User:Simon/Trim4/Project proposal second draft

What do you want to make?

My project will involve two main areas of activity; the implementation and development of a "bootleg library", and material transformations of texts in a process that is analogous to translation. The bootleg library is bootstrapped, providing a public sphere 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 will be a fertile testing ground for examining 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 accompaniements 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

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.

How do you plan to make it?

The collection of library is made with peers -- collectively and in reflection on what type of culture evolves from the use of this library. The library will be a repository for not only texts that we have read and wish to share with each other, but also a testing ground for tools that can be used to "translate" these texts into other material forms. I plan to develop scripts that can be used to translate the material form of existing texts and typefaces.

Reading and writing will be fundamental parts of my project, both in reflection on the texts housed in the collection, and also in the culture that develops around this library as texts are read and annotated.

Alongside human reading and writing, I will also explore machine-based reading and writing in the material translation of publications. Beginning with William S. Burrough's concept of the written word as a virus that propagates the spoken word, I will develop a series of bootlegged material translations of texts. This is a strategy of deliberately seeding the library with a multiplicity of form, that points to difference and links readers to texts and, by subjective association, each other.

What is your timetable?

• September-December: Collect texts, hold user group sessions on how to use the library, create and modify scripts for materially translating texts and typefaces, expand the collection in both print and digital formats.
• December-March: Develop the library interface and distribution capabilities.
• April-June: Finish practical project, prepare final presentation.