the library is a literal metaphor.
reflection⁄The Apocalypse of the Archive
The origin of the archive is always already linked to destruction. Something is preserved in order to avoid destruction. And vice versa, something is destroyed in order to abolish knowledge and memory. The destruction of books is as old as the book.
The Great shard⁄Library of Alexandria, the most famous historical attempt at a universal repository of human memory, vanished in flames. Yet, immediately after destruction, “daughter libraries” were established and the transmission of knowledge continued.
More than two centures earlier, around 213 BC, China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the first book burning in recorded history. Anticipating the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine who said “where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too”, he also buried alive some 460 scholars for owning forbidden books.
Later would come the Inquisition and the Nazis who would perfect the method of burning books together with burning people.
During the early days of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was burned to the ground together with some 3 million books and artifacts. With this event Sarajevo didn’t just lose a building, it was dispossessed and deprived of its memory, including of original documents from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires that were a testimony to various aspects of Bosnia’s centuries-old history and a proof of peaceful coexistence and multiculturalism even before the term was invented by the so called “West”.
Around the same time, during the 1990s, almost 2,8 million books or 13.8% of total books were removed from Croatian libraries. Not in flames, but in a seemingly more “civilised” process of “writing off books” – not only books about socialism and marxism, but also classics like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and others who were considered to be on the “Yugoslav” = “Serbian side”.
Thirty years later, we have witnessed a similar process in Ukraine that has “withdrawn” from its libraries around 19 million Russian and Soviet-era copies of books.
Since October 7th, 2023 until spring 2024, besides the destruction of public libraries, every single university in Gaza was bombed and more than 396 UNRWA and public schools were destroyed or damaged, which left more than 600,000 students without access to education. The Edward Said library, with its English language collection, is likely be ruined too.
As we can see, a new order, which usually comes after or during a war, is always connected to epistemicide, the systematic eradication of education and knowledge of those you want to destroy. Since war seems to be as old as humanity, we must consider epistemicide – along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s famous remark that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" – as old as “progress”.
In his book Archive Fever, based on a lecture given in London two years after Bosnia’s national library was destroyed, Jacques Derrida notably linked the compulsion to archive with Freud’s death drive: “right on that which permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction.”
Derrida calls this death drive the archive drive or archive fever (mal d’archive), claiming that there would be no archive desire without radical finidute. In other words,
the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.
If every archive is inevitably caught in this apocalyptic paradox, what is the use and meaning of archive in our (post-)apocalyptic times? Where does our contemporary archive fever come from if not from the realization that extinction, as the most radical finitude that we can imagine, also means the final death of the archive. Or not? What if the archive has to be pointed not only towards some possible future humans, but also other species that might be a receiver of the memory of the world in some near or distant future?
What is at stake today is not simply extinction and destruction of the biosphere, but also the semiosphere – namely the universe of signs that we created. The question is the following one: who and how is going to interpret these signs after the end of the world as we know it?
While today everyone is occupied by the short-term perspective and destroying the world as quickly as possible, it is precisely these sorts of questions that need to be raised – how to communicate something to the future while preserving it even if the (semiotic) context of the archive might be completely destroyed? If even 4,500 years after the famous Giza Pyramids were built, we are still not able to fully comprehend them, what guarantee is there that some future archaeologist will be able to understand our contemporary semiotic systems and archives?
Interestingly, these kinds of questions were posed in 1981 by the US Department of Energy and the Bechtel Group, the conglomerate in charge of maintaining and securing several nuclear facilities in the United States. Their main concern was how to communicate the Apocalypse (as revelation) about the dangers of buried or leaking radiocactivity to future generations. So, they invited a team of linguists, semioticians, anthropologists and nuclear physicists into The Human Interference Task Force to explore how to reduce the likelihood of future interference in radioactive waste repositories.
The prime objective of this grand initiative of applied “nuclear semiotics”, which had to take into account also the possibility that over such a long period spoken and written languages might go extinct, was to come up with concrete proposals of how to transmit knowledge about the repositories to future generations. To put it simply, how do we prevent some future archaeologists from thinking that they have found the Giza pyramids of our time instead of nuclear waste?
The Human Interference Task Force concluded that significant reductions in the likelihood of human interference could be achieved, for perhaps thousands of years into the future, if appropriate steps are taken to communicate the existence of the repository. Consequently, the Task Force directed most of its study for two years towards the field of long-term communication. Around the same time, in order to determine how to convey such a message to a distant future, the German Zeitschrift für Semiotik carried out a survey in 1982 asking the following question:
How would it be possible to inform our descendants for the next 10,000 years about the storage locations and dangers of radio- active waste?
The responses, even though the period of 10,000 years seems a rather optimistic projection of how long nuclear waste would stay radioactive, were highly original and thought-provoking, even from today’s perspective. And the more we head out into the one-way street of planetary catastrophe, the more interesting – and important – they are becoming. Because they open up the terrain of the shard⁄long-term perspective that is so absent today, and, at the same time, a sense of urgency and necessity to widen our shard⁄sense of shard⁄imagination.
For instance, the American semiotician and linguist Thomas Sebeok, one of the founders of “zoosemiotics” and “biosemiotics”, who was a member of the Human Interference Task Force in the early 1980s, proposed the creation of what he called an “Atomic Priesthood”, a panel composed of scientists (physicists, anthropologists, semioticians) that would, like the major religious institutions (for example, the Catholic Church), have the obligation to preserve and chronicle the ‘warning’ over the next 2,000 years (in this case, not the biblical “revelation”, but the message about the dangers and locations of the radioactive waste). How would they do it? In his detailed report for the US Office of Nuclear Waste Management, titled “Communication measures to bridge ten millennia”, Sebeok proposes a “folkloric relay system”, basically suggesting that the ‘Atomic Priesthood’, after dividing the 10,000-year frame into manageable segments of shorter periods, should deal with creating annually renewed rituals and legends retold year-on-year.
The Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem, famous for his novel Solaris (1961), proposed the creation of artificial satellites that would transmit the warning from their orbit to Earth for millennia and, just in case, would encode information about the nuclear waste into the DNA of flowers to be planted near the repositories. The German physicist and author Philipp Sonntag went a step further and suggested constructing an artificial moon that would last for 10,000 years engraved with the warning message. And certainly, one of the most thought-provoking proposals, based on evidence of the long history of coexistence between cats and humans, a French author together with an Italian semiotician proposed breeding “radiation cats” that would change colour when they went near radioactive sites.
In 1984, after two years of interdisciplinary deliberation across the world, the Human Interference Task Force published a substantial technical report for the US Department of Energy containing their final proposal. None of the above proposals entered the final report, and instead of zoosemiotics or engineering a new religion to protect nuclear waste repositories, the Task Force proposed an architectural – or rather “place- making” – solution, namely, the creation of a large monument at the site formed out of several gigantic stone monoliths inscribed with the information in all human languages. It is an interesting solution, but the same question remains: how to communicate the Apocalypse (the “revelation”) across millennia so that it could be read and decoded, and what if – in that distant future – there is no one to communicate it to?
This brings us, finally, to public shadow archives and libraries. Aren’t the contemporary shadow librarians a sort of a Human Interference Task Force? With an important difference: they want interference, they don’t want to warn some future recepient of the archive to leave it alone, they want her to interfer, to dive into the archive. Yet, there is also a similiarity, as glassblower⁄Nick Thurston has pointed out by comparing the nuclear “archive” with the “public library”. The “radioactivity” of UbuWeb – and other archives, including the pioneering work and tragic fate of Aaron Swartz – consists in its mission to make knowledge publicly available and free, thus subverting the prevailing model of intellectual property and the highest semiotic order that organizes our present, namely, capital – and profit.
So, are the custodians and those involved in shadowing and mirroring some sort of preppers? On the contrary, while the Silicon Valley billionaires are building nuclear shelters on New Zealand and preparing escapes to Mars with their own private archives, shadow librarians are interested in spreading, decentralizing and decolonizing archives, creating conditions for “autonmous life” [shard: Saša Savanović, Autonomous life] in the here and now, while “becoming parasitic” [shard: Saša Savanović, Becoming parasitic] and “barbarian” [reflection: Olga Goriunova]. Their strength is not in acceleration and growth, but in slowness. Like Michael Ende’s Momo. While hacking temporality, they rehabilitate and reinvent the vernacular. They are embracing the inevitable: namely the possibility of post-linguistic communication that is not ashamed of being absurd, on the contrary, they take the absurd as the means of survival.
Shadowing, mirroring, copying, permacomputing, combining low-tech and sustainable technology, using systems that are easily constructed and deconstructed, might seem a bit absurd in a world on the verge of biospheric and semiotic collapse, but as the Custodians remind us in their solidarity letter with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub [shard: Custodians.Online “In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub]:
This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective disobedience.
The “public library” as an institution for survival [shard: Tomislav Medak, Libraries against the separation from the common], or the archive as barbarian and parasitic – is indeed an act of collective disobedience. It is the contemporary response to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in which firemen burn books, while so called “drifters” become living archives – each of them having memorized books in order to rebuild society after the dystopian nightmare.
More recently, the science fiction film Leave the World Behind ends with a girl finding an underground bunker with shelves filled with DVDs, including, the final season of Friends which she watches while the world is ending. “If there’s any hope left in this fucked-up world, I want to at least find out how things turn out for them”, says the girl, meaning the six principal characters of Friends.
You could say this is another ironic proof of the contemporary escapism, but it reveals an important insight about archiving – there is always something, connected to a particular pleasure (or even: jouissance). It is both Thanatos and Eros, destruction and preservation, apocalypse and the archive, which is at play here.
And it brings us back to the starting paradox which obviously can’t be resolved but has to be accepted as the fundamental precondition and – destiny of the archive. If we will never escape the “archive fever”, we should embrace it.
“Everything is temporary”, anyhow.
shard⁄A process, not a place
What is a library? It’s not a place - it’s a process and a relation.
While we all know that the famous library of Alexandria was demolished, it was in fact a gradual process, first through the explusion of scholars from Alexandria, then through the burning by Julius Caesar in 48BC… And even after the destruction of hundreds of thousands of scrolls, “daughter libraries” were established and the transmission of knowledge continued.
In other words, even after the catastrophe(s) and loss of precious knowledge, the library - in different forms and under different names - renewed itself. The library of Alexandria is certainly one of the mythological and imaginary places of human history, but what it shows at the same time is that all libraries - even if destroyed - represent a process and, at the same time, a relation to all other libraries. Unlike the Great Library of Alexandria that required a vast storage space, today we are able to create and recreate numerous “daughter libraries” or “shadow libraries” on the internet.
It requires space, but it can be moved quickly, replicated and renewed easier than physical books. The Library is also a process which entails a relation between the books, the librarians and the readers, it always already also includes a relation between books themselves, intertwined references, the neverending process of writing and rewriting, reading and rereading, so in a sense, the library is everything but a place. Yet, once you are in the library, or reading a book, you are creating a space, perhaps a different space (Foucault’s heterotopia) which is always related to temporality.
The fact that some ancient text survived has, paradoxically, nothing to do with the material libraries (“places”) but with the process of copying and recopying, with creating and recreating imaginary places that are in relation to each other through the diligent work and care of custodians.
shard⁄Duree
Actively growing is taken to be an archive’s sign of life.
By the same metaphor, inactivity must be deathly — archives grow or die. Projecting a mortal lifecycle on to an archive is a coping mechanism. It helps us to cope with the fact that things and structures, including archives, can neither live or die.
They just change in tow with patterns of attention and neglect.
