I: Early Influences and Formative Experiences

As the offspring of a librarian and a database programmer it was probably inevitable that I would end up working with information in some capacity. I began visiting libraries at a very young age and received certain benefits from being a librarian’s son; in the early 1980’s, my mother brought home a World Book encyclopedia set from the 1950’s that was being discarded by the Michael Dowling School library, her employer at the time. I spent countless hours of my childhood navigating the routes of that encyclopedia, and as someone who was drawn to visual communication from a young age, I was especially captivated by its images.

My earliest attempts to work with found images were in the late 1980's when I first began drumming with rock bands in Minneapolis. These initial attempts took the form of flyers that were used to advertise our shows, but creating them quickly became almost as enjoyable as making and playing music. I was already aware of the history of punk rock flyer-art and that appropriated images had often occupied a central role in their design. In the mid 1980's, I was turned onto the idea of the photocopier as a creative tool after reading an interview with Pushead in Thrasher Magazine. Over time my investigations into both the generative potential of the photocopier and the use of appropriated images increased as I continued to create flyers for my bands.

In 1994 I began working at the Minnesota State Legislative Reference Library and immediately starting finding images in their collection to use on flyers. It was at the Legislative Library that I first became aware of just how great a properly maintained photocopier could be; the toner quality alone far exceeded anything that I had ever encountered at Kinko's. I was excited by my access to the Library’s collection of books and to a good photocopier, and for the first time I began using the photocopier to make images without the explicit goal of placing them on a flyer, but simply for my own pleasure.

In early 1996, I created a series of collages from birth, engagement, and anniversary announcement portraits that I found in the small town Minnesota newspapers that the Legislative Library subscribed to. I created hundreds of these images and showed them to anybody that would look at them; my audience generally found them to be either hilarious or terrible or some combination of the two. One day in October of that year, my boss came into my work area and showed me an article in the Star Tribune about a show that had just opened at the Walker Art Center entitled The Photomontages of Hannah Höch and suggested that I go see it. I went that weekend and found myself startled by the degree to which my own project had been realized some 70 years prior, and by how much better it had been done. In addition to introducing me to an amazing artist, that show expanded my understanding of the scope and history of collage and appropriation.

By 1999, I was interested in finding ways to both focus my work and share it with a larger audience. In February, I had a show at the Turf Club's (sadly now defunct) Clown Lounge in Saint Paul for which I made twelve photocopied enlargements of my facial collages. During that summer, I produced a 200-copy edition of a photocopied art zine called Lipinski which I distributed for free at various Twin Cities coffee houses, record stores, and bars, and had friends distribute in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. I produced only one more 200-edition issue of Lipinski that fall, before it became financially unfeasible to continue. Lipinski remained almost entirely unknown, although it managed to get a short, positive review in the Minneapolis Graffiti magazine, Life Sucks Die, which led to a handful of mail requests, mainly from prison inmates, which I gladly filled.

The next few years were consumed by a few more bands which provided the opportunity for more flyer work. It was actually a relatively unfruitful period of time in terms of photocopied art as I turned my image-making attention to photographic experimentation with a modified Polaroid camera and a Lomo LC-A. I had also pretty much exhausted the images from the Legislative Library's largely text-based collection which was where I had produced most of my photocopy and appropriation work during the previous 6 years. Around this time, I visited The Museum of Jurassic Technology for the first time when a tour with my band capital!capital brought me to Los Angeles in the spring of 2000. The visit was revelatory in a number of ways, but especially in the sense that it demonstrated how D.I.Y. could be applied to the cultural institution; one could simply start a museum oneself. The Museum of Jurassic Technology's existence continues to inspire me to this day.

II: The Beginnings of the Collection

Although unbeknownst to me at the time, the collection that would become the Reanimation Library began at 3:19 P.M. on September 8th, 2001, when I purchased Karl U. Smith and William M. Smith's The Behavior of Man: An Introduction to Psychology for $1.37 at a Goodwill in Saint Paul. Although I had frequented thrift stores since the early 1990's, I had rarely purchased books from them. I was absolutely amazed by the quality and number of graphics in The Behavior of Man, and my subsequent thrift outings became focused on finding more books like it. This turned out to be easier than I had thought: once I began searching thrift stores, garage sales, library sales, and junk stores, I found many more books filled with diagrams, illustrations, and pictures covering a wide expanse of human knowledge. And the surprising thing was that for the most part, these books had been removed from the public sphere of information - they were the unwanted discards of libraries and personal collections. It was fortunate for me, although somewhat confusing, that no one seemed to want these books.

