EX LIBRIS

A curatorial- editorial experiment by Anna-Sophie Springer The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is a phenomenon of the library. ~ Michel Foucault

Ex LIBRIS

Assembled by appropriating a variety of display means found on-site, a temporary set of constellations, clusters, and visual narratives play with the book in its multidimensional role as aesthetic object and medium for the representation of information. Through ephemeral connections of image, text, and materiality, the arrangements reect the character, history, and function of these collections while relating to the surrounding architectures that house each of them. Reecting on the process and drawing comparisons between the dierent sites, EX LIBRIS culminates in a library catalogue that archives and presents the curated selections as well as the display strategies. Documentation is created with the available on-site means of reproduction (the photocopier, scanner, reproduction photography, screen grab). While some of the libraries themselves are not open to the public, this exhibition in book form offers glimpses into these cumulative structureshowever, again, only from within the tension of the private.

COMMONPLACE BOOKS
GRR.AAAAARG.ORG
http://grr.aaaaarg.org/txt/collection/detail.php?id=52333d4d307888cb75000006

Partials that can circulate

Sean dockray, Founder of aaarg.org interviewed by charles stankievech

a creative ction that worked in the world, in unpredictable ways experimenting with other forms of living and making things. This research ran in parallel to some infrastructures for groups that I built (a software implementation of anarchist consensus decision-making for non-local, non-synchronous meetings; collaborative writing and drawing tools; some publication platforms; and later things like a library and a school). In this way, I dont think Id separate the formal experiment from the practical infrastructure. CS: At the present, how many documents are served by the Arg.org community? SD: Cant say for sure. After some legal problems a couple of years ago, the site went down, but the library quickly appeared again on another server. I am happy that happened because people put a lot of time and labor into creating that collection and it would be horrible if it were annihilated by lawyers and accountants. But I dont run the site now. And I dont need to, since there are many people who are invested in the sustainability of the library and community. CS: The popularity and the geographic diversity of the users is immense at this point and only going to continue to grow. In what direction do you see Arg.org moving in? SD: Well, the obvious thing would be that it becomes quasiinstitutional, part of the fabric of how things workand that this has happened over the past decade, during which time so much has changed in publishing and education due to the internet, and the internets role in extending the prot imperative to these areas. So this mutual evolution sets up entirely new questions and contradictions for the library (I should note that, for me, library is composed of collection, community and technical infrastructure). And as youve said, the geographic diversity has grown and will continue to grow. On the one hand, arg has extended access to the global South, but also to those in the US who are outside of institutions and paywalls; on the other hand, what happens to those forms of writing, knowledge and theory that is already existing in these situations? Does it become a part of the library and discourse or does aarg simply export the Western canon, overwriting these forms in the process? How the library deals with language, translation, and how it relates to social movements are all part of these questions.

CS: I think one could compare Arg.org with more legal repositories like the Library of Congress, Archive.org or Google Books, but also more independent gestures like the hacking of Aaron Schwartz. From another perspective, one could say, parallel to the history of Arg.org there are the lesharing platforms and protocols like Napster, thepiratebay, megashare, etc., as well as the history of information leaking by whistleblowers such as Wikileaks, Manning, Snowden, etc. Do you see Arg.org connected to either of these types of phenomena? SD: On the one hand, yes, as long as I have been using the internet Ive been excited about these things because they seemed to be making the promise of the internet real, so there is a connection. I can still remember seeing UbuWeb for the rst time, or texts.com. But aarg was not a political statement at the beginning, or a performance of an ideological position, the same way these other things were. That said, each example youve mentioned has in its own way only further demonstrated how destructive and unacceptable private property is, especially in matters of knowledge. I think each instance you have mentioned takes some kind of initiative about what is possible to do within the context of digital networksinitiatives in the spirit of the Library of Alexandria or HG Wellss World Brainand each has a messy confrontation with legality, often changing those very legal structures in the process. In other words, I wouldnt divide them into two phenomena, but rather see them taking many dierent positions across a common eld. But to respond more specically: the Library of Congress, Archive. org, and Google Books each aspire to a kind of completion or totality, which is totally foreign to aarg. The same can be said for Napster, the megas, and The Pirate Bay. And while Wikileaks is involved in a redistribution of knowledge, it is in the service of revelation, of spreading the truth about power, a power that comes in part from keeping those truths secret. aaarg doesnt reveal anything, even though it might undermine a certain form of power through a similar distributive process. The deepest sympathies are probably with Aaron Swartz, whose attention to knowledge and access to resources was combined with a keen sense of global justice. CS: I originally felt while studying in the 1990s, research was changing with the power of search engines available at the time within word processors. One was no longer required to carefully catalogue notes on index cards but could collect all of the quotes and notes in one meta-document and internally search it. Over a decade later, operating systems have built-in search engines

