Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

(in fragments) on its own servers; and the second time when we stole
this digitised version and re-incarnated the book, in a form as close
as possible to the original. In fact, Amazon has similarly disembodied
a substantial amount of the books it sells, resulting in a very sizeable
database indeed. And in a way, it is clearly understood that the entire
content is in fact freely available, just a few mysterious mouse-clicks
away. So Amazon is hosting a cornucopia of texts, an astonishing
amount of knowledge, a compelling body of culture – all of it infinitely
put on hold for marketing reasons.
We asked ourselves: what’s the difference between digitally scanning
the text of a book we already own, and obtaining it through
Amazon Noir? In strictly conceptual terms, there is no difference at
all, other then the amount of time we spent on the project. We wished
to set up our own Amazon, definitively circumventing the confusion
of endless purchase-inducing stimuli. So we stole the hidden and disjointed
connections between the sentences of a text, to reveal them for
our own amusement and edification; we stole the digital implementation
of synaptic connections between memories (both human and
electronic) created by a giant online retailer in order to amuse and seduce
us into compulsive consumption; we were thieves of memory (in
a McLuhanian sense), stealing for the right to remember, the right to
independently and freely construct our own physical memory.
5.5 scrapbooks, grassroots archiving
as a new methodology.
Scrapbooking is a method of preserving personal history by collecting
printed clippings, photos, cherished memorabilia and other artefacts
in blank books or notebooks. Though its exact origins are uncertain,
scrapbooking is probably as old as print itself. The earliest references
to the phenomenon are from 15th-century England, where ‘commonplace
books’ were a popular way of compiling information such
as recipes, letters, poems, etc. Then in the 19th century (particularly
in the U.S.) a different kind of scrapbook made its appearance, owing
to the novelty of newspapers and magazines which were suddenly very
widespread and much cheaper than books. The timeless problem of
stacks of paper taking up precious space could be deftly solved by clipping
out what was worth keeping, and compiling personal selections
of what today might be referred to as ‘press reviews’, to be saved and
sometimes even re-circulated – “occasionally privately printed and
circulated among friends”, as Ellen Gruber Garvey noted in her essay
Scissoring and Scrapbooks. 289
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