Free library / Vlad Nancã

I also hope more ideas for the project would come up as the time is shorter and shorter. One idea which I would like to suggest and I also think would make sense in an Ideal Urbanity is to set up a free library... I know that this isnt very original but anyway here is what i think:

One of things which I think would make the Academy a better place would be if everyone (all the fellows) would share (parts of) the music and video libraries on their computers. One of my biggest frustrations during my time at Solitude was that people wouldnt even share the music on their itunes player or if I wanted to see a film someone had then that involved cd burning or copying on memory stick. So sharing between the fellows computers would of course be very easy to do but the ideal situation would be to have a common Hub which during the exhibition the visitors could access. Stefan Tiron (former fellow of Solitude) has organized this type of project in various locations and people could come to the exhibition and copy files onto their memory sticks. That of course brings about some legal issues but I think working in a legally grey area is also an Ideal Urban situation.

What I would also suggest is to have a traditional library which could perhaps work in connection to the Hub. People could maybe bring books or video in hard formats as an exchange to the files the take from the Hub. That would maybe make sense considering the situation of the Solitude library where some books have been stolen. So there could be some building up.

So I would suggest that this traditional library could be built with contributions from all of us as well as the visitors. As far as I am concerned I could contribute with a book which is being edited at the moment and I would even propose this book in itself to be part of the Ideal Urbanities exhibition (whether a library will be made or not). It is the printed version of the blog about Bucharest which some friends and myself have been doing for over a year. Bukresh Blog. If you want to have a look there is a pdf with the pages from december 2005 which you can download here .

The Bukresh Blog is a toold for us to make public our personal discoveries of buchaerst which is a difficult process as there are no institutions (museums, image libraries etc) that speak about the recent history of the town (which was extremely tumuluous etc). We alike to speak about the real Bucharest not the idealized "little Paris" that most intelectuals think that Bucharest is or could be.

This project of a printed version of the blog also brings up an issue which i think is worth discussing - Online vs offline in an ideal urbanity.

I hope you'd find this interesting and that we can develop it further with your ideas.

Vlad