Canadian wunderkind, David Altmejd, has quickly garnered a reputation for his fantastical chimeras, often realized through Dionysian fusions of synthetic flesh, metal armature, mirror, and fur. Werewolves, half man/half animal hybrids, Paleolithic colossi—all are card-carrying members of the sculptor’s artistic army—divinations culled from the birthing stages of human consciousness, which, had they not been positioned within the white cube of the contemporary gallery, might have found a more proper ancestry on the cave walls of Lascaux. Altmejd’s latest exhibition at Andrea Rosen, however (his third solo endeavor in the space), reveals a break in the artist’s penchant for such raw manifestations of the mind-body. In the wake of Altmejd’s arsenal of fetishistic taxidermied forms, calculatingly precise architectural interventions ensue. Museum-quality dioramas, executed on the sculptural level of history painting, and site-specific evocations and evacuations of space in plaster are only a few of the formal shifts on display.

“The Vessel” (2011) is the overwhelming harbinger of the show, comprised of a series of intricately connected Plexiglas compartments that, when viewed from the front, evoke an eerie illusion of symmetrical precision. Closer inspection reveals the artist’s measured hand at work, as we soon notice the staggering number of “entry points” into and out of the object... This experiment (indeed, the inner sanctum of the scientific lab is repeatedly evoked in Altmejd’s meticulous use of rare materials and Petri-dish displays) of connectedness vs. compartmentalization continues with the second monolithic vitrine, “The Swarm” (2011).

see also http://theidproject.org/blog/matt-jones/2011/04/15/weekly-art-32-altmejd-and-erik-wysocan-andrea-rosen

Nelson Goodman's Problems and Projects (Indianapolis: The Bobbs Merrill Comapany, Inc., 1972) contains a chapter entitles "Snowflakes and Wastebaskets". It is about the notion of "categories" in Immanuel Kant and C. I. Lewis. Since Goodman believes that Lewis went "as far beyond Kant" as Kant went beyond his predecessor, he prefers Lewis's understanding of categories....


Kant thought that "categories" are the fundamental synthetic functions of thinking, that is, the necessary conditions of the possibility of thinking at all. without categories, we could not think at all. In particular, we could not think in terms of objects. Lewis rejected this view. For him, categories were just tools we use to sort out stuff that "comes" to us. They represent the order we impose on things. They represent our "filing system" and any kind of filing will do....

By fiddling with the categories we can make some recurrences more probable. But the reliability of the system decreases with the number of categories. Maximum reliability is achieved by having the waste basket as the only category. But reliability alone is not enough, so our filing systems tend to betray a tension between safety and the "need for specificity" we may have....

The important point for him is, however, that the regularity of the world does depend upon the arbitrary choices we make in categorizing the world. "Reality must be regular because reality is distinguished by the very fact that it conforms to the requirements of the non-wastebasket compartments of our categorical scheme." Chaos is impossible as long as we have some categories.

But absence of chaos is not really what we are after. We clearly want more. Therefore the choice of our non-wastebasket categories matters very much. The trick is to find those that have the right sort of specificity that allows not only for novelty and regularity, but also for revision.

This is why all note-taking systems need categories—any categories and why a "miscellanea" can never be sufficient.

There are two common processing strategies for archival materials: the literary and the historical. The literary model emphasizes the construction of literary works and the importance of biography to literary interpretation. These collections tend to be personal papers of authors, “personal papers” being the term for individual’s collections and “archives” the term for organizational papers. The literary model organizes materials according to various “series” or groups of like materials such as journals, diaries, correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, audio, video, etc. The emphasis in processing is on the draft versions of manuscripts that ostensibly show the process of the creation of a literary work. The historical model tends to be chronological and to look at the “great names” of history as a means of determining which correspondents, for instance, are more important than others when it comes to level of detail in “processing,” i.e. organizing and describing the collections. These traditional models do not work for artists’ papers, for instance—and perhaps never really worked all that well for literary and historical collections. Artists work in very different ways. Objects are much more common in their creative process and serve as source materials. Traditionally, archives have shied away from collecting non-paper-based materials because of storage, lack of preservation expertise, and difficulty in describing such items...

