As the vibrant new field of electronic textuality flexes its muscle, it is becoming overwhelmingly clear that we can no longer afford to ignore the material basis of literary production. Materiality of the artifact can no longer be positioned as a subspecialty within literary studies; it must be central, for without it we have little hope of forging a robust and nuanced account of how literature is changing under the impact of information technologies.
Writing Machines, N.Kathrine Hayles (2002)
The post-digital is thus a realization, that the digital does not simply transform everything into some virtual dimension, but that it is - and needs to be in ways we haven’t quite yet imagined - coupled with the material, spatial, urban, cultural, human flesh. This is both good and bad news.
(Søren Pold) Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2014 4:24am Post subject: post-digital print
The FingerReader is a wearable device that assists in reading printed text. It is a tool both for visually impaired people that require help with accessing printed text, as well as an aid for language translation. Wearers scan a text line with their finger and receive an audio feedback of the words and a haptic feedback of the layout: start and end of line, new line, and other cues. The FingerReader algorithm knows to detect and give feedback when the user veers away from the baseline of the text, and helps them maintain a straight scanning motion within the line.
Developed by the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT
Diff is a small device that monitors the internal events stream of The New York Times and prints out a summary each time an active headline is changed. As it runs, it generates a long stream of changes printed on thermal paper: text that was removed from a headline is rendered as inverted, while additions to a headline are underlined.
Diff, Noah Feehan (2013)
Perhaps the main thing to remember as the fruitless debate circles and circles is that any opposition between print and digital is, today, ridiculous. You might think you’re reading a paper book, but it was, I promise you, produced through digital means. The person who wrote it is overwhelmingly likely to have used a computer to do so, it was edited and typeset using software, its distribution is enabled and tracked with databases, and it is reviewed and discussed in both electronic and physical spaces that are enabled by technology.
What a dodo might teach us about books, Sarah Werner (2014)
A number of different strategies have been employed to assemble information harvested online in an acceptable form for use in a plausible print publication. One of the most popular renders large quantities of Twitter posts (usually spanning a few years) into fictitious diaries […] Another very popular “web sampling” strategy focuses on collecting amateur photographs with or without curatorial criteria […] Finally there’s also the illusion of instant-curation of a subject, which climaxes in the realization of a printed object. [Those strategies] are yet to challenge the paradigm of publishing — maybe the opposite. What they are enabling is a “transduction” between two media. They take a sequential, or reductive part of the web and mould it into traditional publishing guidelines. They tend to compensate for the feeling of being powerless over the elusive and monstrous amount of information available online (at our fingertips), which we cannot comprehensively visualize in our mind.”
Post Digital Publishing, Hybrid and Processual Objects in Print, Alessandro Ludovico (2013)
I find it interesting that we don’t hear many people criticizing a paper book because the creators didn’t take time to use the media to its full potential. The designers didn’t utilize margins, or they didn’t use color, or double page spreads or any number of paper book features. Why is it assumed that digital media must use as much as possible of its ‘digitalness’ (or at least its non-analog-ness) inorder to cross some threshold of ‘being digital’?
Adam Hyde
New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.
Microsoft Research DRM Talk, Cory Doctorow (2004)
Even if electronic literature crashed and burned, which she considered highly unlikely, literary studies could no longer pretend that electronic textuality was print on a screen. The desktop computer changed things forever. Print would never be the same as it was when she was programming assembly code in the sub-sub-basement—and neither would she.
Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles (2002)
Although print remains indispensable, it no longer ‘seems‘ indispensable: that is its curious condition in the late age of print.
Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Jay David Bolter (2001)
What if digital has been mistaken for a medium but actually is an agent that has transformed existing media? I’ve started to investigate other traditional media (audio and video, for example) and how their core form is formally still coherent with their analogue one, but substantially transformed by its current digital nature.
Alessandro Ludovico Mon, 10 Feb 2014 13:03:00 -0800
[…] When surfing the Web, one cannot help but notice that the Internet itself resembles the form of the book in many ways or even tries to emulate the experience of reading a book. How come that electronic book readers, such as the Amazon Kindle or the iPad, imitate the very sensual act of turning the pages of a printed book?
Turning Pages Annett Höland 2010
7:07 reflects upon the infinite quantities of information available on the internet by using pastebin.com as a peephole into the online realm. The contents of the book have been scraped from the site using a Terminal command which automatically collects information in specifically determined intervals. The gathered information varies from log to log, as pastebin is known to carry controversial material. All the information was collected during a span of 7 minutes and 7 seconds and is chronologically arranged from start to finish.
Showing the amount of information that can be collected from the internet in 7 minutes and 7 seconds. Part of the Whole Internet Catalog series.
7:07, Alyar Aynetchi (2013)
See also: #oneSecond, Philipp Adrian (2012)
So what, in the end, will be the role of old-fashioned libraries? Paradoxically enough, they could become the best place to learn how to digitize books or how to print out and bind digitized books that have gone out of print. But they must still be protected as a common good, where cultural objects can be retrieved and enjoyed anytime in the future.
The liquid library, Alessandro Ludovico (2013)
There are a few examples of printed matter which pretend their physical dasein throughout the web without ever getting produced or even being published in the “real world”. Thereby the digital presentation of those fictive products is guided by their analogue realizability. Actually there are no limitations to the enactment of fictive printed-products in the net. Therefore the exhibition “Print Fiction” wants to encourage artists and graphic designers to ask how utopias of printed matter can look like.
The display of fictive printed-matter on computer-screens is certainly not new. There have been folders or imitations of paper in writing programs that seem to be analogue since the beginning of desktop-publishing. Old analogue structures are upheld to ease the orientation within a graphical user interface. But the display of fictive printed-matter is herein extended by the expression of artistic examination.
Paper necessitates a completed work. The digital intercommunication replaces the completed and written corpus of information with a continuous process. This transformation is in full progress – will it come to an end after all? “Print Fiction” is about developing new figures and forms of expression for existing models within a process. The examination should be primarily artistic to create – independent from economic purposes – visions and reflexions of these new figures of fictive products. What conditions make reality shapeable? Which design elements are imaginable?
Print Fiction, curated by Michael Alfred (2012)
People could type a message on the laptop. By pressing ‘send’ a pamphlet was printed and dropped from the 10th floor.
Pamphlet Helmut Smits 2006
5522 tweets sent within the same second from all over the world, preserved and categorized in four books. Containing tweets written in 42 different languages from people all across the world. Categorized by language, timezone, avatar type or registration date. Set by using 14 Fonts with over 100'000 different characters. Using data like followers, friends and status counts to define the appearance for each users data.
#oneSecond (09.11.12 14:47:36 GMT)
This book was art directed by Danielle Aubert and designed by Tan Lin in Microsoft Word. The text is set in Courier except where text was imported directly from the Internet, in which case the original formatting is preserved.
Heath, Tan Lin (2008)
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via It’s Nice That
Using the all-too-familiar format of JPEG files on a desktop background, Adrien recreates scenes from classic and much-loved films with only a few carefully chosen images, which is as pleasingly simple as it sounds.
Cinema.JPG, Adrien Parlenge (2010)
via It’s Nice That
