THE
PUBLIC
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Two free events that may be of interest. Both are by the SVA MFA in Design Criticism program.

David Barringer: Design As Literature: The Changing Shape of the Novel
Tuesday, April 20, 6 - 8pm

David Barringer will discuss new methods of storytelling in his current work-in-progress, a novel that incorporates imaginary magazine covers, interiors, photographs, illustrated stories, a photo comic and more. Barringer is the author of the novels American Home Life (So New Press, 2007) and Johnny Red (Word Riot Press, 2005). He was the recipient of the 2008 Winterhouse Award for Design Writing & Criticism and recently published the essay collection There’s Nothing Funny About Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). Presented by the MFA Design Criticism Department.

136 West 21 Street, 2nd floor
Free and open to the public. RSVP to 212.592.2228 or dcrit@sva.edu.

http://www.sva.edu/events/index.jsp?sid0=70&page_id=181&content_id=3332

Crossing the Line: The 2010 D-Crit Conference, moderated by Kurt Andersen
When: 30 Apr 2010, 11:00 a.m.–6:30 p.m.
Where: Visual Arts Theater, 333 West 23rd Street (between Eighth and Ninth Avenues)
Price: Free

Student Thesis Topics:

Hala Abdul Malak, “Al-Kafiye: A Potent Symbol Uncovered”

Amelia Black, “Design Smells; Odorous Rhetoric for Embodied Experience”

John Cantwell, “Car Sharing: Applications and Implications”

Frederico Duarte, “Alvorada: How Social Change Is Shaping Brazilian Design and Creating Brazil’s Own Design Model”

Chappell Ellison, “Design in the Dark: Finding Meaning in the Multiplex”

Laura Forde, “Objects to be Read, Words to be Seen: Design and Visual Language in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard 1959–1967”

Sarah Froelich, “Dansk Designs: Reinventing the American Tabletop, 1954-1985”

Katie Henderson, “Two Decades of Failure, Betrayal & Disaster: The Production Design of Wes Anderson’s Films as it Relates to the Family Dynamic”

Emily Leibin, “Hidden Nature: Elroy Webber’s Connecticut Valley Modern Homes”

William Myers, “Bacteria Building for Sustainability: The Convergence of Design and Biology in the 21st Century”

Mike Neal, “Tabula Rubra: Critical Reflections on the Design of Mars”

Becky Quintal, “Import/Export: Delivering Architecture in a Public-Friendly Format”

Alan Rapp, “The Esoteric City: Urban Exploration and the Reclamation of the Built Environment”

Angela Riechers, “Designing Grief: Personal Memorial Objects in the 21st Century”

Jim Wegener, “Lived-In: User Experience in Architecture and Design Criticism”

http://dcrit.sva.edu/view/events/save-the-date-sva-design-criticism-conf...

I know it's not easy letting people go. There is a grieving process, but when something dies, there aren't many options. It might be easier for you to join the club network+ training and meet other people first "THEN" let the old gals go. At least you would have friends ready to fall back on. Then you can just move forward.

Possible addendum to session 5, for anyone with any energy left. Wilmers is editor of the London Review of Books:

The Author in the Age of the Internet
A panel discussion with John Lanchester, Andrew O’Hagan, Colm Tóibín, Mary-Kay Wilmers and James Wood

Saturday, 24 April at 7 p.m.
Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street, New York
Tickets: $15 (Students $10)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/spring-events

This is to remind you that The Page + The Screen: Siting Text in the Early 21st Century and Beyond | Session 2: Bob Stein + Dan Visel will take place tomorrow, February 25, 7:30 pm, at 177 Livingston (@ Gallatin Place), downtown Brooklyn http://bit.ly/9720Ae

Please check out the suggested readings:

The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts
http://books.google.com/books?id=DlO1w3BQOdEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gut...

Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark; an early Institute experiment in collective reading
http://www.futureofthebook.org/mckenziewark/

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing; another Institute project that was read by a group of seven women
http://thegoldennotebook.org/

if:book, the Institute's blog
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/

Scan This Book! by Kevin Kelly via The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?_r=2&pagewa...

