Cataloguing Against Categories

Please join us for presentations by Mariana Lanari (Archival Consciousness, Biblio-Graph) and Barbara Biedermann (Sitterwerk Library).

The event will focus on new and experimental ways of organising a library collection and the relationship between the physical and digital archives.

Archival Consciousness was initiated by artist Mariana Lanari and graphic designer Remco van Bladel to collaborate with libraries and archives in cultural institutions. The project works in close collaboration with archivists to implement methods and infrastructure to make their collections more accessible. Aimed at the long term preservation and dissemination of physical archives, in connection with the digital archive. 

Biblio-Graph is a digital archiving system for cultural organizations, publishers, collectives, and social movements that want to make their collections accessible online. It works as an interaction layer on top of existing databases and websites. On Biblio-Graph, you can view and read the archive, moving through the network of people, organizations, objects, and events in the collection.

The initial holdings of Sitterwerk Art Library came from the collections of Daniel Rohner and Felix Lehner and include around 25,000 volumes on art, architecture, and their history as well as on material and casting technology. The Art Library continues to expand, with contemporary art and sculpture and their handcrafted production, casting technology, material sciences and iconography as focuses in the case of new acquisitions. The books do not have a fixed location on the shelves; their order is dynamic and associative—they can be rearranged by users again and again, but can nonetheless be found at any time thanks to radio frequency technology. This technique of continuous inventory, which was developed at the Sitterwerk, provides a platform for examining questions relating to knowledge systems and artistic practices in dealing with archives.

Dynamic Order of the Sitterwerk library has been developed to facilitate a constantly changing position of the books on the shelves by means of RFID technology, so that books can be found in new contexts again and again, and extremely diverse contents can thus be accessed. On the other hand, it is possible to personalize, save, and edit the research conducted on the interactive work surface of the Werkbank (workbench). The smartphone app X-Y-Z enables users to annotate and keyword contents, whereby what is striven for and facilitated is a user-based development of the collection.

Barbara Biedermann studied art history in Zurich and Bern and has been responsible for content-related work with the dynamic system of order as well as its further development at the Sitterwerk Foundation since 2019. Within this framework, she organizes exhibitions, workshops, and panel discussions, develops new tools for working with the collections, and examines new forms of organizing knowledge. She also supervises the Sitterwerk Journal, with which the activities mentioned are documented and made accessible.

Mariana Lanari is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School of Heritage Memory and Material Culture. She is an artist and researcher with a background in Political Sciences and co-founder of Archival Consciousness. Lanari’s research combines computation ontology and data science with performance art to investigate the mediation between physical and digital collections of cultural libraries and archives. She is a member of Third cycle Artistic Research of the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam Research Institute of the Arts and Sciences (ARIAS). Lanari also serves on the board of PrintRoom (Rotterdam), and  DAAP – Digital Archive of Artist Publishing (London). Her work has been broadly exhibited.

All texts are from the projects’ respective websites.

ATTENDANCE FREE WITH ADVANCE BOOKING

Image: Katalin Deér, Sitterwerk Foundation