Economy of production: recycled manuscript pages from Yale Law Library.

 

from Yale Law Library flickr

Ressurecting Books in Birmingham

 Sir David Cannadine surveyed the history of libraries and Johanna Drucker spoke about book in the ecology of things. I could only stay for a day - such a shame to have missed two more days of so well organised and so well put together conference.

My presentation on book destruction in 1940's Lithuania turned out to be longer then I had originally intended. A huge learning experience! (and eight points into my notebook of the improvements to be made). At the end of the first day the exhibition of my fired books was unveiled (literally!)

2000 (two thousand!!!) Timbuktu manuscripts torched

 The latest estimates, though, suggest that about 2,000 manuscripts were torched, while the remainder of the estimated 30,000 at the institute survived.

 A Written Legacy
The written word is deeply rooted in Timbuktu's rich history. The city emerged as a wealthy center of trade, Islam, and learning during the 13th century, attracting a number of Sufi religious scholars. They in turn took on students, forming schools affiliated with's Timbuktu's three main mosques.
The scholars imported parchment and vellum manuscripts via the caravan system that connected northern Africa with the Mediterranean and Arabia. Wealthy families had the documents copied and illuminated by local scribes, building extensive libraries containing works of religion, art, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, history, geography, and culture.
"The manuscripts are the city's real gold," said Mohammed Aghali, a tour guide from Timbuktu. "The manuscripts, our mosques, and our history—these are our treasures. Without them, what is Timbuktu?"
This isn't the first time that an occupying army has threatened Timbuktu's cultural heritage. The Moroccan army invaded the city in 1591 to take control of the gold trade. In the process of securing the city, they killed or deported most of Timbuktu's scholars, including the city's most famous teacher, Ahmed Baba al Massufi, who was held in exile in Marrakesh for many years and forced to teach in a pasha's court. He finally returned to Timbuktu in 1611, and it is for him that the Ahmed Baba Institute was named.

Hiding the Texts
In addition to the Ahmed Baba Institute, Timbuktu is home to more than 60 private libraries, some with collections containing several thousand manuscripts and others with only a precious handful.
Sidi Ahmed, a reporter based in Timbuktu who recently fled to Bamako, said Monday that nearly all the libraries, including the world-renowned Mamma Haidara and the Fondo Kati libraries, had secreted their collections before the Islamist forces had taken the city.
"The people here have long memories," he said. "They are used to hiding their manuscripts. They go into the desert and bury them until it is safe."
(from National Geographic)

Organic Doom of the Paper Codex

The doom of the paper codex is riding high as a subject for all sorts of librophile events in these days. The book has gone digital. Finally, there is a good solid contemporary problem in the area of books: the problem that writes in e-ink megabites and does not smell of animal glue. The number of words on the subject is growing at the speeds that were earlier thought only attainable in particle accelerators.

The problem is about get the worse. The book has not simply converted into digital in the digital world of the digital appliances. This summer the book went organic. Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and his team have now encoded the whole book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (the text, the images and the design) into a DNR. Then they read it and copied it too. 70 billion copies of the book have been printed.  (How is that for an edition size!)

From Aug. 17 issue of the journal Science via Harvard Medical School news:

Biology’s databank, DNA has long tantalized researchers with its potential as a storage medium: fantastically dense, stable, energy efficient and proven to work over a timespan of some 3.5 billion years. While not the first project to demonstrate the potential of DNA storage, Church’s team married next-generation sequencing technology with a novel strategy to encode 1,000 times the largest amount of data previously stored in DNA.
The researchers used binary code to preserve the text, images and formatting of the book. While the scale is roughly what a 5 ¼-inch floppy disk once held, the density of the bits is nearly off the charts: 5.5 petabits, or 1 million gigabits, per cubic millimeter.
The information density and scale compare favorably with other experimental storage methods from biology and physics,” said Sri Kosuri, a senior scientist at the Wyss Institute and senior author on the paper.
And where some experimental media — like quantum holography — require incredibly cold temperatures and tremendous energy, DNA is stable at room temperature.

You can drop it wherever you want, in the desert or your backyard, and it will be there 400,000 years later,” Church said.

Reading and writing in DNA is slower than in other media, however, which makes it better suited for archival storage of massive amounts of data, rather than for quick retrieval or data processing.
Imagine that you had really cheap video recorders everywhere,” Church said. “Just paint walls with video recorders. And for the most part they just record and no one ever goes to them. But if something really good or really bad happens you want to go and scrape the wall and see what you got. So something that’s molecular is so much more energy efficient and compact that you can consider applications that were impossible before.
About four grams of DNA theoretically could store the digital data humankind creates in one year.
Although other projects have encoded data in the DNA of living bacteria, the Church team used commercial DNA microchips to create standalone DNA.
“We purposefully avoided living cells,” Church said. “In an organism, your message is a tiny fraction of the whole cell, so there’s a lot of wasted space. But more importantly, almost as soon as a DNA goes into a cell, if that DNA doesn’t earn its keep, if it isn’t evolutionarily advantageous, the cell will start mutating it, and eventually the cell will completely delete it.
In another departure, the team rejected so-called ‘shotgun sequencing,’ which reassembles long DNA sequences by identifying overlaps in short strands. Instead, they took their cue from information technology, and encoded the book in 96-bit data blocks, each with a 19-bit address to guide reassembly. Including jpeg images and HTML formatting, the code for the book required 54,898 of these data blocks, each a unique DNA sequence.
“We wanted to illustrate how the modern world is really full of zeroes and ones, not As through Zs alone,” Kosuri said.

