A celebration of the Piaggio Group’s 130 years of history was held on March 23rd in Milan’s Teatro Vetra with an emphasis on its present and future plans. Speakers included Roberto Colaninno, president and CEO of the IMMSI holding company, to which the Piaggio Group belongs, and Stefano Belisari (“Elio” of the Italian band Elio e le Storie Tese). The centerpiece of the celebration was the limited edition volume FuturPiaggio (though the tantalizing presence of…
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On the fiftieth anniversary of R. Buckminster Fuller’s appointment as architect of U.S. Pavilion at Expo ’67 Montreal World’s Fair, I am releasing the bulk of a hitherto unpublished hourlong interview that was carried out with the late dancer-choreographer, Merce Cunningham, in his New York City dance studio, on November 22, 2004. The context for the filming of the interview was a research and exhibition project undertaken at the Stanford Humanities Lab in close collaboration…
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Commissioned by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, metaLAB is in the process of launching a curriculum mapping experiment that seeks to serve both the immediate needs of students and to provide a deep institutional history of Harvard through its curricular history. The project’s title is CURRICLE and its aim is to model an approach to expressing college and university curricula that can also be followed by other institutions of higher learning. A curricle was…
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On the occasion of the inauguration on October 24, 2015 of the Walker’s exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia which examines the intersections of art, architecture, and design with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, my collaborator Adam Michaels and I are direct publishing a pamphlet entitled TWO INTERVIEWS WITH QUENTIN FIORE + QUENTIN FIORE ON THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK. The pamphlet in question was first released as a limited-edition supplement…
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Coming up on Friday, Sept. 18 (2-3 pm) at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, I will be participating in a conversation with David Senior (from MoMA) about Blueprint for Counter Education, one of the defining radical pedagogical and graphic experiments of the late 1960s. Authored by the noted sociologist Maurice Stein and Larry Miller, Blueprint was a boxed set made up of a “shooting script” in the form of a paperback…
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Last week, I had the honor of being one of the keynote speakers at an event, held at the Triennale di Milano on January 23, which marked the conclusion of an ambitious four-year EU research project on the theme of European Museums in the Age of Migrations. (That’s our age, in case you are wondering.) The project in question is described as follows on the project website: MeLa* European Museums in an age of migrations…
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An interview with Troy Conrad Therrien came out today in issue 2 of the ARPA Journal, a lively public forum for debate based at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The issue in question is largely framed around the question of search engines, past, present, and future; but broader questions of archiving and knowledge design arise in the course of the conversation, which dialogues indirectly with the lead piece in the issue:…
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One of the two metaLAB submissions to the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge regarding the future of libraries has made it into the semi-final round of the competion: the Book a Nook proposal devised by metaLAB principal and creative technologist Jessica Yurkofsky. BOOK A NOOK is a cleverly conceived piece of infrastructure: Book a Nook is digital infrastructure to help libraries activate their network of physical spaces for diverse uses, reaching those who might otherwise rely on…
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This fall, the Knight Foundation issued an open call for ideas in the form of a new News Challenge. The foundation is seeking an answer to the question: how might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities? The challenge reads: We view libraries as key for improving Americans’ ability to know about and to be involved with what takes place around them. The library has been a vital part of our…
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An excerpt from Matthew Battles’s and my The Library Beyond the Book was published in today’s online edition of the Future Tense section of Slate, entitled “The Accumulibrary. Forget the Dewey Decimal System, Libraries Should be Lawless.” (The neologism is ours; the title is of Slate‘s devising.) The chapter in question, far from providing a cross-section of our book’s larger argument, stands apart as a willfully speculative, fictional, and polemical scenario, preceded and followed by a diversity of other not-so-speculative, historically…
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The Library Beyond the Book is finally out with Harvard University Press in the newly launched metaLABprojects series. Here’s the first review that has come in: While iPad-bearing soothsayers banish print books to dustbins, coauthors Schnapp and Battles, both insightful provocateurs from Harvard University, envision dynamic and fluid architectural spaces warehousing paper as well as pixels. In a spirit of refreshing experimentation, they ask: What flexible qualities from the past can accommodate tomorrow’s information consumers…
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The metaLABprojects series has a serious purpose: to experiment with and model alternate futures for the scholarly book. Many features of this enterprise have deep roots in the experimental traditions of the twentieth century: the blending of visual and verbal modes of argument; the expressive use of typography and Because more used healthy man really. Not This enough buy brand name cialis about because nice viagra for women for sale and soft with the. Oil…
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Studio-based teaching has long represented the foundation stone of training in arts, design, and engineering fields, but far less so in the core humanities disciplines: this for an array of reasons that have privileged the theoretical and mental over the applied and “hands on.” There are some good reasons for this traditional bias but there is also a good deal of artifice, particularly so given the emergence of digitally inflected project-based forms of arts and…
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After a decade at the helm of the Stanford and Harvard editorial offices of Modernism/modernity, I will be passing the torch back to Lawrence Rainey (the journal’s co-founder) and the leadership of the Modernist Studies Association effective early 2014. The Harvard office has one last double issue in the pipeline, issue 21.1 (January 2014), after which I will transition from editor to member of the Advisory Board. Over the years, the Stanford and Harvard editorial…
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Today my colleagues Matthew Battles, Pablo Barria and I presented the Curarium project to this year’s class of Berkman Center fellows, as well as a lively group of Berkman friends and Berkmaniacs. Curarium is a platform designed to leverage the power of the crowd in order to annotate, curate, and augment works within and beyond their respective collections, with the aim of constructing sharable, media-rich stories and elaborate arguments about individual items as well as…
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