Jeffrey Schnapp

(Icy) cold spots

jeffrey — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 18:56:49 +0000

As this year’s edition of the Library Test Kitchen wraps up, the role of spaces of silence, contemplation, refuge and retreat in the library of the future has emerged as a frequent topic of conversation. For several decades now, libraries have striven to become network hot spots, informationally “hotter” than potential rival public spaces like coffee houses. In so doing, they have quite properly built upon their traditional identity as information hubs and sites of discovery and access. But as high speed wireless and cellular networks encompass ever larger portions of the world, being networked and hyperconnected is emerging as the new norm. And the norm in question not only reduces the degree of differentiation between hubs and peripheries, but also destabilizes the dividing line between public and private realms, giving rise to new hybridities: public performances of privacy –think: a caller-pedestrian madly gesticulating “over his cell phone” at an interlocutor 1,000 miles away– and private performances of once exclusively public behaviors –think: a student dressed in pijamas doing online research in a national archive from her bedroom.

Which raises the question of how the redesign of libraries as hot spots could or should be complemented by the creation of cold spots: wifi, cell phone, and signal free zones. Should the cold spot be integral to the permanent programming of the building, i.e. part of an interior zoning system? Or might it instead be imagined as a portable ice-cube shaped, battery equipped, signal jamming device that an authorized patron or librarian could introduce into a given space to reprogram it, as it were, on the fly? Or might it assume the form of an enclosure structure or booth, a kind of phone booth in reverse? Participants in the Test Kitchen have been exploring similar hypotheses.

One thing is for certain: as hyperconnection becomes the norm, disconnection takes on new social and cultural value. Where does the library wish to figure within this new universe of value? I’d venture to say as a place where extremes meet: the hot, the cold, and the tepid.

Anatomies of the reading hand, thumbing to swiping and back

jeffrey — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 16:31:55 +0000

One of the most famous page layouts in The Medium is the Massage displays the thumbs of a reader –Quentin Fiore? the male model depicted elsewhere in Peter Moore’s photo shoot?– holding the volume open to a page spread that reads THE BOOK. The gesture is self-reflexive, like much else in The Medium is the Massage. In order to “read” this page, the reader has to mime the gesture and press back against the edges of the opposing pages of the perfect-bound original paperback. The script is one that readers have internalized and naturalized over the course of centuries of print culture: thumbs are cast in the lead role as the holding and navigation system for tightly bound bundles of print. Whereas other fingers can play roles in paging forward or backward, the thumb anchors the physical act of reading. Two thumbs and hands are required. A single thumb could serve as a placeholder but not a reading device.

This script has a number of presuppositions built into it that triumph in the modern era of printing. The first is one of scale: the book must exist on certain physical scale, assume a certain shape, and possess certain physical characteristics in order to be “thumbable.” Most medieval codices and early modern books were too large or unwieldy to invite any such activation of the thumbs (however gradual or slow-paced). Like contemporary coffee table books, their weight and size invited other sorts of manual maneuvers, not to mention giving rise to an arsenal of support devices like lecterns, desks, markers, and weights. A significant exception were Books of Hours, the most popular category of devotional books produced between the 12th and the 16th century: works that were surely read much as the reader of The Medium is the Massage ”reads” the first electric information age book. Other presuppositions include: a tight binding that requires pressure to hold a page spread open; a certain range of rigidity and pliability in the page support; a vertical format (a too horizontal book format will produce too much flex).

The rise of mobile devices has given rise to a new digitality in the double sense of the word.

On the one hand, thumbing has become a single-handed operation, carried out at a hyperactive pace that would be improbable if one were performing a print artifact. The operation is restricted to smaller mobile devices such as smart phones and mini-tablets. On the other, swiping with index and middle fingers prevails on larger devices and readers like the iPad and the Sony e-Readers, though with significant variants: the Kindle has buttons and the Nook invites index-finger taps. All these operations are asymmetrical. They do not imply a balance between right and left. No tension structure (like a binding and page span) bridges the gap between left and right. The device is rigid and relatively thin so as to allow for single-handed holding or lap-top use. Is there a role for the unused hand within this asymmetrical performance of reading operations? Does one really “read” in any ordinary sense of the term given the cognitive pace and the prevalence of non-linear page scanning on the part of many users? Is the true model for swiping the machine reading of credit cards and smart id’s? Continuities in language have a way of covering and smoothing over cognitive and cultural shifts.

Italiamerica II — Il Mondo dei Media

jeffrey — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:18:46 +0000

The second volume of Italiamerica, a collaboration with my friend, Professor Emanuela Scarpellini at the University of Milan, has now been published in Milan by Il Saggiatore in concert with the Fondazione Arnoldo Mondadori. The volume contains a range of innovative essays on everything from the history of baseball in Italy (by Sergio Giuntini) to Hollywood’s stagings of Italian tourist destinations (Robert Gordon) to the Italian reception of American pop music (Irene Piazzoni) to US punk rock on the Italian scene (Nicola del Corno and Sergio Maramotti) to the americanization of Italian public television (Simone Tobia).

