An expansive statement of intent, broadly concerned with Libraries, Media, and Time (though not necessarily in that order) Angie Keefer: AN OCTOPUS IN PLAN VIEW I. The etymology of the word “octopus” Octopus. Noun. A mollusk with eight sucker-bearing arms, a soft sac-like body, strong beak-like jaws, and no internal shell. A taxonomic genus within the family octopodidae. Origin: Greek, from OKTO-, meaning “eight,” plus -POUS, meaning “foot.” Plural: debatable. Rob Giampietro, David Reinfurt: FROM 1 TO 0 0: May I speak now? 1: Of course. I didn’t mean to get carried away, but— Dexter Sinister: A NOTE ON THE TIME The time right now is 2011 Feb ...

  This issue grew out of two physical incarnations of The Serving Library in 2011. The first took place from July 4–August 10 in the Walter Phillips Gallery of the Visual Arts department at The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. Here we set up a model of the library’s projected interior to house a six-week summer school titled From the Toolbox of a Serving Library. The school comprised daily morning seminars, supplemented by a few evening events. Each week was based on a specific component from a (Photoshop-proxy) digital software toolbox, in order to reconsider what a contemporary (Bauhaus-proxy) Foundation Course might ...

This Issue was produced under the auspices of the research program Dexter Bang Sinister at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, January 21 – October 28, 2012, curated by Rhea Dall. The program, devised by Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey together with writer-critic-curator Lars Bang Larsen, was based on Lars’s just-completed PhD dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, A History of Irritated Material: Psychedelic Concepts in Neo-Avantgarde Art. In practice, a large part of the so-called research played out in the form of an exhibition set up to explore the notion of *black & white psychedelia*— halfway closing the doors of ...

Issue #9 tackles all manner of SPORTS. It kicks off with a commentary on New England Patriots controversial Quarterback Tom Brady in view of Ancient Greek ideas of heroism, and ends with seminal Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly’s 1975 interview with Prime Minister Harold Wilson on the radio. In between, the issue slaloms around bodybuilding, bridge, ice hockey, tennis, darts, golf, reporting, running, drugs, rock climbing, basketball, and Pong.   THE SPORTING LIFE Junior Aspirin Records FAIR PLAY Rob Giampietro ENDLESS COMBINATIONS Linus Elmes QUIET EYES, MAGIC GUTS Leila Peacock ERRORS HIT ORIENT Chris Evans ROCK, PAPER, CHISEL James Langdon SERVE AND VOLLEY Justin Warsh and Miguel Abreu ...

Issue #10 is a TEST, containing one choice bulletin from each of the previous nine issues. It is a compendium of sorts, a best-of double-album printed at 50% scale, a sample for what’s next. This issue also includes 140-character summaries of every bulletin we have published previously in the printed journal and online and so serves as a retroactive portrait of the library we are busy assembling. From now on, Bulletins of The Serving Library will proceed in full color and at half its former size—but will be twice as good. To mark this change, 100 complete sets of the previous ...

In the first episode of Scratching the Surface, Jarrett talks with designer and writer Rob Giampietro. Rob is currently the Design Lead for Material Design at Google New York. In this conversation, we talk about how Rob approaches writing and designing, design as a critical activity, and the design writing he’d like to see more of.

The 2019/20 issue of The Serving Library Annual is entirely devoted to the late Italian designer, artist, inventor and polymath Bruno Munari. The core of the annual is the first English translation of Obvious Code, the 1971 collection of Munari‘s own writings, sketches and poems about his own work, published by arrangement with Corraini, who issued the book’s anastatic edition in 2017. It includes iconic design objects such as the Abitacolo, ground-breaking artworks such as his 1952 series of hand-made projection slides, and little known rhymes about the art market, as well as an original piece from his “unreadable books” ...