@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ In the Special Issue 19, How do we library that? or alternatively Garden Leeszaa
Like community gardens, libraries are about tenderness and approachability. However, does every book and each person feel welcome in these spaces? Publications are empty leaves if there is no one to read them. Libraries are soulless storage rooms if there is no one to visit them. People give meaning to libraries and publications alike. People are the reason for their existence. People tend to cultivate plants. Audiences tend to foster content. The public tends to enrich the context. Libraries as complex social infrastructures.
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The release of the Special Issue 19 was a momentary snapshot of the current state of a library seen through the metaphor of gardening; pruning, gleaning, growing, grafting and harvesting. Garden Leeszaal is an open conversation; a collective writing tool, a cooperative collage and an archive. We asked everyone to think of the library as a garden. For us, being a gardener means caring; caring for the people and books that form this space.
@ -26,24 +26,31 @@ During the collective moment in Leeszaal people started diving into recycle bins
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Console is an oracle; an emotional first aid kit that helps you help yourself. Console invites you to open the box and discover ways of healing. Console provides shelter for your dreams, memories and worries. Face the past and encounter your fortune. Console gives you a new vantage point; a set of rituals and practices that help you cope and care. Console asks everyday questions that give magical answers.
Special Issue XX was co-published by xpub and Page Not Found, Den Haag. With guest editors Lídia Pereira ♈︎ and Artemis Gryllaki ♐ we unraveled games and rituals, mapping the common characteristics and the differences between games and rituals in relation to ideology and counter-hegemony. We practiced, performed and annotated rituals, connected (or not) with our cultural backgrounds while we questioned the magic circle. We dived into the worlds of text adventure games and clicking games while drinking coffee. We talked about class, base, superstructure, (counter)hegemony, ideology and materialism. We discussed how games and rituals can function as reproductive technologies of the culture industries. We annotated games, focusing on the role of ideology and social reproduction. We reinterpreted bits of the world and created stories from it (modding, fiction, narrative) focusing on community, interaction, relationships, grief and healing.
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why shd it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points of flowing multi directional creativity. If I invented a word placing machine, an “expression-scriber,” if you will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches, I'd have magnetically recorded, at the same time, & translated into word or perhaps even the final xpressed thought/feeling wd not be merely word or sheet, but itself, the xpression, three dimensional-able to be touched, or tasted or felt, or entered, or heard or carried like a speaking singing constantly communicating charm. A typewriter is corny!!
Amiri Baraka, Technology & Ethos, http://www.soulsista.com/titanic/baraka.html
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This issue started from a single technical object: a Model 33 Teletype machine. The teletype is the meeting point between typewriters and computer interfaces, a first automated translator of letters into bits. Equipped with a keyboard, a transmitter and a punchcard read-writer, it is a historical link between early transmission technology such as the telegraph and the Internet of today. Under the administration of our kubernētēs, Martino Morandi, each week hosted a guest contributor who joined us in unfolding the many cultural and technical layers that we found stratified in such a machine, reading them as questions to our contemporary involvements with computing and with networks.
The format of the issue consisted of on an on-going publishing arrangement, constantly re-considered and escaping definition at every point in spacetime, a sort of Exquisite Corpse Network. It evaded naming, location, and explanation; the Briki, the Breadbrick, the Worm Blob. A plan to release weekly bricks was wattled by a shared understanding of time into something more complex in structure, less structured in complexity.
Initially, the week's caretakers were responsible for collecting materials from our guest contributions, which included lectures, collective readings, hands-on exercises, an excursion to the Houweling Telecom Museum, Rotterdam and another to Constant, Brussels. The caretakers were responsible for recording audio, editing notes, transcribing code, taking pictures, and making lunch. Meanwhile the week's editors were responsible for coming up with a further step in how the publishing progressed, by adding new connections and interfaces, creating languages, plotting strikes and cherishing memories. This mode of publishing made us develop our own collective understandings of inter-operation, of networked care and access, backward- and forward-compatibility, obsolence and futurability.
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Teletypewriters ushered in a new mode of inscription of writing: if the typewriter set up a grid of letters and voids of the same size, turning the absence of a letter (the space) into a key itself (the spacebar), the teletypewriter finished it by inscribing the space in the very same material as all other letters: electrical zeros and ones, that were to immediately leave the machine. The Teletype Model 33, one of the most widely produced and distributed text-based terminals in the 1970s, introduced multiple technological concretizations that are present in the computers of today as a sort of legacy, such as the qwerty keyboard with control keys, the ascii character encoding and the TTY terminal capability. We have created short-circuits that allow us to remember otherwise technical progress and computational genealogies.
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TTY was produced in april-june 2023 as special issue 21 with guest editor Martino Morandi, and contributors Andrea di Serego Alighieri, Femke Snelting, Isabelle Sully, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing, and Zoumana Meïté.
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Initially, the week's caretakers were responsible for collecting materials from our guest contributions, which included lectures, collective readings, hands-on exercises, an excursion to the Houweling Telecom Museum, Rotterdam and another to Constant, Brussels. The caretakers were responsible for recording audio, editing notes, transcribing code, taking pictures, and making lunch. Meanwhile the week's editors were responsible for coming up with a further step in how the publishing progressed, by adding new connections and interfaces, creating languages, plotting strikes and cherishing memories. This mode of publishing made us develop our own collective understandings of inter-operation, of networked care and access, backward- and forward-compatibility, obsolence and futurability.
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Teletypewriters ushered in a new mode of inscription of writing: if the typewriter set up a grid of letters and voids of the same size, turning the absence of a letter (the space) into a key itself (the spacebar), the teletypewriter finished it by inscribing the space in the very same material as all other letters: electrical zeros and ones, that were to immediately leave the machine. The Teletype Model 33, one of the most widely produced and distributed text-based terminals in the 1970s, introduced multiple technological concretizations that are present in the computers of today as a sort of legacy, such as the qwerty keyboard with control keys, the ascii character encoding and the TTY terminal capability. We have created short-circuits that allow us to remember otherwise technical progress and computational genealogies.
TTY was produced in april-june 2023 as special issue 21 with guest editor Martino Morandi, and contributors Andrea di Serego Alighieri, Femke Snelting, Isabelle Sully, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing, and Zoumana Meïté.
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