At Fales we process all the materials from an artist’s collection together in the “finding aid” so that the intellectual organization of the artist’s materials is maintained. We separate the materials for storage, of course, but we are committed to maintaining the artist’s intellectual organization. My favorite example is David Wojnarowicz’s Magic Box. [See photo]. Wojnarowicz kept this old orange crate under his bed and didn’t tell anyone about its meaning, even his partner, Tom Rauffenbart. It contains about 80 objects, including a primate skull painted Klein blue, a plastic dog, a cloth snake, a metal globe, a crucifix, and other various objects. If you know Wojnarowicz’s work, you find physical representations of his set of symbols and metaphors that he uses in his painting, photography, films, and writing in the box. This is the very kind of thing that most archives would not accession or would refer to as “realia” and not describe in any detail. For me, the Magic Box is essential to understanding Wojnarowicz’s artistic practice and central to the collection. We borrowed descriptive methods from museum practice to accession each object in the box as a part of the whole, so there is a number for the box itself, a “parent record, and each object within it has a number as a “child.” We are able to blend these styles of description because of the flexible nature of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) that is used now as a standard to create finding aids. For me, each time I bring in a collection that confounds typical archival practice, I am reminded that libraries and archives are grand narratives of culture that impose the epistemology of their time onto materials rather than merely describing those materials. Downtown art questioned these structures of culture. Downtown collections query the library and archive in the same way....

The process of accreditation that libraries maintain is rarely questioned, but it should be. The post-structuralists taught us how to look at master narratives, interestingly, none of them looked at the library as such a structure. I’ve spent a lot of time doing just that. I found that special collections and rare book libraries were one of the most conservative and most heavily politicized places in library history...

what parts of the story would you say scholars sometimes miss when they use archives to tell the stories of subversive artistic or creative networks? Where should we be directing our attention? Archives are the fossil evidence of human experience. They are necessarily stripped of the quotidian context in which they were originally embedded. The practical, the daily, the mundane aspects of a person’s life may not be evident from the remains of their artistic practice, but they may be incredibly important to a more complex understanding of the artist’s life, work, and the broader cultural milieu in which he or she lived and worked.

Diagrams are usually thought of as a tool for displaying information economically, for enabling us to more easily parse the connections between ideas and events. But diagrams are also often used to opposite ends, to call into question the kind of thinking fostered by the overly rational organization of information. In this sense, the work of many artists, poets, and filmmakers might be understood as diagrammatical. Take, for example, Stuart Sherman, whose “spectacle” performances consisted of the artist rearranging inanimate objects on tabletops; he created semantic relationships but eschewed narrative, instead revealing “all the natural metaphorical resonances of an object.” Approaching the diagram in such a way—as an epistemological figure—means questioning the nature of relationships between things and how we perceive them, and how we understand our own subjectivity in relation to that process.

Dion is one of those curious characters the world produces every so often; men and women who combine making things with intervening in the institutions that show them — in museums and schools, in cities and far-flung sites, disrupting the flow and structure of our picture of the world just enough to make us wonder why we give it that structure and flow in the first place. Dion’s a collector of collections, especially the hundreds or thousands (or more — who knows how many?) hidden in forgotten buildings in small cities around the world: Cabinets of Wonder, specimen museums, obscure archives, as well as the complex and uncataloged collections of things, both manufactured and natural, one might find in, say, a patch of the rain forest or a bank of the Thames... He finds things — whether it’s detritus from an urban archeology dig, trees in South Africa or objects in Ohio State University’s museums and archives — and shows them, assembled in an order that half mimics and half parodies the various orders we impose on the world, be it Aquinas’s Great Chain of Being, Linnaeus’s classification of the natural kingdom or an Enlightenment amateur’s private display of curios, along with all the attitudes they embody, from the benign (sheer curiosity and the enticements of adventure) to the malignant (West-is-best imperialism, violence and environmental depredation). He’s done this sort of thing well over a hundred times and produced 15 books and a half dozen “field guides” along the way. “Examining the beast from within the belly of the beast,” was the way he described it.