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier
http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307269647

This session will be recorded, for use in a future Triple Canopy piece. In addition, a magazine photographer might be present for the first few minutes of class.

Thanks, Caleb, for starting off the series! I left feeling very inspired and am looking forward to the continuing conversation(s). I’m planning to post some of my notes/thoughts and hope that others will do so, too. Also, if anyone decides to post anything on their individual blogs, please let us know so we can share the links.

hi,

Thanks everyone for coming yesterday. I learned a lot from our conversation in the class and a few private ones that followed afterwards. I've got some follow ups and/or clarifications that I plan on posting soon.

In the meantime, good luck with the upcoming classes and hope to be back soon!

best,
-c

This is to remind you that The Page + The Screen: Siting Text in the Early 21st Century and Beyond | Session 1: Caleb Waldorf of The Public School LA (and Triple Canopy) will take place tomorrow, Sunday, February 21, at 5:00 pm, at 177 Livingston (@ Gallatin Place), Downtown Brooklyn http://bit.ly/9720Ae

Please be sure to check out Caleb’s suggested readings:

The Unworkable Interface
by Alex Galloway
http://a.aaaarg.org/text/3157/unworkable-interface

User Labor:
http://userlabor.org/

NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE
by Clay Shirky
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthink...

Micro Economies of Attention
http://blog.connectbeam.com/blog/2008/12/micro-economies-of-attention.html

Updates for The Page + The Screen | Session 3: Andrew Beccone on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at The Reanimation Library:

The class will begin at 7:15pm. Snacks and refreshments will be served.

Please see the attached note (http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/note/2119) for the suggested reading list.

For those of you who just signed up, please note that if you’re interested in attending The Page + The Screen | Session 3: Andrew Beccone @ The Reanimation Library, you must send an RSVP to thepublicschoolny@gmail.com because space is limited. The first 10 respondents will be guaranteed a spot. All others will be put on a waiting list in the order in which their email was received.

For those of you who just signed up, please note that if you’re interested in attending The Page + The Screen | Session 3: Andrew Beccone @ The Reanimation Library, you must send an RSVP to thepublicschoolny@gmail.com because space is limited. The first 10 respondents will be guaranteed a spot. All others will be put on a waiting list in the order in which their email was received.

For those of you who just signed up, please note that if you’re interested in attending The Page + The Screen | Session 3: Andrew Beccone @ The Reanimation Library, you must send an RSVP to thepublicschoolny@gmail.com because space is limited. The first 10 respondents will be guaranteed a spot. All others will be put on a waiting list in the order in which their email was received.

FIRST SESSION SCHEDULED FOR SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21!

The first session of this class will take place on Sunday, February 21, at 177 Livingston (http://www.177livingston.org) in downtown Brooklyn, at 5pm. It will be taught by Caleb Waldorf, of The Public School Los Angeles (and Triple Canopy). Since this class is somewhat sprawling, and will include a number of sessions over the next couple of months, the first session will be structured loosely, providing us with an opportunity to talk about our various interests and concerns in relation to the subject matter and how the rest of the sessions might be planned accordingly.

Caleb will give a brief presentation on some of his own projects (TPS, Version, and East of Borneo among them; see bottom for links) as a way of planting ourselves firmly in the current-day before delving into the origins and future of print culture. Then we can discuss these—and some of our own projects—in relation to the evolving nature and meaning of publishing and new-media-based art practices that assume an analogous (oftentimes barely distinguishable!) form. How do these new models respond to and/or produce changes in print culture? How has print culture come to be defined, or pressured, by forces external to it, i.e. digital technologies and the new modes of social interaction and knowledge exchange they've spawned?

We can follow this with a more general discussion about the future of the class and how to tackle the wide array of issues related to the many topics that have been broached on this page.