An archive is a structure that organises access to its holdings.
Whether it is growing or not, it can still afford that access so long as its structures are at least
maintained.
So, UBUweb has stopped growing but it is all still there.
Its duree is not that of mortality but of a time-based performance — a subjective cultural gesture.
It was always a durational performance of gathering, organising and sharing; one that would last for as long as the act was sustainable and interesting.
In turn, UBUweb, like all artworks, has a quasi-subject status.
It bears characteristics — or their markers — that we associate with subjecthood.
It invites or inclines us to attend to it on terms that reinforce subjectivity: its, ours, the archivist’s, and the authors archived.
Like all ‘little databases’, UBUweb is flooded with subjectivity: tastes, identities, desires, capacities, and of course, limitations.
So there it is. Subject-like. But perfectly capable of affording things we cannot do or even yet imagine. A mirror and a prism on to subjectivity.
shard⁄Widen your sense of imagination!
The worlds are constantly ending. The point is to widen our sense of imagination and go beyond the paralysis in thinking and acting.
Back in 1957, in what has to be considered one of his classical essays Commandments in the Atomic Age⦚bib:f56a232d-d8f1-4c0b-90f8-574a261cd5bfnot found, Günther Anders published a warning to widen our sense of imagination: " (…) you have to violently widen the narrow capacity of your imagination (and the even narrower one of your feelings) until imagination and feeling become capable to grasp and realize the enormity of your doings; until you are capable to seize and conceive, to accept or reject it - in short: your task is: to widen your moral fantasy. “
Today, when we are faced by the accelerating climate crisis, nuclear threat and extinction, when our imagination seems to be shrinking (and we can only see the end at the horizont), what we have to do is to go into the opposite direction - imagine many possible worlds beyond the end itself.
shard⁄The Imaginary
The imaginary is not imagination, because it is not personal and not located in the mind. (Verran, p.37) It is not something a person calls upon by creative cognitive capacity. The imaginary rather refers to a collective process of “figuring” the world.
Verran specifically talks about the modern figuring of the world, where a “figure” can be, for instance, a “feature of the physical matter”. Such a figure has become a foundational unit of universal western epistemology. Verran shows how we parse all modes of abstraction or scientific logic we encounter with this figure, thus remaking them in the image of the western episteme. We can easily add here the figuring of the world in terms of time, money, liberty, autonomy, agency, etc.
This shows that it is not very easy to alter / change or expand the imaginary. It is not just a matter of putting a bit of extra effort into fantasy. It is about a profound remaking of the foundational beliefs, principles and practices that formulate the world in ways in which we are used to encountering it, physically, abstractly, emotionally and in myriad other ways. That is why our imaginary is rooted in the past both conceptually and practically and shapes the future.
Extra reading:
reflection⁄Alternative Information Ecologies
- shard⁄Crisis
- shard⁄Latent Image
- shard⁄Protocols
- shard⁄Maintenance
shard⁄Crisis
We are at a tipping point: climate change, nuclear war, tensions in global
infrastructure (supply chain, COVID spread), information overload. They are too
large to apprehend; supra-liminal. This is paralyzing.
shard⁄Latent futures
The gap between the tools (the excavator) and the crises (the Evergreen) is an
imaginary. The construction of an imaginary, a re-writing of history, allows
one to step into the future.
The new imaginary does not necessarily arise from acts of imaginations. Often
it is already present in the raw materials we have at hand. It is latent
inside the library. There is a process of refactoring, often beginning in the
linguistic domain, but manifesting in an ontological shift.
We can conceptualize this shift with reference to the bi-stable images from
perceptual psychology. The balerina who rotates both clockwise and
counterclockwise. The Necker cube whose orientation is unclear. The dress that
is both black and white. The material content does not change, but the
perceived gestalt changes entirely.
How to provoke that shift in perception, that re-organization of the archive?
This is the role of art, as Alva Noe argues.
- www⁄Cristobal Sciutto: " Ideas are not objects"
- ⦚bib:03752270-ca9b-4647-ac83-938c5d55ee22not found
- ⦚bib:99a194e9-5499-4027-9719-4a558dcf85e9not found
shard⁄Protocols
For global action, local relationships must aggregate rhizomatically. The
formal mechanisms of communication protocols are the way of facilitating this
aggregation. They are abstractions on social processes which produce global
artifacts, with traces back to the local.
- www⁄http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf
- www⁄https://subconscious.substack.com/p/thinking-together
shard⁄Resilient Infrastructure
For protocols to be resilient, they must be maintained. Simple tools can be
interrogated. Simple tools can be tweaked. Worse is better.
Software must be executed on a substrate, a computational abstraction on top of
hardware. If that substrate shifts from under the software, the software stops
running. It must be “ported” to new hardware via a new abstraction. Longevity
thus implies constant maintenance.
The easier to port, the more resilient software becomes. Sometimes porting
becomes impossible, and then software dies. This is what happened to Adobe
Flash, until it was ported to the internet browser (flash.pm). Choosing a
simple abstraction on top of hardware, despite being inefficient is often worth
it. This is the approach taken by www⁄100 rabbits with Uxn. They write:
“As it stands today, modern software is built with extreme short-sightedness,
designed to be run on disposable electronics and near impossible to maintain.
We decided to not participate. Our aim is to create a machine that focuses on
answering the handful of little tasks we need, which is centered around
building playful audio/visual experiences.
Uxn was created explicitly to host software on pre-existing platforms, the
design was advised primarily by relative software complexity, not by how fast
it could run on new hardware standards. Features were weighted against the
relative difficulty they would add for programmers implementing their own
emulators.”
reflection⁄Closing the window to open the door
The reflection has two parts. Closing the window is a critique of the neoliberal demands for transparency and openness. Rather, certain ways of being accessible, of being read must to refused. With possible reference to Eduard Glissant’s Right to Opactiy.
