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August 10, 2009

echan's thoughts: Where's the link for me to order my "Serious Inquiries Only" Snarkmarket tee-shirt, preferably pr... >>

Crowbars and Teaspoons (or) The Winning Snarkmarkitect

Wow. I want Snarkmarket to be all of these things and more. I've picked the winner, but first, a review:

I think echan's vision probably comes closest to the actual San Francisco apartment of my dreams:

One wall is lined with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf complete with ladders (a la Mr. Penumbra). There are nice, large tables (the kinds intended for group study in college) at the bottom level.

For the exterior, I imagine the building wrapped in copper (something akin to the DeYoung), which is already developing a nice green patina from the city fog.

And of course Tim is right about this:

There's a library (where you check out your own books), and a letterpress (to print broadsheets and pamphlets and collaborative novels), and people leave messages for each other on the communal computers. Only some of them specify a recipient. Most are for anyone who discovers them.

Now, as a hobbit, I find the idea of an ever-growing thicket very appealing:

The structure of the space is organic; it looks like the wood of a log cabin, but if one looks closely, the "wood" it is actually moving. The entire structure can shift shape and grow with the ideas and creativity born within the space.

And likewise, I love the mythic evocation here—it's almost, you know, The Song of Snarkmarket, by Malory or someone like Malory:

Some say its origins were in an ancient Roma meeting area and others say the great Roman empire. Many insist it began as the lands of a great knight. A story about human contact with other worlds arose -- probably due to the unique capabilities of the citizens... human but linked in a communicative, generative web of visual and textual imagery... a cloud of knowledge and possibility. But, go there yourself. You will see that Snarkmarket clearly exists in ceremonial time.

Then of course, there's the wandering Snarkmarket, by land...

The set up is always the same, three guys with laptops and projectors and a lighting system. They come in, close the blinds and get to work repainting the area with light.

...or by sea...

...a flotilla of hand made boats manned by pirate intellectuals, navigating the magnetic currents of the seven seas by the single rusty needle of a lost and found compass.

And I have to say, I really liked Dan's vision, which encompasses not only Snarkmarket but, er, the entire internet:

R, M, and T spend their days watching stuff fly through the tubes. Once in a while, something strikes their fancy and they grab it (with blacksmith's gloves of course), throw it to the work bench, strap it down (some ideas have some fight in 'em), and make some modifications.

But Nina wins the prize, for a scene that captures, in just a few strokes, the spastic secret we've all stumbled onto here:

I think of Snarkmarket, the physical space, as a place with a hidden entry--not like an ultra-hip speakeasy, but like a secret room in the library with a too-small door or a curtain that says, "SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY."

And then, a room full of people in gloves, pulling wondrous things out of crates, some armed with crowbars, others with teaspoons. A mechanized activity, like a Fritz Lang dance number. But every few minutes one of the people pulls something really wondrous out of a crate and shouts and holds it up high, and everyone else pauses, looks over for a minute, or crowds around or starts yelling too, and the scene turns into a frenzy of delight. A few minutes later, the machines start up again and everything is back to business as usual, like nothing happened.

Crowbars and teaspoons! Yes! What says "bigger and more humble" better than crowbars and teaspoons?

Nice work, Nina. And thanks for the visions, everyone.

Because actually, you see, I tricked you. These snarkmarkitectural renderings aren't ex post facto descriptions. They're blueprints.

Matt, you get the projectors. Tim, we need a "SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY" sign. Me, I'm going to go find a thicket.

Robin-sig.gif
Posted August 10, 2009 at 9:16 | Comments (5) | Permasnark
File under: About Snarkmarket

August 7, 2009

Tim Maly's thoughts: I'm voting for fake TV's. ... >>

BLDGBLOG Book Contest: Snarkmarkitecture

It has been indicated, correctly, that I am in possession of two (2) copies of The BLDGBLOG Book. How this came to pass, only Etaoin Shrdlu knows. But two copies is clearly too many for one man; the double-dose of enthusiasm and imagination threatens to consume me.

Therefore, a contest: SNARKMARKITECTURE.

The premise is simple. Imagine Snarkmarket as a physical space. What is it? Where is it? What does it look like? What does it feel like to walk through or around it?

I'm intentionally leaving this open-ended—maybe it's a gleaming HQ, maybe it's a storefront, maybe it's a feral house of Detroit. Maybe it's like one of those taco trucks...

Leave your pitch in the comments. Focus on creativity and brevity. It can definitely just be a sentence or two—though, by all means, if you want to Etaoin Shrdlu it up, I'm not going to stop you.

The contest ends Sunday, August 9 Monday, August 10 at midnight EST. (Update: I wanted to accommodate non-weekend-readers.) I'll choose my favorite comment and send its creator a copy of The BLDGBLOG Book. (Be sure to use a real email address in the comment form so I can contact you if you're the winner!)

Snarkmarket co-bloggers are not eligible to win but they are required to enter.

Snarkmarket as a physical space. Go for it.

