Ambient¶
First, we are building an ambient, a (fictional) room filled with bookshelves. In that room, whenever you reach for a book, it is immediately clear why that book is there. It’s a place where you could easily lose yourself by following a reference from some specific part of our collective publication. Or you could start by sitting inside the library and lose yourself in exploring all of the references on surrounding bookshelves.
That’s how we build a catalog. A bibliography. ⁄A library. Something
like: www⁄https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/,
www⁄https://monoskop.org/log2/ or www⁄https://aaaaarg.fail.
Building that library will be as easy as sending a reference – an article, a book, a webpage - to a chat room (www⁄https://t.me/+xFYiBlTfBrhkZjI0), via an email to glassblower⁄me or glassblower⁄Tomi, or adding it to a page at www⁄https://git.sandpoints.org/CustodiansOnline/MirrorUbu
Our collective publication emerges from that initial sharing of texts and thoughts, building a three-level hierarchy of written documents:
Shards¶
A lot of us approach the task of writing a text first by jotting down some notes. Those notes often have references to items in the catalog/bibliography. Notes relate to each other. More often than not, notes get dropped, with the hope they might better serve us in the future in another process of writing.
We like to understand our notes as ⁄shards. Shared shards. Shards collected/curated together build a reflection. We encourage editing someone else’s shard or picking it up for your own reflection(s). Collective writing is hard but such guestures could help. That’s our hope at least.
Reflections¶
reflection⁄Alternative Information Ecologies collect shards and build upon them. A reflection is a work in progress, a bit more articulate than a shard. A short essay if you want.
Mirror¶
mirror⁄Stage: Everything Is Temporary. It’s a single document describing our endeavor. A mirror is gradually built from reflections which are built from shards. This process is neither linear nor unidirectional. A shard could come from a spark kindled by a sentence being written in the mirror document or from a reflection. Forget about spark. This is the moment where metaphorical starts to ruin its purpose.
We have a software platform which transforms this metaphorical play into a literal one. It is called www⁄Sandpoints. But let’s forget about software for now. It will come in handy only when we need to accelerate what we agreed upon and set as our collective common ground. And for that we need to waste some time together. We couldn’t imagine a better place than a renaissance palace on the Adriatic island of Cres. Once we are all in Cres you will totally get what we think by this ;)
reflection⁄The Art of Living at the End
How not to become shard⁄existentially paralysed when faced with catastrophic shard⁄crises of such a scale as climate catastrophe and mass extinction intertwined as they are with a system of such flexibility and domination as capitalism? Thinking about such future 25 years down the line, we are stuck in the shard⁄gap.
How to live and act in the shard⁄long extinction is to be able to carve the space for doing work in and on the shard⁄imaginary. The imaginary of the world that is not linear, deterministic and unavoidable. The role of shard⁄imagination here /to add/. Multiple threads of possibility, some realised in the past - some ongoing, some private - some public, some local and atomistic - some large-scale.
How to do such work? Where are the sites of such work? This is supported by the project of the shard⁄library, which is shard⁄a process, not a place, supported with the
shard⁄The role of tools in relational practices in shard⁄custodianship.
shard⁄Existentialism
Existentialism here is a marriage between some literary and philosophical positions.
In literature, Varlam Shalamov wrote about his life in the camp versus how Solzhenitsyn wrote about his. When the latter talked about certain redemption, a rediscovery of humanity and in that, a certain good that the camp showed, Shalamov wrote that a camp is something that should not have happened. This is not something humans should ever experience; such experience has no redeeming qualities. His is a position of contemplating pain (Simone Weil’s malheur?) that arrests in the tracks and that refuses such spiritual and rational solutions as redemption and (logical) causality.
In philosophy, it is about being driven beyond the limits of rationally comprehensible.
“Contrary to the rationalist program of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, existential philosophy shows that the horrors of existence, the paradoxes and contradictions of human life cannot be grasped through “clear and distinct ideas” but are only given through extreme emotional states such as anxiety and despair—through passion.”
Also “the impossibility of knowledge by ‘clear and distinct ideas.’” What is worth emphasising here is not anxiety or personal pain, but that apart or on top of “universal truths” and solutions, one needs a “personal solution”, valid for them alone. (Even if it can be useful locally or collectively).
Benjamin Fondane, Existential Monday
Dostoevsky
Shalamov
shard⁄Crisis
We are at a tipping point: climate change, nuclear war, tensions in global
infrastructure (supply chain, COVID spread), information overload. They are too
large to apprehend; supra-liminal. This is paralyzing.
shard⁄Latent futures
The gap between the tools (the excavator) and the crises (the Evergreen) is an
imaginary. The construction of an imaginary, a re-writing of history, allows
one to step into the future.
The new imaginary does not necessarily arise from acts of imaginations. Often
it is already present in the raw materials we have at hand. It is latent
inside the library. There is a process of refactoring, often beginning in the
linguistic domain, but manifesting in an ontological shift.
We can conceptualize this shift with reference to the bi-stable images from
perceptual psychology. The balerina who rotates both clockwise and
counterclockwise. The Necker cube whose orientation is unclear. The dress that
is both black and white. The material content does not change, but the
perceived gestalt changes entirely.
