VAST: Visiting Artist & Scholar Talks

Amidst widepread attacks on and disillusionment with public institutions, many activists, communitiy organizers, and artist collectives have launched informal libraries to support social movements and intentional learning communities. In this talk, we’ll examine libraries themselves as media forms, and we’ll consider how the curation, circulation, and civic activation of the various media within their collections — from books and zines to cassette tapes and pirated digital files -- constitute vibrant, creative, transformative media practices. In the process, we’ll also question what constitutes a library — just as the Media Archaeology Lab asks critical questions about what makes a lab, a lab.