Our Individual Travelogues

Agenda

This week we’ll take a moment for reflection, for retracing our footsteps. I’ll host an open, optional, hour-long Zoom session during our regular class time — Wednesday from 4 to 5pm — for anyone who wants to drop by for an informal group reflection on our previous weeks’ activities and readings, plus some preliminary planning for our collaborative project. I’ll email you the link at noon on the 25th! We won’t be hosting our Thursday or Friday group drop-in discussions this week.

In addition, you’re all invited to schedule an (optional), individual ~half-hour Zoom meeting with me during which we can discuss your experience in the class thus far, your evolving interests, and your preliminary thoughts about our final collaborative project — in other words, your metaphorical personal travelogues. (I apologize: these scheduling options are scattered throughout the week — on Monday the 23rd, Tuesday the 24th, Wednesday the 25th and Sunday the 29th; between my partner’s chemotherapy and my own surgery, we’ve lost control of our March calendars 🙂

To Explore This Week (All Optional)

• Following up on last week’s discussion about poetic, aleatory discovery, I encourage you to peruse Library Stack. As co-director Ben Tiven explained to me in a recent email exchange: “Library Stack is itself precisely a kind of end-run around the SEO constraints of the open web, the algorithmic suppositions and limits of Web2 platforms, and the automating-away of intellectual and creative labor that corporate AI so brazenly wants — that is, it’s trying to offer a new portal mode of “finding” things — at least within the fields of visual art, graphic design, paper architecture and the philosophy universe undergirding those aesthetic pursuits. We are underwritten by the university system (check out subscribers here!), but we aren’t ed-tech. We are committed to library science and the inheritance of an intellectual commons — deriving from what’s been published — but just with a somewhat wider purview on what “published” means.”
• Read Meg Miller’s interview with Erik Wysocan and Ben Tiven on Arena (June 28, 2017). 
• Ben recommends that you explore their featured “visual culture” stack. “If one really scans across the whole feed, it’s kind of a structured window onto a gazillion different projects and artists, and I hope people use it that way.”
• And here are a few collection items pertinent to our exploration:
  • On cartography and navigation: Gregor Weichbrodt, On the Road(0x0a, 2014).  
  • On the aesthetics and politics of digital search: Gilbert Again, Maya Indira Ganesh, Angie Keefer, Alex Quicho, Noura Tafeche, William Wiebe, Proof of Personhood(End of Medium / Singapore Art Museum, 2025); Matias Faldbakken, SearchDocumenta 35(Hatje Cantz, 2012); Cornelia Sollfrank and Winnie Soon, Fix My Code(EECLECTIC, 2021); Bruce Sterling, Sculpting the Flow of Reality(Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art, 2014). 
  • On the reduction of knowledge to “content”: Dena Yayo on the “content industrial complex,” e-flux podcast (2018).