Invited Thesis Exhibition Respondent, âLooking From a Distance,â Royal College of Art, Architecture Thesis Exhibition, July 2020.
Looking from a Distance (2020)

Invited Thesis Exhibition Respondent, âLooking From a Distance,â Royal College of Art, Architecture Thesis Exhibition, July 2020.
“Furnishing Intelligence,” Perspecta 51: Medium (Yale School of Architecture, 2018).
The Helsinki Central Library Oodi and the MOBIUS Fellowship Program of the Finnish Cultural Institute New York hosted The Libraryâs Other Intelligences, a project of commissioned artworks and a series of events, anticipating and celebrating the opening of the new Helsinki Central Library in early 2019.
MOBIUS fellows Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, UK) and Shannon Mattern (The New School, US) commissioned Finnish artists and designers Samir Bhowmik, Tuomas Aleksander Laitinen, and Jenna Sutela to create works that examine the new intelligences our evolving knowledge institutions accommodate. Installed in the new Central Library in January 2019, these projects revealed the alien logics of neural nets, gave voice to machinic and otherworldly languages, and made visible the material and informational infrastructures that allow intelligence to circulate.
Our exhibition opened on January 11, 2019, and we hosted a symposium featuring the artists’ work on January 12. Visitors to the library were invited to engage with the works — and with the new building — by attending live performances, embarking on expeditions, and reimagining how we will read, listen, and learn in a new techno-cultural future.
Tuomas A. Laitinen: Swarm Chorus from FCINY on Vimeo.
Jenna Sutela: nimiia ĂŻzinibimi from FCINY on Vimeo.
Samir Bhowmik & 00100 ENSEMBLE: Memory Machines from FCINY on Vimeo.
In the year leading up to the exhibition, we also hosted two public events in concert with PUBLICS, an event space and gallery in Helsinki:
Images by Laura Boxberg and Ilari Laaminen
Project-based graduate seminar elective
Throughout the semester, weâll learn by doing: weâll learn about theories and practices of display and curation by creating the Project Media Space|Public Space exhibition, which will be held in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Councilâs 3000-square-foot gallery at 15 Nassau St., in Lower Manhattan, for two week in mid-May 2006. Weâll pay particular attention to the unique challenges of displaying media pieces, and by addressing these practical concerns, weâll also explore such theoretical issues as the âsituatednessâ of media experience and the relationships between media and âspace.â All students enrolled in the course must be prepared to make themselves available for installation during the last week of April and the first week of May.
Spring 2006: Syllabus | Exhibition Poster | Sonic Channels audio program | InWords reading invitation | Project Media Space
âIndexing the World of Tomorrow,â Places (February 2, 2016)
on filing and the 1939 Worldâs Fair â or, on the aesthetics of administration and the urban imaginary
In November 2015, I gave a talk in the Media Design Practices Program at ArtCenter College of Design. I spoke about Remington Rand, âdesignerlyâ filing and administration, and the 1939 Worldâs Fair. This research was eventually published as âIndexing the World of Tomorrowâ in Places Journal. You can find my slides here.
âSpeculative Archaeology,â Places (December 12, 2014)
on the myriad art and design projects that adopt the m.o., method, or metaphor of archaeology
National Museum of Natural History
It’s been a week of constructed views. I started off last week in Washington D.C., where I gave one of the opening plenary lectures at the Library on Congress’s Digital Preservation conference and spoke quite a bit about the constructed — and de-constructed — aesthetics of preservation. And of course L’Enfant’s plan for D.C. itself, full of monuments and grand buildings, emphasized (or, rather, forced)Â majestic views. The museums along the mall, too — many of which I hadn’t visited since I was a kid — offered a variety of case studies in the rhetorics of display.
A brief aside: shortly before heading south, I enjoyed some lovely sunsets from my roof.