However, an interesting thing happened as my collection grew and I began sharing it with friends who are artists and designers. Many of them liked the books as much as I did and they began to ask if they could use elements that they found in them for their creative projects. Around this time, I also purchased a copy of Negativland's book Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, which I read with great interest. The book documents their experience of being sued by Island Records, Casey Kasem, and SST Records for releasing a sound-collage version of U2's, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. I didn't think it was possible for a book primarily comprised of legal documents to be so thoroughly engrossing, but it was, and after I read it, I began thinking a lot about the legal dimensions of appropriation.

Between the fall of 2001 and the summer of 2002, the collection grew steadily. In May of 2002, after more than 7 years of working at the Legislative Library, I decided to apply to graduate school and get a Masters of Information and Library Science. It was becoming apparent to me that my collection of books ought to be made accessible to other people; I imagined that there were others who would be as excited about the collection as I was and who would want to use it to create their own work. I realized that if I were to create to a collection that encouraged appropriation, I had an obligation to provide information about the notoriously opaque nature of copyright law, especially in light of Negativland's trials. Furthermore, I envisioned these collections in the context of another collection dedicated to the art and cultural history of appropriation. With these realizations in mind, my purpose for going to school became, to a large extent, to figure out a way to facilitate this. I was accepted into the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science in New York City, and was set to begin in the fall of 2003.

In January of 2003, I moved from Minneapolis to Albuquerque, New Mexico for seven months. I spent much of my plentiful free time in Albuquerque getting to know the city’s amazing thrift stores and adding to the collection. In mid-August, I moved to Brooklyn to start school. It’s probably best to limit my remarks about library school; with the exception of a few fellow students, it wasn’t a place where I found a receptive audience for my ideas or ambitions. I graduated with an M.I.L.S. in August of 2005.

III: The Birth of the Reanimation Library

In May of 2005, I finally settled on the name Reanimation Library and launched the first version of the website. The response was immediately encouraging. I began receiving emails from people who were excited by the Library and who had material that they wanted to donate. I also began receiving requests to speak to college and university classes about the Library. The website quickly became an essential way for the Library to communicate to a larger community of likeminded individuals. Because of this, (and because I wasn’t wholly pleased with the initial version) I began a redesign in June of 2005 that stretched through the end of the year. The current version of the website was launched in January 2006.

While it was gratifying to cultivate an online presence, I was interested in figuring out a way to improve access to the physical collection of books, which is, after all, the heart of the Library. From the very beginning, the collection had always been housed in my apartment. I hosted visitors at the apartment that I shared with my girlfriend (and now wife) Rachel which, while adequate and functional, was far from an ideal arrangement.

In late November of 2005, on a suggestion from our friend Jen Bervin, Rachel and I visited a new art space near our apartment in Brooklyn called Proteus Gowanus. I was immediately drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of the space which included exhibited books alongside works of art that related to an annual theme (which at that time was "travel"). In early February of 2006, I met with Sasha Chavchavadze, the founder and director of Proteus Gowanus, for the first time. I was interested in finding out how she went about opening Proteus Gowanus and how I might go about finding a similar space for the Reanimation Library. Sasha had many encouraging words about the Reanimation Library and after a few subsequent meetings, she told me that she was thinking of making "library" the following year’s theme and asked me if I would be interested in co-curating the exhibit. I said yes.

Sasha and I spent the next six months lining up the artists and developing the programming for the show. It was incredibly gratifying to be able to help shape an exhibit of visual art that directly engaged libraries and it was especially exciting that the Reanimation Library would be a part of it because that meant that it would be housed at Proteus Gowanus for the duration of the show. To prepare the Library for its move into a public home, I finally committed to an organizational scheme and applied Library of Congress classification and attached call number labels to the entire collection. I moved the Reanimation Library into Proteus Gowanus in late August.

We were lucky to find many receptive participants for the show; it was encouraging to learn that there was such a wide scope of artists who were producing compelling work about libraries. By the beginning of September, we had the initial round of work hung. This included a small area that displayed artwork that was generated from the Reanimation Library; Chris Warrington’s Two Poodles was the first of these pieces. The show opened to a packed house on September 5, 2006 with Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger giving a talk about their library in San Francisco. Since then, Proteus Gowanus has hosted dozens of events and workshops relating to many different aspects of libraries and books. The show will ran through June 2007.

Aside from many Proteus Gowanus-related activities, the current central project at the Reanimation Library involves rebuilding and expanding the capabilities of the Library’s database in preparation for its transformation into a web-based online catalog. The Library’s initial single-table database was created in Microsoft Access in early 2004, and it left a lot to be desired. In December 2006 I began building a much more sophisticated relational database out of Filemaker Pro that includes greatly expanded cataloging capabilities. This has involved retroactively re-cataloging the entire collection (to capture information that the first database was not equipped to capture), a process that is nearly complete. Once I have the database fully prototyped in Filemaker, I will start rebuilding it again in an open source web platform.