Wot is a book?
Adrian Franzese, 00:00 AM, 2018
website (HTML, CSS, JS), v1.0
This work is a non-linear electronic book that explores our relationship to time online. It is an attempt to embody what internet-time feels like, how we lose our sense of it, how it flattens and folds back over itself. On a more personal level it is an interrogation of my own relationship to the
wider cultural (online and off) mimetic spirals of ‘Next related video’s. I feel like I’m stuck in a sort of loop, and why is there all this buffering going on? The work was heavily inspired by the writing of Mark Fisher and is — in a sense — a reaction to that text. Fisher was a British cultural writer who often wrote about what he calls a “nostalgia of the future”1. My practice over the past two years has been focused around craft-based publication design. Recently however I have been interested in how the internet and networks can disrupt, influence, and inform these methods. This project has made me consider how both the form and the act of publishing are altered in the post-digital era. Annete Höland’s Turning Pages (2010)2 is an animated gif of books flipping, drawing on the similarities between these two mediums: “When surfing the Web, one cannot help but notice that the Internet itself resembles the form of the book in many ways or even tries to emulate the experience of reading a book”. Jeroen van Loon’s site Life Needs Internet3, allows users to upload a hand-written letter about their own personal relationships to the internet and social networks. Spanning cultures and languages, his website is an attempt to globally summarise what this particular cultural moment feels like.
1 Mannucci, V, Mattioli, V 2015, “Mark Fisher in conversation with NERO on notions of hauntology, nostalgia and lost futures”, Nero, accessed June 1 2018, from 2 Hölland, A 2010, Turning Pages, accessed June 1 2018, from 3 van Loon, J 2010, Life Needs Internet, accessed June 1 2018, from