Fantasies of the library
By: edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin
Edition: Revised, second edition.
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 147
ISBN-13: 9780262035200
Subjects: Libraries; Libraries in art; Philosophy
Description: "Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas--as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, 'Reading Rooms Reading Machines' further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others. The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book--and this book--'resists the digital,' argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, 'but not in a nostalgic way.'"
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Melancholies of the paginated mind : the library as curatorial space  -- Anna-Sophie Springer; title: The library as map  -- Megan Shaw Prelinger & Rick Prelinger in conversation with Erin Kissane; title: Andrew Norman Wilson : ScanOps --; title: Intensive geographies of the archive  -- Hammad Nasar in conversation with Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin; title: Reading rooms reading machines  -- curated by Anna-Sophie Springer; title: Letter to the Superior Court of Quebec regarding Arg.org  -- Charles Stankievech; title: The ethics of the book (beyond species nostalgia) -- Joanna Zylinska in conversation with Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin.