ERNESTINE ECKSTEIN (1941–1992) was ahead of her time. As the lone Black lesbian at an early gay rights protest in front of the White House in 1965, her legacy is one of courage and unwavering resolve for the liberation of all peoples. She was a vice president and active member of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first lesbian civil rights organization in the United States. She helped move the DOB away from the early homophile movement’s emphasis on medical legitimization and towards direct action in the form of protests and demonstrations which she described ...

GERARDO VELÁZQUEZ wrote filth poetry. No taboo was off limits. As a self-described militant homosexual, he skewered societal norms through his transgressive sound art, performances, computer graphics, song lyrics, and poems. Velázquez was born in Mexico in 1958 and later immigrated with his family to Los Angeles. In 1978, he co-founded the infamous synthpunk band Nervous Gender alongside bandmates Michael Ochoa, Edward Stapleton, and Phranc. The band emerged from the early LA punk scene of the late 1970s wielding synthesizers in lieu of guitars. Their sound was raucous and confrontational, fondly described by punk fanzine Slash as “absolutely un-hummable.” They ...

Immutable: Designing History explores the graphic genealogy of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a roughly 5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed blockchain ledgers. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering securitization techniques (material, technological, administrative) against the entropy of a document’s movement through space, time and the political. This project is proposed as a counter-position to the imperatives of graphic design education, which foregrounds logos, books, websites and branding while passports, money and property deeds constitute the field’s more profoundly ...

The history charted by the museum will be familiar to anyone who’s taken an introductory typography class. It begins with models of cuneiform tablets and Egyptian hieroglyphics, which slowly lead into alphabets by the North Semitic, the Phoenicians, the early- and classical-Greeks, the Etruscans, and then the Modern Roman characters we read in the west today, with significant attention paid to the technologies that made such writing and printing possible. The museum also features rooms dedicated to the development of Cyrillic, Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Cherokee, and Indic writing systems. Each room communicates a profound fascination ...

It’s funny because here we are talking about listening and four out of six people around me are wearing headphones, curating their own sound environment and blocking out others. Those parties where everyone dances and listens to the same music on wireless headphones is the closest to being “in it,” together. Plus, none of the neighbors call the cops. • Empathy is a term that appears in theories of the psychology of art, according to which visual art can make the general public experience emotions. Following this school of thought, art appreciation is not a matter of reason but of feeling. This ...

MILTON FANGLINN: My name is Milton Fanglinn. I don’t teach, no. I work in the antiquities industry as a kind of. . . well let’s say a freelance scholar. I run a small consulting business, first out of New York but now from London, authenticating and researching the provenance of ancient objects in the field. Most of these don’t things have paper- work, or known owners, and are probably never going to be seen by the public. I have worked discreetly for many of the finest museums in the world, none of which would ever want its competitors to know ...

MOONSTORM was a lesbian-feminist magazine published by the Lesbian Alliance of St. Louis, Missouri, USA, from 1973 to 1980. The magazine was published through the Alliance’s imprint Tiamat Press, and its themed issues covered topics like food justice, violence, gay and lesbian bars, and collectivity. In a 1974 issue, the editors shared their goals: “…our main reason for putting out the magazine is to have a means for lesbians to communicate with each other, a means for them to share their knowledge, experiences, and feelings … We all want to encourage women to write … We know there are enormous ...

…There’s no thing for a library to buy and shelve, nor a standardized way to price the media files originating in a platform’s attention economy, where value only correlates to further exchanges of other kinds of labor. In library science terms, these publications might be thought of as the digital versions of realia, physical objects that resist classification but must be cataloged and stored anyways, like honorary jars of dirt, textiles, or other material leftovers from daily life…

A conversation between Library Stack and Sam Hardy, a British archaeologist who tracks the black market trade in illicit antiquities. Working from London and Rome, Hardy studies Conflict Antiquities: that’s everything from the looting of ancient objects at unguarded archaeological sites, to thefts from national museum collections, to the anonymous finds of amateurs with metal detectors. Library Stack got in touch with Sam to learn more about his work, and about how this global trade cuts across contemporary politics. Sam spoke at length about how the presumed cultural right to understand the past sometimes pushes against the implicit human right ...

Newly published by ROMA Publications in a yearly format, this inaugural issue of The Serving Library Annual is realised in collaboration with Public Fiction, a journal and exhibition-maker based in Los Angeles. Public Fiction’s next project, which runs broadly concurrent to this new Annual’s lifespan, is named The Conscientious Objector — a multifaceted endeavour commissioned by West Hollywood City Council that unfurls in parts from September 2017 to April 2018. These bulletins have been conceived as one part: they deal with acts of civil disobedience and other forms of resistance, particularly in view of the relationship between entertainment and power. Contributors ...

Shifter published ten issues between 2004 and 2007. Issues 1 to 9 were distributed as free PDFs. With the 10th issue a short print run accompanied its digital counterpart. This anthology presents re-edited and reformatted versions of first ten issues, in order to consider them together and take stock of the early period of Shifter.