Introduction : BiblioTech: ReReading the Postdigital Library

Jones, Nathan (2025) Introduction : BiblioTech: ReReading the Postdigital Library. In: BiblioTech : ReReading the Postdigital Library. Torque Editions, pp. 4-41. ISBN 9780993248788

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Abstract

This illustrated chapter introduces BiblioTech, a curatorial and editorial project that reimagines the contemporary library through the lens of post-digital art. The library is presented as a hybrid, evolving ecology of interfaces, infrastructures, and practices—at once material and immaterial, personal and institutional, civic and computational. Drawing on exhibitions held in Liverpool and Limassol, the chapter traces how books and libraries have become complex mediating systems shaped by platform capitalism, automation, and digital abstraction. It reflects on the library’s shifting role—from a space of preservation to one of broadcast, speculation, and ambient labour—and positions post-digital art as a method for interrogating the politics and aesthetics of reading, writing, collecting, and cognition today. Through case studies, conceptual framing, and practical accounts of artistic and bibliotechnical experimentation, the chapter proposes the “post-digital perma-library” as both a critical figure and an imaginative infrastructure for cultivating new forms of knowledge and care in increasingly automated, surveilled, and hybridised academic and cultural contexts.