The Page + The Screen: Siting Text in the Early 21st Century and Beyond | Session 2
Thursday, February 25, 7:30 pm, at 177 Livingston; taught by Bob Stein + Dan Visel
All sessions of The Page + The Screen are FREE.
Visel is a researcher and Stein is the director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a publishing think tank based in Brooklyn. Stein is the co-founder of Voyager, the pioneering CD-ROM publisher that spawned the Criterion Collection, and the founder of Night Kitchen, a company dedicated to developing authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing.
Visel and Stein will discuss Stein's experience of the evolution of electronic publishing, the history of multimedia artwork and literature, and the transformation of reading and authorship with the advent of the network. They will revisit the utopian strands of cyber-futurism that dominated the early days of online publishing and examine the effects on culture and literature of that era's “information wants to be free” attitude. How have new technologies enhanced and democratized—as well as diminished—the way we read and write? How have thirty years of reading screens altered our literary culture and thus the relations between people and communities?
The interview will be followed by a general discussion among class participants and Stein and Visel, drawing on their interview, the reading and publishing experiences of the participants, and the readings (see below). A transcript of the interview and discussion will be later be edited and expanded upon for a future issue of Triple Canopy dealing with the history of multimedia work and transitions in modes of text production and readership/viewership.
Suggested readings:
The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts
Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark; an early Institute experiment in collective reading
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing; another Institute project that was read by a group of seven women
if:book, the Institute's blog
Scan This Book! by Kevin Kelly via The New York Times
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier