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 ...

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 ...

If the hype is to be believed then the next big thing is the Internet of Things. But is it what you think it is? Because the Internet of Things is not about things on the internet. A world in which all our household gadgets can communicate with each other may sound vaguely useful, but it’s not really for us consumers. The Internet of Things serves the interests of the technology giants, in their epic wrangles with each other. And it is they who will turn the jargon of “smart cities” and “smart homes” into a self-fulfilling prophesy. In this ...

Produced as a catalogue for the exhibition Holy Fire: Art of the Digital Age (2008), this book is more than a simple catalogue. Along with the works of the 27 artists in the exhibition it features the editors’ essays along with a collective interview involving some of the most important representatives of the new media art world.
 Holy Fire is not a book on new media art, but an exploration of the contemporary art of the digital age, and a pamphlet against the new media art paradigm and the self-isolation in which these practices evolved in the last sixty years.
 In ...

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 ...

Bruce Sterling, the world famous cyberpunk sci-fi writer and ideologue of hacktivism, writes about the Italian media conceptual artist Paolo Cirio’s works on the occasion of his personal exhibition Realityflowhacked. According to Sterling, Cirio thinks as a programmer and through aggregation, contextualization and fabrication, he “sculpts” data. He draws flow diagrams – which represent the way he sees and understands reality – to show maps of vulnerabilities possibly subject to be hacked. Cirio’s diagrams function at the same time as works of art with a precise aesthetics and as operating instructions. They are meant to reveal the unethical and obfuscating ...

The future never felt closer than it does today. A series of environmental, technological and social shifts are affecting today’s world and the human’s role within it. Continuous urbanization, the impact of the anthropogenic activity on the natural environment, the increasing use of algorithmic systems in all sectors of life, and the growing asymmetries of power among territories and populations, are all central issues at stake. How possible is it to address the future and the changes already taking place?