Readings will be announced in the next week or so. We're aiming to post a few brief articles and book excerpts that do some of the following things: situate the traditional concept of publishing (and the literary culture that evolved from it) in relation to the Internet, and the resultant shifts in reading practices (attention, the form of the screen, etc.); speak to the development of a discourse around "siting text," emergent forms of authorship and readership, and the new social and political relations that may result; illustrate the parallel development (or lack thereof) of an analogous (but ultimately anachronistic, facile, narrow, and self-preservationist) discourse in the publishing world. Feel free to make suggestions.

Version: http://www.version.org
East of Borneo: http://www.eastofborneo.org
Caleb: http://calebwaldorf.net/

Please note that there is a new class proposal called “The Public School and Democracy Now! The Future of Progressive Media” which is a spin-off from The Page + The Screen. It will focus “on the the future of journalism and progressive media. Related areas of inquiry include the rise of the informational commons, peer-to-peer networks, the Open Source movement, and the archive - both analog and digital.” To sign up, go to http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/2045.

To add to anamo's comment (01/17/10), NPR's On the Media addressed some of these issues last spring: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/04/03/02. Although the segment does not provide lengthy analysis, it does introduce some relevant players into the discussion, including Gary Small, author of a UCLA study (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/first-time-internet-users-find-1112...) which demonstrates that using the Internet can actually build cognitive skills. The study does not necessarily refute Carr's argument, but does complicate it.

Relatedly, edge.org (also referred to by anamo in the same post) recently posed the question "How does the Internet change the way we think?" eliciting responses from thinkers/artists in various disciplines. The entry by MIT Mind Machine project researcher David Dalrymple -- mainly, that filtering is now more important than remembering -- might prove particularly relevant to questions of how readership is changing. http://edge.org/q2010/q10_16.html#dalrymple

In addition to Callahan's great suggestions for major topics, I'd also be interested in seeing a topic develop around issues of the archive. (A part of me feels like addressing these issues could require its own multi-part class series.) One narrowed approach might be to explore the future of archival work/research/scholarship in the digital age. The preservation and management of digital content has been rendered increasingly difficult (as compared to analog/print content) due to the rapid evolution of technology (formats/technologies approach obsolescence every few years); changes in intellectual property regulations; and new publishing models. It is not exactly clear how access to the content being produced today -- particularly informal content such as blogs, discussion lists, etc. -- can be maintained for future users. I can add more to this area later...

just wanted to chime in on Callahan's great suggestions for ways of exploring different aspects of screen and print-based reading.

In his article in The Nation, aprovan referenced a piece in The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

which generated a number of responses, among them:
http://www.edge.org/discourse/carr_google.html
http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par.php?page=all
etc

So. There's a lot of fascinating stuff happening around the idea of reading, including of course Stanislas Dehaene's new book and Alison Gopnik's nyt review (mentioned in the course proposal) of it: how reading itself is changing, but also how it changes our brains and also how the way in which we read affects our understanding of what we're reading. I'd be very interested in an exploration of those notions, including, if others are into it, a session built around assembling the type of typology mentioned in Callahan's third idea:
"-- Relatedly, one framework for understanding readership is to make a typology of forms that texts take: a collection of terms and definitions for the types of things we read, which in turn is useful for understanding ways of reading."

We've made contact! DN! has offered a special field trip for the class to come to their new studio to watch a live broadcast of the show and discuss these issues. It would need to be at 8am. The show is over at 9 and then we could spend 45 min-1hr in discussion. I (Davina) will come to the meeting this Wednesday to help organize this section of the class. If anyone reading this wants to prepare possible discussion topics which directly engage Democracy Now!, in terms of the future of (investigative) journalism, the rise of the informational commons, the Open Source movement, and the archive (both analog and digital) - I can collect them on Wednesday and start preparing questions to give them ahead of our visit. I will also bring more specific possible dates with me so we can start mapping out this section.

hey solidk, I will be there that weekend (Feb 20/21) and would love to facilitate one of the sessions.

