Yuri Pattison shares his selections for our Room for Reading, ahead of his commission as part of ‘anywhere in the universe’, our project looking at the present, past and future of the public library.
Pattison’s installation, which explores the shifting history of access to knowledge and information, will be situated in the Mitchell Library from 18 June 2023.
Recommendations include – ‘World of Interiors’ (2022) by Aurelia Guo; ‘The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption’ (2019) by Pamela M. Lee; ‘Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information’ (2013) by Malcolm McCullough; ‘Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence’ (2022) and ‘Non-Fascist AI’ (2019) by Dan McQuillan; and Aaron Swartz’s ‘Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’ (2008).
Aurelia Guo, ‘World of Interiors’ (2022).
“When bees are close to death, they cling to flowers.”
Aurelia Guo’s ‘World of Interiors’ is a book of poetry and essays using collage and appropriation to destabilise the first-person ‘I’. Guo, who is a writer, researcher and lecturer in law at London South Bank University writes directly about the inescapable condition of being perceived and positioned by other people. Covering economic cycles of wealth and poverty at the levels of the individual, group and state, ‘World of Interiors’ is a book about travel and immigration: migrants, tourists and refugees. It is about the work of survival and the cost of survival. It is also a hopeful book - about how strong and indomitable the will can be.
Watch Aurelia Guo ‘Place's Tragodia: Law as Poetry and as Politics in Modernity’, a live event at Cell Project Space, March 2020 here.
Pamela M. Lee, ‘The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption’ (2019).
In her book ‘The Glen Park Library: A Fairy Tale of Disruption’ (2019), Art Historian Pamela M. Lee uses the 2013 arrest of Ross William Ulbricht, suspected to be the mastermind of dark net marketplace Silk Road, at Glen Park Public Branch Library in San Francisco, to tease out the relationship between public libraries and digital culture. Written as a work of experimental art criticism, Lee provides original readings of five women artists—Gretchen Bender, Cecile B. Evans, Josephine Pryde, Carissa Rodriguez, and Martine Syms—who weigh in, either explicitly or inadvertently, on the nature of contemporary media and technology.
Watch art historian Pamela M. Lee read from ‘The Glen Park Library’ here.
Read a review of ‘The Glen Park Library’ in Art Forum here.
Malcolm McCullough, ‘Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information’. (2013)
In ‘Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information’ (2013), Malcolm McCullough, Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, conceptualises what he terms ‘the Ambient’, interrogating how it is interacted with in everyday life and how it can be used to rethink attention.
Watch an interview with Malcolm McCullough here.
Dan McQuillan, ‘Resisting AI; An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence’. (2022)
Pattison recommends two texts by Dan McQuillan. In ‘Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist approach to Artificial Intelligence’(2022), McQuillan calls for us to resist and restructure AI by prioritising the common good over algorithmic optimisation. McQuillan outlines his proposals for this restructuring, utilising mutual aid as a means to support collective freedom. McQuillan’s article ‘Non-Fascist AI’ explains the basic workings of artificial intelligence and what is needed to achieve non-fascist AI.
Read ‘Non-Fascist AI’ here.
Pattison’s final recomendation is ‘The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’ (2008) a document written by “hacktivist” Aaron Swartz, outlining the importance of freely accessible information on the internet. Swartz argues against publishers charging for copyrights and for sharing as a moral imperative that allows the dissemination of knowledge.
Read ‘The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’ here.
Details
In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.
Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.