In order for closing the window, enforcing some boundaries not to become a reactionary stance, there is a need to think about what one wants to open up towards. Hence, the opening the door.
I want to think about an opening in two directions: towards /abundance, which implies things and objects beyond the commodity from, that become more valuable in a social sense through use and re-use. We all know, degrowth is coming. Question is: can it be avoided to become civil war. This makes thinking about abundance urgent.
The second direction I want to open the door towards is the shard⁄duree, the long-term. On an infrastructural level, this means /permacomputing and question of autonomy. On a cultural level, it means providing a framework that allows for both readability in the long-term and for unknown future adaptations. Here there is a possible reference to Achille Mbembe’s Earthly Community, in which he writes:
The Earth can attain unlimited duration, but only if it is capable of fecundity and regeneration. In the absence of this capacity for periodic (re-)begetting, it amounts to no more than the darkened mask of a vast house of the dead.“ (p.9)
shard⁄Enshittification
A term www⁄proposed by Cory Doctorow in 2023, to make sense of why most of
the commercial Internet services not only got objectively worse (Google
Search is less capable of finding relevant stuff today than it was 10
years ago), but also why it has become an outright hostile environment.
He describes it as this:
It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
The most hopeful part is „Then, they die“. Because it points towards a
configuration of social infrastructures beyond the one we know and hate.
To help imagine this “beyond”, we can look at projects and their
infrastructures that never entered this process in the first place.
shard⁄Duree
Actively growing is taken to be an archive’s sign of life.
By the same metaphor, inactivity must be deathly — archives grow or die. Projecting a mortal lifecycle on to an archive is a coping mechanism. It helps us to cope with the fact that things and structures, including archives, can neither live or die.
They just change in tow with patterns of attention and neglect.
An archive is a structure that organises access to its holdings.
Whether it is growing or not, it can still afford that access so long as its structures are at least
maintained.
So, UBUweb has stopped growing but it is all still there.
Its duree is not that of mortality but of a time-based performance — a subjective cultural gesture.
It was always a durational performance of gathering, organising and sharing; one that would last for as long as the act was sustainable and interesting.
In turn, UBUweb, like all artworks, has a quasi-subject status.
It bears characteristics — or their markers — that we associate with subjecthood.
It invites or inclines us to attend to it on terms that reinforce subjectivity: its, ours, the archivist’s, and the authors archived.
Like all ‘little databases’, UBUweb is flooded with subjectivity: tastes, identities, desires, capacities, and of course, limitations.
So there it is. Subject-like. But perfectly capable of affording things we cannot do or even yet imagine. A mirror and a prism on to subjectivity.
reflection⁄Decapitated UBU: a Decapitated Reflection
I had in mind Walter Benjamin: I’m back in my library.
You have all heard of people whose loss of their books has turned them into invalids or of those who, to acquire them, became criminals.
I aim to connect at least two dots or questions:
- One is on meaning out of language – referencing Godard – in order to go back to reality (or conquer reality)
- The other is on archives void of content and back to the gesture.
Both dots should provide a trajectory for recovering the imaginary.
shard⁄Sense and countersense
Why do all these signs around us make me doubt language and submerge me in meanings that drown reality instead of getting it out from the imagination? Jean-Luc Godard - Two or three things that I know about her (film 1967)
Qu’est-ce tout ces signes parmis nous qui finissent par me faire douter du langage et qui me submerge de significations noyant le réel au lieu de le dégager de l’imaginaire?
Jean-Luc Godard - Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (film 1967)
Language does not convey reality all at once; between the thing and the idea comes the meaning of words as an intermediary.
reflection⁄The Art of Living at the End
How not to become shard⁄existentially paralysed when faced with catastrophic shard⁄crises of such a scale as climate catastrophe and mass extinction intertwined as they are with a system of such flexibility and domination as capitalism? Thinking about such future 25 years down the line, we are stuck in the shard⁄gap.
How to live and act in the shard⁄long extinction is to be able to carve the space for doing work in and on the shard⁄imaginary. The imaginary of the world that is not linear, deterministic and unavoidable. The role of shard⁄imagination here /to add/. Multiple threads of possibility, some realised in the past - some ongoing, some private - some public, some local and atomistic - some large-scale.
How to do such work? Where are the sites of such work? This is supported by the project of the shard⁄library, which is shard⁄a process, not a place, supported with the
shard⁄The role of tools in relational practices in shard⁄custodianship.
shard⁄Existentialism
Existentialism here is a marriage between some literary and philosophical positions.
In literature, Varlam Shalamov wrote about his life in the camp versus how Solzhenitsyn wrote about his. When the latter talked about certain redemption, a rediscovery of humanity and in that, a certain good that the camp showed, Shalamov wrote that a camp is something that should not have happened. This is not something humans should ever experience; such experience has no redeeming qualities. His is a position of contemplating pain (Simone Weil’s malheur?) that arrests in the tracks and that refuses such spiritual and rational solutions as redemption and (logical) causality.
In philosophy, it is about being driven beyond the limits of rationally comprehensible.
“Contrary to the rationalist program of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, existential philosophy shows that the horrors of existence, the paradoxes and contradictions of human life cannot be grasped through “clear and distinct ideas” but are only given through extreme emotional states such as anxiety and despair—through passion.”
Also “the impossibility of knowledge by ‘clear and distinct ideas.’” What is worth emphasising here is not anxiety or personal pain, but that apart or on top of “universal truths” and solutions, one needs a “personal solution”, valid for them alone. (Even if it can be useful locally or collectively).
Benjamin Fondane, Existential Monday
Dostoevsky
Shalamov
shard⁄Crisis
We are at a tipping point: climate change, nuclear war, tensions in global
infrastructure (supply chain, COVID spread), information overload. They are too
large to apprehend; supra-liminal. This is paralyzing.
shard⁄Latent futures
The gap between the tools (the excavator) and the crises (the Evergreen) is an
imaginary. The construction of an imaginary, a re-writing of history, allows
one to step into the future.
