Matthew Battles with Joanne McNeil

The creaky, creepy shapes of the Baroque era collide with the sleekly insidious forms of the 21st century techno-landscape in The Sovereignties of Invention, rare book librarian and cultural critic Matthew Battles’ collection of short stories. Battles, the co-founder of HiLobrow, and the managing editor at Harvard’s metaLab, is also the author ofLibrary: An Unquiet History. In Sovereignties, Battles unfolds the layers of our obsessions with both past and present, in prose Lorin Stein calls “precise, concise, musical, and alive.”

He will be interviewed by Joanne McNeil, editor of Rhizome, an organization dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.