[-empyre-] printed matter

[Domenico Quaranta]

Dear Johannes,

> rather good questions I think, posed by Mathias, and I was just wondering
> also what happens to the fetish value we lavishly endow our books and magazines
> with? well for me at least the years i spent collecting performance books and
> magazines, from different countries and locations and exhibits etc are themselves
> collected (and part of my memory bank) in the library at my Houston studio, thus also now part of a design
> I like for my creating-environment or thinking environment, probably not so much possible with online
> platform hybridity and small tablets. 

we have always this bad habit to see "old" and "new" technologies as oppositional, and to wonder whether the new will kill the old or not. If it does, it's a success; if it doesn't, it's a failure. 
But it doesn't work this way most of the times actually. And it won't work this way with books. "Book" (as addressed by this clever Spanish fake commercial: http://youtu.be/YhcPX1wVp38) is such a good technology, perfected along centuries to perfectly adapt the needs of the digital age - it won't never become obsolete. My studio is filled up of an ever increasing amount of paper even if I have hundreds of ebooks on my kindle; I would even say that my book collector mania is nurtured and enforced by the access I have to a vaster amount of information.

But we - as readers - need also something else. We need fast access and searchability; we need portability; we need hyperlinks. As producers, we need access to distribution and to the tools of production. As humans, we need to waste less trees, and we need less trucks on the streets...

So, let's keep doing books; but why shouldn't we do e-books?

My bests,
Domenico

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Domenico Quaranta

email: quaranta.domenico at gmail.com
skype: dom_40

http://domenicoquaranta.com
http://www.linkartcenter.eu