-c

(I sent it on Thursday, the 14th)

I sent an email to a few producers at Democracy Now, but have not heard back yet. If anyone else knows someone there, let me know and I'll pass on the letter I wrote.

@calebwaldorf, I don’t know if you’ve already had this conversation with TC NY but would you be interested in teaching one of the classes? Perhaps the session that you suggested for the same weekend as The Medium Was Tedium (http://newmuseum.org/events/424)? I guess this would be separate from the possible interview with Dan Visel and Bob Stein.

@davina, were you able to touch base with Democracy Now?

@Callahan, @davidsenior, and @samfrank, these are all wonderful ideas! If anyone else has suggestions or feedback, this is a good time to share them because our next committee meeting is on Wednesday, January 20th.

Yes, seems appropriate for the material in the course description + these comments to be distributed over more than session (@davidsenior), and (@sam frank) that some sessions could take form around a specific story or topic or format, ex. interview or reading group or production workshop.

Following some of the paths of inquiry already marked out, here are a few ideas for major topics we could use to organize a series of sessions:

-- History of transitions. Not tied to chronologies, more like a comparative free-for-all of historical changes in the ways texts have been transmitted. Ex: oral culture to literate culture, audible reading to silent reading, manuscript to print, etc., including small stories like the invention and diffusion of the typewriter (see "Remington Launches Ghostwriter" http://www.dextersinister.org/index.html?id=221) as well as big stories like movable type.

-- Reading and readership. Elusive topic for historians, but it's easy in the here and now to gather evidence of who/what/when/where/why/especially how people read, which in turn impacts the forms reading material takes. As a counterpoint to the future-of-the-book lectures and panel discussions by authorities from the realm of text-production, we might systematically gather feedback from different 21st c readers in order to consider their habits and expectations.

-- Relatedly, one framework for understanding readership is to make a typology of forms that texts take: a collection of terms and definitions for the types of things we read, which in turn is useful for understanding ways of reading.

-- Also relatedly, the open circuit between readers and authors made possible by the web, by social networking sites as well as specialized software for developing, editing, annotating, and/or publishing texts such as Scribd or CommentPress or Writeboard. A discussion of this topic maybe should take place in the software.

-- Last, defining publishing. Robin Kinross from Hyphen Press described his impulse to photocopy newspaper articles and pass them onto friends as a sign of his future as a publisher: "the publishing bug" = "some wish to disseminate." Another related meaning for publishing is the official conversion of property from private to public ownership; another another is to establish one's own reputation. Even as it relates specifically to books and texts, the activity of publishing is difficult to delineate, because the role of publisher overlaps and even coincides with the roles of authors, editors, designers, printers, binders, etc. Then the Internet bucks whatever conventions did exist: is it useful to call tweeting 'publishing,' or putting a pdf on a webserver, or making web comics? The parallel problem, that looms large in web publishing, is defining the role and charge of a publisher. A session on this topic would perhaps benefit from the presence of publishers.

+ Here are a more lecture and text references:

-- Lecture by Paul LeClerc, Director of the New York Public Library, "Managing Transitions in one of the World's Biggest Libraries." Wesnesday Feb 3 @ 6pm at the Bard Graduate Center. http://www.bgc.bard.edu/news/upcoming-events/leclerc-managing-libraries....

-- Lecture, "The Presence of the The Presence of the Book: Its Technology, Conservation and Meaning." Wednesday March 3 @ 6:30 pm at the Center for Book Arts http://www.centerforbookarts.org/events/default.asp#203

-- One book-length study that could serve well to ground our subjects historically is Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 by David McKitterick (librarian-scholar). It has rich source material and useful insights on the co-existence of manuscript and print in fifteenth-century Europe.
http://books.google.com/books?id=OMs9WQXpIXIC&dq=mckitterick+search+for+...

-- Adrian Johns's The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, mentioned by Alex, also deals with many of the same issues as the above and delves deeply into histories of publishing (incl copyright), distribution and circulation.
http://books.google.com/books?id=zobsj8npWeAC&dq=adrian+johns&source=gbs...

