collaboration with researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, is a way of understanding the collective existence of cookies and their role in the outsourced production of carbon dioxide. The interactive web-based installation shows the average global volume of cookie traffic in real time and demonstrates how cookies parasitize ...

THIRD REPORT Two of the protagonists of the final iteration of the exhibition project The Gutenberg Galaxy at Blaker were makers of books who have had a profound influence on the archival practice of Guttorm Guttormsgaard. They were also experts in the destruction of books. A friend of Asger Jorn (1914– 1973) once noted how the Danish artist “presented a danger to any book collection” as he used to tear out pages from books belonging to others in order to create his own. Jorn’s compatriot Rudolf Broby-Johansen (1900–1987) was also a notorious book slaughterer, leaving behind a trail of books full ...

Social change does not simply result from resistance to the existing set of conditions but from adapting and transforming the technical apparatus itself. Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Author as Producer’, written in 1934, recommends that the ‘cultural producer’ intervene in the production process in the manner of an engineer. The term ‘engineer’ is to be taken broadly to refer to technical and cultural activity, through the application of knowledge for the management, control and use of power. To act as an engineer in this sense, is to use power productively to bring about change and for public utility. ...

An excerpt from the third Report from the Gutenberg Galaxy (Blaker), this essay forms part one of a diptych in which Matthew Fuller develops the idea of the book as diagram, and tries to imagine what new forms of readers might be bred in a book culture transfigured by computational forms.

A Sarai is an enclosed space in a city, or, beside a highway, where travellers and caravans can find shelter, sustenance and companionship; a tavern, a public house, a meeting place; a destination and a point of departure; a place to rest in the middle of a journey… The Sarai Reader (which is the first of what we hope will be more such collections) can be seen both as a navigation log of actual voyages and a map for possible journeys into a real and imagined territory that we have provisionally called the “Public Domain”. This republic without territory is a ...

This year’s Sarai Reader brings together a range of critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary, marked by spreading media cultures, new social conflict and globalisation. Scholars, media practitioners, critics and activists use a flow of images, memories and hidden realities to create a fascinating array of original interventions in thinking about cities today. In the context of India, where a large part of this reader has been edited, this is significant, given the frugality of writing on city life in this part of the world. With essays, images, analyses, and manifestoes The Cities of Everyday Life reflects on ...

Modernity’s great promise – the freedom from fear, now lies in ruins. One can argue that this vision was always compromised – modernity (especially in the form that emerged in the West, under Capitalism) always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears – the fear of epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal activity. This led to a drive for transparency: for separating the civic from the criminal, the civilised and the barbaric peoples, the human from the non human, life from the machine. With the advent of the mass slaughters of the ...

What lessons can architecture learn from software development, and more specifically, from the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement? Written in the form of a quasi-license, Urban Versioning System 1.0 posits seven constraints that, if followed, will contribute to an open source urbanism that radically challenges the conventional ways in which cities are constructed.

Wild Things is the first in a series of Blowup readers. It collects several essays on the subject of media art for animals. When curating this inaugural edition of Blowup, I was motivated by a desire to capture a sense of the current and future possibilities to reach non-human audiences. Several recent events inspired me to pursue this, including hearing about a university research project wherein a game between humans and pigs was being developed, and watching a friend’s cat play a game designed especially for cats on their iPad. Perhaps it is inevitable that our contemporary galaxy of gadgets such as ...