Uprisings (on the limits of screen culture)

jeffrey — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:45:58 +0000

Trend-tracking isn’t my day job. But in my own shuttling back and forth between physical and digital curation, scholarship, and teaching, I’m regularly struck by the ways in which the normativity of screen culture today is intensifying urges for sensorially richer, more tactile forms of experience and communication. From the revival of knitting and other forms of manual craft to the chapbook subculture that seems to be spreading worldwide to makers fairs, “analog” modes of experience, culture, and knowledge making/sharing are showing signs of renewed vigor. Or, rather, their renewal is being fed by the very pervasiveness of networked electronic screens.

It’s a dialectic (and it’s this dialectic that I think we need to design for, whether we are designing knowledge, future classrooms, galleries and libraries; or trying to reshape the book as a cognitive object).

Among digital natives –viz. my students– I’m encountering a growing proportion who are web savvy but web-engaged only to the degree that such engagement assumes the form of a corridor that runs back and forth between screens and more tactile realms of experience. I take this as a cautionary tale that underscores the fundamental importance of retaining our commitment to grappling with the FULL human sensorium even as forms of cultural and social exchange migrate to the digital realm.

HIGH REVS = http://alpha.zeega.org/project/344/view#/player/frame/1615

The Electric Information Age LP

jeffrey — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:46:22 +0000

Following in the tracks of our model pre-digital “augmented” book, McLuhan/Agel/Fiore’s 1967 The Medium is the Massage, Adam Michaels and I are beginning to cook up a vinyl LP project that will consist in a remix of The Electric Information Age Book. The idea is to work up a ludic soundtrack for our print excavation of a moment from the e-Book’s prehistory that riffs off of Agel’s own quirky Columbia Records project, marketed as THE FIRST SPOKEN ARTS RECORD YOU CAN DANCE TO.

If you aren’t familiar with this curio from the late 1960′s, you’ll find an online copy at Ubu web.

Livebrary + Curation Stations = Test Kitchen Fun

jeffrey — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:07:10 +0000

For Bibliotheca II, the library test kitchen being generously funded by Harvard’s Library Lab, my collaborator Jeff Goldenson and I are planning to develop projects of our own alongside the student developed projects. I have two currently in mind on which I’m planning to work with Jeff, fellow metaLAB founder Bobby Pietrusko and other team members (tbd).

The first, entitled the Livebrary is a data visualization appliance that exposes the multilayered life of the Harvard Library System in real time in the form of a set of visualizations delivered on a large touchscreen that allows library users to explore what is happening system-wide on a variety of scales: data flows, traffic patterns, emerging search and discovery patterns, etc. The touchscreen’s output would also be projected on the opposing curvilinear walls of the same walk-through space where the touchscreen is located, becoming a show for other library patrons.

The second, entitled the Curation Station is a reinterpretation of the carrel as a hybrid digital/physical desktop that is both an inward facing site (for research) and an outward facing site of display, exchange and sharing. This piece of furniture would be tested both as a library device and as a device for exhibiting work from the metaLAB curatorial innovation fellows, as their projects mature this spring.

Stay tuned for drawings, thought bubbles, test iterations…

Bibliotheca (the sequel)

jeffrey — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:28:26 +0000

Bibliotheca I has a successor: Bibliotheca II.

The fall seminar that I co-taught with my friend and fellow Berkmanite John Palfrey last semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design was built around three nodes: the history of the library as an institution from antiquity to the present; case studies in the design and construction of contemporary libraries; and the development, design and discussion of elements that might make up the library of the future. So as to give the seminar a problem-solving character, four half-sessions were dedicated to challenges currently being faced within the Harvard libraries. These sessions, organized with the expert help of Anne Whiteside (director of the Loeb Design Library) and Jeff Goldenson (of the Law Library Innovation Lab), were opened up to the Harvard library community.

The momentum of the seminar was such that, with financial support from Harvard’s Library Lab, Jeff, Anne, Ben Brady and I have gone on to organize a “library test kitchen” for the spring for the full development, building and testing of some of last semester’s student projects as well as the incubation of other brand new ones. Last semester’s work included flexible carrel designs, modular media/reading/event space structures for insertion into existing library facilities, networked scanning stations, spatial Googling, a radical rethinking of the reference desk, a navigational app for library exploration, as well as designs for district libraries in Bogota, Columbia and South Central Africa. Among other things, this semester’s work will include policy proposals, a book project, and the building of curatorial stations.

