Large Language Models have created the ultimate (un)ideal readers for electronic libraries. In treating e-libraries as vast training datasets, algorithmic scraping is, paradoxically, both the fulfilment and ruin of a driving fantasy in public library culture: that access to books should be free and unlimited for all types of reader. AI systems read everything and nothing at an inhuman scale and speed, ‘learning’ it all to extract historical patterns and sell what they pretend to know as a consequence.
But why should we care? And if we do, how can we put that care into practice?
This exhibition centres a new conversation between three custodians of radical public libraries, known as ‘shadow libraries’: Dušan Barok, founder of Monoskop, and Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, co-founders of Memory of the World. Organised around that conversation are a mixture of symbolic and tactical gestures that help people to think and act carefully in relation to the infrastructures of their public knowledge systems.
For the occassion, we compiled a new publication, Careful: A repertorium on Shadow Library Practice, which was printed-on-demand for Distro but is free to download via Monoskop.
The exhibtioin was launched with a colloquium, 'Library Making as Practice', on Wednesday 5 November, featuring Stefanie Bräuer, Lucie Kolb, Lara Kothe, Philipp Messner, Nick Thurston, and Eva Weinmayr.