"As the quotation from Denis Diderot suggests, the information overload that we associate with the Internet is not new. While the Internet is undoubtedly compounding an old problem, its instant searchability offers new means of exploring the rapidly expanding universe of information. From Cave Paintings to the Internet cannot save you from information overload and offers no panacea for information insufficiency. Using Internet technology, it is designed to help you follow the development of information and media, and attitudes about them, from the beginning of records to the present. Containing annotated references to discoveries, developments of a social, scientific, theoretical or technological nature, as well as references to physical books, documents, artifacts, art works, and to websites and other digital media, it arranges, both chronologically and thematically, selected historical examples and recent developments of the methods used to record, distribute, exchange, organize, store, and search information. The database is designed to allow you to approach the topics in a wide variety of ways."

via Artforum: "Minutely arranged on a number of unobtrusive shelves, Matt Hoyt's sculptural works appear as art as if by incidence: Each seems to resemble cast-off flotsam one might typically kick about while wandering through a train yard or a former industrial lot. This may lead an inattentive viewer into mistaking Hoyt for a rarified variant of the urban archaeologist... Yet close scrutiny soon reveals these works as the product of an immersive craft. Amalgams of putty, clay, paint, plaster, resin, and a number of mercurial materials... come together as assemblies of qualities that just slip past familiarity. One could liken them...to fractured artifacts or even lilliputian architecture, but such feats of metaphor and metonymy only manage to kick up a flurry of linguistic dust about this art and its irreducible material processes..."

Where would you place the historical beginnings of information graphics?
I would start with early cave paintings. Seen from today's perspective, they unify visual storytelling and artistic beauty. In other words, art and science originally belonged together, and their division is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although there aren't many examples of infographics remaining from the following centuries, I'd stop talking about the beginnings by the year 1350, when the French bishop Nicole Oresme (1323-1382) "invented" the bar chart. Then, in 1493, Hartmann Schedel printed his famous book Schedel'sche Weltchronik, which explained how God spent the first seven days creating the world. Leonardo da Vinci's technical drawings were tools to clear up thoughts and convey knowledge in a visual manner. In 1786 William Playfair made extensive use of infographics, explaining economic matters in his Commercial and Political Atlas. Finally, in 1869 Charles Joseph Minard created an impressive diagram about Napoleon's march to Moscow and back... A taxonomy cannot relate to the aspect of visualisation—pie charts, bar charts, explosion drawings—which could disappear from time to time, but rather to the information behind the visualisation. All visual means that try to explain something to you can be placed into one of three groups. The first group is based on numbers, statistics and relations between sizes (data graphics); the second group is made up of objects (group system graphics); and the third one consists of spatial data like maps (spatial graphics). As these fields often overlap, it's also important to consider the borders between information design and, for example, illustration. I always say that information graphics has a strong appeal in the way it can clear up stuff and convey knowledge. Compared to examples such as illustration, information graphics always seeks to increase the knowledge of the reader, like every design process... The idea behind system graphics is not to make things more concrete but to make them more abstract. So by transforming photographs of surgery or forensic entomology into a graphic, you make them consumable. A translation into a vector graphic helps to look at things that would otherwise shock you. Only drawing gives you the ability to modulate details within one image. When you take a photograph you have the possibility to bring one object into the centre, but with an infographic you can show how it works internally... In perspectives the presence of the viewer is very strong, while an axonometric view has no centre point at all. We could say it's more democratic. In axonometric maps you're above the scene, not part of it, and when you don't have a vanishing point everything looks "over-parallel": everything is clear, clean and in the same light. Perhaps it's more of a communistic than democratic view of a scene. Often axonometric maps look more beautiful than reality itself... Are you familiar with Baidu? The Chinese can't show satellite images of their cities so they model these detailed axonometric cityscapes. Baidu shows very beautiful representations, similar to hand-drawn maps. They're like the depiction of a promise, telling you that it's a beautiful country to live in, whether it's true or not.