The new imaginary does not necessarily arise from acts of imaginations. Often
it is already present in the raw materials we have at hand. It is latent
inside the library. There is a process of refactoring, often beginning in the
linguistic domain, but manifesting in an ontological shift.
We can conceptualize this shift with reference to the bi-stable images from
perceptual psychology. The balerina who rotates both clockwise and
counterclockwise. The Necker cube whose orientation is unclear. The dress that
is both black and white. The material content does not change, but the
perceived gestalt changes entirely.
How to provoke that shift in perception, that re-organization of the archive?
This is the role of art, as Alva Noe argues.
- www⁄Cristobal Sciutto: " Ideas are not objects"
- ⦚bib:03752270-ca9b-4647-ac83-938c5d55ee22not found
- ⦚bib:99a194e9-5499-4027-9719-4a558dcf85e9not found
shard⁄Long Extinction
For many peoples, the apocalypse has already occurred. For many, it lies ahead. We are in the long extinction, a process underway. A long duration extending forward, in which we will spend our lives. Framing extinction away from a figure of something contained in the future, a singular event of extermination, and into a process that we have to deal with daily, and increasingly, is important.
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
shard⁄The Imaginary
The imaginary is not imagination, because it is not personal and not located in the mind. (Verran, p.37) It is not something a person calls upon by creative cognitive capacity. The imaginary rather refers to a collective process of “figuring” the world.
Verran specifically talks about the modern figuring of the world, where a “figure” can be, for instance, a “feature of the physical matter”. Such a figure has become a foundational unit of universal western epistemology. Verran shows how we parse all modes of abstraction or scientific logic we encounter with this figure, thus remaking them in the image of the western episteme. We can easily add here the figuring of the world in terms of time, money, liberty, autonomy, agency, etc.
This shows that it is not very easy to alter / change or expand the imaginary. It is not just a matter of putting a bit of extra effort into fantasy. It is about a profound remaking of the foundational beliefs, principles and practices that formulate the world in ways in which we are used to encountering it, physically, abstractly, emotionally and in myriad other ways. That is why our imaginary is rooted in the past both conceptually and practically and shapes the future.
Extra reading:
shard⁄Widen your sense of imagination!
The worlds are constantly ending. The point is to widen our sense of imagination and go beyond the paralysis in thinking and acting.
Back in 1957, in what has to be considered one of his classical essays Commandments in the Atomic Age⦚bib:f56a232d-d8f1-4c0b-90f8-574a261cd5bfnot found, Günther Anders published a warning to widen our sense of imagination: " (…) you have to violently widen the narrow capacity of your imagination (and the even narrower one of your feelings) until imagination and feeling become capable to grasp and realize the enormity of your doings; until you are capable to seize and conceive, to accept or reject it - in short: your task is: to widen your moral fantasy. “
Today, when we are faced by the accelerating climate crisis, nuclear threat and extinction, when our imagination seems to be shrinking (and we can only see the end at the horizont), what we have to do is to go into the opposite direction - imagine many possible worlds beyond the end itself.
shard⁄Library
Library supports the functions of the imaginary, both repressive and emancipatory.
shard⁄A process, not a place
What is a library? It’s not a place - it’s a process and a relation.
While we all know that the famous library of Alexandria was demolished, it was in fact a gradual process, first through the explusion of scholars from Alexandria, then through the burning by Julius Caesar in 48BC… And even after the destruction of hundreds of thousands of scrolls, “daughter libraries” were established and the transmission of knowledge continued.
In other words, even after the catastrophe(s) and loss of precious knowledge, the library - in different forms and under different names - renewed itself. The library of Alexandria is certainly one of the mythological and imaginary places of human history, but what it shows at the same time is that all libraries - even if destroyed - represent a process and, at the same time, a relation to all other libraries. Unlike the Great Library of Alexandria that required a vast storage space, today we are able to create and recreate numerous “daughter libraries” or “shadow libraries” on the internet.
It requires space, but it can be moved quickly, replicated and renewed easier than physical books. The Library is also a process which entails a relation between the books, the librarians and the readers, it always already also includes a relation between books themselves, intertwined references, the neverending process of writing and rewriting, reading and rereading, so in a sense, the library is everything but a place. Yet, once you are in the library, or reading a book, you are creating a space, perhaps a different space (Foucault’s heterotopia) which is always related to temporality.
The fact that some ancient text survived has, paradoxically, nothing to do with the material libraries (“places”) but with the process of copying and recopying, with creating and recreating imaginary places that are in relation to each other through the diligent work and care of custodians.
shard⁄The role of tools in relational practices
The tools are meant to help the bridging of relational practice and sharing. Tools can escalate the dimension of the relational to a level of interconnection that might constitute a critical mass for impactful actions.
shard⁄The role of relational practices in custodianship
Relational practices should be the conceptual building infrastructure of custodianship. These practices are caring processes, which can be mutual, instigating further care and relationships. This mutuality potentially creates relationships, which might help to constitute interdependent networks of people and content, formulating different communication protocols which can be understood as “abstractions on social processes”shard⁄Protocols These interdependent networks can be used to extend the library. It is a process to branch (or even ‘fork’) the library models which have a centralised nature. What they build over time, is to provide the missed content, the specialised care and the shared responsability conceptually adding them independently to the public services. As Horvat affirms “it’s a process and a relation” shard⁄A process, not a place.
reflection⁄A homelandless parasite
As repositories of knowledge, archives and libraries are old as the written word itself (actually, in some instances, they precede it). In their modern form, they emerge over the course of 18th and 19th century as monolithic and hierarchical but public and supposedly neutral institutions, meant to provide uncommodified access to culture and knowledge in the climate of rising capitalist commodification. As Medak and Mars write, “the public library held a utopian promise of making all the world’s memory available to all members of society without barriers.”
