Gallery Nova, Teslina 7, Zagreb

27.05 - 13.06.2015 exhibition and reading room
04.06 - 06.06.2015 conference
06.06 - 07.06.2015 workshop with Kenneth Goldsmith Wasting time on the Internet

A public library is:

• free access to books for every member of society
• library catalog
• librarian

With books ready to be shared, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a librarian. When everyone is librarian, library is everywhere.[^5]

The Public Library cares for and preserves collective memory of all challenges and struggles with artificially induced scarcities, forbidden knowledge and exclusive territories. The activation of the public library's memory holds the key to its survival, but also to something much more important: it holds the key to the struggle for joint management of joint resources.

Exhibition and reading room

Exhibition in Gallery Nova is a follow-up of the current collaboration on the project Public Library by curatorial collective WHW and Multimedia Institute - mi2. The project has been so far presented at international exhibitions Dear Art in Ljubljana's Museum of Contemporary Art -- Metelkova and Calvert 22 in London, and at the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge in the Museum Reina Sofía in Madrid. The earlier theme of art as infrastructure and new version of the exhibitionPublic Library are followed by the exploration of the theme of activation of materials of tactical archives and open digital collections.

The exhibition in Stuttgart's Kunstverein in 2014 presented Public Library as a collection of collections, and the form of repertory (used in archive science to describe a collection) was taken as a basic narrative procedure. In Gallery Nova we will present tactical archives: MayDay Rooms from London; The Ignorant Schoolmaster and His Committees from Belgrade; open digital repositories Library Genesis; aaaaarg.org;Catalogue of Free Books (K_O_K); (Digitized) Praxis; digitized work of Midnight Notes Collective and Textz.com. A special activation emphasis will be on the digital repositories: UbuWeb and Monoskop. Using the resources of these two repositories, WHW curated a selection of artistic and documentary film and video works; texts; audio files and books.

During the exhibition Showroom will host a selection of books related to the question of libraries, development of information studies, media theory and theory of the commons, borrowed from Media Archive of Multimedia Institute.

Conference

In the framework of the exhibition we are organizing a conference that brings together artists, hackers and activists who are building infrastructures for knowledge exchange and activation of library holdings in the attempt to change social reality. The conference will be in English.

Conference participants are the following: Dušan Barok (Monoskop); Anthony Davies & Rosemary Grennan (MayDay Rooms); Kenneth Goldsmith; Sebastian Lütgert & Jan Gerber (Open Media Library); Alberto Manguel; Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (Multimedia Institute); María G. Perulero & Celia Gradín (Platoniq); Noa Treister (The Ignorant Schoolmaster and His Committees); Dubravka Sekulić; Femke Snelting (Mondothèque); Što, kako i za koga / WHW.

Workshop with Kenneth Goldsmith Wasting time on the Internet

Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet, editor-founder of net archive for avant-garde art UbuWeb, lecturer of poetry and poetic practices at Pennsylvania University. Live without dead time. --- Situationist graffiti, Paris, May 1968.

We spend our lives in front of screens, mostly wasting time: checking social media, watching cat videos, chatting, and shopping. What if these activities --- clicking, SMSing, status-updating, and random surfing --- were used as raw material for creating compelling and emotional works of literature? Could we reconstruct our autobiography using only Facebook? Could we write a great novella by plundering our Twitter feed? Could we reframe the internet as the greatest poem ever written?

organizers: What, How and for Whom/WHW and Multimedia Institute - mi2