A new journalistic recipe is afoot: find once ubiquitous technology that is on the wane and write about its quirky history. The latest exhibit at the LA Review of Books: the phone booth. Ah, the phone booth, haven of bacterial infestation, coin-operated dysfunctionality, and cinematic obsession. We’ll miss you. Of course …
A new series of exhibits at the Goethe Institute in New York City called “The End(s) of the Library.” David Horvitz will be producing an exhibit on the problems of DRM called “How can a digital be gift?” and Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström, and R. Lyon will be exploring “the way …
It seems like this is going to be one of those debates that will be rehearsed over and over again, but here’s a quick response to the scuffle caused by the recent LA Review of Books piece on “literature is not data.” The general resistance to electronic reading (aka digital humanities) …
The interest in language as a visual and material medium continues to grow. The more we lose in this area electronically, the more we are learning to value it. A new exhibit, “Postscript,” now on view at the Denver Museum for Contemporary offers a nice look at the history of …
Introducing the “book pillow.” At first glance it looks like a large dictionary and can even be slid between other volumes on your shelf just like a regular tome. But when you’re feeling sleepy, just get out your reading material from your desk drawer, filing cabinet or shelf. The “book” …
Starting back up again with some humour: the used book simulator by Tom Gauld. The pinnacle of the weirdness of media nostalgia.
I was recently at an exhibit at the MOMA in New York called “Foreclosed.” It was about imagining new architectural forms and new urban spaces. I was struck by this particular image: what does the ideal town of the future need? A bookstore of course (and fresh eggs). Look way …
A bit macabre, I know. But here begins a new category looking at the ways we talk about the death of books and other kinds of media. Its part voyeurism, part debunking of the hyperbole surrounding reading. The first exhibit belongs to Laura Miller’s recent piece in Salon, “Click here …
Media recycling has achieved a new degree of absurdity with Booksi. Designed by Richard Neely, these are charging docks for iPods/phones that are recycled books. What a fate: you were a book and now you’re a stand for the smart phone’s ass.
My friend Ina Ferris has been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between books and remnants — the way books were integral during the nineteenth century to think about how cultural forms and practices persist past their time. The book was itself already seen as a vestige during the …