Tag Archives: Vandalism

History of an image scraper

“Shinn’s motel room contained 26 stolen books and a file full of inventory cards for another 154 volumes. He was well-educated in book history, restoration and binding, and the tools of his trade filled the room: color-stained cloths and Q-tips with jars of shoe polish, used to color-match and conceal library markings on book spines. […]

There is no home like place

“Airbnb is a global hotel filled with the same recurring items. Bed, chair, potted plant, all catered to our cosmopolitan sensibilities. We end up in a place that’s completely interchangeable; a room is a room is a room. An algorithm finds these recurring items and replaces them with the same items from other listings. By […]

SICV in Barcelona

Tras poner en marcha mi Instituto Escandinavo de Vandalismo Comparado, muchos se preguntan por qué le puse un nombre tan peculiar, sin llegar a tener del todo claro si tomárselo en serio o no. “Giving the Finger (Back) to the Digital: The Art and Politics of Archival Practice”. Presentation at the MACBA symposium La condició de […]

Every annotation is an act of vandalism

Asger Jorn reading Sartre’s L’Imaginaire. Questioning Sartre’s floating use of the term intentionality regarding the photograph. The fragment describes ambiguously the photograph or its content (the characters it depicts) as an object without particular intentionality. Jorn sees intentionality potentially elsewhere: “Intentionality on whose part, the artist?”

Damnatio memoriae

Recarving Nero

Portrait heads of the emperor Octavius Augustus. “The Joslyn portrait displays clear indications that it was recut from another person’s likeness, limiting the sculptor by dissimilarities to Augustus’ features in the original subject. Recut portraits in general exhibit asymmetries, undercutting, and unnatural planar features where a chisel or other implement has been used to remove […]

Scandinavia is a joke

Ellef Prestsæter: Did you feel that you were collecting evidence for a specific archaeological argument? Jacqueline de Jong: Yes, sure! It was the argument that there had been people, like the Visigoths, travelling all over the globe. Jorn wanted to show that the images are the same in Italy, Spain, Portugal, wherever you go.

The index at work

Erasmus censored The censorship of books by the Catholic Church has been a complex process. The list of books to be banned is first compiled in an Index, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Then the books are physically altered. Various censored specimens have been kept and give us the chance to see the index at work.

Templates after the fact

The edits of the declassifiers do not merely hide some content to preserve secrecy or privacy. They also underline the repetitive nature of the requests and controls that are taking place in the administration. The words that are “redacted” become like variables in a template.

The declassifiers

A declassified document is a document that ceases to be classified as secret. The process of declassification is not a simple publication of a once secret document. It leaves its traces on the document. When the document is released for public scrutiny, parts of it may still be removed. The classification of the paragraphs is […]