The idea that libraries are in any way neutral was challenged during 1960s and 1970s, when it increasingly became obvious that the notion of neutrality effectively perpetuated implicit structural exclusions of class, gender, and race. Libraries provided access but were also the instruments of enclosure, serving as gatekeepers of epistemic and material privilege. They were meant to conserve not only the artefacts, but even more importantly, the context in which these have been acquired and stored, that is to say, the ways in which the artifacts are meant to be interpreted. The type of world’s memory that libraries/archives held, turned out to be very particular, despite posing as universal.
For a brief time, the emergence of the internet invigorated the dream of libraries as providers of universal access to the entire world’s memory and knowledge. But, the availability of appropriate technological infrastructure to conduct the task did not translate into desired political and economic reality. [shard: technological determinism] Quite the contrary, internet helped enforce capitalist intellectual property regimes even more efficiently, creating artificial scarcity in the place of actual abundance [shard: abundance].
At the same time, the public function of the library itself came under attack as the logic of the market penetrated the public realm of politics. Wendy Brown argues that the neoliberal extension of market values into formerly non-economic domains turned all human and institutional action into “rational entrepreneurial action”. Not only have libraries progressively lost funding, they also had to orient themselves towards commercial ends; curation processes were supplemented by an imperative to provide what is commercially viable, popular, dictated by demand. The public became even more porous.
Owning to methodological nationalism [shard: methodological nationalism], the national container of public repositories of knowledge has for a long time remained invisible. With revisionist politics taking hold around the world, the function of the library as not simply public, but national-public institution, came to the forefront. The revisionist trend showed that the notion of the public is further demarcated, nationally cast, and instrumental for any nationalist project.
Digital shadow libraries germinate and sprout on the verges of these enclosures and redefinitions of what constitutes the public and how is one able to access it. They reject the rules of the game – copyright law, the logic of supply and demand and the imperative of profit, the dominant ideology of nationalism and identitarianism – without exiting it. They are parasites [shard: becoming parasitic]. They hide within the system, they latch onto it, without belonging.
As UbuWeb memorably stated: “We are hiding in plain sight, right out in the open. You just have to know how to find us.”
As carriers of context, digital shadow libraries and archives do not aspire to universality. In line with the feminist politics of location, they are always located somewhere, in a certain context, taking accountability for their particular position. However, they are firmly homelandless [shard: homelandless]. They are not patriotic; they don’t pledge allegiance to any particular state or nation. They hide where ever a shelter is available. They are on the go, barbarian [reflection: Barbarian library].
They are institutions, not communities of the like, but negotiators of difference working towards a common goal. They are not unconditionally open nor transparent. They determine rules and procedures for admittance and exclusion [reflection: closing the window to open the door]. They are not blind to power relations. They are autonomous in as much as they are shard⁄interdependent [reflection: the interdependent networks of archives]. They are fragile and ephemeral. They are vernacular, functional rather than monumental. They change hands. From 
. They are shard⁄produced through shard⁄care.
References:
Tomislav Medak & Marcell Mars. 2022. Public Library and The Return of the Repressed Memory of the World. Stories and Threads: Perspective on Art Archives. L’Internationale Online
Wendy Brown. 2003. Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy
shard⁄Autonomous life
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow identify three basic social freedoms – freedom to disobey, freedom to move away and freedom to create and transform social orders – found across cultures and centuries, which facilitated the ability of pre-modern peoples to leave behind – by transforming, destroying, or simply abandoning – social setups that have become inappropriate or otherwise unwanted.
In contrast to the modern (Western) concept of individual freedom, where to be free means to be self-sufficient and as such is inseparable from private property, for the indigenous societies of America, individual freedom was embedded within structures of care; it implied that people permitted each other to live without fear of falling through the cracks. Individualism of European societies is thus about getting advantage over others, while for the indigenous American societies it was about guaranteeing one another the means for an autonomous life.
Autonomy is not about self-sufficiency, shard⁄it’s about shard⁄interdependence.
References:
Graeber, David & Wengrow, David. 2020. The Dawn of Everything. Macmillan Publishers
shard⁄The role of relational practices in custodianship
Relational practices should be the conceptual building infrastructure of custodianship. These practices are caring processes, which can be mutual, instigating further care and relationships. This mutuality potentially creates relationships, which might help to constitute interdependent networks of people and content, formulating different communication protocols which can be understood as “abstractions on social processes”shard⁄Protocols These interdependent networks can be used to extend the library. It is a process to branch (or even ‘fork’) the library models which have a centralised nature. What they build over time, is to provide the missed content, the specialised care and the shared responsability conceptually adding them independently to the public services. As Horvat affirms “it’s a process and a relation” shard⁄A process, not a place.
shard⁄Production/reproduction
- in contrast to production
- collective survival
- freedom is embedded in care
- patriarchy and non-human nature > modernity > after modernity
- “freedom starts in 2” Baumann dependency
- non-human nature
- (secondary, follows production)
- centre <> after modernity <> violence
- reproduction > notion of new, Groys?
- reproduction in mirror, archive, library, production
- production / reproduction as development of new
- redefining reproduction is needed
- symbiotic production
- byside products; rapports / relational structures (byproduct, byproduction; Valeria)
- reproduction = recreation and creation of something new-anew
- ANEW - possible term for a shard - or to come out of this?
shard⁄care
- ⦚bib:afb82208-7d1d-4b02-92df-6175b03651f1not found
- critique of care
- dependency is a social condition
- realm of needs vs realm of freedom (separation by Marx, mentioned above) is also about the division of labour and also class, gender, race
- instead: community as the centre of subjectvation (Marxist approach desubjectivises community)
- Vulnerable state
- needs - freedom - knowledge
reflection⁄A Material Basis for Digital Archives
- Why preserve the archive? (exuberance, potentialities, political imaginary, etc)
- Not just the ecological problem, but the cultural problem.