How to provoke that shift in perception, that re-organization of the archive?
This is the role of art, as Alva Noe argues.
- www⁄Cristobal Sciutto: " Ideas are not objects"
- ⦚bib:03752270-ca9b-4647-ac83-938c5d55ee22not found
- ⦚bib:99a194e9-5499-4027-9719-4a558dcf85e9not found
shard⁄Long Extinction
For many peoples, the apocalypse has already occurred. For many, it lies ahead. We are in the long extinction, a process underway. A long duration extending forward, in which we will spend our lives. Framing extinction away from a figure of something contained in the future, a singular event of extermination, and into a process that we have to deal with daily, and increasingly, is important.
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
shard⁄The Imaginary
The imaginary is not imagination, because it is not personal and not located in the mind. (Verran, p.37) It is not something a person calls upon by creative cognitive capacity. The imaginary rather refers to a collective process of “figuring” the world.
Verran specifically talks about the modern figuring of the world, where a “figure” can be, for instance, a “feature of the physical matter”. Such a figure has become a foundational unit of universal western epistemology. Verran shows how we parse all modes of abstraction or scientific logic we encounter with this figure, thus remaking them in the image of the western episteme. We can easily add here the figuring of the world in terms of time, money, liberty, autonomy, agency, etc.
This shows that it is not very easy to alter / change or expand the imaginary. It is not just a matter of putting a bit of extra effort into fantasy. It is about a profound remaking of the foundational beliefs, principles and practices that formulate the world in ways in which we are used to encountering it, physically, abstractly, emotionally and in myriad other ways. That is why our imaginary is rooted in the past both conceptually and practically and shapes the future.
Extra reading:
shard⁄Widen your sense of imagination!
The worlds are constantly ending. The point is to widen our sense of imagination and go beyond the paralysis in thinking and acting.
Back in 1957, in what has to be considered one of his classical essays Commandments in the Atomic Age⦚bib:f56a232d-d8f1-4c0b-90f8-574a261cd5bfnot found, Günther Anders published a warning to widen our sense of imagination: " (…) you have to violently widen the narrow capacity of your imagination (and the even narrower one of your feelings) until imagination and feeling become capable to grasp and realize the enormity of your doings; until you are capable to seize and conceive, to accept or reject it - in short: your task is: to widen your moral fantasy. “
Today, when we are faced by the accelerating climate crisis, nuclear threat and extinction, when our imagination seems to be shrinking (and we can only see the end at the horizont), what we have to do is to go into the opposite direction - imagine many possible worlds beyond the end itself.
shard⁄Library
Library supports the functions of the imaginary, both repressive and emancipatory.
shard⁄A process, not a place
What is a library? It’s not a place - it’s a process and a relation.
While we all know that the famous library of Alexandria was demolished, it was in fact a gradual process, first through the explusion of scholars from Alexandria, then through the burning by Julius Caesar in 48BC… And even after the destruction of hundreds of thousands of scrolls, “daughter libraries” were established and the transmission of knowledge continued.
In other words, even after the catastrophe(s) and loss of precious knowledge, the library - in different forms and under different names - renewed itself. The library of Alexandria is certainly one of the mythological and imaginary places of human history, but what it shows at the same time is that all libraries - even if destroyed - represent a process and, at the same time, a relation to all other libraries. Unlike the Great Library of Alexandria that required a vast storage space, today we are able to create and recreate numerous “daughter libraries” or “shadow libraries” on the internet.
It requires space, but it can be moved quickly, replicated and renewed easier than physical books. The Library is also a process which entails a relation between the books, the librarians and the readers, it always already also includes a relation between books themselves, intertwined references, the neverending process of writing and rewriting, reading and rereading, so in a sense, the library is everything but a place. Yet, once you are in the library, or reading a book, you are creating a space, perhaps a different space (Foucault’s heterotopia) which is always related to temporality.
The fact that some ancient text survived has, paradoxically, nothing to do with the material libraries (“places”) but with the process of copying and recopying, with creating and recreating imaginary places that are in relation to each other through the diligent work and care of custodians.
shard⁄The role of tools in relational practices
The tools are meant to help the bridging of relational practice and sharing. Tools can escalate the dimension of the relational to a level of interconnection that might constitute a critical mass for impactful actions.
shard⁄The role of relational practices in custodianship
Relational practices should be the conceptual building infrastructure of custodianship. These practices are caring processes, which can be mutual, instigating further care and relationships. This mutuality potentially creates relationships, which might help to constitute interdependent networks of people and content, formulating different communication protocols which can be understood as “abstractions on social processes”shard⁄Protocols These interdependent networks can be used to extend the library. It is a process to branch (or even ‘fork’) the library models which have a centralised nature. What they build over time, is to provide the missed content, the specialised care and the shared responsability conceptually adding them independently to the public services. As Horvat affirms “it’s a process and a relation” shard⁄A process, not a place.
reflection⁄The role of relational practices in custodianship
Relational practices should be the conceptual building infrastructure of custodianship. These practices are caring processes, which can be mutual, instigating further care and relationships. This mutuality potentially creates relationships, which might help to constitute interdependent networks of people and content, formulating different communication protocols which can be understood as “abstractions on social processes”shard⁄Protocols.
