I had a chance to chat about the project with a couple of professors at my uni. 'You are creating infographic!', exclaimed one when I told her about the process of presenting the most popular passage in the essay by font size. 'It's visually really interesting', I replied. She made a wavy movement with her hands replicating how the varied font sizes in the essay would look visually. 'I'm also thinking of joining question marks with comments, to create a way for the different readers to connect with one another', I said. 'You should also see if that particular phrase or passage has been referenced or reviewed by anyone', offered a Professor in Art and Media, 'this way, you may be able to create a way of connecting not just the readers but a much wider connection - a universal one.' I thought this idea was wonderful so quickly googled the most highlighted passage in the essay, 'mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual', and was extremely pleased to find it mentioned in number of articles. The Library of Traces project uses a lot of existing networks; the library network (University Libraries selected from the Sconul Access List), the library system (lending and borrowing and sharing of books, hence the inevitable marginalia and traces left by the readers), and the postal system (the project uses the methods of mail art). It also uses a number of digital networks too; social media, website, and blogs. The professor's idea to form wider connections using the Internet is based around his thinking of creating new and shareable networks using existing systems and infrastructures. I have always liked his ways of finding creative (and sometimes subversive) means of working with both the digital and the analogue. His suggestion has got me thinking 'bigger', to lift my head out of the book and to look around to see what other networks are out there that I could potentially tap into to form interesting connections.
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I have typed up all of the underlined sections from the collected images of marginalia and traces. These are the words and passages that the readers have felt the need/urge(?) to highlight (in order of popularity according to the top three font sizes ranging from size 16 to 14 - the largest font size means that the passage has been highlighted the most):
'mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual' (p.218)* 'Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.' (p.214) 'Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the "beautiful semblance" which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.' (p.224) '...process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction' (p.214) '...technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself '(p.214) 'aura of the work of art' (p.215) 'the desire of contemporary masses to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent towards overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction' (p.217) 'The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.'(p.217) *the page numbers are taken from the 1990 edition of Illuminations, which seems to be the most widely stocked copies of the book in the university libraries. There are others that didn't quite make the top three font sizes and I was rather surprised that they were not more popular (but then what do I know): '"aura"' (p.215) 'Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.' (p.218) '"I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images"' (p.231) 'The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one' (p.234) 'Communism responds by politicizing art.' (p.235) I do like it when I come across '?', not only because it makes me feel that I am not the only one who struggles with Benjamin's writings, but because it shows that the reader is engaged with the activity of reading and trying to make sense of what they are reading (and failing to do so). I wondered if there was a way for the other readers to shed some light to the '?" that were left in the margins. So I took a brave decision to break up the photocopied pages, which were organised by universities and instead to order it by pages. Will this present new ways of creating connections with the different marginalia and traces that are left on the pages? Now that the Library of Traces project is up and running and the collection of marginalia and traces from Walter Benjamin's essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is steadily increasingly (thank you to the University Libraries that have kindly responded to my invitation so far), I have been thinking very hard the last few days as to how I should work with the fascinating array of data/'traces' that I am accumulating. I really want to make sure that I work with them in such a way that do justice and that the resulting artists' book can speak of the 'others' who have been involved in the book coming into being - this includes the librarians who went out of their way to respond to my invitation, the postman who delivered the envelope, and, of course, the readers who left their traces in the essay . I am thrilled to be able to witness the various marginalia and annotations that have been left inside Benjamin's essay. The readers who left their marks, I am presuming, would have been students who had studied at the different universities at some point in their lives. Although the essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', is widely referenced in many writings and also an essential reading material for students in different subject area's, it's not a particularly easy essay to comprehend (well I don't think so). So, when I come across '???' and 'what the hell!?' scribbled in the margins of the essay, I feel a sense of bonding with the other readers - 'ah, you too!'. 'Marginalia may seem like a game of ping-pong between author and reader' writes David Pearson in Books as History (2008, p.114) but I also think it gives a further dimension to the reading experience for the new reader, a way of sharing between the readers, a little like what happens during a book club. So, other people's scribbles have provided me with a useful insight to help me understand a passage that I had been struggling with or on other occasions left me further perplexed - 'The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced' wrote Benjamin. 'Like Warhol Brillo Box' commented a reader. What I am beginning to see from the photocopied pages of the essay that are being sent back to me is a certain trend in the passages that are repeatedly marked and commented on. What if I tried to extract all the bits from the essay that people found the need to underline (sometimes underlined twice to emphasise the importance) or to place star marks and exclamation marks? What if I changed the font size to correspond with the number of times the section was underlined? What would be the resulting five most popular words, phrases, sentences, etc., in the whole of the essay? What could I do with those words? This is how the text is beginning to look using the traces sent back from Cardiff University Library. The 'bold' areas are those that had star and exclamation marks next to them or were underlined with strong emphasis by the reader. I like how some of the words and phrases are beginning to visually jump out. I will go through all the other collected data (to date) to see how I can develop the idea further.
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