Marcell Mars is a research associate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University (UK). Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb. His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. He is a doctoral student at Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, writing a thesis on Foreshadowed Libraries. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.
Tomislav Medak is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as an amateur librarian for the Memory of the World/Public Library project. His research focuses on technologies, capitalist development, and postcapitalist transition, particularly on economies of intellectual property and unevenness of technoscience. Together with Marcell Mars he coedited Public Library and Guerrilla Open Access.
Memory of the World: Custodianship and Collective Learning
November 21-22, 2019
WHW Akademija, Zagreb
In this two-day workshop, we plan to do two things: to present the context of amateur libriarianship and custodianship of knowledge from which the Memory of the World as a shadow library emerged, and following from there teach the participants how to create, maintain and share a collection of digital texts they can use as a commonised resource in the collective learning process.
We will highlight the massive disobedient practice of sharing books and articles online. This practice has sprung up in response to the fact that the digital networks have made possible a radical expansion of access beyond geographic and economic divides, and yet the public libraries were denied from providing that access as a consequence of the limitations of copyright and the economic barriers in the economically uneven world of research and learning. Users digitising, freeing and sharing books and articles have stepped up to supplement what public libraries were not able to do. We will also highlight practices of pirate care that go along with digitising, sharing, creating collections and maintaining infrastructures of shadow libraries that we have called the custodianship. We will show how creating a collection can be a political intervention by showing some examples of collections we have created and demonstrate hands-on how one can easily do it.
However, the two days we will primarily use to start building a shared collection with the participants of WHW Akademija, demonstrating a number of workflows to digitise, catalog, maintain, share and annotate texts that could be useful in their collective learning process.
Memory of the World: Politics of Custodianship and Intervention
MAMA, Preradovićeva 18, Zagreb
May 15, 2019
In this talk/workshop, we plan to discuss the context and events from which the Memory of the World as a shadow library emerged. We will highlight the massive disobedient practice of sharing books and articles online. This practice has sprung up in response to the fact that the digital networks have made possible a radical expansion of access beyond geographic and economic divides, and yet the public libraries were denied from providing that access as a consequence of the limitations of copyright and the economic barriers in the economically uneven world of research and learning. Users digitising, freeing and sharing books and articles have stepped up to supplement what public libraries were not able to do. We will also highlight practices of pirate care that go along with digitising, sharing, creating collections and maintaining infrastructures of shadow libraries that we have called the custodianship. We will discuss how creating a collection can be a political intervention by showing some examples of collections we have created and demonstrate hands-on how one can easily do it.
Recommended reading:
-- Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak: System of a Takedown
-- Custodians.online letters [http://custodians.online, http://custodians.online/ubu]