- Not less, more of the right thing. (Keito Saito)
- A grey world of rented space and rented rooms, interpellated by capital.
- Alienation as the inability to write information.
- Preservation of difference, diversity, ambiguity, etc.
- Bataille, The Accursed Share
- The digital medium of archiving (difference, context, information)
- Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication
- Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
- The problem of maintaining the medium
- Vernacular infrastructure
- Requirements of audiovisual media as a constraint worth keeping
- Steal This Book, Abbie Hoffman
- Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich
- Problems with existing digital infrastructure
- Complexity which leads to bureaucracy due to the exception outside of the system
- Lock-in: dependency on existing systems
- Two watershed moments
- Enshittification: locked into the attention economy.
- Search of mixed-media
- New directions in digital infrastructure
- Infinite use of finite means
- Programming system as material (convivial forms), instead of tool with a function.
- Autoprogettazione, Enzo Mari
- The aesthetic of compression, simple tools which produce complex artifacts.
- Permacomputing, sustainability through simplicity
- www⁄http://viznut.fi/files/texts-en/permacomputing.html
- Damaged Earth Catalog
- www⁄https://damaged.bleu255.com
- AI: embeddings, in counterpoint to generated data.
shard⁄Difference
Lack of information is uniformity. All objects are identical to each other, and hence indistinguishable. White noise—artifacts shimmering without difference that makes a difference. The introduction of difference gives us a bit of information. This is not like that; there are characteristics that separate. The blob of white noise has an edge, and hence some elements are internal and others form the boundary.
Exuberance is an overflowing of information. A book inside a chest in the last floor of an abandoned home is difference, but it is not difference that makes a difference. A librarian, professional or amateur, must distribute the book for it to resonate in the world.
The transmission of information through time or space is the mirroring of difference through time or space. A picture captures the difference apparent through color and location on the projective plane so that it can be re-transmitted in a different place. Hence, the medium of photography is a form of transmission of a set of differences legible to its technical mechanism of capture. Analogously, the phonograph is a means of transmission of sound waves—differences in distribution of particles in the air. The technical means of capturing some difference determines what difference is legible to be transmitted.
Preservation is transmission through an indeterminate amount of space and time. At these scales, the second law of thermodynamics begins to take effect—entropy increases in an isolated system. As such, information is erased. To preserve information is to counteract the law and maintain difference. A path is kept by walking along it, stifling the growth of weeds. Technology imitates this process: a lawnmower to trim the weeds, or pesticide to avoid their growth. Alternatively, a social system can lead to preservation: park rangers can prepare trails, which are then navigated by visitors, propelled by the tourism industry.
These practices establish ecologies of preservation. The lawn trimmings must be reused or disposed and the pesticides’ side effects must be accounted for. Similarly, tourist economies generate income to finance maintenance, while also producing waste and even over-consumption. These second-order effects must be folded into the practices, in order to continue to maintain difference.
shard⁄Crisis
We are at a tipping point: climate change, nuclear war, tensions in global
infrastructure (supply chain, COVID spread), information overload. They are too
large to apprehend; supra-liminal. This is paralyzing.
shard⁄Interpretive labor
The promise of search: no need to navigate explicit ontologies. Google will
crawl the internet for you. Simply type what you desire and the output will
appear! Instantaneous luxury knowledge.
However, the best answers are found by prefixing a query with “reddit”. These
small communities, subreddits, are specialists in their domain. They are the
Encyclopedians of the internet, pulling together the relevant information into
threads. Google is dead!
This Library of Babel can be deciphered, but only through local custodianship.
A custodian, albeit self-interested, can establish “grassroots way-finding” in
relationship with readers. They act below Dunbar’s threshold.
www⁄https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying/
www⁄https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/
shard⁄Latent futures
The gap between the tools (the excavator) and the crises (the Evergreen) is an
imaginary. The construction of an imaginary, a re-writing of history, allows
one to step into the future.
The new imaginary does not necessarily arise from acts of imaginations. Often
it is already present in the raw materials we have at hand. It is latent
inside the library. There is a process of refactoring, often beginning in the
linguistic domain, but manifesting in an ontological shift.
We can conceptualize this shift with reference to the bi-stable images from
perceptual psychology. The balerina who rotates both clockwise and
counterclockwise. The Necker cube whose orientation is unclear. The dress that
is both black and white. The material content does not change, but the
perceived gestalt changes entirely.
How to provoke that shift in perception, that re-organization of the archive?
This is the role of art, as Alva Noe argues.
- www⁄Cristobal Sciutto: " Ideas are not objects"
- ⦚bib:03752270-ca9b-4647-ac83-938c5d55ee22not found
- ⦚bib:99a194e9-5499-4027-9719-4a558dcf85e9not found
shard⁄Protocols
For global action, local relationships must aggregate rhizomatically. The
formal mechanisms of communication protocols are the way of facilitating this
aggregation. They are abstractions on social processes which produce global
artifacts, with traces back to the local.
- www⁄http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf
- www⁄https://subconscious.substack.com/p/thinking-together
shard⁄Resilient Infrastructure
For protocols to be resilient, they must be maintained. Simple tools can be
interrogated. Simple tools can be tweaked. Worse is better.
Software must be executed on a substrate, a computational abstraction on top of
hardware. If that substrate shifts from under the software, the software stops
running. It must be “ported” to new hardware via a new abstraction. Longevity
thus implies constant maintenance.
The easier to port, the more resilient software becomes. Sometimes porting
becomes impossible, and then software dies. This is what happened to Adobe
Flash, until it was ported to the internet browser (flash.pm). Choosing a
simple abstraction on top of hardware, despite being inefficient is often worth
it. This is the approach taken by www⁄100 rabbits with Uxn. They write:
“As it stands today, modern software is built with extreme short-sightedness,
designed to be run on disposable electronics and near impossible to maintain.
