a walk through time: book press & the web & machine meditations

photo friday's new theme is: "Machines". it brought me back to this moment from last October: standing in front of an old printing machine, made out of wood and metal, like back in the Gutenberg days of the first printed pages:



every hour, a printer came to the machine and showed how it worked.





that was at Frankfurt Book Fair, more moments and impressions from that day are online here:
International Book Fair Frankfurt - impressions, themes, snaphots

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and another machine - same day, same hall, but almost a different universe:

the CERN institute was at the book fair, too, with their digital science lab. and they brought with them - the first www.server of the world - the starting point of the internet:



so exciting to see this. they had a copy of the original internet proposal: the "Information Management" proposal of Tim Berners-Lee. The proposal has a pencilled note on top that says: “vague but exciting”

here's more about it, in an own blog post: the beginning of the web

machine meditations
and of course, the theme brought me back to my own series of machine videos in January...



- once you start looking at them in that way, you find that we are surrounded by little technical wonders, and mostly we don't really know how they work. my favourite probably is the "nähmaschine" - the sewing machine at work.

with it, i also sewed some mini books once - so it's not really so far away from the printing machine.

now, for a walk through the fields, without machines. well, that is when you don't count the mobile phone... this hybrid of telephone and camera and computer, all in one, in pocketsize.. how did someone once define it: "Magic is nothing but advanced technology"..