Discorder Magazine
WORDS by TASHA HEFFORD ILLUSTRATIONS by ROB ECCLES LAYOUT by OLIVER GADOURY
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verything is observed in a specious present, but nothing, not even the observations themselves, can ever be in the specious present. Things cannot be directly perceived, the thinking goes, but must be reconstructed by the brain. I am fascinated by the process of memory and reconstruction — how all things accrue detail in repetition, how things are marked by recall. Among the practices which illustrate sufficiently how re-inserting, re-membering, re-peating, re-stating, re-circulating and re-working is an art of possibility rather than limitation, there is CRISIS L I B R A RY, t h e p u b l i s h i n g initiative of graphic artist Robin Netherton, which hunts for the end of this long tail — and rearranges its parts for free.
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“ CRISIS LIBRARY”
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Feb-March 2021
he enduring inspiration for CRISIS LIBRARY comes by way of the anarchist practice of the “infoshop” — resource spaces wherein information, texts and art were shared to aid in the distribution of information. They often included photocopy machines for people to use and produce their own booklets, “this particular iteration was originally meant to function more as a library” Robin tells me, “where people would “borrow” the texts through a printer but due to COVID it has been moved online.” The present collection follows this crucial inversion — a series of CRISIS EDITIONS are produced specifically for online distribution. They can be read and downloaded through a digital library, or reprinted by request. Among the “books”, mined for their emotive yelp of exposure and uncovering of institutional intention (in effect, a “crisis”) floats the vaguely Jean Baudrillard-esque quote “only what can be reproduced is real” — a lure to read and an ethos of the process. Among that which is reproduced back into reality, is Mike Davis’s 1992 The Ecology of Fear - Beyond BLADE RUNNER: Urban Control and Lucy Forsyth’s SOFTECHNICA — a 1991 text which declares “new technological systems” to be reflections of those who design them, and the conditions under which they are devised. Not a far yelp from Facebook’s partisan “fact-checking”, or, say, the big business of data exploitation.
