About this item
Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas--as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, "Reading Rooms Reading Machines" further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined) , and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others. The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks.
About the Author
Anna-Sophie Springer is a writer, curator, and co-director (with Charles Stankievech) of K. Verlag, an independent Berlin-based publishing project exploring the book as a site for exhibition making. Her practice merges curatorial, editorial, and artistic interests by stimulating fluid relations among images, artifacts, and texts in order to produce new geographical, physical, and cognitive proximities, often in relation to historical archives. She has previously worked as Associate Editor of publications for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and as Editor for the pioneering German theory publisher Merve Verlag as well as the annual digital arts and culture festival transmediale, before launching K. in 2011. Anna-Sophie is also a member of the Haus der Kulturen's (HKW) SYNAPSE International Curators' Network where she co-edits the intercalations: paginated exhibition book series co-published by K. in the framework of the HKW's Anthropozän Projekt.
Her essays and interviews have previously been published including in C Magazine, Fillip, and Scapegoat; she currently blogs about human-animal topics for the HKW's SYNAPSE Curators' Network blog on http://synapse.info/blog. Her collection of interviews, TRAVERSALS: Conversations on Art and Writing, was released in September 2014; in January 2015 her exhibition-book Fantasies of the Library was released as the inaugural publication in the intercalations series. She is also the editor of The Subjective Object (Berlin & Leipzig, 2012) , Charles Stankievech's artist book LOVELAND (Berlin, 2011) and the co-editor, together with Etienne Turpin, of Land & Animal & Nonanimal (Berlin, 2015) , the second publication in the intercalations series.
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