Underground nuclear and military materials have been the subject of international commissions, tribunals, and wars. Yet subterranean facilities also commonly inventory a similarly volatile, though less noxious, resource: information. SubTropolis’s central location, solidity, and security have drawn technology companies, who host data centers in the mine’s massive pillared rooms. Many underground garrisons and command centers of the Cold War era have likewise become “data bunkers.” Given that industrial metaphors of “mining” and “smithing” have long pervaded the discourses of intellectual labor, it should be no surprise that we’re now data mining inside our mines. And alongside the subterranean servers and ...

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 ...

Author Chris Lee in conversation with scholars Shannon Mattern, Francisco Laranjo and Lisa Gitelman about the new eBook Immutable: Designing History, which traces the evolving graphic strategies of documents, money and writing and their entanglements with statecraft and colonialism. This event took place online on June 15th, 2022.

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 ...

In 2015, the American Library Association adopted the Resolution on the Importance of Sustainable Libraries; since then, other international organizations have been quick to go along with the proposal, reporting on the potential relationship between sustainability and libraries. However, such documents (which, in general, support the role of librarians in building “sustainable, resilient and regenerative” communities and making “sustainable decisions”) remain purely statements of intent… that include a handful of trendy topics in their paragraphs, and fall short of being credible action plans. It is worrying to note that, despite the seriousness and urgency of the discussion, these statements tiptoe ...

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 ...

To celebrate the ebook Ming Romantic: Collected and Bound, 2nd Edition, authors Caspar Lam and YuJune Park (Synoptic Office) are in conversation with contributor Chris Wu (Wkshps) about the origins of the Ming Romantic typeface, their shared practices across the field of graphic design, and their wider research into Chinese typography. The discussion ranges widely, from bilingual design to the 2008 Beijing Olympics to using AI for imagining new forms of Chinese type.

Ming Romantic: Collected and Bound, 2nd Edition folds together reproductions of historical documents with contemporary texts to examine how Chinese typography can evolve through the use of digital tools and manipulation of form. The ebook also illustrates the design process of Ming Romantic, a display face reinterpreting a style of printed type originating in China’s Song and Ming dynasties. The typeface imagines how the character set could look when divorced from the effects of the brush. Ming Romantic comprises three sections: “Possibilities: Typographic Speciation”; “Translations—Putting It Together: Conversations about Language & Form, Ming Romantic, and It’s Our Ming”; and “Myths: Chinese ...

The iPhone 3G, this innocuous and already slightly outmoded little cluster of minerals and marketing, is an emblematic meeting point for the material and symbolic processes shaping the contemporary entanglement of social and geologic stratifications: both product and engine of the great cleavages of the global economy, those geopolitical fractures that Marxist critics refer to with euphemistic kid gloves as “uneven development;” a treasured possession bound up with resource wars and environmentally destructive extraction practices driven by a rapacious global system of neo-colonial corporate-feudalism; the consumer excretion of a world where exhausted Chinese factory workers are driven to suicide satisfying ...

…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 ...