Pibliothèque workshops
Dates: Saturday 20 September & Sunday 21 September
Time: 10:30-17:00
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
For 2 days, Lionel Maes and the research group Les nouveaux habits du colportage (Alexia de Visscher, Alice Néron, Léonard Mabille) will be running a workshop on an offline, local and collaborative tool of sharing digital books: Pibliotheque.
Pibliotheque is a file sharing system between computers on the same local network. The project has been initiated in the context of the “digital design” class at ERG, Brussels.
Pibliotheque is designed for collective practices involving documents sharing within a local context. When a computer (e.g. a Raspberry PI) on which Pibliotheque is installed connects to a local network, it starts looking for peers. Once all the peers on the network have found each other, they exchange their list of shared documents. Each computer displays the documents lists of all the peers on its own custom interface that can be accessed with a web browser from any device connected to the same network. The interfaces are like libraries sharing the same books but displaying them on their own ways, with their own designs, (non-)categorisations, filters, interactions. Each document hosted by a peer on the network can be downloaded by another to add to its own documents collection so it remains accessible after being disconnected.
As well as activating the Pibliotheque and holding workshops, this event will also be an opportunity for more informal exchanges and discussions on other tools approaching the same issues and what their use means in the contexts in which they exist.
The research project Les nouveaux habits du colportage focuses on book-sharing spaces that operate on a local scale, rather than large collections that circulate on the global Internet. Where the great shadow libraries (Library Genesis, Anna’s Archive, etc.) contain infinite texts that can be downloaded continuously from any machine connected to the Internet, we have chosen to focus our attention on initiatives for dissemination that propose sensitive curation and seek to ‘build community’ locally. We use the figure of the peddler as a metaphor for the networking and dissemination of specific knowledge in the digital age.
To show interest in attending this event, please email info[at]varia.zone with Pibliotheque in the subject heading. We are looking for a group of amateur library enthusiasts, who would like to work with the software, share their files and impressions. To get the most out of the workshops, attendance on both days is important & appreciated.
–With the support of the FRArt.–