The F.A.T. Manual
The F.A.T. Manual
producing a book about their work. They were. I explained that I was not interested in producing a catalogue, or a book of essays and interviews celebrating five (amazing) years of work; rather, I was interested in the way they shared their practices and tools on their website, and felt it might be meaningful to put these on paper. They agreed. At that point, most of it was done. What followed was just basic editorial work: select the projects, copy the text, put them in chronological order, do some editing when needed, collect hi-res images, design the book. This was possible because everything was already there, available on or linked from their website: descriptions, tutorials, source codes, documentation material. This may seem prosaic, but it isn’t. Again: you are missing the point if you think F.A.T. Lab are just the creators of some amusing Firefox add-ons, or the perpetrators of some spectacular media stunts like the Fake Google Street View Car, Occupy the Internet or Social Roulette. The most important thing about F.A.T. Lab, in my opinion, is that everything they have done so far, even the simplest, most banal and obvious project, is there to be taken, improved on and re-distributed. Sharing is such an important part of their practice that if you remove or simply forget about it, you will miss what really matters in their work. On one level, The F.A.T. Manual simply re-enacts the gift economy approach to art in editorial form. This might seem superfluous, but I don’t think it is. Even though everything could not be translated into book form, and even though the book still relies on a lot of online resources, available on Github or Instructables, this publication still works as an alternative means of distributing, archiving and offering access to a rich set of resources; an alternative to the Internet, capable of reaching the same goal in a different way. A book is a material object, something you can keep in your pocket and consult when you are offline too. It arranges the content in a linear way, inviting the reader to go through it from start to finish. E-books do not substantially differ. When this publication was still an incomplete pdf draft, a friend told me that before seeing the book she didn’t realize F.A.T. Lab did so many interesting projects. And I didn’t realize it myself either, until I produced the book, for one simple reason: even if we could do so, we rarely go through an online archive the way we go through a book. We can subscribe to its updates. We can visit it frequently, at different times, for different reasons, via different links, but it’s difficult to get an idea of it as a whole.
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