“Sometimes when I’m careless enough to turn in my sleep or call out or
twitch, I am horrified to hear the books start to slide, because it would take
little more than a raised knee or a shout to bring them all down like an avalanche,
a cornucopia of rare books, and squash me like a flea.”
Like the obsessive collector of knowledge, Hanta in Bohumil
Hrabal’s novel, “Too Loud a Solitude” I share, a slightly more rational, but
real fear of the impending possibility that I could be swamped or crushed under
the sheer weight of paper I have accumulated in the form of books (mostly),
magazines, photos, postcards, drawings on paper and exhibition catalogues. I
sleep in a bed towered by two rather large bookcases. It is a collection that is
forever growing, even now, from having just sorted through an album of some 170
photos printed and chronicled into another album to sit on top of the ever
groaning and increasingly bowing bookcase shelves. I have never tested their
structural integrity, but am happy to keep adding to them, long may they hold!
I paint a dramatic hyperbole and it is of course true that
much of this material could be digitised and made far smaller (and safer) but my
reasoning for mentioning is that somewhere in my madness lies the bigger question of how we
gather, store and access knowledge and information in a world that is
consistently producing.
“It took two centuries for the Library of Congress to acquire its 29
million books and 105 million other items...today it only takes 15 minutes for
the world to produce an equal amount of information in digital form.”
Where does all of this information go? What happens when that storage is full? And how much knowledge can we possibly stand to lose or even be unable to re-call if it is forever increasing? I am emphatically not suggesting the solution is one of burning or saving books as the premise of Hrabal’s novel, but for me, it does raise the foremost questions as well as the notion of the personal archive versus the public archive and how they operate differently but share a similarity in that they are both dependent on issues of space in relation to time, accumulation and editing.
“According
to a 2007 BBC report, the Vatican library (1.5 million books on 37 miles of shelving)
was literally sinking under its printed burden.”
I do not aim to answer or resolve all of these ideas in this post, but felt
that I had begun collecting too many thoughts and references on the subject to
ignore it completely; it is a starting point from which hopefully I will
revisit themes again at a later date. The origins of this post have
actually come from those photos I mentioned earlier, specifically they document
a recent trip to Copenhagen where in the Architecture Centre I came across a
zine all about Archives and their relationship to space and storage. Titled MAP
(Manual of Architectural Possibilities) and created by David A Garcia Studios on an A1-sized folded sheet of paper, printed on both sides in a
poster-style format. Each issue deals with a different theme succinctly
presented through text, quotes, stats, info-graphics and graphics.
 |
| Sample of the layout of MAP 003 Archive |
For its size, the content and information within this
zine is impressive and relevant to my current thoughts on the huge amounts of
paper I personally hoard! Its utilitarian size also refers to its purpose of
providing insight into the spatial implications needed for systems of
organising information, i.e. collections, libraries, archives, servers etc.
“Where do we store all of this info?”
being the question asked that also seems to me to be intrinsically linked to
the more written about question of, “how is it stored?” Much seems to be written about systems of categorisation , less so on where it is held. According to MAP, preserving information for the future seems to
be closely linked with physical issues of context and space as much as it does
with the organizational systems by which information is catalogued. Not to mention,
of course, political implications of the institutionalisation of knowledge, i.e. how,
when, by and for who information is gathered; a question for another day!
“From antiquity to the present, and with an exponential impetus, we
have been obsessed with systematically collecting and reorganizing what in
effect already exists, in its own kind of order, or disorder. This desire for
control and centralisation of our environment, has no doubt aided us in the
past and present. Nevertheless, some think that archives have reached such
epidemic proportions that, not only has the digital revolution not been able to
solve the problem, but it has in fact aggravated it. All of this, of course,
occupies space, an increasingly huge amount of space.”
It was interesting to discover that,
The British Museum exhibits 1% of its total collection of
7 million items.
The British Library exhibits 3% of its total collection
of 14 million items.
The MOMA exhibits 15% of its total collection of 150,000
items.
The above stats highlighting, for me, the importance of
circulating what is exhibited within these collections or making what isn’t
shown ,accessible in other formats; either online or per request which many of
them already do. It is really a question of who decides what is shown and when
and whether some things are better not shown in order to protect/preserve them?
I speculate that archivists, curators and librarians will also have their own
set of either institutionalised or professional criteria for selecting work to
be added or displayed within collections. I do not know and am curious as to
what these are, but am more interested in the idea of what a creative or artistic
practice could bring to the process of archiving that perhaps these other
professions lack or are prohibited in some way from doing.
I’m fascinated by the idea of archiving but I carry the suspicious mind
of one who is easily bored: that dares to suggest that the very act of making
an archive is already an admission of creative defeat...Others will argue that
the very process of making the archive, devising the system...is in itself
totally creative...What if the day-to-day circumstances may not be as neat as
the parametric analysis? –Peter Cook
 |
| Inside The Black Diamond in Copenhagen |
In an interview about, Collection (not) as curation: how
exhibitions are different from libraries, artist and librarian, Andrew Beccone explains how collecting can
function as interpretation,
“Absolutely, but many libraries don’t have the freedom to approach
their own collections from such a standpoint. One of the things that I find
interesting about the current trend of independent libraries is the attention
that they often call to collection-as-interpretation.”
I think Beccoone’s statement implies that by allowing more control in a curatiorial
sense of what is admitted and omitted within a collection can become a means by
which collections can be interpreted by what is in them and how it is
organised. This seems to me a similar process to that of curating, when art
objects are [collected] and [organised] into a new system, in other words
exhibition, from which they can gain new meaning and interpretation as a whole
as well as individual works within a bigger concept. The problem with the
library as a collection is whether it becomes more about the overall
interpretation or the sum of its parts?
He does however acknowledge that there is some overlap
between the two,
“In library-speak, those who are responsible for acquiring materials
and shaping collections are known as collection development librarians. These
are probably the closest corollary to curators in librarianship, but there’s a
difference (and this is speaking very broadly because there is an incredible
range of conditions within which both librarians and curators operate), for
instance, between a curator who is able to assemble a group of artists based on
a particular idea of his or her own choosing, and say, a collection development
librarian at a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library who is “curating” a
collection based on a concrete set of criteria such as the demographics of the
neighborhood, the library’s own circulation statistics, or some institutional
policy.”
The brain has also been discussed as a medium of data storage and it
has been estimated that the brain has the equivalent digital capacity of 1-1000
terabytes…1 terabyte is the equivalent to 50,000 trees made into paper and
printed...
Quotes and Images sourced
from: http://davidgarciastudiomap.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/map-003-open-call.html
& https://hyperallergic.com/57475/interview-reanimation-library-andrew-beccone/
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