The story of information is the story of how we have shared and will be sharing with others our life experiences.

Consider this blog as notes from my field research into our lives in information. If you would share here experiences and ideas from your life in information, I’m sure the record will improve greatly.

""Man of the Twentieth Century" was Sander's monumental, lifelong photographic project to document the people of his native Westerwald, near Cologne. Stating that "[w]e know that people are formed by the light and air, by their inherited traits, and their actions. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled," Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life and created a typological catalogue of more than six hundred photographs of the German people."

Technology can help. Tim Hitchcock has described how something as simple as keyword searching can turn archives on their heads. Recordkeeping systems tend to reflect the structures and power relations of the organisations that create them. The ‘hierarchical and institutional nature of most archives’, Hitchcock argues, ‘contains an ideological component which is sucked in with every dust-filled breath’.[4] But digitisation and keyword searching free us from having to follow the well-worn paths of institutional power. We can find people and follow their lives against the flow of bureaucratic convenience. We can gain a wholly new perspective on the workings of society. ‘What changes’, Hitchcock asks, ‘when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?

"Talk to Me is an exhibition on the communication between people and objects, and how designers write the initial script that enables the two parties to communicate effectively and elegantly.The exhibition hinges on an important development in the culture of design (and in culture at large), a shift from the centrality of function to that of meaning. From this perspective, all objects contain information that goes well beyond their immediate use or appearance. In some cases, objects exist to provide us with access to complex systems and networks, behaving as gateways and interpreters. Whether openly and actively, or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us, and designers help us develop and improvise the dialogue. Talk to Me will focus on objects that involve a direct interaction, such as interfaces, information systems, visualization design, communication devices, and projects that establish an emotional, sensual, or intellectual connection with their users."

"criticism suggests that the...exhibit seems to mimic rather than critique the internet. Where would the internet be if not for “playful comparisons?”...The quandary is that while the introductory statement suggests that new media are a danger to the printed word, the exhibit’s curatorial style indicates that the library is trying to fight back by beating the internet at its own game....An argument for the value of the physical is partially provided by the contrast between the projected slideshow of the digital collection + the objects on display. ...The slower pace of walking through the rest of the exhibit, the chance to read even the short explanatory statements + the objects’ physicality give them an inherent context that the projected images lacked...The library is at its best when it offers itself as a public space for this contemplative process, providing equal access not only to information, but also to reflection; not only to rote learning, but also to the autodidact’s tools."

Receivers: "What I found most interesting about these amps, preamps, and exposed tubes was their architectural quality, although I was never able to translate this appreciation into the images themselves" / “eBay Pictures”: "We photographed hundreds of items on a white bedspread and showed the resultant prints in grids" / "a piece in response to Robert Walser’s microscripts... His writings are Kafkaesque, which is not really my thing.... because I write a lot on the subway, I got the idea to photograph other people writing on the subway" -- "Your work is frequently tied to discussions around the death of analog media" -- "I’ve been fascinated by the way other photographers are installing their work as a kind of montage, a visual cacophony of all these different forms of photographic presentation, with images framed and unframed, pinned up, mounted on Plexiglas, or xeroxed and papered to the wall."

"According to Foucault, museums as heterotopic warehouses of knowledge contribute to this in many ways, and are past masters at giving accumulative space to the diversity of this world and all the different ways of accessing it. This development and its importance for our intellectual history have been closely examined in recent decades. Not least among the contributions to this process were those of art, whose own musings took very disparate forms. In this sense, an exhibition that investigates 'measurement' can be seen as a form of museological self-reflection, taking an impartial, critical look at our own activity on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Universalmuseum Joanneum.

Concerning oneself with the question of systematisation means also challenging the way the exhibition is set up. Consequently, some projects arose from looking at ourselves, the issue of exhibiting, the place and its history."

