Unfold is an online publishing and archiving platform based upon the structure of the digital folder. Conceived by different guest curators, every issue of Unfold explores a selected topic through constellations of research materials and new commissions to artists and writers. One after the other, the various installments will be archived to form a comprehensive and trans-disciplinary library. Unfold has an experimental vocation and believes in the free circulation of art and knowledge. Therefore all materials in Unfold blend genres and are available for free download and online consultation.

ABOUT UNFOLD #1 A Library Where the Books Have Melted Into One Another and the Titles Have Faded Away Sara Giannini In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm, and interdependent in harmony. The first installment of Unfold proposes a contrapuntist arrangement for coded texts, found images, field recordings, photocopies, notes and videos extracted from different times and places. Let’s play! Open the folder named “A Library Where the Books Have Melted Into One Another and the Titles Have Faded Away” and you will be led to two series of alphabetically ordered folders. Some of them ...

The Lesson of Zoology first appeared in the trash heap of contemporary Lisbon. While researching the role of Lisbon’s Geographical Society in one of the first planetary colonizations, we happened upon an antiquarian bookshop with seemingly endless piles of natural history lithographs. Among them, The Lesson stood out as an especially compelling meta-image of just what a lesson is—an ordering of nature, by way of presentation, about who intended to possess the earth.

Dear Kris, first I would like to thank you for participating to Unfold as our third guest curator with The Economy is Spinning, a multi-faceted curatorial project on the language of finance and its irrationality. Your Unfold#3 is in fact connected to the exhibition of the same name you have just curated for Onomatopee in Eindhoven and which, as is the case with all Onomatopee’s projects, will also produce a publication. With Unfold the process of translation and transmigration between the exhibition and the publication expands and takes over the space of the digital folder. Could you describe this three-folded relation between the exhibition, the folder and ...

Sara Giannini Dear Alessandro, thanks so much for your participation to Unfold as our 4th guest curator. Your Unfold#4: daily_unfold(ing) seems to show a structuralist approach to the digital folder, constituting the most meta Unfold issue so far! I am referring to the fact that the folders are rarely only containers but rather enunciation and narrative devices. Where did this exploration of the folder structure lead you? Alessandro Ludovico The folder has been used for its symbolic qualities by net artists and software artists since the ‘90s. These qualities include being a container which has a universal icon, but whose content is only limited by the OS structure or the ...