We are initiating conversations with potential institutional partners for this venture including public and research libraries, as well as device and appliance development labs. Any takers?

Photo remix by Ben Brady

Visual/verbal essayism

jeffrey — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 03:46:21 +0000

When proclaiming the advent of a new photo-driven mass communications vernacular, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy coined the neologism TYPOPHOTOGRAPHY in the mid-1920s. The label may not have stuck. But the conviction that underwrote it did: namely, that offset lithography, photography, telegraphy, telephony, radio, moving pictures (and, later, video, television, and electronic data networks), shaped by and shaping, in turn, new social needs and expectations, had disrupted the galaxy of the Gutenberghian book and created the preconditions for a communications revolution. A gulf had opened up between the printed page–with its well-oiled typographic geometries, its subordination of image to text, and cognitive linearity–and contemporary life, with its simultaneity, accelerated cadences, and overloaded sensorium. The solution was to bridge the gulf by means of a mode of communication better suited to the requirements of an era in which the multitudes were history’s (distracted) masters. In other words, to forge a new visual-verbal vernacular.

Moholy was persuaded that “philosophical works would use the same means.” (From Le Corbusier in Vers une architecture to Archigram with its space comics to today’s authors of philosophical graphic novels, some have sought to prove him right).

Right or wrong, I often muse about the transformative potential of such an endeavor in the domain of humanities scholarship, especially when merged with the genre of the essay, the most porous and public genre of learned writing. What if the visual-vebal essay were to become one of the defining short genres of intellectual debate in the human sciences? Or is it already–if not in print then at least in public speaking–beckoning toward a fusion of the horizons of the verbal and visual, thanks to the increasing ubiquity of slide shows in the delivery of professional papers? (If only the use of Powerpoint and Keynote were more typophotographic and less, well, pedestrian.)

Below you’ll find an experimental iteration of the genre that was embedded into Speed Limits, the companion volume for an exhibition of the same name, hosted by the Canadian Center for Architecture (2009) and the Wolfsonian-FIU (2010-2011).

The Electric Information Age Book (now out)

jeffrey — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:07:09 +0000

The Electric Information Age Book is a collaboration between myself and designer Adam Michaels of Project Projects (NYC) in the form of an excavation of a moment from the e-Book’s prehistory and metabook on a cut-and-paste genre of original paperbacks. The book explores on a time span in mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when former backstage players—designers, graphic artists, editors, “coordinators,” and “producers”—stepped into the spotlight to create a set of exceptional paperback books. The period begins in 1966 when Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, in collaboration with Marshall McLuhan, first developed The Medium Is the Massage into “an inventory of effects,” and continues to 1975, the publication year of Other Worlds, Agel’s collaboration with the exobiologist Carl Sagan. Graphic designers such as Fiore employed a variety of radical techniques—verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics—that were as important to the content as the text. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the “Electric Information Age,” these small, inexpensive paperbacks brought the ideas of contemporary thinkers to mass audiences and established a distinctive new graphics-rich, montage-based genre of bookmaking that still resonates loudly today.

Addendum Jan. 5, 2012: the Inventory Books series, founded and directed by Adam, was just very warmly written up by Steven Heller in The Atlantic‘s online edition.

Addendum Jan. 19, 2012: very fine review published by Buzz Poole in Imprint; also published in Salon.

DPLA: conjugating the physical and the digital

jeffrey — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 02:15:20 +0000

In the course of metaLAB’s participation in the Digital Public Library of America project, I have become increasingly concerned not just with how to design DPLA as a user-centered platform, but also with how to build bridges between DPLA and the 17,000 public library facilities in existence today in the United States. Local public libraries play a multitude of key roles with respect to the communities that they serve and these roles cannot simply be displaced by waving a digital (not to mention a national) magic wand. Moreover, DPLA’s own public mission cannot be fulfilled without coupling the affordances of the digital to those of the physical world with its assembly, event and conversation spaces. So how to build light, nimble, architecturally and informationally flexible physical instantiations of DPLA at the local level that add value with respect to local needs and can also be used to feature local or regional curatorial work carried out within DPLA alongside samples of that which is being done on the national scene?

The answer, I believe, lies in the creation of innovative pop-up modules, kiosks but without the abysmal design of contemporary media stations with their formica- or corian-encased touchscreens or bolted-down keyboards. The inventive vein that shaped early experiments in multimedia kiosks, like those designed in the 1920s for the streets of revolutionary Moscow by Gustav Klucis, long ago ran dry and we find ourselves surrounded by dreary and dronelike post-industrial descendants.

It’s time for a wholesale reconceptualization that inserts multimedia kiosks into the very fabric of the existing architecture of one of the few remaining truly public spaces in contemporary life: the local public library. (And, why not, also in the streets.)