"“Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?”–Henry David Thoreau...Tangible Things highlights and questions the modern Western intellectual categories that distinguish art from artifact, specimen from tool, and the historical from the anthropological in Harvard’s unparalleled museum and archival collections. The exhibition features nearly two hundred intriguing objects from across the University. Images are available upon request. Visitors begin in an orienting exhibition located in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. There they are introduced to established ways of organizing tangible things and are challenged to classify a seemingly random assortment of objects according to these scholarly conventions. Where in the University do items like John Singer Sargent’s palette, the dress and beads of a Camp Fire Girl, a crystal ball, or a stuffed Bengal tiger belong?... Why? "

"One of our main functions as archivists is to create descriptive tools that allow researchers to situate knowledge within a larger informational structure while providing enough detail to make “power-search[ing]” targeted and useful. The value of our professional expertise lies in offering tools that aid researchers in contextualizing knowledge, not necessarily in our own authoritative knowledge of a subject. This is where things like recording provenance, maintaining original order, & value neutral description come into play. Blouin took an even broader perspective, saying that it is becoming less and less important for institutions to “have” collections; instead, we should focus more on our ability to “pull information together.” Again, the value lies not in our authority as an institution or our exclusive hold on a particular collection, but in being able to illustrate the relevance of our holdings to a larger body of work + our institutional relevancy to culture at large."

"To browse online is to enter into a search that allows one to sail, according to an idiosyncratic route formed out of split-second impulses, across the surface of the world, sometimes stopping to randomly sample the surface, sometimes not. It is only an accelerated form of tourism. To browse in a bookstore, however, is to explore a highly selective and thoughtful collection of the world—thoughtful because hundreds of years of thinkers, writers, critics, teachers, and readers have established the worth of the choices. Their collective wisdom seems superior, for these purposes, to the Web’s “neutrality,” its know-nothing know-everythingness."

"Porn for book lovers. A photo blog collection of all the best bookshelf photos from around the world for people who *heart* bookshelves."

"This conference will explore the material dimensions of inscribed knowledge across modern disciplinary lines, featuring talks by scholars in History, Literature, Digital Humanities, Geography, Music and Art History. The speakers will collectively address the role of material inscription in the formation, or deformation, of knowledge from roughly 1660-1850. Kinds of inscription that we will consider include manuscripts, drawings, maps, graffiti, archives, books and other objects. We will also consider the physical circuits and practices (i.e., manual, technological, social, institutional) through which such inscriptions traveled. Free registration is now open on the conference website."

photographer of books

"The Time Machine in alphabetical order is a complete rendition of the 1960's film version of HG Wells Novella re-edited by us into alphabetical order from beginning to end. In doing so, we attempt to perform a kind of time travel on the movie's original time line through the use of a system of classification. We consider this experiment as using what we have decided to call 'a constrained editing technique' in light of the literary artistic movement Oulipo who would make works through the use of constrained writing techniques."

"This project explores how data visualization techniques can be used to display the contents of library catalogues, creating a new way of searching for information.

The first part of this project uses The St Bride Library catalogue as a subject to develop a visual system that can be applied to any other library using a similar classification system. The final design displays the libraries classification hierarchy and the volume of information held on each subject within the classification system.

The screen-based outcome of this project is a prototype of an interactive tool/website that enables users to compare library catalogues and discover which libraries hold the most items on a given subject by comparing their library spot size."

"Despite significant advances in the field of paleontology since the early 20th century, the methods used to preserve specimens has remained largely unchanged. This photograph, part of the Smithsonian Institution's archives, shows the National Museum of Natural History's Paleontology Laboratory on January 15, 1911."

1934: "Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards" -- "would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another,...forming from them what might be called the Universal Book.” -- In 1895, Otlet and Henri La Fontaine established the Repertoire Bibliographique Universel (RBU), an ambitious attempt at developing a master bibliography of the world’s accumulated knowledge" -- 1910: Mundaneum: "Originally envisioned as the centerpiece of a new “city of the intellect,” -- "Inside the new Mundaneum, he began to assemble his vast “documentary edifice,” eventually comprising over 12 million individual index cards and documents."

