BiblioTech

https://www.neme.org/projects/bibliotech

BiblioTech transformed the NeMe Arts Centre into a library of the future, hosting artist projects that critically engage and radically reimagine what it means to read, write, organise, and distribute knowledge and information today. New digital technologies from the internet to artificial intelligence, semiconductors to smart phones, have profoundly changed the nature of information and communication, and the ever growing crisis of climate change and social inequality are further altering how and what media we produce and consume. This project explored these entanglements of form and content, and offered a space for readers, writers, lurkers, tweeters, and influencers, to explore a diverse range of artist projects that rethink what books, publishing, and libraries can be.

BiblioTech presented an alternative model of the library, one run by artists, composed of experimental publications, parasitically inhabiting its host institution. The exhibition was composed of projects which push the boundaries of what constitutes a book or a publication, such as: Jenna Sutela’s project nimiia ïzinibimi composed of a new language for interspecies communication, forcing us to rethink the fundamentals of communication; or Katie Patterson’s Future Library, for which a forest has been planted in Norway to supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 100 years time. The project also included new works, including Anna Barham who developed her work produced in collaboration with reading groups.

Artist and technologist Tom Schofield, worked in collaboration with the curators, also present two artworks: Crash Blossoms / If and Only If, an interactive online AI newspaper that generates headlines using an archive of historic and contemporary headlines, and new audience submitted headlines; and Self-Help Concentrate a new work which creates a single self-help book produced from mining and summarising an archive of 1000s of self-help books using AI text generation tools.

A reading room area brought together a wide range of discrete publishing projects across print, screen-based and online formats, including: _Post-digital Publishing Archive+ which presented over 100 projects exploring relationships between publishing and digital technology; and Textz.com which collates a series of ‘shadow libraries’ of millions of free to access publications.

A public programme included: a ‘reading group’ project led by the artist Anna Barham; and talks by curators Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner; Silvio Lorusso; Tom Schofield; and a lecture/performance by Rosa Menkman.

Collectively the project functioned as a survey of critical and experimental publishing practices in the arts and will provide an immersive space for visitors to explore the peculiar conditions of post-digital literacy today, and reimagine what the library, the book, and reading, has, or may yet, become.

Artists: Animate Assembly, Anna Barham, Jonathan Basile, Joe Devlin, David Gauthier, Silvio Lorusso, Rosa Menkman, Katie Patterson, Tom Schofield, Erica Scourti, and Jenna Sutela.
Curators: Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner

Thanks

Main Funder: Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture
Funding: Arts Council of England
Support: Medochemie, AlphaMega, Alinea