15 September 2013 and ongoing

EX LIBRIS departs from investigating the inside of the book as a potential curatorial space. Initiated in six specic libraries, EX LIBRIS comprises a series of book displays developed within these collections, each of which creates a separate constellation of meanings through the careful organization of selected books. Situated between the exhibition and the editorial process, and using the library both as a resource for curatorial connections from book to book and as a direct platform, EX LIBRIS expands the curator Anna-Sophie Springers original research interest in the book-as-exhibition to include the relationship between the book and its context. If the book traditionally is seen as the strategy for private consumption and research, and the gallery as the space for public exhibition and performance, the libraryas the public place of readingthus becomes the hybrid site for performing the book. The selected libraries range from personal and nonaccessible libraries such as those of artist Nina Canell and book designer Robin Watkins, a private art collector, through the bookshop of gallerists/ publishers Barbara Wien and Wilma Lukatsch to the state-funded, public collections of the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig and the Art Library of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Pointing to contemporary transformations in print culture, the digital pirate archive GRR.AAAAARG.ORG is also probed, engaging the particularity of seeking unrestricted accessibility through private efforts. Together, these collections reect an exemplary publicprivate spectrum.

A PDF has been created from excerpted and copied passages of thematically relevant publications available in digital form in the Arg library. It has been uploaded back onto the platform and a link will appear in the New Texts section on http://grr.aaaaarg.org making it available to all network users.

At that same time, I had been doing research into autonomous art and architecture groups, mainly through surveys and interviews, to understand how they materially survived, how they made decisions, how they distributed power, and how they safeguarded their autonomy. It appeared to me that although each group made projects, the group itself was the most interesting projectit was

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commonplace books

Dating back to antiquity and with particular popularity in the Renaissance period, commonplace books are a type of scholarly notebook containing a collection of excerpted and copied passages that a person compiled and stored for future purposes such as reference and quotation. How to actually keep and organize a commonplace book was a small science in itself. John Lockes text A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (1706) suggested some techniquesone of which is a system of classifying and coding entries into a growing subject index, ones personal potential encyclopedia. While physical notebooks remain a treasure to keep and even if we do not yet live in a truly paperless age, our commonplace of today is that we access and store a huge amount of information digitally. By engaging an online pirate library, specically the Arg library, Commonplace Books seeks to address shifts in how we approach notions such as the common or the public more openly and actively than ever.

Charles Stankievech: Lets start at an imagined beginning. Why did you start Arg.org: was it a solitary venture in the form of an experiment or connected to something else which required the infrastructure? Sean Dockray: An imagined beginning! I like that, because there is no beginning (like there will never be an end) but rather a coherent form that emerges for a period of time, out of many people, ideas, and circumstances, before it disperses again into bits and memory and new forms. I can say that it wasnt an experiment in making information free in the abstract. Rather I was involved in several small collaborations, private remote correspondences, and semipublic debates, all of which were directly or indirectly trying to come to an understanding of, or invent a vocabulary for the contemporary political and economic realities of the time, around 2003. George Bush was the President of the US, which was itself expanding its permanent war on terror, and there seemed to be no ght or theory coming from the left. In that context, aaarg was just an infrastructure for these fragmented discussions and projects to share theoretical resources, reading material.