"This site now links to the entire translation of Briet’s book (translated by Ronald E. Day (Indiana University) and Laurent Martinet (Paris), with Hermina Anghelescu (Wayne State University)) and to the preface and commentary on that text, as well as to Michael Buckland’s biography of Briet and his selected bibliography of her works, as printed in What is Documentation?: English Translation of the Classic French Text (Scarecrow Press, 2006)."

"Fillip is pleased to present The AAAARG Library, a project specially commissioned for the 2010 New York Art Book Fair. Since 2005, AAAARG has served as an online research tool for tens of thousands of students, educators, curators, and artists seeking access to books and essays on critical theory, art, architecture, and film. Developed around a near-10,000-item printed card catalogue that indexes the content of the AAAARG Web site, the Library creates a temporary, participatory space for the free redistribution of textual material....During the course of the three day event, a librarian will be on staff in Fillip’s project room (I01) to fulfill book requests using the material available on AAAARG. A computer and scanner will also be on location enabling patrons of the Library to share material with the communities of both the Book Fair and AAAARG. Exhibiting publishers are strongly encouraged to submit material to the Library and may do so at any time during the project."

"gestures to overcome the limitations of a once-and-for-all ordering of the physical space of the store. We have at times reclassified titles on a rotating basis. We’ve also, as a kind of network running through different sections in the store, included stickers to indicate gay/lesbian titles + employee faves; printout in a few of the genre sections titles that fit those genres but are classified elsewhere in the store...These gestures attempt to address the inherent problems of the first order of order, but they may ultimately only be provisional and partial solutions.... Weinberger’s polemic is aimed at removing experts from their gate-keeping functions and allowing users to determine on their own what categories might be useful. He sees the proliferation of categories as a good thing and embraces the democracy of ideas over an elitist guarding of culture and knowledge. I’m not so convinced we want to do away with the gatekeepers (i.e., "experts"?) in the name of democracy.

Mike Wesch video about information organization

"an ongoing gathering of John Todd's Index Rerum ; together with observations on index rerum, commonplace and scrap books, and journals; their relationships; and something on the literature "

"The library is designed not simply to make information rapidly accessible—as a search engine might—but to shape and channel scholarly investigations. Any sustained trip into the Warburg stacks will bring the reader not only to the books he or she is looking for, but also to their unexpected “good neighbors.” Magic and science, religion and philosophy, Christianity and Judaism appear in close proximity—and challenge the reader both to trace webs of unexpected connections and to find the points of radical disjunction. Look for the history of astronomy and you will find primary and secondary sources, learned treatises and popular almanacs—texts, tables, and images that range in origin from the ancient Near East to the present—and the vast literature of astronomy’s unruly sister discipline, astrology, as well. On the shelves of the institute, the reader experiences the coincidence of opposites. "

Interactive map/catalogue of Donald Judd's Library

"Donald Judd’s library houses 13,000 books spanning a range of subjects as broad as the artist’s thinking. Judd’s arrangement of the library reflects his sensitivity to geography and understanding of the development of the arts, languages ad sciences across different cultures.

Judd deeply valued books for their ability to share knowledge…. He also considered books as beautiful objects to be treated with respect. Objects that serve as tools, instigators, rousers, mind-openers, and soothers. In Judd’s library, one can find the community of his awareness, respect, and influence"

"a cabinet for note-taking by Vincent Placcius with the comment: "The cabinet was designed by Vincentius Placcius. It had 3,000 hooks for topics, each with places where you could hang scraps of paper with notes pertaining to those topics." Well, actually this is not quite true. What is true is that Placcius published in 1689 a book called De arte excerpendi: Vom Gelahrten Buchhalten (Stockholm/Hamburg): "On the Art of Excerpting. Of [the Method] of Learned Bookkeeping." [1] In it, he described not just John Locke's method of making common-place books and other methods of keeping notes, but also included an anonymous treatise about an "arca studiorum" without (perhaps) all-too clearly identifying it as not being his own. The manuscript of the treatise is now to be found in the British Library.[2]"

