Wanneer je alle 29.500 boeken uit de auteursrechtvrije Gutenbergbibliotheek (peildatum 2010) zou willen lezen ben je 33 jaar verder. Dit besef, waarbij lezen onlosmakelijk aan (het gebrek aan) tijd gekoppeld is, bracht Michael Ciuffo ertoe de collectie als een leesbare klok tot leven te wekken.
Kan je er de tijd mee lezen? Nee, dat niet, maar dat is ook niet het doel van het project. In een forumdiscussie op Hack A Day legt iemand aan criticasters uit waarom dit project juist zo ontzettend gaaf is:
Well, unlike the nattering nabobs above, I think this is incredibly cool. Dealing with commercial LED matrix signs always seems to involve some dirty hackery since they’re never well-documented or designed for this sort of integration, but that’s really not the point.
The point is that this device starts conversations. It’s not meant to sit in your private lab and tell the time — it’s not really a clock in that sense. Put it in the study, put it in the family room, put it in a coffee shop or a gallery or a courthouse. It’s a reminder of how much time humans have spent writing down our thoughts, and how much time it would take to absorb them all. This has already been shown to be impossible:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/76/
The irony is that ch00f’s project will, in fact, run out of material in just a few decades. Maybe by that time, copyright law will have been reformed and the next version will read for a millennium, or maybe it’ll just be stuck reading the same 29,000 out-of-copyright books forever, emphasizing how *modern* human knowledge is not as free as it once was. Even as the practical barriers to writing and distribution get almost infinitely low..
bron: Nerdcore
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