Constant

The library is open

Femke Snelting — 2019-05-22T15:48:57Z

Dear readers,

The Library Is Open invites you to an afternoon of workshops that make the operations within libraries visible. Join us in exploring the actions and roles of legal and extra-legal libraries (municipal, pirate, academic, +++), their custodians, and the public that form a community around collections of texts.

Registration is not necessary, as on arrival you will be assigned to two workshops. After the first session there will be a short break, after which the second session of workshops will begin. At the end of the event we'll have a moment to share the outcomes of the workshops all together. We'd like you to attend both sessions if possible, in order to maximise the experience.

The event is divided into three parallel workshops which will be held twice, giving participants the opportunity to encounter different experiences: Marginal Conversations, Knowledge in Action and Blurry boundaries

The Library Is Open is a participatory event developed by the Piet Zwart Institute's Experimental Publishing program as part of the research project Special Issue #9: Interfacing the Law, in partnership with Constant. Interfacing the Law is a recurring thematic project which looks at how publishing practices develop in accordance, or in dissonance with legal frameworks.

Contributors: Simon Browne, Tancredi Di Giovanni, Paloma García, Rita Graça, Artemis Gryllaki, Pedro Sá Couto, Femke Snelting, Biyi Wen, Bohye Woo

Special thanks to: Bodó Balázs, Dušan Barok, Anita Burato, André Castro, Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh, Martino Morandi, Leslie Robbins, Steve Rushton, Amy Suo Wu, Eva Weinmayr

View online : https://issue.xpub.nl/09

Interfacing the law: XPPL

Femke Snelting — 2018-05-28T10:01:36Z

Festive launch of XPPL: Xperimental Potential Pirate Library, Xperimental Private-Public Liaison, Xperimental Pretentious Performative Labor, Xperimental Platform for Potential Legality, Xperimental Post-Public Library.

"XPPL is a space for potential pirate librarianship aimed at people who are studying the field of media culture, or as we like to call them: knowledge comrades. This library gathers all the books and articles floating around on PZI shelves and our hard drives and memory sticks, so that they can be shared. As a web interface, it hosts a curated catalogue of books and articles, and instances for uploading and downloading. It starts at XPUB, but can go anywhere we want it to."
https://issue.xpub.nl/06/

XPPL was developed in the context of Interfacing the law, a collaboration between Constant and the Experimental Publishing program in Rotterdam. The project experiments with and openly discusses shadow libraries, piratical text collections and other forms of disobedient sharing.

XPPL interfaces and infrastructure by: Alex, Tash, Joca, Alice, Zalán, Angelika. With a guest contribution by Dubravka Sekulic.

View online : https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mw-mediadesi...

Let's build a library together

Femke Snelting — 2017-04-23T23:29:56Z

Let's Build a Library Together invites designers, artists, theoreticians, hackers, librarians and activists to join forces during an intense week of discussion, collective prototyping and exchange on the future of Public Libraries in the digital age.
Femke Snelting contributes to the workshop initiated by Public Library/Memory of the World and Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz.

- Interfacing the law / Workshop, Archives

Interfacing the law @ Cinema Sauvage

Femke Snelting — 2017-04-23T20:02:31Z

The Festival Mondial des Cinémas Sauvages (World Festival of Wild Cinema) is an open space and an open event traversed by contradictory currents. It aims to bring together films and practices that defy notions of property, authorship or copyright. Sometimes consciously through free licence; often naively, following only their own energies.

In the warming-up event for the festival in Cinema Nova and on it's way to Public Domain Day, Constant will present the project Interfacing the law as a way to reflect about the parallels and differences between sharing films and books.

View online : http://www.festival-cinemas-sauvage...

Interfacing the law

Femke Snelting — 2017-04-23T20:02:28Z

A research project developed in collaboration with the experimental publishing program at Piet Zwart Institute of Media Design in Rotterdam.

How can the right to access to knowledge be held up against claims of copyright? How can we battle the 'terror of the mind' produced by the current intellectual property regime? Interfacing the law was an attempt to build a series of platforms, both in the sense of on-line interfaces and of public discourse, that allow us to experiment with, to openly discuss and to reflect while the next wave of court cases is waiting to happen. It is urgent that we find ways to make the public debate transcend the juridical binary of illegal vs. legal, and claim political legitimacy for acting out the potential of digital publishing, and the possibility of sharing digital books.

This project was developed in collaboration with Memory of the world and the experimental publishing program at Piet Zwart Institute of Media Design in Rotterdam.

View online : https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/...

Special Issue: Interfacing the law

Femke Snelting — 2017-03-31T18:02:40Z

How to defend the access to knowledge in the current intellectual property regime? Interfacing the law is an attempt to experiment with and to openly discuss shadow libraries, piratical text collections and other forms of disobedient sharing. Interfacing each in their own way with legal and political frameworks, we want to consider those vibrant practices as experiments with the social contracts that link libraries, librarians, readers and books.

After a welcome by the Nieuwe Instituut library staff, students from the XPUB program present four projects developed in the context of Interfacing the law. Followed by a discussion with Aymeric Mansoux and Séverine Dusollier. Moderation: Femke Snelting

Projects: Clàudia Giralt Monedero, Franc González, Giulia de Giovanelli, Max Franklin, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe, Kimmy Spreeuwenberg, Margreet Riphagen, Emily Buzzo, Karina Dukalska

Séverine Dusollier is doctor in Law and professor at SciencesPo, Paris. She has carried out research in several European and national projects, namely for the Belgian Government, WIPO, the Council of Europe, UNESCO, the European Commission and Parliament. Her current research relates to intellectual property, copyright and IP limitations, the public domain and the commons.

Aymeric Mansoux is an artist, musician and media researcher. His research deals with the defining, constraining and confining of cultural freedom in the context of network based practices. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London on the creative misunderstandings between art, politics and the law within free culture.

Interfacing the law is developed by Constant for the Experimental Publishing programme at Piet Zwart Media Design (Rotterdam), in collaboration with Memory of the World. The project is part of Society for Library Access (SLAX), a coalition of people and organisations that want to publicly address the antagonism between the access to knowledge and the current copyright regime.

Recording of the discussion: http://sound.constantvzw.org/interfacingthelaw/mansoux-dusollier.ogg

View online : https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/...