-- A useful reference work for the cultural history of printed texts in the U.S.: the huge new five-volume series The History of the Book in America, which gives as much attention to other, less monumental types of publications (magazines, newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets...) as to books.
http://books.google.com/books?id=1lLetiCmAIkC&dq=history+of+the+book+in+...

-- For the history of bookselling in the 20th c in the U.S.: Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption by Laura Miller, which follows American bookselling from dry goods shops to storefront publisher-booksellers to franchised bookstores to the internet. See esp Chapter 2 for a historical overview.
http://books.google.com/books?id=KxbZz3FPcH0C&dq=laura+miller+booksellin...

-- For histories of note-taking, archives, and historical instances of "information-overload," see articles and essays by Ann Blair http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/blair.php

I wrote Dan Visel (Center for the Future of the Book). He's interested in participating. Though he also mentioned that the Center for Book Arts is putting together a spring series on related issues (from a fine press angle), and he's going to give a talk there on March 24. See: http://www.centerforbookarts.org/events/

One idea he had for Triple Canopy, that I suggested he maybe conduct in its first iteration live as a class for TPS, is an interview with Bob Stein. This would be an odd class format, but maybe a sufficiently specific and oblique way in to issues that could otherwise sprawl and sprawl. Let me know whether this is something I should encourage Dan on further. Here's what Dan wrote:

"For a long time I've been looking for an excuse to do a long interview with Bob Stein, director of the Institute [for the Future of the Book]. Bob has a very long history in publishing/technology & this isn't actually a story that's been told very often. There was a Wired cover story a long, long time ago:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/stein_pr.html

which is interesting, but that does suffer from being a typical Wired story. Bob does have a very interesting past: in the late1960s he was at Columbia, in the 1970s he was involved in publishing Maoist political works, in the 1980s he was involved with Atari & Encyclopaedia Britannica thinking about the future of the encyclopedia. Voyager, his press, spun off the Criterion Collection; he came up with the idea of DVD extras & director's commentary. Voyager managed to get books on 3.5'' floppy discs into bookstores; what they were publishing on CD-ROM is much stranger than most people remember (there was a Free Mumia CD-ROM in there). He's done a lot of strange things, mostly in connection with changing publishing; however, in the spirit of most of the tech world, he never really bothered to document them. There are plenty of threads to be picked apart - he still, for example, maintains a very hard left political orientation, at odd with most of the tech world's de facto libertarianism. Voyager went under in part because he bankrolled Laurie Anderson's world tour. He's a strange, strange man.

(Bob, by the way, would almost certainly be happy to do something should you want him - he's uncharacteristically going to be around New York for all of February because he's involved in the Tino Sehgal thing at the Guggenheim.)"

obviously - this comment comes a little late in game...
seems like it might be opening up into a very broad topic. a discussion of the history of print culture - ie. early history of printing and/or the transition from a oral/manuscript culture to print culture - is pretty massive in and of itself. Maybe two sections could be created - one dealing with these history of the book questions and another dealing more contemporary watershed points - like 20th century print media, contemporary self-publishing strategies and the dispersal on info via electronic media.

i am not writing to dissuade anyone...just the opposite - it seems like a great "foundation" course for an extended discussion of contemporary "text" matters. as for the "history" topic, my favorite polymath, Ivan Illich, who has come up in other sections - and his "In the Vineyard of the Text" is one of my favorite books on the topic - particularly in re the transition from spoken to silent reading - which some people in the field think of as equally important - or parallel to the development of the press. so - maybe just opening a can of worms - but interested in the idea of the class.

as an aside - new york based peoples should feel welcome to use the library at MoMA - its open to the public and has some great resources - particular along the lines of little magazines, artists' publications and design history.

