Spiabooks

A black out implies temporary darkness, an actual lack of electricity, a lack of consciousness or a lack of information. Humans are so visually biased that darkness has come to symbolize evil or ignorance and light symbolized knowledge. But what would happen in a prolonged blackout? No electricity would mean a loss of data on a massive scale. A loss of the day to day accumulation of human interaction, boundaries, limits, agreements, possessions... not to mention transportation and distribution that makes modern life modern. Our "global-ness" would jump backwards in time more than 100 years. There have been many moments in history that reinforce our visual nature. Writing transformed an oral history into a visual page. The printing press began to make information available to the masses; the personal computer and now the smart phone have made a staggeringly visual culture. I find it ironic that data was first introduced to computers via the punch card. A very tangible and tactile mechanically made piece of paper that stored the information the computer was meant to process; a hard disk with the scale and feel of the human hand. This book is meant to be read during a black out.