And when I got back to NY, I checked out “Another Look at Detroit,” a show, conjoining the Marianne Boesky and Marlborough Chelsea galleries, that examines the city’s past and present as a creative center. I love, love, loved how the show was staged — with so many fabulous formal, textual, and temporal juxtapositions. The presentation implied how place-based movements and geographic “scenes” take shape, with many lietmotifs resonating across art forms. Political economic and cultural contexts, climate, topography, industry, even signature urban and architectural forms, etc., can conspire to give rise to geographically-informed aesthetics, across all media. [Update: August 5: see the Hyperallergic review, which addresses the exhibitions’ whiteness and “lite” politics.]
Then, continuing in the “self-conscious display,” or “rhetorics of presentation,” theme, I visited Matthew Higgs’s “Displayed” at Anton Kern. As Ken Johnson wrote in the Times,
When you exhibit a work of art, there are two things going on. Thereâs the object and thereâs the presentational apparatus, which might be a frame, a pedestal, a shelf or a vitrine. Also involved are the gallery architecture, the structure of the exhibiting institution and, in the broadest terms, the art world social system. Usually, viewers are supposed to focus on the object and take for granted the apparatus.
At Kern, Higgs, director of White Columns gallery, has highlighted those apparatae by, well, displaying works that are representative of what he calls “displayism”: they “explore the methodologies — both formal and psychological — of display and presentation. Borrowing from the languages of architecture, the museum, interior design, retail, and advertising among other disciplines, the works in Displayed variously consider our shifting relationships with (but of course!) — and attachments to — objects and the circumstances in which we encounter them: whether it be the gallery, the store, the street, the home, etc.” (These  themes were also palpable in Kristen Morginâs âThe Super Can Man and Other Illustrated Classicsâ and Dominique Gonzales-Foersterâs âeuquinimod & costumes,” which I saw and wrote about a couple months ago.)
Then, uptown to Gallerie Perrotin’s Kate Ericson & Mel Ziegler show, which features the pair’s community-based artwork from the 80s and 90s, up through Ericson’s death in 1995. This show totally captivated me — and not only because of the regularly ordered displays: the racks of jars and rows of tools. Seen en masse, the work’s understated politics becomes clear: here’s an attempt to distill and order, through basic elements — color, water, food, language — the identity of a community, of a place.
Below, on the ground:Â A Long Line: “22 antique toy dump trucks carry a load of fractured marble pieces sandblasted with texts from used history books.”
Above:Â The Authentic Colors of Historic Philadelphia: “Displayed on an antique wooden bench, these ten jars contain different paints and are each sandblasted with its corresponding official color name. The colors were chosen from a paint chart that consists of 31 colors, all matched and certified to have been used on the interiors and exteriors of public and private buildings in colonial Philadelphia.” And relatedly…
Below:Â Dark on That Whiteness, 1998: “These 173 jars are filled with paint, each color matching the exterior walls of a federal building or monument surrounding the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The installation maps out the neighborhood, with each jar installed according to the corresponding building’s location. The jars are sandblasted with the commercial name of each color from the paint manufacturer. The title of the piece is a quotation from the nineteenth-century sculptor Horatio Greenough, which describes the dark red color of the stone used for the Smithsonian Institution building….”
And more from D.C, below: Where the Water Goes: “The water int these jars was collected from three sites in the Washington, D.C. area. On the left, the water was collected from the Upper Potomac River, north of the aqueduct that supplies the city with water. The nine center jars contain water from each of the nine sinks in the public restrooms of the United States Supreme Court. On the right, the jar is filled with water from the Lower Potomac River, downriver from the city’s primary wastewater treatment facility.”
