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Category: zettel

scraps of paper

The Agility of the Book in the face of the Digital and the Censor

Published May 4, 2008 by cgerrish

Tim Tate: Video book artist

I have shelves of books, some that trace back all the way to my childhood. A few others were passed on to me from my grandfather, through my father. I expect my long relationship with books will continue throughout my lifetime. However, the book seems to be in transition, and it’s not clear if the current package can survive the challenge of the digital. As a non-volatile storage medium, the book has many virtues, and currently provides substantial value. In the shadow of this looming threat, the book has inserted itself into my thoughts recently through two upcoming shows:

San Francisco Center for the Book
Banned and Recovered: Artists Respond to Censorship 
In the Gallery: Fri Aug 15 – Wed Nov 26
Opening Reception: Fri Aug 15, 6-8pm

Donna Seager Gallery
The Art of the Book
Third Annual Exhibition of Handmade and Altered Artist Books 
April 25 – May 31, 2008
Reception for the Artist: Friday, May 9, 6 to 8pm

The Center for the Book show will feature artists reacting to the act of censorship and the recovery of texts and thoughts. The show at Donna Seager’s  gallery features artists exploring the form and expanding the meaning of what it means to be a book. When artists engage with books at this level, there is a profound conversation that occurs outside of language. It’s an excellent reminder that substantial thought can occur across many modes of expression.

The artist book is generally singular; it’s not meant to be mass produced as an inexpensive package for text or images. In that sense, it’s the opposite of what has made the book successful as a form. The digital is no threat here. The artist book is singular and original, the digital is a copy at its origin. The leaves of an artist book aren’t limited to text and images; and the book form itself explodes out to its boundaries and beyond. We’ve lived with the classic form of the book for so long that it’s become part of us. A show like “The Art of the Book” reminds us that even with a familiar object, an infinite realm of possibility abides in every moment. And the book reveals itself to be an agile species changing its form to adapt to new artistic landscapes.

The question of banning a book in the age of the digital is an interesting one. One might ask if it’s even possible. Certainly we’ve seen books banned by governments, by school systems, religions and other social collections. And yet, it’s not the form of the book that is being banned, it’s the ideas and stories that are considered dangerous. All books aren’t banned, just certain ones. The digital and the network make it much more difficult to stop ideas through the banning a particular package and delivery method.

Our country’s history of banning books is a series of markers on our trek toward a more perfect union. As we contemplate the banned book, we need to look both backward and forward. In the future, it may not be the book that is banned—and interestingly, that could provide a new opening for a kind of book to route around the ideologically filtered network.

The work at the top of this post is by Tim Tate, and is called “Page 100 of Each Volume of the 1954 World Book Encyclopedia.” Mr. Tate has created a compelling vision in which a book is revealed through cast glass, electronics and video. As the book traces its evolutionary arc, it emerges here for a moment or two as an interesting kind of amphibian.

 

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Personal Data Management: Mesh, Evernote, the Atom and the Wave

Published April 29, 2008 by cgerrish

A couple of early observations about MS Mesh:

Storage space will need to be unlimited and permanent. Imagine a 7 year old starting to use Mesh today. What will their data storage, connection and organization requirements look like in 20 years? Why should anyone need to delete anything ever?

It’s early yet, but it seems like there’s a missed opportunity around changing the desktop and folders metaphor. The single stream tag and search metaphor allows every object to be tagged (or filed) in many categories at once and retrieved along many facets. As the stream of data that is pointed at the Mesh grows, the idea having to drag things to folders stops making sense.

Although not a platform, Evernote does a good job of allowing you to save things to a storage space using multiple devices. They have Web, Phone, PC and Mac clients and you can send items via email. Tagging is already in place, but it doesn’t current support standard feed protocols or SMS. And it doesn’t support both individual and group storage, or have a newslog of system activity.

The physics of personal data storage seems to come down to the atom and the wave. Are things to be stored individual objects or are they streams? The answer is that they exist as both depending on your perspective. Can you mix the metaphor? Can you put a stream in a folder?

While not strictly competing, it will be interesting to compare these two services as they go forward. Complexity and simplicity are large factors in user acceptance. The service that can be most useful to digital natives will eventually go viral. What would a digital native save? And how would they like to access it?

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A Gathering of Tribes: Tree Huggers and Foodies Rock the House

Published April 28, 2008 by cgerrish

Last night Friends of the Urban Forest held a fund raiser at Anne Sommerville’s Greens restaurant. It was a gathering of tribes and a connecting point for future action. The treehuggers and the foodies have a common agenda around environment, sustainability and engagement. Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office presented FUF executive director Kelly Quirke with a proclamation, a representative of Nancy Pelosi’s office expressed her support of the urban forestry movement, and Katrina Heron, speaking on behalf of Alice Waters, spread the word about the Slow Food Movement.

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Identity, Privacy, Society: The Laws of the Tribe

Published April 27, 2008 by cgerrish

The Tribe

As we become both individuals and members of a group on the network, we become more tribal. Social graph is often discussed in terms of the linkages between the members of a set. But there’s a quality to the links that doesn’t seem to come through in the conversation. We argue that the word “friend” doesn’t properly signify in the context of social network websites because it merely describes a raw physical link of data sets. We need to take the thoughts further. When networks become social, it’s not the fact of a connection that makes the society, it’s the quality and intention of individual acts. How do the members of the group treat each other?

Anyone who has followed the formation of groups on the network from BBS and ListServs to NewsGroups to IRC and Chat Rooms, knows that primitive impulses surface regularly and threaten the structure of the tribe. The designation “anonymous coward” was created to encourage members to claim and assert their identity within the group, and to signal that no value or reputation accrued to the speech of the anonymous. Godwin’s Law is evidence that a conversation in a  frictionless environment veers into common patterns of primative gesture.

Identity, privacy and society have a different meaning within a tribe. We’re used to thinking of identity on an individual basis, but identity claims have to be validated by our society. Some day our tribes will have developed to the point where identity theft will be a crime against the tribe, rather than just the individual. The idea of privacy will have to take tribal membership into account.

We have a lot to learn from the power dynamics and organizational structures among members of tribes in non-western countries around the world. The word “tribe” itself is filled with a thousand stories and histories; some very dark, others powerfully progressive. The new gathering of tribes will be an extension of our ongoing experiments with decentralized democracy.

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