Activating The Drawing Center's newly inaugurated Lab Gallery as a site for innovative, impromptu, and experimental considerations of drawing, Drafts, a series of curated public programs organized by Kaegan Sparks, encourages speculative tangents from images in a variety of creative practices. The program launches on Thursday at 6:30 pm with Drafts Phase I: Advanced Mechanics of Materials, which will consider drawing as an index of movement.

A draft—as a preliminary sketch, an embryonic form subject to revision, a current of moving air—provides a model for the series, promoting conjecture, digression, and dérive through overlapping curatorial and creative functions. Each program will derive from images in the archive of the Reanimation Library, an initiative based in Brooklyn dedicated to salvaging and stewarding obsolete or ‘pedestrian’ books that have fallen out of circulation, with an emphasis on remarkable visual content.

Drawing on the collaborative energy and associative thinking of the Surrealist exercise cadavre exquis, the programs of Drafts will unfold in a participant-driven evolution. An initial series of nine images culled from the library’s books will mutate over the course of the series, as multiple curators and artists take turns at revision, extracting an image from the preceding set and re-contextualizing it among other images.

Each resulting set will form the basis for a program, in which assorted artists, writers, and other cultural producers will respond.Various voices are thus gradually incorporated into a capricious and collaborative line of thinking: working in contingent succession, every contributor builds and strays from the mark of the last (above: preview of 6 of the 9 Drafts Phase I projects).

The Reanimation Library, located at Proteus Gowanus, in Brooklyn, was founded by Andrew Beccone, who began collecting books for this enterprise in 2002. These books that have fallen out of routine circulation and been acquired for their visual content. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and given new life as a resource for artists, writers, cultural archeologists, and other interested parties.

Beccone calls this a Presence Library, which he says is a mistranslation of the German word for Reference Library, Präsenzbibliothek. It is employed because the library is a non-circulating collection that exists in the physical world. The library was established to:

• build a collection of resources that inspire the production of new creative work
• pan for gold in the sediment of print culture
• draw attention to the visual and textual marvels in seemingly ordinary books
• encourage collaboration among human beings
• call attention to the generative potential of libraries
• contribute to our cultural commons and gift economyexplore pathways between digital and analog worlds

Last January, Zack Friedman interviewed Andrew Beccone for Bomblog:

Zack Friedman What does it mean to reanimate books?

Andrew Beccone I think that on balance, most people would look at the kinds of books that I collect and have trouble seeing much value in them, aside from being a kind of minor historical curiosity. By collecting, cataloging, and making these books available, I am really hoping to demonstrate their continuing relevance and facilitate their further use. So rather than sitting in a basement or rotting away in some thrift store, they can continue to be of value. Perhaps the books have outlived their original intended purpose, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways to use them. [read the interview]

Thursday, February 7^th, The Drawing Center Presents, 6:30 pm: Drafts Phase I: Advanced Mechanics of Materials. The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, NY, NY. Information. Drafts Phase II will take place on March 12, 2013.