As we first received the task for the task number one, I had mixed feelings about the following exercises. At the beginning, I didn’t understand the purpose of this exercise “friends with an old book”. I was a bit surprised, because as I first came to the Eth zürich, I couldn’t have imagined that we would have an exercise like that.
The first task was good so I could make myself a brief of the book. I enquired about the author, year of publication, language of the book and where I could find the original book. This part of the exercise wasn’t really interesting but necessary to know in which language I would have to speak with my book. As for any kind of interview, I had to prepare myself, so I would be ready for the second task.
Then I went to the library to get in touch with my book “perspectiva” from Hans Lenker. I began to realize what this “friends with an old book” was all about. For me, it was really special to be able to analyze such an old book, because I had never looked at such an ancient book. It was a great experience. The only thing that I have to say is that I didn’t find the video part really useful, because I didn’t understand the way the video would be used afterwards. As we had to look at the book to do the exercise, I didn’t understand why we had to film ourselves.
The third task was a little different and complicated. I had to find up to five known editions of my book before 1800. I listed some books but this didn’t give me any interesting information about “perspectiva” and it was therefore frustrating to know that this exercise didn’t make us better friends.
For the fourth task I had to face some problems. I tried to find a txt. file for my book, but the program couldn’t identify what was written in my book. So I received another one to do the exercise. “A Treatise on Ancient Painting” written by Turnbull. This change was frustrating as I had to give up my recent new friend “perspectiva”. The task of becoming friends with this book in this short period of time turned out to be complicated, but at least, I tried my best.
The fifth and last task was interesting as we had to understand how the books interact. In the group, everyone learned something about the other books and how they became friends with their book. It was also very particular to create a dialog between books. I had never seen this before.
To summarize, this exercise was in part very interesting, but because of the way we had to upload the tasks, questionable.