An interesting course at GSAPP:

Images After Images: Architecture + Print, Post-War Case Studies
Taught by Craig Buckley

Architecture is arguably unthinkable without the medium of print, and today architecture is certainly printed in more and different ways than ever before. At the same time, we live in a moment when we continually hear of the death of print, with newspapers, books, and magazines succumbing to emerging forms of communication and dissemination. How do we comprehend such a transformation as well as its implications architectural culture? This seminar will attempt to plumb the implications of such a situation, exploring architecture's printedness through series of case studies beginning just after the end of the Second World War and continuing up until the mid 1970s.

The question is hardly new. The decades following World War Two witnessed a radical transformation of printing technologies from the spread of office duplicators, to the growing accessibility of offset lithography, to the emergence of xerography. The era was likewise marked by a theoretical fervor which aimed to conceptualize the new forms of communication that would replace the culture of print. In order to examine the impact of such technological and conceptual transformations upon architectural culture, neither the term architecture, nor the term print can be taken at face value. To examine the notion of print more broadly we will bracket more conventional designations such as magazine or book; in order to move in more closely we will examine specific relationships -- between architects and graphic designers (at times the same figure), between printed objects and architectural discourse, between architects and various kinds of printing companies -- relationships (economic, aesthetic, conceptual) in which the two fields of practice are strangely entwined.

This will be a research-based seminar, encouraging students to identify and work on primary documents and objects from the period, including sessions in the archive, as well as guest visits by graphic designers and architects.

Topics may include: the history and reception of the ASCORAL grid, both as a graphic object and as a "thinking tool" for architects; Herbert Bayer's exhibitions and designs for the boxboard company Container Corporation of America; the collaboration between Theo Crosby and Edward Wright; the wider printed network of the Situationist International; the role of graphic design and printing firms in the 1963 exhibition Living City, organized by architects soon to be known as Archigram; the exhibitions and publications produced out of the collaboration between architect Hans Hollein and graphic designer Walter Pichler in Vienna; the role of print in the break-up and reform of the Beaux-Arts system in May 1968 and its aftermath; the involvement of the laminate firm PRINT with key groups involved in the phenomenon known as "Architettura Radicale" in Italy, as well as the formulation of the design identity of the Institute for Architecture and Urban studies in New York.

Copied from GSAPP site: http://bit.ly/4ykbUh (via @kshpatel)

fyi, The Evolution of the Book: http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/images/EvolutionBook.jpg

Thank you, Alex, for all of your great recommendations, and thanks to all at Triple Canopy for generously offering your space and time. Once you’ve decided on who will join the current committee, I’m hoping that point person will also join our group of organizers for both text classes.

Regarding your comments, I completely agree that we also need to “spend some time thinking about the invention and history of the book and print culture (and corresponding ideas of authorship).” After the meeting, Anne mentioned that we should discuss, for instance, the hybridization of forms that resulted through the transition from manuscript to print.

On another note, I will be meeting with Andrew Beccone, founder of The Reanimation Library, on Monday to discuss his involvement with both classes. I’ve also asked Anne to join. If any other committee members are interested, please let me know. I’m hoping that we can start fleshing out ideas on the types of discussions that could take place at the different sites.

There’s a lot of ground to cover so I’m hoping that more people will join the organizing groups. I’m happy to see so much enthusiasm.

Hey, good talking through this at the meeting yesterday. Some provisional notes and a bunch of ideas:

• First: yes, 177 Livingston will have video-streaming capabilities.

• Since there's so much excitement about this topic, and it ties in so well to Triple Canopy's mission and interests, I think we should plan on having multiple sessions of the class, perhaps each with its own guest facilitator/speaker.

• Sam mentioned he would get in touch with Dan Visel, who has much to say about this, could perhaps be a guest teacher/facilitator, and is associated with the Institute for the Future of the Book.

