User:Francg/expub/media-writing/draft-10May

Draft 2 - drafting a guide

This text is a method to help developing a clear perspective on the topics I am interested in regarding media design practices, as well as defining those stimulating aspects from my previous and current practical experience studying the Master of Experimental Publishing,

involving a variety of subjects, ranging from environmental issues (scarcity of resources), audio programming languages (concerning the merging/interaction of mankind with technology) and digital libraries (related to the legality of public spaces).

I am currently working on creating a digital platform/data base with Max and Giulia, which will work as a digital archive/library for the Poortgebouw building, giving public access to specific knowledge in form of digitalized documents concerning the legality of this historical urban space, from 1980 to nowadays.

This work will provide information such as letters from the previous owners, town hall and other institutions, files from different (previously and/or nowadays active) cultural centers or existent communities in the city of Rotterdam supporting the initiative of having an alternative space to help the youth, schedules, news leaflets or handwritten letters designed from previous inhabitants, architectural maps of the building’s refurbishment, etc.

We are physically building an office on the ground floor of the building; setting up printers, scanners, monitors and towers that were left over untested. This archiving system we are working on, has bigger social implications/dimensions than the fact of being a work-in-progress experiment of this course project.

This may not only inspire the current inhabitants to engage more actively to social projects, but to external institutions such as the “Het Nieuwe Instituut” to contribute supporting the archive. With regards to technical aspects, it contemplates the possibility of recording life footage, so that further material related to the current legality process of the building can be stored.

We are also learning on transforming digital images such as jpeg, tif or pdf documents containing text, whether in English or Dutch, into editable (translated) text files using an OCR program.

Further tweaking/editing will be possible in order to ensure a correct format transition. Eventually, we will need to build a graphic interface that will store and dynamically update all this data into this online/offline library.

In relation to this subject, I am personally interested to the fact of creating an interactive digital platform that may continuously generate new data, which could work as a cross over experiment within different creative practices; being an archive itself, exploring on how to efficiently use sensor technologies connected to different video inputs simultaneously on specific urban environments, further exploring audio environments, combining printed matter, contemplating the idea of the “posthuman” in the current and future technological era.

This connects to the projects we’ve been working on this year, specially for reading methodologies as we will need to go through written communication.

May the fact of being able to diy our own devices such as scanners, powerful computers, speakers or create editorial objects/books exposing unique material, makes our digitally oriented path to become a more crafted technologically based work, something in between unconventional non-standardized home made art and a science laboratory.

As the book from Naomi S. Baron “Always on...” says; “The challenge is not words but technologies and the systems we build upon them for communicating with one another.” The interest here remains in the combination of power between technology and language, as Kathy Acker’s real email correspondence in her book “I’m very into you”.

In Eli Pariser’s “The Filter Bubble”, it is investigated what does technology hides from us and questions our awareness to daily used technologies, which is quite significant to the idea of hiding knowledge and the existing pirate libraries striving for the freedom of information.