Sunday, June 8, 2008

Reanimation

The Reanimation Library in Brooklyn (via) offers a collection of discarded and found books not likely to be held elsewhere: curios, out-of-print, wonders. Here librarianship is inflected with an art aesthetic (perhaps more outwardly or radically than in the common case). There seems to be more than rarity justifying the in-status of the books; but it is a sort of rare collection, one inflected with the idiosyncratic impulses and tastes of the collector. The 600-book collection raises the question of whether it is simply an installation called by the name of library. The mission statement:

The Reanimation Library seeks to assemble an inspiring collection of resources that will facilitate the production of new creative work and promote reflection and research into the historical, legal, and methodological questions surrounding the adaptive reuse of found materials. It strives to provide the necessary space and tools to allow these activities to flourish, and to foster a climate of spirited collaboration.

"Adaptive reuse of found materials" and so on: sounds like ideas that would serve well as the guiding impetuses for a composition course--one I'd like to teach, anyway. The Thingology entry refers to this recent report from the Minneapolis City Pages; both of them mention Dewey's Nightmare, a playwriting experiment tied to the Reanimation Library in which seven writers wear blindfolds and pick one book each randomly from the stacks. Their challenge, then, is to shape the random sample into something for the stage. Quite a methodology, and one not unlike the stuff Sirc discusses in "Box-Logic": the found collection, the interplay of contingent samples and selections, renewal in re-coordinating affinities, pulsion, etc.

Don't miss the catalog or the pile of images.

Posted by Derek Mueller at June 8, 2008 10:30 PM to Methods