Robin-sig.gif
Posted August 7, 2009 at 10:05 | Comments (19) | Permasnark
File under: About Snarkmarket, Cities, Collaborations, Design

August 6, 2009

fake TV's thoughts: LOVE IT... >>

The Strange, Sweet Tale of Etaoin Shrdlu

This is the best comment ever posted to Snarkmarket. I don't say that lightly, because there have been some great comments. I mean, hello? But, wow: I said hey, we need a story starring Etaoin Shrdlu! and, what seems now like only moments later, Mike Duncan wrote:

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The first appearance of Etaoin Shdrlu in the public record is the issuance of a Reader Identification Card in 1976 from the main building of the Library of Congress (now known as the Thomas Jefferson Building). Shrdlu, born in Minsk in 1951 to an American mother studying Eastern European folk dances, began his daily trips to the library on Monday, July 5 -- the day after the Bicentennial celebrations. He attracted the notice of the staff by his strange book requests and by remaining in the famous circular reading room all day for the next several months.

The Etaoin Shrdlu broadsheets have been discovered in their entirety at this point, though collecting the early days' sheets proved difficult and remaining copies were auctioned to collectors for staggering sums. In particular, the July 7 front page incited a bidding war that ended with a then-record $1.1 million purchase price. The art publisher Taschen has released a book of retouched scans of the broadsheets under the title The Fanciful News from Etaoin Shrdlu: The Long Sweetness of the Simultaneity, a phrase that Shrdlu placed under the false masthead of every day's issue. (Incidentally, this phrase appears in John Ashbery's 1981 poem, "Here Everything is Still Floating," a fact that Shrdlu defenders point to as further evidence of his clairvoyance, and Ashbery himself claims is nothing other than a coincidence.)

In his seminal monograph on Shrdlu, Juxtaposition and Fictionalization, Elgin Hacking describes the artist's workday as such: "Creating a third American century on the scale he wanted to required nearly superhuman endurance. After a full day of research into past events' primary sources like any good reporter, Shrdlu would return home and craft the future stories well into the evening. By 10 pm, the false front page would be completely written, and Shrdlu would spend the next hours setting the type to print 50 copies of the broadsheet. These false front pages were delivered in the night to his friend William Bethell at the Washington Post manufacturing plant, where one stack of the newspapers would be stripped of their outer page and have the Shrdlu page added before delivery to a random newsstand... One can only imagine the surprise of the sanitation worker or aide or teacher who picked up the paper to find a well-researched account of the latest James gang robbery, a stub about Ronald Reagan's marriage effect on his Presidency, and the high-stakes negotiations for the 2017 annexation of Vancouver... As word slowly spread of the false newspapers, like-minded people saw them as a major artistic statement about the illusive nature of time and the equality between fully imagined events and actual events that only are encountered through the written recountings of strangers."

Shrdlu continued his project through the end of 1976, quitting at the end of the year when only a handful of people knew of it. The Post itself was the first to report on the project in 1977, as it was their complaint department that first had an idea that fictional Washington Posts were being manufactured. The focus of the first news story was on the oddity of his project, though over the next years people began to obsess over his many correct predictions (the Stockholm air disaster, the mode and month of Elvis Presley's death, the election of Reagan, many of the details of the Iranian hostage crisis, and on and on).

Shrdlu, who is now considered a pioneer in public art, was seen by many a modern Nostradamus and harassed as such. He later disowned his project as 'the meanderings of a bored and self-important young man,' and died on August 6, 2009.

Thanks, Mike.

Robin-sig.gif
Posted August 6, 2009 at 2:24 | Comments (6) | Permasnark
File under: About Snarkmarket, Books, Writing & Such

July 13, 2009

Tim's thoughts: This post is rife with typos! Yuck. I just wanna read Jakob Burckhardt's book on the Rena... >>

Giving Things Away Is A New Liberal Art

The title is half a joke, but half true. Part of navigating the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of this century of scarcity and abundance is going to involve not just working and understanding flows of goods and money, growing and eating things, understanding marketing or images, or managing your attention and identity (or identities), but also trying to figure out what you give away and what you charge for, what you take and what you pay for, and why and how you do all of these things.

Many, many people have been at least as interested in how and why we printed only 200 copies of New Liberal Arts and then gave digital copies away as they've been interested in any or all of the entries. And you know what? I'm kind of more interested in that too -- at least for the past thirty minutes or so.

Kevin Kelly's formulation of what we did is worth repeating: "The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible." We knew that we wanted to make an honest-to-goodness well-made book*, AND that we wanted everything to be freely available on the web. I don't think there was ever a conversation about doing it any other way.

But I think there's a difference between just selling a physical thing and giving it away for free. One of the things that I think was clever was the "ransom" model that Robin came up with, whereby the free copies were only released after the print run was sold. I think it was the motive of patronage, the aligning of the interests of the purchasers with the freeriders, that made it work.

(Aside: When I was a kid, I remember how the Detroit Lions' football games on TV used to be blacked-out in Detroit whenever the Silverdome didn't sell out. Since the Lions stunk, this happened a lot, and CBS wouldn't even show you another football game, you'd just be stuck watching reruns or infomercials instead of football, which made you hate the Lions even more.)

Janneke Adema keys in on this:

Actually this is just a variant of the delayed Open Access model, in which after a certain embargo time the books or journals are made Open Access. What I like however about the example Kelly mentions of the New Liberal Arts book, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collaboration, is how they combine this delayed Open Access model with a community support or maecenas model.

In another, earlier entry, she elaborates:


It looks like we might be slowly returning to the old Maecenas system, or Maecenate, when it comes to culture, flourishing as it did in the old Rome of Virgil and Horace, and still visible today in many a countries