FYI France (since 1992) -- http://www.fyifrance.com
File 3: Ejournal & archive, by Jack Kessler,kessler@well.sf.ca.us
-- archive copy of an EXTRA issue of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, distributed via email on April 24, 2012, and a little later here on http://fyifrance.blogspot.com, and on Facebook at Jack Kessler's "Notes".
A very interesting symposium takes place the week after next: Thursday-Friday, May 3 & 4 -- at a place called MIT... in Cambridge Mass...
"Unbound : Speculations on the Future of the Book" http://futurebook.mit.edu/
- Amaranth Borsuk (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media
Studies and Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT) :
- "the use of writing technologies by modern and contemporary poets to change their relationship to the page and their constructions of authorship"
- "a book of augmented-reality poetry that lets readers hold the words in their hands" -- what, you may wonder, is "augmented-reality poetry"?...
- Gretchen E. Henderson (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Writing and
Humanistic Studies at MIT) :
- "aesthetics of deformity, museology as narrative strategy, poetics of (dis)embodiment / (in)acces-sibility / author(ity), and the body of the book" -- I bet you've never heard of "disability studies", either... now consider what those studies might bring to "the Future of the Book"...
- "literary appropriations of music", "cross-genre writings" -- plus a book entitled, Ugliness: A Cultural History... Ruskin and Berenson move over...
These are free-thinking folks, at MIT now -- also far-thinking, perhaps. The symposium they have assembled appears to reflect their sensibilities & flexibilities:
"This symposium explores the future potential of the book by engaging practitioners and performers of this versatile technology to ask some key questions: is the book an artifact on its deathbed or a mutable medium transitioning into future forms? What shape will books of the future take?"
-- but these people seem, as well, to be aware of the past -- so often a major drawback of such futurology, and a major task now, seeing the past clearly for a technology over 500 years old -- something does get learned, in 500 years --
"Grounded in this technology’s history, we will reflect critically on possible futures, promises, and challenges of the book, showcasing practices by writers and artists, putting them in conversation with scholars and thinkers from across the disciplines who are framing discourse and questions about book-related technotexts..."
"Technotexts"... :-)
The speakers for this event seem remarkable for both the breadth and the depth of the promised discussion:
- Christian Bök, Calgary -- "pataphysics"! -- how could any devotee of Perec & Oulipo, as I am, resist? -- incidentally the term gets translated by my iPhone as "pasta physics", which Perec would have loved;
- Mary C. Fuller, MIT -- one of the truly nimble minds -- "she studies travel literature, articles on Caribbean poetry, exploration narratives and video games, early modern circumnavigations, and Renaissance narratives of travel to Russia, West Africa, Guiana, Newfoundland, and Istanbul. Her books include 'Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624' (1995)..." -- "works on the history of early modern voyages, exploration, and colonization. She is also interested in material books and how readers use them, in the past and in the present... Her teaching spans a broad range of topics, from poetry to scientific expeditions, including subjects cross-listed with Comparative Media Studies, Music, Anthropology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and EAPS / Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences ...";
- Katherine Hayles, Duke -- "How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics" (1999) -- also, 'My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts" (2005) -- move over, Hal...;
- Wyn Kelley, MIT -- _everything_ that is or can be known about Melville...;
- Bonnie Mak, UI Urbana-Champaign -- "studies the history of medieval manuscripts and early printed books, and analyzes the cultural implications of digitizing such materials... role of the page in the production and transmission of knowledge from the Middle Ages to the modern day, focussing particularly on the dynamic relationship between materiality and meaning... the re-emergence of the notion of authenticity in debates about electronic records... the social, political, and economic pressures that shape digitized data... the consequences of the reconfiguration of historical sources in digital media for the production of knowledge...";
- Gita Manaktala, MIT Press -- "cutting-edge scholarship in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences" -- someone after my own business heart, the eternal problem of making all this "pay";
- Nick Montfort, MIT -- "writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media" -- what is "constrained" poetry, I wonder -- poetry written in prison? poetry written hung-over? -- Norman Mailer had to walk a ceiling balance-beam to reach his attic office, to be sure his writing was suitably-"constrained"... or that's a good story about Norman, anyway...;
- and there are, lined-up for this extraordinary gathering, Rita Raley (UCSB), "distracted reading and bookwork after new media" -- James Reid-Cunningham (Boston Athenaeum), "bench-trained bookbinder" -- Bob Stein (Institute for the Future of the Book), "a small think & do tank aimed at exploring and hopefully influencing the evolution of new forms of intellectual expression" -- David Thorburn (MIT), Director of the Communications Forum -- fascinating-sounding folks, all...
And there's a blog! So you yourself can participate, and contribute, even if currently you are in Montferrand du Perigord, or Noe Valley de la Californie, and can't make it to Boston --
Recent Unbound Blog postings:
- Of e-Books and old books – or what the 21th [sic] century can learn from the 15th.
- The future of the book?
- What happened to all the e-books?
- Zines!
- Non-anglophone worlds?
-- that last & most recent being moi, naturellement / évidemment, people here know my predilections...
From here, then, out in the West Coast California "antipodes" -- as Australians like to label their Oz -- Cambridge Mass seems a world away , maybe... Someone in Brisbane, starting now, might just get there on-time -- well jet-lagged... folks down-under are heartier than most, when it comes to jet-lag...
But for the rest of us: if you can head Out East to Boston, week after next -- or north or south or even west if you are in Lyon -- there's a train, up from Mannahatta... -- then check out,
"Unbound : Speculations on the Future of the Book"
-- week after next, at MIT!
I wish I could be there -- New England is beautiful in the Springtime -- but I do have my iPhone, and they have that blog, so at least la Californie is connected.
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