Finally, Ericson and Ziegler’s interest in color and identity followed me downtown, to MoMA, where I saw Christopher Williams’s “The Production Line of Happiness” (a line drawn from Godard, with all kinds of obvious allusion to Marxism and myth). Here, color is tied to brand — in this case, the brand-name materials (Kodak, Fuji, Pantone, etc.) integral to manufacturing idealized images. Just as Higgs’s exhibition highlighted the integrated apparatuses(ae) of “displayism,” Williams’s work and the show’s exhibition design operate in tandem to make manifest the various apparatae of image-making, image display, and perception — we see the guts of cameras, the guts of galleries’ temporary walls, light meters, color correction gradients, coolers of film — and how those technical systems (all described exhaustively in lengthy captions, none of which, notably, are presented on the walls, but are instead made available in the text-heavy, clinical exhibition guide) work together to produce meticulously “constructed images” that define our (consumer) ideals, that determine for us what constitutes “happiness.”
Sure sure sure: institutional critique, blah blah blah. But institutional critique on so many simultaneous rhetorical and material and technological registers seems freshly challenging.
As Villem Flusser states in his “Photo Production” lecture, reproduced in the exhibition catalog:
[I]mages are potent models. If one calls models of experience ‘art,’ models of knowledge ‘science,’ and models of evaluation ‘ethics’ or ‘politics,’ it becomes evident that photographing in the true sense is much more than an artistic endeavor. It is a fully human endeavor, where art, science, and ethics cannot be distinguished from one another.
The “true photographer,” he continues, aims to “inform” others while acknowledging the “automatic reproducibility” of his tools. He “is committed against automation,” “engaged in a struggle against apparatus function.” (It’s not irrelevant that both Williams’s father and grandfather worked in movie special effects, as Schjeldahl notes in his New Yorker review).
[The true photographer’s] aim is to force the apparatus to somehow invert its program like a glove, and have it produce that which is unexpected from the point of view of the program. Thus was we have here is the attempt to face the fact that the apparatuses we have produced tend to escape our control, tend to become autonomous of human decision. I believe that this is the context in which we must see the photographer’s commitment: to oppose the stupidity of the automatic disinformation with the human intention to produce, to distribute, and to stock new information, and thus overcome death and become somehow immortal.
Williams makes vision visible. He displays photography’s apparatae of automation, highlights the museum’s discourses of presentation, and denaturalizes the means by which consumer culture and capitalism “produce” spectacles of happiness.
I was honored to serve as one of the closing keynotes at the Rare Book and Manuscript Librariansâ pre-conference at the 2014. American Library Association conference. I spoke about design and aesthetic experience in archives and special collections. You can find my talk and slides here.
I was delighted to be invited to deliver one of the closing plenary talks at the 2014 preconference for the American Library Association’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, on the theme of “Retrofit,” in Las Vegas. I was joined on the plenary panel by Jim Reilly, Founder and Director of the Image Permanence Institute, and Emily Gore, Content Director of the Digital Public Library of America, both of whom gave fantastic presentations. Unfortunately, we had far too little time for discussion.
What follows are my slides and the text of my talk:
In Rare Fashion: Special Collections Infrastructural Aesthetics
I come from Brooklyn, the land of archival aesthetics. I realize this is kind of old news, but those of us who live the antiquarian lifestyle are quite happy to be behind the curve. [S2] Weâre committed to canning, [S3] letterpress, [CLICK] suspenders, [CLICK] and classic cocktails. [S4] We mix our vinyl with taxidermy. [S5] This coming weekend weâre opening a new museum, Morbid Anatomy, thatâs dedicated to spirit photography, embalming, and 19th-century medical and mourning practices. [S6: Blank] Weâre into performing our preservation, too; we can make anything âheritageâ or artisanal â [S7] including our faces. (I should note that recent research has shown that [S8] we may recently have reached âpeak beard.â)
[S9]Rare book and manuscript libraries certainly have their own aesthetic of ârarityâ â but itâs not often manifested in the same way that we Brooklynites do it, [S10] with reclaimed wood and Edison bulbs. In a 2007 article in RBM, Gerald Beasley described what one might see if one approached the archive as an aesthetic place:
[S11]rows and rows of acid-free boxes and acid-free folders on inert gray metal shelving in climate-controlled storage⌠â not what you call âeye candy.â âŚ[W]hat goes on inside those boxes is often a far more riotous mix of material culture than anything a row of books or periodicals can provide. But in marketing terms, archives in storage suffer from an image problem.[1]
In my comments here Iâm not going to focus on the [S12] riotous content of those boxes and booksâ on the woodcuts and gold leaf embellishments and marginalia on their enclosed pages; or on the stories and arguments and information conveyed through their words and images. Andrew Staufferâs beautiful plenary talk from Wednesday acknowledged much that can be gained from the textual and material-aesthetic dimensions of archival artifacts.