"Vladimir Nabokov wrote several novels on index cards. The celebrated nonfiction writer John McPhee has developed a whole system of research and writing around them, and Ludwig Wittgenstein reportedly used them to develop the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Which means that index cards played a critical role in modern literature, journalism and philosophy. (And, incidentally, in the French Revolution, which some say was when they were invented: the new government used the backs of playing cards to record details of the books held in libraries seized from private ownership.)...The sociologist Niklas Luhmann did something similar in reality, creating what he called his "secondary memory": an index-card system that held, eventually, a lifetime of research notes. He came to think of it not as an archive but as a collaborator: as in Lila, an order emerged from the bottom up, and when he followed cross-references through the system, he'd discover connections that took him by surprise."

Sven Spieker, “The Administration of Modernism: Art and Archive in the Bureaucratic Age"; Wolfgang Ernst, “Order by Fluctuation? Classical Archives and Their Audio-Visual Counterparts”

"A screencast demo of the Series Browser - a browsable visualisation of some 65000 Series in the collection of the National Archives of Australia. This is a prototype visualisation made as part of the Visible Archive - a research project on the interactive visualisation of archival datasets, by Mitchell Whitelaw: visiblearchive.blogspot.com"

"If his library was already the most eccentric of collections - organized not alphabetically or according to subject but by ‘elective affinities’, the secret intimacies that Warburg himself intuited between its volumes - its oddest offshoot is surely the massive and fragmentary constellation of images that Warburg, in the last five years of his life, obsessively tended and reorganized: the Mnemosyne Atlas. It is the strangest of art-historical artefacts: the kaleidoscopic image of the scholar’s enigmatic reordering of a lifetime’s meditation on the image. The Atlas, wrote Warburg, was ‘a ghost story for adults’: it invents a kind of phantomic science of the image, a ghost dance in which the most resonant gestures and expressions its creator had discovered in the course of his career return with a spooky insistence, suddenly cast into wholly new relationships. "

"What is the conceptual and aesthetic power of databases? Does it really need millions of entries to make a database piece interesting as Lev Manovich claims? What are alternate cultural expressions using databases? How do we structure our digital backpacks, and online briefcases? In the 1970s and 1980s Marcel Broodthaers and Martin Kippenberger commented on storage and archiving practices. How can artists who are, like Andy Warhol, obsessive collectors use archives as deliberate base for artistic endeavor and social commentary? Artists working with digital media often work in the network and are concerned with a new aesthetic that not only involves visual presentation but also invisible back-end data that are organized, retrieved and navigated. "

"A temporary physical installation and a permanent, expandable database in the virtual, interactive and multimedia space of the internet and the world wide web, all of it referring to censorship – and to those of an artistic or cultural order specifically –, on a world scale and ranging from historic cases to those that are more incandescently current....In its materialization as a multimedia and three-dimensional sculptural installation the bureaucratic atmosphere of an archive is recreated, a bit sinister and rather somber, with the walls full of file cabinet drawers that increase the darkness of the enclosure, which is lit nonetheless by the terminals and monitors that allow the consultation in situ of the compiled computer archives. Archives are accessible moreover through the internet."

"Databases drive culture. 33 artists take us on an imaginative and subversive ride. The artists presented in Database Imaginary use databases to comment on their uses and to imagine unknown uses. The term database was only coined in the 1970s with the rise of automated office procedures, but the 23 projects in this exhibition - which includes wooden sculptures, movies and telephone user-generated guides to the local area - deploy databases in imaginative ways to comment on everyday life in the 21st century. Using newly inflected forms of visual display arising from computerized databases, the works seem to raise questions about authorship, agency, audience participation, control and identity."

"I'm interested in examining how the spatial organization, labour and aesthetics of office culture are dealt with in film, gaming and digital art. Some of the topics that I'll be examining: The evolution of various document producing, processing and archival technologies (the vertical filing cabinet, the typewriter, the index card, the spreadsheet, etc.) and their progression from revolutionary into obsolescence and subsequent rediscovery through art."

"Stefanie’s maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject."

