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The University of Southampton
Archaeologies of Media and Technology Research group

Unfold #4 | Guest-curated by Alessandro Ludovico

Published: 13 February 2017
Unfold

Unfold #4: daily_unfold(ing), an issue of the digital publishing platform, has been published, curated by WSA Associate Professor Alessandro Ludovico, media theorist, artist and editor-in-chief of Neural magazine since 1999.

daily_unfold(ing) constitutes a meditation on the digital folder through a constellation of three original contributions by artist and scholar Silvio Lorusso, artist Nandita Kumar and by Alessandro Ludovico himself. In all three "the folder is respectively understood as a verbal unit, a container for recalculated text gestures, and ephemeral repository of text memories."

While Ludovico's diary of "folded" backups addresses the coexistance of memory overload and forgetfulness in our digital lives, Lorusso stresses the enunciative power of the folder as an organizing principle and turns Benjamin’s essay Unpacking my Library into an abyssal and yet empty structure of self-referential folders. Nandita Kumar’s fRom paRaDigm to paradigm uses instead the folder to document and narrate a performance action that itself investigates texts from the aleatory perspective of alghorithms and machines.

Unfold is an online publishing and archiving platform investigating new formats for the production and free circulation of art and theory. Using the architecture of the digital folder as its organizing principle, Unfold commissions and hosts shifting constellations of research materials and new work by artists and writers. Drawing inspiration from periodical magazines, exhibition and book series, every issue of Unfold is created by different guest curators every 3-6 months. Each issue investigates a specific topic by means of archival materials and new artistic and/or theoretical contributions. The accumulated issues are archived and form a comprehensive and transdisciplinary library.

View Unfold here: unfold.thevolumeproject.com

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