monument to the end of bookishness barbara cuerden
indexes libraries material culture keywords eco-art
The sense of loss of three-dimensional physical reality led artist Karina Kraenzle and I to construct Monument to the End of Bookishness, built out of discarded books. In the countryside outside of Perth, Ontario and created from a thousand books, our mute Tower of Babel was gathered, struggled with, collected, amassed, transported and installed by us, in a pine forest at the Fieldwork eco-art site. This was our ultimate book return, back to the (tree) gods that made them. · As a professional indexer for scientific research as well as being an artist, it’s my daily occupation to work with books, texts, records and digital files on and off the screen. The On Site review issue 40 call for proposals called me to reflect on “…books… bought, inherited, given away, stolen, returned, used to level table legs, prop open doors…” and, as immediately came to mind, books as building materials. An index re-builds the content of the book it serves through networks of
words. Eyes scan a paper index much like a screen. Useability and browse- ability pertain to its structure. The spaces contained in an index act as neural synapses. We jump from one thing to another, re-constructing meaning through an alphabetised wordlist. As an artist and indexer, I’ve noticed that a great index is like a work of art; it’s a code for something culturally deeper, unfolding a lineage of related works and words. From the indexer point of view, the backbone of an index reveals itself as you build from the content, which I feel is akin to the limitations of artists’
Does the scanning activity of online reading reach only surface depths? Skipping on and offscreen, scanning sideways, sliding down under or even deeply, the hyper of hypertext transfer protocols and https take you outside yourself to external realms, under glass, away from where you are then back again. Command click, or double click, are there enough live link dimensions to re-construct a monument (built from books)? Grounded in a back story of material culture, and having abandoned thumbing through books with no- longer handwritten marginalia, cracking the spines or dog-earing pages earmarked where eyes have scored a treasure, the escape from materiality lingers as physical loss. Eyes sliding over a screen is an act of differently slippery sensations.
materials. Maybe three-quarters through the book matter, cross-
references and page locators, a pattern emerges whereon you can hang most of the terms. It literally starts to make sense, sometimes in ways the author did not foresee. Something new emerges when you get down to the DNA, or you read in-between the lines. Through a pared-down index that includes links to external other sites, I invite you, the reader, to re-construct the book monument (referred to on the website as Still Voices ). You can slip your eyes over this spinal column of index entries, using hyperlinks as page locators, and in the meantime ask: can our internally created spaces be three- dimensional as well? c
Karina Kraenzle
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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