The complex architectures of the new “memory palaces”, from libraries, archives and museums to the IT structures, databases and server farms that feed the flow of data on the network. The transitional situation that we are experiencing, which brings together a book culture with a culture of the screen, is gradually shifting us from a graphic reason to a computational one. In the same way that writing has made it possible to generate a particular mode of thought, where lists, tables and formulas have played a primordial role in the modeling of knowledge. With digital technology, other systems of knowledge ...

Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. This book sets out to show how expanded archival practices can challenge contemporary conceptions and inform the redistribution of power and resources. Calling for the necessity to reimagine the potentials of archives in practice, the three contributions ask: Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle?

En los últimos años, el lugar del documento y los archivos ha cobrado una fuerte dimensión pública y han suscitado importantes debates ético-políticos frente a aquellas posturas que los dimensionan únicamente en tanto mercancía o activo económico. De este modo, la segunda emisión del Encuentro Internacional Archivos fuera de lugar. Desbordes discursivos, expositivos y autorales del documento, realizado en el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo en colaboración con Ex Teresa Arte Actual, convoca a la reflexión de diversos agentes vinculados con la práctica del archivo —desde el arte contemporáneo y otras prácticas que lo atraviesan— para exponer casos y posicionamientos concretos. Esta ...

We are sitting here at ECAV in our current working place, which is the salle de réunion at the administration. Our fingers are typing this letter to invite you to contribute a text within the Art Work(ers) research project. We are thinking about how closing factories and the use of industrial ruins have affected our ways of working in the arts, and of the promises of creative economies. What narratives have been created to tell stories of art and industrial production as well as of deindustrialisation. Besides looking at historical examples such as EAT, Artist Placement Group, Equipo 57 & Grupo ...

On the ledger and the herbarium: the settling of financial and botanical accounts. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the age of digital media and TCP/IP protocol architecture, the 1989 discovery of the manuscript of Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863) in a locked safe perhaps appears more dramatic than the unpublished novel’s retrospectively tepid dystopian prophecies. Yet its narrator Michel Jérôme Dufrénoy’s employment in the banking house of Casmodage et Cie. provides unexpected insight into what it meant to keep the books in nineteenth-century France. The novel is set in a Paris of the 1960s, when literary culture was ...

In the wake of the so-called digital revolution numerous attempts have been made to rethink and redesign what scholarly publications can or should be. Beyond the Flow examines the technologies as well as narratives driving this unfolding transformation. However, facing challenges such as the serial crisis, knowledge burying or sudoku research the discourses and practices of scholarly publishing today are mainly shaped by confusion, heterogeneity and uncertainty. By critically interrogating the current state of digital publishing in academia the book asks for how a sustainable post-digital publishing ecology can be imagined.

Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg Institute, discusses the work of Frances Yates and Aby Warburg’s library.

What you are hearing right now, if you’re at 1:48 of my recording, which I did via my iPhone’s “Voice Memos” function, is me typing the words you’re currently reading. I’m in Bobst Library, which is New York University’s library. I’m in a computer lab with 24 Apple computers. I’ve probably been in this computer lab 2000+ times. Besides me, there are 6 people in here. I haven’t counted the number of computers or estimated the amount of days I’ve been in here—that I can remember at the moment—until today, and I’ve been using this computer lab for something like ...

This issue was produced as part of The End(s) of the Library, a series of exhibitions at the Goethe-Institut New York Library organized by Jenny Jaskey from October 30, 2012 to June 21, 2013; hence the German theme. The Serving Library was resident for three months at the end of The End(s), from April Fools’ Day on, in the form of a hang of objects from our collection of source material. if all went according to plan, the end of the library show was marked by the launch of this issue. *Wie ein Pfeil lief ich einfach durch.* With many thanks to ...

For this PILOT issue, we have posted PDFs, bound and printed the publication over the first six months of 2011 in advance of launching. From now on, bulletins will be posted to this website as they are ready. If you would like to be told when a new season is complete, and the printed version available, you can join our mailing list. We begin with a plea to remember dead media by Bruce Sterling; an 8-part examination of the Octopus Vulgaris as a metaphor for post-symbolic communication (whatever that might mean) by Angie Keefer; a zero-sum conversation about Libraries and ...