I doubt very much if Robert Winthrop and his team considered for a minute the philosophical implications of their actions (hugely inconsiderate!) By the time the chitchat surfaces, they will be far away building an organic superlibrary as a pill.**













** Should be popular! (especially with the hummus generation of babyEinstein parents).

Recycling printed matter: ancient palimpsest II

 

South Asia developed a very efficient manuscript culture, allowing copying and distribution of very large quantities of texts. Scribes were employed and editions of identical copies often reached into thousands. The books were written on palm leaves, which deteriorated rather quickly. The texts had to be regularly rewritten and the damaged ones had to be regularly disposed of. Buddhists traditionally buried their worn manuscripts in the jars, while Hindus drowned theirs into the flowing waters.

Recycling printed matter: ancient palimpsest I

* Sumerians treated clay tablets as ephemeral notebooks. Once the information they contained became irrelevant, the tablets were soaked an reshaped, to be used again. As a result, few examples survived - ironically, largely survived those that got burned in the fire, i.e. fired.

* Sometimes the back side of the papyrus scroll was used to copy an new text.  The books of that kind were not particularly decorative - they were produced for a keen reader, who was more interested in content rather than the status.

V&A doors by George Cullen

 

Rotating doors at Victoria and Albert museum (by George Cullen). One of those instants of cinematic poetry, if there is one...

II. (Museums. Lithuania. Žilinskas) Soothingly unchanged.

Part I.
 


Not all is stale at M. Žilinskas Art Gallery. Here are some highlights:

1.  A display of photographs from Čiurlionis's photo album accumulated during his travels in Caucasus (1905). 
There were some predictable mountainscapes as well as some astonishing portraits from the boat trip. Thoroughly postmodern.

M.K. Čiurlionis photos from Caucasus

M.K. Čiurlionis photos from Caucasus

 
The only true disappointment is the museum had not published the album as a book (well, an artist book, probably - I’d love to work on it!). What about a limited edition of prints from the original negatives?

2. The last painting by Čiurionis Trikampis. Ratas. Kvadratas  (Triangle. Circle. Square.)
 Apparently, they used to title it “Boats” (yawn-yawn), because it ... well... shows boats on it. I am delighted that the original name had been reinstalled. One should always remember the problem of titles and untitles and the importance of naming things.

The last painting by M.K.Čiurlionis

3.  Deathmasks by Petras Rimša. 
A selection of white heads is set out at the end of a rather large room. They are obviously meant to be a centerpiece. It is a rather crowded display for a room that size (have they  considered of dividing the space). The spotlight is very bright. White masks are arranged of black, like an assortment of ritual masks. Clinical curiosities? Despite an unsuccessful display, I found the presence and the reality of the person (behind the mask) extremely physical: you can see the veins in the neck, the hair stuck in the plaster.

4. Then there are photos by Domicelė Tarabildienė. Photomontages from 1932. 
Simple. Elegant. I had no idea she existed.
She was working in the context of Hartfield, Lissitzky and Rodchenko. I would very much like to research her photography more. To be continued.

Generally - the gallery seems to host a phenomenal amount of artwork in one exposition. Sheer volume is diluting the effect.  Too much stuff to take in. There is enough work and space to assemble a few blockbuster exhibitions.


The visit felt like a trip to the past. Soothingly unchanged. All is quiet in the Eastern front.

I. (Museums. Lithuania. Žilinskas) Soothingly unchanged

Museums in Lithuania never fail to amuse me, surprise me, excite me. Visiting them offers a refreshingly archaic experience. The time flows slower there. The word progress does not have an exclamation mark at the end of it.
Nostalgia lives there.

I had not been to M. Žilinskas Art Gallery (unreadable webpage) in Kaunas for a about 20 years. Until yesterday.

So what had changed in that time, I wondered, as I climbed the stairs (passing the giant sculpture of a naked man which has been causing endless complaints since 1989 from the prudent ladies and gentelmen of Kaunas).

The power of a bare willy! Petras Mazuras managed to produce a sculpture that has be causing discontent among prudent Lithuanians for over 20 years now. No need for Salman Rushdie here.

The answer is - I don’t know what had changed, if anything.

The building is a good example of grandiose Soviet architecture. It still maintains most (if not all) original features, including crouching toilets and a room Nr 428 accessed from the ladies lavatories. I am assuming that the room is the office/storage for the cleaning lady and it is expected that a lady (not a gent) will be cleaning the toilets.

Original toilet from 1989. Most certainly adds to the charm and the atmosphere of the gallery.

There are clear signs ekspozicija, taking you to the exact place where you should be starting. The rooms are minded by a selection of sombre looking old women, who’s watchful eye will prevent you from touching the glass  or  - God forbid! - anything else.

The arrangement of the objects follows a rather mysterious sequence. I am sure they are expertly arranged. (It is not them, it is me) There is also a noticeable lack of information about the artefacts. Most of the vitrines are titled XIXc Europe. Or XIXc Russia, from Xyz collection. Am I that interested in who owned the object previously? Or am I more interested in what the object is?  A lot of paintings are disastrously lit, with frames casting shadows over the work.

How not to light the paintings.

The gallery also hosts a special exhibition Mirábile Visu / Nuostabu matyti for the 90th aniversary of M.K.Čiurlionis museum. Some rooms are filled with artworks that the museum had acquired over specific decades. Result? The rooms look like a cacophonous selection of art with a number of surprisingly modern juxtapositions: a huge classical painting along a selection of round 50's pots and opposite a traditional textile. There is certainly something something in it.

Part II.