User:Simon/Trim4/Project proposal fourth draft

What do you want to make?

My project will involve two main areas of activity; the implementation and development of various situated libraries, and material transformations of texts in a process that I consider analogous to translation. The first of such situated libraries is one I have initiated; a "bootleg library", which distributes digital and printed books from the locality of the Piet Zwart Instituut at Wijnhaven 61. The bootleg library is bootstrapped, and developed in response to user feedback. It provides an emerging public sphere, and a sandbox within which I can investigate representation through strategies of transformation, publication and distribution.

The bootleg library hosts a collection of texts that are shared over a local network. Through a browser, users are able to upload, download, and also write and edit metadata. The collection represents the interests of a diverse range of people who access a local network, through the books they choose to upload, download, borrow, read and annotate. The library is a fertile testing ground for examining and responding to the culture that develops around a collection of texts, and materially translated books in reflection. Legal concerns that jeopardise the survival of the library offer an opportunity to devise different strategies of subterfuge, adjusting how public it is, and how texts are distributed. Of particular interest is the social and cultural effects of annotation -- from a broad sense (e.g. metadata) through to notes written as accompaniments to texts.

All of the texts currently within the library have been "bootlegged" -- according to the simple definition of a "bootleg" as a fairly faithful unauthorised recording, published in a gesture of homage. Bootlegging involves reproduction of source files to create copies, although no two copies are the same by nature. Through bootlegging I create a multiplicity of form and reading experiences, and a diversity of interpretations of texts through their materiality.

As a parallel process, I have been reformatting, re-designing and uploading texts. I make them accessible for a variety of reading purposes (onscreen and offscreen), both in digital and analog format. Users may upload digital texts on the conditions that they are familiar with the texts, feel that they represent them, and that they also write the metadata. The collection of printed books I have reprinted are available to be borrowed on the condition that they are used and returned. Borrowers are invited to annotate the books in any way they like, as long as they return them. The accumulated traces left on the texts (metadata, annotations) then become para-texts, which document the public that accesses the collection.