BiblioTech
April 28 – May 13, 2022.
Preview April 28, 5:00 – 6:30pm.
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Extended dates:
May 27 – May 31, 2022.
Preview May 26, 6:00 – 8:00pm.
(Please note – the gallery will be open on Saturday, but not Sunday.)
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Animate Assembly (w/ Caroline Sebilleau & Antonio Roberts), Anna Barham, Jonathan Basile, Joe Devlin, David Gauthier, Sumuyya Khader, INTER–MISSION & formAxioms, Rosa Menkman, Katie Paterson, Post-Digital Publishing Archive (Silvio Lorusso), Tom Schofield, Erica Scourti, and Mark Simmonds.
Curated by Torque Editions.
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BiblioTech explores the changing role of the library, reading, writing, and publishing in a post-digital age. The title suggests the latin term for library, ‘bibliotheca’, and also alludes to how the library and book culture has become increasingly technologised.
The exhibition asks: What is the library-as-institution in the context of advanced AI language tools, new forms of text and image processing, and the increasing spread of publishing technology into our lives? How might the library evolve within the next phases of digitisation entangled with issues of climate change, mental health, social justice, and automation? And how will print culture respond to these changes too?
This exhibition also takes place at NeMe in Cyprus, running in both locations simultaneously for a period. The majority of works are presented in both locations, while some one-off works are exhibited in only one site. Accordingly, this crossover and correspondence creates a context to explore modes of reproducibility, presence and difference at play in print and digital-based artefacts, the library, and culture more broadly.
By transforming the gallery into a library, composed of diverse publishing, reading, writing and learning practices, as reinvented by contemporary artists, BiblioTech seeks to playfully push against audience expectations for gallery and library alike. More broadly, the exhibition explores how libraries have become hybridised with other environments: from museums and schools, to bedrooms, computer-networks, labs and forests, opening up new conceptual space for the future of books; of how and where they are accessed, written and read.
Curated by Torque Editions (Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner) the exhibition also presents books published by Torque, a number of artworks they have produced (in collaboration with Tom Schofield) focused on machine learning and language, a selection of material from LJMU’s Stafford Beer archive, and a curated list of shadow libraries.
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A symposium exploring projects within, and broader contexts to, the show will take place on May 5, 3:00 – 6:30pm. Featuring Joana Chicau, Johanna Drucker, Gary Hall, Mel Jordan, Esther Leslie, Edgar Schmitz, and Emily Segal.
More information about the symposium can be found here.
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This project is supported by Arts Council England, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts and Liverpool School of Art and Design.
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*Image still from: Katie Paterson, ‘Future Library: A Century Unfolds’, 2019.