Book as a network
By book we mean...
A durable,
autonomous,
portable,
shareable object,
that acts as an
archive and
memory.
By network we mean ...
An infrastructure for
sharing files,
looking up references,
writing collaboratively,
distributing and disseminating ideas and documents.
From 5 June to 7 June 2015, I took part to a Close-reading Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing workshop in the rooftop location of Aleppo in Brussels. This session was part of the residency of artists Billy Bultheel & Enad Marouf and co-organized by Constant aiming at creating a space for presentation, exchange, discussion on new ways of reading & writing.
And it did... I particularly appreciated to spend 3 days in a room with a local bunch of people who all relate to text in their practices with distinctive backgrounds & approaches (philosophy, computer sience, graphic design, publishing, free culture, performance, digital writing, visual arts, etc).
Together with Michael Murtaugh, we shared experiences in setting up local servers / offline networks, then the conversation moved to responsabilities of Internet Providers, actually looking at ourselves as Internet Providers and what it implies (Michael was the one “in charge” of the network set-up during the session)
We as (inter)network providers care about Terms of Services.
... underlining the fact that users of a local network (exactly the case with the group of participants in Aleppo) need to accept (local) Terms of Services, mean, be able not only to read but also to (re)write them. We ended choosing to document the network setup as a contribution to the workshop. But we still need to do it - Michael I’m up to : )
__ Reading Writing Interfaces, Lorie Emerson
__Tyranny of Structurelessness, Jo Freeman