[S13]Instead, Iâm going to focus on the boxes themselves, and that inert gray metal shelving â and the study tables and the conservation labs and vitrines and online catalogues and drably lit rooms â all the architectural and technological infrastructures that enable archives and rare book and manuscript libraries to do what they do. For the sake of brevity, Iâll heretofore lump these spaces together and call them âspecial collections.â Iâll argue that even the seemingly anti-aesthetic aspects of the special collection actually do â or can â embody an aesthetic, an experience, that enhances the various programmatic functions the institution serves; and can even serve as a means of advocacy for those functions. These aesthetics can, as John Overholt argued in last springâs issue of RBM, serve to âdemystify special collections, to convey the message: âPlease touch. This is here for youâ â and, I would add, this is how we made it possible for this to be here for you, to touch and read and listen to and learn from.[2]
[S14]By âaesthetics,â I donât mean beauty or sublimity, or a taste-based assessment of âlook and feel.â I mean sensory contemplation, which is not separate from or opposed to the realm of the intellectual. Rather, aesthetics are an integral part of the teaching and research â as well as the processing and preservation, cataloguing and curating â that take place in special collections. We need to acknowledge these aesthetics of experience, for both patrons and staff â as well as both on-site and online communities, both the local and distributed.
There are cases in which intellectual labor and aesthetic experience are balkanized. [S15] This was made especially clear to me several years ago, when I was working on an essay about the 2006 renovation â a controversial retrofitting â of Alvar Aaltoâs Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvardâs Lamont Library. [Warning: this account will involve an embarrassing number of âair quotes.â] The room was founded with a gift from Harry Harkness Flager in honor of his friend and former Columbia professor George E. Woodberry, who aimed to afford undergraduates an opportunity to experience the âdelight and entertainmentâ of poetry outside the âchore of the curriculum,â where, under the influence of new approaches to criticism, poetry was increasingly analyzed with a ârigorous empiricismâ and mined for âfacts.â [S16] My study examined how Aaltoâs forward-thinking and fluid design â a humanistic variation on Modern design â accommodated and symbolized the myriad material forms of poetry represented in the collection: manuscripts, little magazines, records, printed books, even poetry-inspired artwork. One of the reviewers of my article, however, claimed that my focus on âdelightâ and âentertainmentâ precluded poetryâs âsignificanceâ; to highlight aesthetic experience was to suggest that poetry is devoid of âintellectual or political engagement,â and to fail to acknowledge that âpoets even think rationally.â
Of course in my revision I took great pains to demonstrate that feeling â even, heaven forbid, pleasure and delight â is not inimical to rational thought. [S17] I also had to spend some time explaining, contra many preservationistsâ claims, why computers werenât superfluous technologies that could be moved off-site to as to preserve the roomâs classic aesthetic. At just over 1000 square feet the Poetry Room was the smallest media space Iâve ever worked with, and its focus on poetry made its mission and audience particularly delimited. But even this small case study illustrates what Iâve tried to do with all of my research on media architectures: [S18] that is, to demonstrate how entwined infrastructures â architectural, technological, social, etc. â embody certain politics and epistemologies. And this embodiment happens in large part through their aesthetics.You see here a related piece I published a couple weeks ago.