Paul Otlet - Le Corbusier - Libraries - Classification Systems - Marginalia

"Molly Springfield's drawings and installations are based on texts, particularly those that reveal visionary moments in the history of how we experience, organize, and reproduce information. She combines a labor-intensive drawing practice with an investigation of problems such as reproduction versus originality, seeing versus reading, and technology versus labor."

"This archive is diverse in terms of medium; it includes ephemera and loose paper sheets, sketches, physical plant-related materials, orders, collections of porcelain objects, prototypes, books, notes, working drawings, ledgers, letters, biographical data, photographs, copper engravings, plaster and resin models and moulds, building and grounds information, notebooks specific to paint mixing and kiln firing, and information, both digital and analogue, related to commissioning, client requests, publicity and marketing materials, and purchase orders. The cataloguing system...is a rag-tag collection of disparate, multi-medium, and often overlapping records, databases, shelves, filing cabinets, computer databases, lists, ledgers, letters, engravings, drawings, original artworks, notebooks, and alpha-numeric systems, where the line between what constitutes hardware and what constitutes software, what constitutes a storage medium and what a transmission medium, is not readily maintained"

Danny Snelson's "titles increasingly overlap in the internet's library without walls--an environment that often embodies the Foucauldian idea that "one never archives without editorial frames and 'writerly' narratives (or designs)," as Snelson put it in an email. As an archivist, he has made substantial efforts to preserve endangered cultural artifacts -- making them universally accessible and useful, you might say -- on behalf of PennSound, an audio archive specializing in recorded poetry, and UbuWeb..."

"Although heterogeneous in terms of formal proposals, the artistic projects that will be dealt with in this coming series have in common discursive aspects or forms of presentation that may be said to constitute “innovative forms of archives.” Such a phrase is at the same time deliberately ironic, as the notion of scientific or creative innovation is necessarily followed by the well-known support structures of presentation (exhibitions, events, and so on), within whose regimes and formats the Rancièrian redistribution of the sensible takes place. "

"In the library,...a suite of horizontal canvases announced the names of plants that could be found on the grounds of the house or in albenda's own garden in Brooklyn....The paintings are themselves a catalogue of the outside world, imported into the very room designated for the systematic storage of knowledge...." Color calibrations: "to investigate the relationship between visual and linguistic modes of comprehension."

"Her photographic art captures only alphabetically related terms and puts them into new context. Her photographs are archaic storage systems of knowledge yielding randomly found commentaries, creating landscapes of words, as "subject headings" appear over the vistas of information sheets formed by unexposed cards in card catalogue drawers... "The self-consciousness" entailed in the act of cataloguing the catalogue, wrote Christopher Chamgers, "intimates the transcience and fragility of human accomplishments. It is our learning that makes the endless concatenation of teaching ironic." In Baum's art, "the act of information retrieval is turned into a journey," writes Josefine Raab, "--of seemingly unknown destination." Baum will produce a picture of related terms (words and phrases) in alphabetical order, so that for instance the term "Subversive Activities" will appear next to "Suburban Homes"... The result is what Alice Thorson sees as "a form of found minimalist poetry.""

"In the February 1998 issue of Art in America, Grady Turner reviewed Baum's exhibit at the Clementine:

As libraries make the transition to computerized catalogues, many still rely on drawers of index cards. In most respects card catalogues are no match for computer databases, but the quaintly fastidious cards, smudged by the fingers of past researchers, remain far more likely to yield serendipitous discoveries and seem to have far more appeal as raw material for art works.... Erica Baum approaches [card catalogues] with a linguist's
eye for found poetry, discovering unintended relationships in random names and phrases filed in alphabetical order. While Baum is obviously well-versed in language theory, her black-and-white photographs of outmoded catalogues have a dry wit typically lacking in post-structuralist discourse about archives. "

"In 2004 my partner Rick and I built and opened our own library in San Francisco. After many years of intermittent development, the project took over a year of our lives and we began to make tangible our vision of a great and reasonably organized pile of resources that can inspire and enable thousands of projects."