Torque Editions, book, ISBN 978-0993248788, English, 292 pages, 2025, UK

The political role of libraries is receiving focused attention from artists, writers, academics, and activists. Researching this role, as the project behind this book has done, inevitably intertwines two essential perspectives: experimental literature and publishing, and critical librarianship. BiblioTech seeks an active synthesis of these processes and the entire technical and cultural ecosystem surrounding them, bringing together more than twenty authors. The artworks in the two related exhibitions, held in Liverpool and Limassol, have informed some of the chapters (such as Wafaa Bilal’s analysis of the remarkable 168:01), while theory is unfolded in most of the others. To mention just a few: Federico Campagna’s essay, related to his Overmorrow’s Library podcast series, proposes a library as “an executable encoding of cultural values, encoding of cultural values, capable of ushering in a new civilization “after the apocalypse’”. Johanna Drucker writes about how book storage is the dematerialised dimension in libraries, and the counter-condition of being on display, and Winnie Soon’s “Computational Publishing”, in which they assemble a range of original publishing processes using collaborative digital infrastructures. There is sometimes a passion for coinages, but the ‘libraryness’ explored here is at 360 degrees, becoming a reference book.