[S19]Francois Blouin acknowledges in a 2010 issue of RBM that many notable special collections are often sited in privileged places, apart from more pedestrian collections, and housed in monumental spaces, which connect contemporary researchers to the âenduring scholarly valuesâ and research traditions they embody. Yet he claims âthe importance of these settings to scholarship has seldom been cause for much reflection.â[3]
[S20]I noticed that what seems to be a key text in the design of archival and special collections, Michele Pacifico and Thomas Wilstedâs 2009 Archival and Special Collections Facilities, frames the special collection as an architecture primarily for objects. There are chapters on the building site, environmental control, fire protection, security, materials and finishes, storage equipment, prohibited materials, etc.[4] A paper presented at the 2012 IFLA conference acknowledged that the 2009 study needed to expanded â but the proposed areas of development included sustainable design; environmental standards for storage, including design for buildings in extreme climates; planning for disasters; and the design implications of electronic records and digitization.[5] Aside from considering accessibility issues, once again very little attention seems to be paid to the aesthetics of experience, both for patrons and staff. [S21]The recent translation of Arlette Fargeâs The Allure of the Archives has attracted a great deal of attention precisely because she addresses both the delights and miseries of peopleâs embodied, multisensory interaction with collection materials and the collectionâs physical space.[6]
[S22]In the time that remains, Iâll discuss the aesthetics of five intertwined infrastructures that compose the special collection, and many of which have undergone recent retrofits in light of technological and curricular and pedagogical change. Iâll offer some brief comments regarding their political and epistemological significance, as well as their potential to serve as tools for pedagogy or advocacy for the importance of special collections. There are certainly more than five infrastructures I could talk about, but, in the interest of time, I’ll need to limit my focus. This means, unfortunately, that much is left out, including perhaps the one area of special collections whose aesthetics are most commonly recognized — namely, the reading room. You could turn to Farge’s text for a discussion of reading-room aesthetics.
[S23] I’ll start with the aesthetics of storage infrastructures. Collection storage has long been a central design feature â there never seems to enough of it â and itâs often an aesthetic focus for libraries. [S24]Storage spaces played a central role in the controversy of the planned renovation of the NYPLâs Schwartzman Library. Iâve written about a few other designs, [S25]including the 40-anniversary retrofit of Louis Kahnâs library for Philips Exeter Academy and [S26]Rem Koolhaasâs 2004 Seattle Public Library, with its book spiral, that prioritize storage of the collection. More recently, [S27]TAX arquitecturaâs 2006 Biblioteca Jose Vasconcelos in Mexico City and [S28]MRVDVâs Book Mountain, which opened just two years ago in a town in the Netherlands, continue to fetishize the stacks. We see similar focus on the aesthetics of storage in some special collections, including [S29]Dartmouthâs Rauner Special Collections, a project completed in 2000; and of course its formal predecessor, the [S30]Beinecke at Yale. The epistemological implications of this aesthetic are obvious: these architectures put on display, and make empirical, if not navigable, the wealth of knowledge that the collection represents.
[S31]Even behind-the-scenes storage spaces â those acid-free boxes grey shelves â have aesthetic appeal. Many conceptual artists have worked with what art historian Hal Foster calls the âaesthetics of administration.â [S32]Thereâs also been a lot of fantastic recent scholarship on the history of paperwork and filing â [S33]I wrote something last year, too â that attests to the deeper social and cultural implications of back-stage storage systems. [S34]And in my classes on archives and mapping, I often organize field trips in which we take these media studies and design students behind the scenes at various museums and archives and special collections. Amidst the beige and grey, the students not only begin to grasp the scope of an institutionâs collection and the breadth of formats it contains, but they also begin to appreciate how value is attached to those materials â and just how much of it lives only in material form, and will likely not be digitized any time soon.
