Category Archives: books
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. […]
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?”
Artificial intelligence
Research on the Softening of the Brain, Léon Rostan
A dilation of the soul-itself
Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 to the small-landowning Aurelii of Thagaste, an “obscure provincial city” in the uplands of Roman Numidia; and in the year of his birth the Christian emperor in Milan devised this new imperial epithet: “Eternity.” He died as Augustinus Hipponiensis, in the Vandal-besieged city of Hippo Regius —fronting […]
A book worm’s micrography
From http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/hooke.html Hooke’s reputation in the history of biology largely rests on his book Micrographia, published in 1665. Hooke devised […] one of the best such microscopes of his time, and used it in his demonstrations at the Royal Society’s meetings. With it he observed organisms as diverse as insects, sponges, bryozoans, foraminifera, and bird […]
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.
in the case of templates the writing itself becomes peripheral to the processing
Excerpts from Matthew Fuller’s It looks like you’re writing a letter The Templates, sample documents that the user can edit to make their own, with their repertoire of ‘elegant fax’, ‘contemporary fax’ to ‘formal letter’ or ‘memo’, acknowledge that forgery is the basic form of document produced in the modern office. The purest manifestation of […]
Arcane 17
Arcane 17 is a text by André Breton written at the end of the war while traveling on the East Cost of Canada. Arcane 17 is a book object that contains text, images and objects.
Text-ures 2
Lapsus by the Google Books OCR program. The visual approximations of the algorithm for the word arms and anus are similar enough to create some confusion. Mentioned by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup in her talk The politics of archival assemblages in the seminar Culture@Work