We decided to not participate. Our aim is to create a machine that focuses on
answering the handful of little tasks we need, which is centered around
building playful audio/visual experiences.
Uxn was created explicitly to host software on pre-existing platforms, the
design was advised primarily by relative software complexity, not by how fast
it could run on new hardware standards. Features were weighted against the
relative difficulty they would add for programmers implementing their own
emulators.”
reflection⁄The role of relational practices in custodianship
Relational practices should be the conceptual building infrastructure of custodianship. These practices are caring processes, which can be mutual, instigating further care and relationships. This mutuality potentially creates relationships, which might help to constitute interdependent networks of people and content, formulating different communication protocols which can be understood as “abstractions on social processes”shard⁄Protocols.
These interdependent networks can be used to extend the library. It is a process involves an activity of branching (or even ‘forking’, technically speaking) the library models which have a centralised nature, and a hierarchical structure, which includes who decides about the library content, its paths to expansion, the interface with the public, and the public itself.
In this sense, the library, as a model, an infrastructure, and more than anything a paradigm, is a collection of culture that represents a conscious or unconscious curatorial perspective on one side. On the other side, it is also a collection that is activated by the public, and depending from what they host they activate a different public imaginary. So it “supports the functions of the imaginary” (see shard⁄Library) through the ideas circulating through its publications, which can be “both repressive and emancipatory” (ibid.)) because of both its content in itself, and how the curational process has been taken.
In this sense, some of the foundations of the publishing preserving (the library) systems are questioned in this different systemic embodiment. It is inevitable then to mention Barthes’ consequential relationship between the “birth of the reader” and “the death of the author”. They deeply question “ownership, copyright and the subjects supposed to know” (see shard⁄Death of neoliberal library), which can be connected with what we might call now a neoliberal vision of the library.
What these libraries (possibly both online and offline) outside of the official library system build over time, is to provide the missed content, the specialised care and the shared responsibility conceptually adding them independently to the public services. As glassblower⁄Horvat affirms, “it’s a process and a relation” (see shard⁄A process, not a place).
shard⁄Library
Library supports the functions of the imaginary, both repressive and emancipatory.
shard⁄Death of neoliberal library
Roland Barthes famously said: “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”. Similary, what could - and should - be said today: the birth of the emancipatory library of the future - for the future and from the future - must be at the cost of the death of the neoliberal library based on ownership, copyright and the subjects supposed to know (whether it’s librarians or authors themselves). No gods no masters!
shard⁄Protocols
For global action, local relationships must aggregate rhizomatically. The
formal mechanisms of communication protocols are the way of facilitating this
aggregation. They are abstractions on social processes which produce global
artifacts, with traces back to the local.
- www⁄http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf
- www⁄https://subconscious.substack.com/p/thinking-together
reflection⁄Variations on preserving a digital archive of the avant-garde
consider diff approaches to preservation, non-digital, but also small-digital
- media archaeology approach - remediation to non-digital media ( skor codex, tapebook , ….) .. vhs, vinyl, paper / print, microfilm, tape
- poetic compression - florian’s floppys, slit-scan photography
- activation : temporal / social / site-based - eg. via exhibitions, KG did it : printing out the internet, retyping a library, top tens show in athens /// or via workshops such as this one
- selection (eg. only top tens), curation, sampling, playlists, screenshot per day, metadata archive / sitemap
- oral tradition, narration, literary interpretation (KG’s ubu book, ubu bibliography @ monoskop)
- video registration of browsing ubu
- forking : making a mirror and continue adding stuff
- approaches from contemporary art conservation - view ubu as an artwork from an individual artist with its performative gestures etc… eg. if this is acquired by a museum (different to when it is acquired by an archive such as archive.org or LOC via web snapshots etc..) … eg. understanding ubu as a complex artwork consisting not only of digital files but also of physical manifestations in the form of exhibitions and as a long-term performance …. artist interview, identifying artist intent, identifying components and their relations and dependencies
- taking into account : longevity / enviro footprint (digi size constraint, non-digi or non-electric formats) / accessibility–distribution / usability / original/social context , …
- ref : www⁄https://permacomputing.net/personalities/
shard⁄Cultural work under externally imposed constraints
There are constraints that, although they shape art, design and cultural works in fascinating ways, are not in fact the result of privileged cultural workers searching for novel creative processes. In certain circumstances, the constraints can be political: unofficial artists during ‘normalisation’ in Czechoslovakia (1970s-1980s) and elsewhere retreated from public space and galleries to nature and private homes, and to media such as concept, action, performance, land art and video, such as the dissident video magazine Original Videojournal, which was secretly edited and copied on school equipment. Limitations may also arise from working within restrictive copyright or uncertain legal status: 1970s ephemeral media circulation in Cuba; low-resolution bootleg videos on UbuWeb; shadow and bootleg libraries. Finally, constraints can be socio-economic: Soviet Constructivists using wood and scrap metal because other art supplies were scarce; 1970s artists using discarded materials to produce their work quickly and cheaply;[ 93 ] the ‘Free Furniture’ design ideas from the 1971 Steal This Book work by American political and social activist Abbie Hoffman;[ 45 ] the ‘street-level’ one-stop graphic design convenience stores in the Philippines.[ 3 ] More generally, while affecting creative processes and aesthetics, these constraints challenge privileged Western understandings of art, design and culture. These practices exist outside the cultural and creative industries because they are driven by working class strug- gles, the need to adapt and survive, and to make do with whatever means are available. Relevant elements of discussion can be found in the improvised creative solutions of Gambiarra in Brazil[ 31 ] or Jugaaḍ, applied to concrete problems by repurposing objects and with limited resources, including the unexpected reconfiguration of media saturation in South Asia.[75]"
www⁄https://limits.pubpub.org/pub/6loh1eqi/release/1