IMPRESSUM

and Google is synonymous with the web, making the collection and nding of information take a methodological quantum leap. Of course, academic search engines pregured such a phenomenon for the researcher, but the ease and ubiquity of the search engine seems to change the way people research and possibly connect and present information. Do you think there is a fundamental shift occurring with digital media and repositories of information when it comes to learning and writing? SD: Although there have been fundamental changes in the archives and especially the tools with which we can browse, sort, and search these archives, I am not sure that there has been a corresponding shift in our sensibilities and in our reading and writing practices. Across the computers that maintain the search indexes you are talking about, all of the texts are decomposed and recombined with one another into structures completely alien to their writing. Only when re-presented to us in search results do they return to their familiar form of an authored volume. Our solitary reading and writing practices havent made the same radical jump and it might be interesting to see ways in which readership and authorship could be decomposed and collectivized, not just as wordplay but embodied formal experiments. CS: Perhaps something like EX LIBRIS plays exactly with this formal experiment you are referring to, for it seems like something regarding the project has changed with the shift to the digital archive. For example, the history of the Cut-Up technique I feel attempts to deal with an explosion of media information, by turning a random/intuitive assemblage of information into a statement of meaning. Do you not feel that something like Aaargs scanned documents pushes research and writing in this direction? You have mentioned insightfully elsewhere both the prevalence of the cut & paste options today as well as the scanned page existing as an excerpt or a subjective partial. A library of partials I imagine would shape research and writing uniquely, and I do feel though that something like AAaarg creates the ability to collect information across a broad landscape of data and rapidly juxtapose these texts, which results in something dierent than the more traditional linear reading. SD: I am curious to nd out what eect the library has had on peoples writing. For me, the partials are important not because they can be easily recombinedthink of a musical sample library, for instancebut because those subjective partials are so invested with somebodys attention, an attention thats only magnied by the work of making notes and scanning. Broken out of their contexts (book, discipline, copyright regime, etc.) I think the partials can circulate

A curatorial-editorial experiment by Anna-Sophie Springer Miniature publication produced for the third iteration of a six-part project called EX LIBRIS: Commonplace Books GRR.AAAAARG.ORG 15 September 2013 and ongoing

to new readers and be activated in new ways, yes, often in relation to texts to which they may not have typically been exposed. You nd that the site is used in many reading groups outside of ocial academic classes and institutions, or for self-education, and the purpose it seems to me is less about mastery of a discipline than it is about identifying the tools to make meaning out of where we nd ourselves, and learning to use them. But back to writing, I think that AAaarg could go much further: for example, the discussion around a text could happen within the text; readings could layer on top of readings such that when you read a text you read its past readings as well; you might read one text in the library within the margin of another text, and so on. I also have thought recently that video lectures should be considered texts, especially since most of the time the person is reading a text which may or may not ever be published in written form. These videos travel in parallel to written texts now. How do they live in the library in a meaningful way without being marginalized into the video library? How do these videos become incorporated into new writing projects? CS: Would you at least agree research has reached a terminal velocity in the indexeither with every word in a text searchable in formats like epubs or OCR pdfs, or simply the democratic access to meta-indexes, and that this possibly has in turn an inuence in research and writing? SD: Absolutely, I agree with you that the full-text indexing of so many books is remarkable and qualitatively dierent from historical cataloguing projects. And as we know, the search algorithms are still under active developmentso perhaps we havent reached the limits youre implying, but we will nd new peaks revealing themselves to us from this new perspective. But reading and writing do adapt to the particularities of the searchable libraryin fact, we could say that searching itself becomes a mode of reading (similar to how skimming or reading out loud in a group are each dierent from a close reading). When we search we read from the middle outwards, from the relevant passage into the rest of the text, as far as we choose to go. Its just one way that these dierent modes transition into one another. Although I think there is a lot of possibility in these indexes and in libraries that try and explore the creative potential of the indexed archiveexperimenting with dierent searching and ltering algorithms, or dierent compositional tools beyond the word processorits really only possible if the indexes and the archives

that they index are actually available. This is one of the damaging inuences of copyright and rent-seeking on knowledge. There are many possible archives that are never built, or actual common archives that have been run underground or destroyed such that there isnt the time or space to develop these projects. The platforms are often too precarious, they are under attack; and the corporate versions under-develop the resources in order to manage access and establish payment rituals, which in turn retards research and writing. This is why I think that radical software development and a conception of the digital commons shouldnt be separated from one another. This interview took place via email in July / August 2013.

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