The Boston showing of metaLAB’s documentary/web documentary COLD STORAGE at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design took place in early February of this year, but we are now preparing for the film’s European premiere in Paris. The presentation will take place at 4:30 pm on Wednesday, September 30, in the Petit Auditorium, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Quai François Mauriac, within the setting of the conference Vers une littérature mondiale à l’heure du numérique?. The…
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Tag: libraries
In their celebrated 1972 critique of modernist architecture, LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown summoned architects, designers, planners, and policy makers to learn from what, at the time, seemed like the most improbable of urban models: the Las Vegas Strip. Of course, learning from Las Vegas meant more than simply scrutinizing the Strip or appreciating it as a work of Pop Art. It meant reappraising the top-down ideology of modern(ist) urban…
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After several iterations of the Library Test Kitchen design studio (including a detour to SXSW), the publication of The Library Beyond the Book (whose final chapter assumes the form of a screenplay), and a spring 2014 Humanities Studio dedicated to analyzing, mapping, documenting, and interpreting the Harvard Depository, metaLAB is pleased to announce the Boston premiere of its documentary/web documentary COLD STORAGE on February 6 at 3:30 pm in Piper Auditorium at Harvard’s Graduate School…
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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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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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My colleague Matthew Battles and I recently completed the lead book in the new metaLABprojects series that will be launched by Harvard University Press in the spring of 2014. Under the title of The Library Beyond the Book, it reflects on what libraries have been in the past from a broad cultural anthropological and architectonic standpoint in order to speculate on what they will become in the future: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks,…
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