A few years ago an architect friend and I used to fantasise about building and animating a model of a small but representative section of Borges’s “Library of Babel”. We wanted to incorporate the animation into a short film with a reading of Borges’s story, complete with lots of digitally-assisted indefinite zooming through the model. [...]
Category Archives: events
Architectural Literature, Literary Architecture
Also posted in architecture, art, culture, exhibitions, history, literature Tagged architecture, borges, calvino, library, literature, unbuilt extremities 4 Comments
Ars Combinatoria at Transmediale
Today I co-ran a session called Ars Combinatoria at Transmediale. From the blurb: As a young man the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz was interested in creating an ‘art of combinations’, which would allow people to create interesting new inventions from a set of basic elements. The ‘Ars Combinatoria’ project is about creating new works [...]
Also posted in culture, leibniz, openknowledge 1 Comment
Leibniz’s Funny Thought
Last night I went to the 25th annual Long Night of Museums in Berlin, where over 125 museums, galleries and archives are open until the early hours of the morning for live music, films and talks. As well as some Javanese gong music and a rendition of Philip Glass’s Dance 2 in the Berliner Dom, [...]
Also posted in intellectualhistory, leibniz, philosophy 2 Comments
The Construction of Immateriality
The International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP) was launched last year at the conference for copyrighthistory.org, a digital archive of primary sources on copyright. In addition to the history of copyright, patents and other rights, the society aims to examine: [...] the diverse “roads not taken” in the evolution of [...]
Also posted in conferences, copyright, edwardyoung, history, intellectualhistory, law, legalhistory, notes 1 Comment
The Magus in New York
Johann George Hamann, “the Magus of the North”, was a minor civil servant working in tax administration, a Lutheran pietist, prolific lettrist, and polyglot. He is best known for his short, rhapsodic, densely allusive and often pseudonymous dispatches – on everything from erotic love to the importance of the letter ‘h’ – and for his [...]
Also posted in hamann, nietzsche, philosophy, talks, wittgenstein Tagged comparativeliterature, conferences, german, hamann, newyork, nietzsche, philosophy, talks, theology, wittgenstein 3 Comments
Jonathan Gray