• The above list of readings and websites sounds great, but my one concern is that it includes mostly people who are experimenting with or practicing these new forms of print or responding to their developments more or less in real-time, and no book-length studies by people who have thought really deeply and seriously about the relationship between these contemporary trends and the greater history of print culture. I think it would be great to spend some time thinking about the invention and history of the book and print culture (and corresponding ideas of authorship) in order to gain some perspective before delving too deeply into the transformations wrought by digital technologies. So much has been written on this, but here are a few excellent (and concise) works:
– Robert Darnton, "What is the History of Books?" In Books and Society in History, edited by Kenneth E. Carpenter (New York: Bowker, 1983), pp. 3-26.
– Jonathan Rosen, "The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds." (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000), This is an excellent primer on the genesis of literary culture in relation to the Internet and is, at 130 pages, a quick read.
– Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?"

• I'd also be interested in reading and talking about the legal status of the book and the changes in print culture that have been affected by changes in laws governing the ownership, distribution, and use of knowledge. Esp. the development of copyright law, its breakdown in the digital age, and Google's effort to digitize the world's books. Some readings:
– NY Review of Books archive of Robert Darnton's articles on the Google case: http://www.nybooks.com/authors/32
– Mark Rose, "Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright." (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995.)

• Then there's "contamination anxiety" and issues of form and originality in the digital age, and the questions about whether reading on the Internet has value, generally, or consists mainly of the intake of "content."
– Jonathan Lethem, "The Anxiety of Influence." Harper's, 2007. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387
– Robert Coover, "The End of Books." NY Times, 1992. http://tinyurl.com/ybnw8qy
– Coover again, a video of a talk called "The History of the Future of Narrative." http://www.vimeo.com/1765099?pg=embed&sec=1765099
– Kevin Kelly, "Becoming Screen Literate." NY Times, 2008. http://tinyurl.com/6ev4nd
– Eh, myself, "The Idiocrats." The Nation, 2008. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081117/provan

• Sam mentioned the possibility of including people with more parochial experiences and perspectives in relation to these issues, whether as readings or facilitators. I think it would make sense to include a working journalist who has spent time mulling over the changes print media must—and must not—make to thrive in the digital age without making undue accommodations. Perhaps Robert Mackey, who runs the NY Times "The Lede" blog? http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/

Please note that I periodically update the links section of the class proposal. Also, feel free to add to the list of supplemental reading via aaaarg.org.

Thank you, caleb! This is all very exciting. Looking forward to meeting you and TC in person. Re: your space, do you have equipment for live video streaming? If not, I wonder if anyone out there has that capability. I know of, at least, one person who’s interested in participating but is unable to attend because of the location. Perhaps others would want to view this from elsewhere?

hi everyone,

This is Caleb from the Los Angeles Public School. This proposal looks great! I'm involved with a NYC based project called Triple Canopy (http://canopycanopycanopy.com) that is doing an event at the New Museum in February that is related to issues in this proposal: http://newmuseum.org/events/424. I might be coming out for that and would be really excited if you could hold one session of the class during that weekend. A bunch of folks from TC would definitely be interested as well. (I think TC is also maybe hosting The Public School at their new space in Brooklyn?)

I'm also involved in a couple of other projects that might be interesting "case studies" to look at:
Version - a "micro-journal" that I co-edit: http://version.org
East of Borneo - an online publishing platform based out of CalArts that I've been working on for the past six months which is set to launch later this year. The website isn't much to look at right now but by mid-Feb I could show some things from it: http://eastofborneo.org

Hope we can arrange something when I'm in town! And thanks for the great proposal solidk!!

-c

Yes, my original thought was to have an interdisciplinary team teach this class. Also, with the amount of ground to cover, it may make sense to hold a series of classes like you did with Species of Spaces. I guess we can talk more about this on Saturday. Thanks, maria!

solidk, what a great collection of readings and sources on the topic.
does it make any sense to put david reinfurt and/or luke bulman together with a journalist in traditional print media?

Those are excellent suggestions! Here are links to their websites:

David Reinfurt (Dexter Sinister) http://www.dextersinister.org/ http://www.o-r-g.com/

Luke Bulman (Thumb) http://www.thumbprojects.com/

I suggest either David Reinfurt (Dexter Sinister) or Luke Bulman (Thumb) to teach this class. Both graphic designers are deeply engaged in these issues.