Even as collections move off-site, Iâve noticed continuing fascination with the aesthetics of storage. There are several recent videos, including some expertly produced documentaries â featuring the Bodleian, [S35]the Harvard Depository, North Carolina Stateâs new Hunt Library, the University of Chicagoâs new Mansueto Library, [S36]and the Corbis Image Vault inside Iron Mountain, a former limestone mine in Western Pennsylvania â that aestheticize remote storage and automated retrieval. I situate these projects in relation to growing interest in the materiality of information and media archaeology. We can also position these âstorage storiesâ within within a larger body of work that attempts to make material, empirical, phenomenological â and thereby comprehensible â a lot of behind-the-scenes informational experiences. [S37]Itâs part of the trend toward âmaking visible the invisible,â calling attention to the distribution of information, which has tended to be eclipsed by interest in production and consumption.
[S38] Second, the aesthetics of conservation, also typically behind-the-scenes. But, again, when Iâve taken my students to various institutions, theyâve been fascinated by the intricate, embodied labor involved in conservation. [S39] At the New York City Municipal Archives, we watched a photography conservator peel apart 80-year-old homicide scene photos from the NYPD; we watched a print conservator âfloatâ a 400-year-old Dutch document in a tub of wood pulp; we [S40] we observed a staff member custom-build an acid-free box for a rusty switchblade found amongst the police departmentâs records. The organic materiality of media is quite a revelation to many of these supposed âdigital natives.â [S41] And even the material work of preserving the digital â of practicing digital forensics, making sure to regularly spin the back-up hard drives, or reformatting video archives to keep pace with evolving best practices â is illuminating for students to observe. These backstage activities have such great pedagogical potential â and thereâs demonstrated interest. Whatâs more, making this activity visible has the potential to manifest, and thereby advocate for, the critical, specialized work that takes place in special collections. [S42] Not all institutions have beautiful conservation facilities like the Morgan Libraryâs Thaw Conservation Center, but there have to be ways to allow different publics to experience the aesthetics, and thus the politics, of the work of conservation.
[S43] Third, the aesthetics of exhibition. This may be the most obvious example: the curation of special collectionsâ materials is intended primarily to create an aesthetic frame for those materials, and to render them experiential. In recent renovation projects several institutions have added exhibition space or upgraded their exhibition areas. [S44] The Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale repositioned its exhibition spaces outside the special collections âsecurity perimeter,â so as to potentially draw in visitors who wouldnât otherwise be compelled to enter.[7] Such exhibitions not only highlight collection materials, but they also have the potential to model scholarly methodology and intellectual frameworks; they can show students how to put objects in conversation with one another and make inferences or draw conclusions from historical texts and primary resources.
Of course putting those special collections materials in a vitrine or display case typically emphasizes the visual at the expense of the other senses, and thereby limits the pedagogical âchannelsâ that we can use to teach with or through these materials. [S45] There are other special collections infrastructures â classrooms and programing spaces, for instance â that allow for different aesthetic and epistemological experiences. These spaces â which constitute our fourth aesthetic infrastructure â [S46] create opportunities for the handling and activation of materials, and offer the ability to bring those materials alive in group settings, via a variety of pedagogical techniques, or perhaps through performances. Ideally, careful attention is paid to furnishings and lighting and display technology that lend themselves to flexible use. In some cases, however, as we see here, teachers simply commandeer whatever space they have for communal use.
Yaleâs Arts Library, as part of their renovation, also integrated a classroom, which grew their instruction program over 900 percent. Years earlier, the Beinecke Library underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation, which involved converting conventional shelving into compact storage, and transforming some storage space into classrooms and a [S47] Digital Studio. As Ellen Cordes wrote, âThis choice to build classrooms in preference to both storage space and a conservation studio is a very concrete demonstration of the libraryâs commitment to access, and not just to the preservation of collections.â[8] The library hosted a record number of classes in 2004-5 and [S48]launched a bunch of extra-curricular programs, including non-credit classes, lectures, musical performances, and poetry events inspired by the collections.