These interdependent networks can be used to extend the library. It is a process involves an activity of branching (or even ‘forking’, technically speaking) the library models which have a centralised nature, and a hierarchical structure, which includes who decides about the library content, its paths to expansion, the interface with the public, and the public itself.
In this sense, the library, as a model, an infrastructure, and more than anything a paradigm, is a collection of culture that represents a conscious or unconscious curatorial perspective on one side. On the other side, it is also a collection that is activated by the public, and depending from what they host they activate a different public imaginary. So it “supports the functions of the imaginary” (see shard⁄Library) through the ideas circulating through its publications, which can be “both repressive and emancipatory” (ibid.)) because of both its content in itself, and how the curational process has been taken.
In this sense, some of the foundations of the publishing preserving (the library) systems are questioned in this different systemic embodiment. It is inevitable then to mention Barthes’ consequential relationship between the “birth of the reader” and “the death of the author”. They deeply question “ownership, copyright and the subjects supposed to know” (see shard⁄Death of neoliberal library), which can be connected with what we might call now a neoliberal vision of the library.
What these libraries (possibly both online and offline) outside of the official library system build over time, is to provide the missed content, the specialised care and the shared responsibility conceptually adding them independently to the public services. As glassblower⁄Horvat affirms, “it’s a process and a relation” (see shard⁄A process, not a place).
shard⁄Library
Library supports the functions of the imaginary, both repressive and emancipatory.
shard⁄Death of neoliberal library
Roland Barthes famously said: “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”. Similary, what could - and should - be said today: the birth of the emancipatory library of the future - for the future and from the future - must be at the cost of the death of the neoliberal library based on ownership, copyright and the subjects supposed to know (whether it’s librarians or authors themselves). No gods no masters!
shard⁄Protocols
For global action, local relationships must aggregate rhizomatically. The
formal mechanisms of communication protocols are the way of facilitating this
aggregation. They are abstractions on social processes which produce global
artifacts, with traces back to the local.
- www⁄http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf
- www⁄https://subconscious.substack.com/p/thinking-together
reflection⁄Alternative Information Ecologies
- shard⁄Crisis
- shard⁄Latent Image
- shard⁄Protocols
- shard⁄Maintenance
shard⁄Crisis
We are at a tipping point: climate change, nuclear war, tensions in global
infrastructure (supply chain, COVID spread), information overload. They are too
large to apprehend; supra-liminal. This is paralyzing.
shard⁄Latent futures
The gap between the tools (the excavator) and the crises (the Evergreen) is an
imaginary. The construction of an imaginary, a re-writing of history, allows
one to step into the future.
The new imaginary does not necessarily arise from acts of imaginations. Often
it is already present in the raw materials we have at hand. It is latent
inside the library. There is a process of refactoring, often beginning in the
linguistic domain, but manifesting in an ontological shift.
We can conceptualize this shift with reference to the bi-stable images from
perceptual psychology. The balerina who rotates both clockwise and
counterclockwise. The Necker cube whose orientation is unclear. The dress that
is both black and white. The material content does not change, but the
perceived gestalt changes entirely.
How to provoke that shift in perception, that re-organization of the archive?
This is the role of art, as Alva Noe argues.
- www⁄Cristobal Sciutto: " Ideas are not objects"
- ⦚bib:03752270-ca9b-4647-ac83-938c5d55ee22not found
- ⦚bib:99a194e9-5499-4027-9719-4a558dcf85e9not found
shard⁄Protocols
For global action, local relationships must aggregate rhizomatically. The
formal mechanisms of communication protocols are the way of facilitating this
aggregation. They are abstractions on social processes which produce global
artifacts, with traces back to the local.
- www⁄http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf
- www⁄https://subconscious.substack.com/p/thinking-together
shard⁄Resilient Infrastructure
For protocols to be resilient, they must be maintained. Simple tools can be
interrogated. Simple tools can be tweaked. Worse is better.
Software must be executed on a substrate, a computational abstraction on top of
hardware. If that substrate shifts from under the software, the software stops
running. It must be “ported” to new hardware via a new abstraction. Longevity
thus implies constant maintenance.
The easier to port, the more resilient software becomes. Sometimes porting
becomes impossible, and then software dies. This is what happened to Adobe
Flash, until it was ported to the internet browser (flash.pm). Choosing a
simple abstraction on top of hardware, despite being inefficient is often worth
it. This is the approach taken by www⁄100 rabbits with Uxn. They write:
“As it stands today, modern software is built with extreme short-sightedness,
designed to be run on disposable electronics and near impossible to maintain.
We decided to not participate. Our aim is to create a machine that focuses on
answering the handful of little tasks we need, which is centered around
building playful audio/visual experiences.
Uxn was created explicitly to host software on pre-existing platforms, the
design was advised primarily by relative software complexity, not by how fast
it could run on new hardware standards. Features were weighted against the
relative difficulty they would add for programmers implementing their own
emulators.”