10 JULY

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing of speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, “What is the content of speech?” it is necessary to say, “It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal.” An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs. What are we considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media, 1964

[...] Should the normalcy of being able to read anonymously, which is clearly worth protecting, and the private sphere as a basic human right, continue to be eroded, the entire historical learning process of our branch of civilization is at stake! 

And can’t we learn to again appreciate the fact that paper pages of analogue books don’t send information to the US about our personal reading behavior?

 Bernhard Cella, No ISBN, 2017

The cultural status of printed media is extremely dynamic right now, but it also goes back and forth. I would describe the book of today as a medium that has been liberated from the need to transport information. Older printed matter, such as professional journals, address books and telephone books, restaurant guides, maps and dictionaries are already online and for years have not given any signs of returning to the analogue world. On the other hand, that does not at all apply to all aspects of a broad-based book culture, which, after all, paved the way for European Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and literary modernism.

 Bernhard Cella, No ISBN, 2017

3 JUNE

3 JUNE

We touch, and by that, we are touched. Touch is a full-body experience, literally inter-active- Thereby, touch gives us the feeling of being in control, exploring and manipulating the world around us, and at the same time it makes us vulnerable: it is through being touched that we can be irritated, harmed or even destroyed.

Marieke Sonneveld, Can you feel it? Effectuating tactility and print in the contemporary (2016)

Como los borgianos bibliotecarios de Babel, que buscan el libro que les dará la clave de todos los demás, oscilamos entre la ilusión de lo alcanzado y el vértigo de lo inasible. En nombre de lo alcanzado, queremos creer que existe un orden único que nos permitiría alcanzar de golpe el saber"; en nombre de lo inasible, queremos pensar que el orden y el desorden son dos palabras que designan por igual el azar.

También es posible que ambas sean señuelos, engañifas destinadas a disimular el desgaste de los libros y de los sistemas.

Entre los dos, en todo caso, no está mal que nuestras bibliotecas también sirvan de cuando en cuando como ayudamemoria, como descanso para gatos y como desván para trastos.

Georges Perec, Pensar Clasificar, (1985)

Print does have a number of unique characteristics which are yet to be surpassed by anything else. The first of these characteristics is the way prints use space. The space taken up by printed material, either in the shape of document folders, stacks of printed pages on a table, or a library of shelves filled with books, is real and physical. This is entirely different from something existing only on a screen, since it relates directly to our physical space, and to a sensorial perception developed over [...] thousands of years.

 Alessandro ludovico, Post digital print. The mutation of publishing since 1894, (2012)

“It isn’t human consciousness that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”

Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the critique of political economy, (1859)

4 APRIL

Media archaeology, defined by Siegfried Zielinski simply as not seeking the old in the new, but finding something new in the old: an experimental attitude that has its aim “not to seek the old that is already past in the new, but to reveal the new, the surprising in the old” Thus the current state of what has come and gone can give dead media new life.

Lars Bang Larsen, Can you feel it? Effectuating tactility and print in the contemporary (2016)

Conceptually, an archive can be considered as a substantial quantity of raw material (data) to which further transformations may be applied. Art, and more specifically media art, often deals with archives and their intriguing content (data is connected yet heterogeneous) — Still, the attitude of artists, when referring to paper archives, seem to be to approach them from a retrospective point of view. An artist referring to an archive will usually depict its traditional, physical form, which is undoubtedly still the one we’re most familiar with, even after a few decades of computers and databases.

Alessandro ludovico, Post digital print. The mutation of publishing since 1894 (2012)

The sense of touch is basically sensing our self: how we are touched, our body posture and the muscle force we are exerting. Objects invite us through their tactual properties to behave in a specific way, which in turn makes us feel in a specific way about ourselves. A wine glass will make us feel elegant, because of the delicate, refined posture of the hand, and the awareness that we have to be careful; so our movements become delicate. Whereas a beer glass will make us feel tough, because it is tough itself, and the way it has to be held is tough.

Marieke Sonneveld, Can you feel it? Effectuating tactility and print in the contemporary, (2016)