“Cats and Watermelons,” by Gabriel Orozco. Photo from PBS “First thoughts about classification inevitably turn to the simultaneously mundane and extraordinary ambition to capture the universe of all that there is and has been” – Roy Boyne Walking around a new grocery store is always a small adventure for me. Each experience provides an… Read More »
“The Industrial Library” and “Think/Classify” have a very important theme in common: the apparent need to classify and organize. The more “stuff” that is one place the more accessible is has to be. At least, that is the trend in “The Industrial Library” and catalog systems. For example, Panizzi introduced “call numbers” in order to… Read More »
All utopias are depressing because they leave no room for chance, for difference, for the ‘miscellaneous’. Everything has been set in order and order reigns. Behind every utopia there is always some great taxonomic design: a place for each thing and each thing in its place. (Perec P.191) As soon as I read this passage,… Read More »
Until I read The Industrial Library, I didn’t even think of how people find or meet books they need. And I was impressed by the card catalog systems that librarians created. Anthony Panizzi worked at the British Museum introduced a subject catalog that no one had ever tried to create such kind of classification. “Panizzi… Read More »
In An Archival Impulse by Hal Foster, hes illustrates archival aesthetics by giving examples of three artists. He focus the work of art which sources are drawn from the archives of mass culture, but they can also be obscure. Thomas Hirschhorn’s work change my idea of archival art. For me, when I hear “archival art”,… Read More »
I’m going to talk about three different examples of useless classification today, but I guess in order to do that, I need to say what would constitute useful classification, so I can show how these examples don’t fit that mold. That, of course, is the main question of today’s readings. For my purposes, I’ve been using… Read More »
Besides serving as a practical guide to find one’s destination, street names and place names in general, create symbolic connections with the past, or recent past by commemorating and honoring the contributions of historical figures, military heroes, political leaders, inventors, industrialists, and athletes. “Commemorative landscape” is a term referring to a wide range of material… Read More »
Inspired by Perec’s Think/Classify and portions of David Weinberger’s talk on miscellany focused on tagging, faceted classification, and other ways that newer media puts classification into the hands of the user, I have decided to focus on systems of classification that are functionally useless…or are they? Considering how frequently Borges’s fantastical, hypothetical taxonomies have appeared… Read More »
This week’s reading on Ordering Media’s “Innumerable Species”encouraged me to think about the ways classification affects us in ways that are both unthinkably “mundane” and at the same time unbelievably ambitious. That any grocery store must attempt to contain and organize in one (sometimes small) space the universe of food which we deem acceptable to… Read More »
As our society generates more and more data, with each new data set replacing the old, the information of the past can be easily devalued (I’m not sure if the information is devalued) and forgotten.The forgotten information can be resurfaced by artists who find or remember its value to our society. There are artists who… Read More »