By Silvio Lorusso – May 18, 2015
On the 9th and 10th of April, Jacopo Pompilii and I had the pleasure to run a workshop in Emanuela Bonini Lessing and Francesco Franchi’s Contemporary Publishing studio at Iuav University of Venice. Since we wanted to work on the limitations and opportunities of EPUB format, we prepared a 2-days session entitled “The Mobile is the Massage – EPUB as an Inventory of Effects.” Here’s the abstract:
The Medium is the Massage, written by Marshall McLuhan, designed by Quentin Fiore, and produced by Jerome Agel in 1967 is a milestone. Highly influenced by the kaleidoscopic effects of television, it helped to popularize McLuhanism, an irresistible mix of theories around media and messianic claims about the developments of society at large. We’ll attempt to translate this “cinematic paperback” into an ebook in EPUB format, a widespread free and open standard for digital books. For pragmatic reasons (not everyone owns a dedicated ereader), the smartphone will be our privileged reading device. Given both the potential of the EPUB and its limitations, the translation process won’t be neutral. Instead, we’ll need to actively interpret the peculiar graphic solutions employed by McLuhan and Fiore in this self-reflexive paperback.
You can read the full report here: http://silviolorusso.com/the-mobile-is-the-massage-workshop-report/
By Silvio Lorusso