Making space in the special collection for greater public access â both for a greater variety of publics, and a greater variety of aesthetic experiences â opens up the collection to innovative uses and unanticipated applications. This is in keeping with John Overholtâs proposal that the future of special collections will encompass both âdisintermediationâ â the collectionsâ âunmooringâ from librariansâ âorganizational and interpretive contexts â as well as their creative âtransformation.â[9] [S49] The Woodberry Poetry Room, for instance, has become home to a variety of programs in which the collection is activated. When poet Christina Davis became curator of the room in 2008, she introduced group listening sessions and a works-in-progress series, among other events. When these open events are not in session, the uses of the room range from âquiet study, perusal of literary magazines, the research of rare material (broadsides, manuscripts, chapbooks), listening to archival recordings,⌠and (yes) writing poems.â[10] âThe latter is, to my mind,â Davis told me, âthe surest sign of the success of the room: It means that scholarship and the art-form it hopes to perpetuate have come full circle.
[S50]And over the past few days at this conference weâve seen myriad other creative uses to which special collections materials have been put â everything from Burroughâs Reality Studio to Booktraces to Tumblrs and student Omeka exhibitions and Neatline timelines to physical, on-site exhibitions. These transformations might take shape within the physical confines of the special collections space, or without. And the fact that, increasingly, interactions with special collections do happen outside the facilities themselves highlights the centrality of a [S51]fifth aesthetic infrastructure: the digital interface. The aesthetics of the special collections interface â in the form of online catalogues, finding aids, and digital exhibitions â has received continued attention, particularly from institutions like the University of Michigan, the NYPL, Princeton, and Brigham Young. [S52] Interface aesthetics, and how we critique them, were our chief concerns in a Digital Archives graduate studio I taught this past spring at The New School [S53].
Given the centrality of place to this panel, we might wonder what distinctive conceptions of place these intertwined physical and virtual infrastructures represent.[11] Weâve seen some attempts to [S54] recreate our physical infrastructures online â to simulate stack views and virtual shelves; or to digitally âmirrorâ our on-site exhibitions â but this might not make sense when patrons wonât likely ever encounter special collections materials on those insert grey shelves, and some might not encounter those materials in-person at all. Why adopt these skeuomorphic tropes, why adhere to the âeach book (or box) its place on the shelfâ structure, when the physical and virtual are separate, if intertwined, places, with distinctive, if mutually informing, aesthetics?
[S55]Perhaps one way to reconceive âplaceâ in the special collections interface would be to acknowledge the objectâs provenance, which has been a recurring theme in our discussions over the past few days. Or, in the case of distributed, federated collections, like the DPLA, place might refer, as Blouin recommends, to an objectâs institutional home. Highlighting these distributed institutional responsibilities again serves to advocate for the integral and complementary roles that different institutions play in maintaining our seemingly seamless, placeless web of content.
[S56]We need to acknowledge these myriad, intertwined interfaces and their aesthetics, because we inevitably need to negotiate among them. Those negotiations are driven by space and budget limitations, and stakeholdersâ diverse interests. Prioritizing one â as Beinecke did with spaces of instruction, for example â usually means compromising on others, like storage or conservation. Yet itâs important to recognize that we neednât undertake expensive architectural renovations or massive technological overhauls in order to retrofit our institutionsâ functionality. [S57]A retrofit can involve new, creative, resourceful, economic ways of framing aesthetic experience â physical and/or virtual; small interventions, kits of parts â to accommodate new pedagogies, new approaches to scholarship, and new politics of knowledge.[12]
[1] Gerald Beasley, âCuratorial Crossover: Building Library, Archives, and Museum Collectionsâ RBM 8:1 (Spring 2007): 23.
[2] John Overholt, âFive Theses on the Future of Special Collectionsâ RBM 14:1 (Spring 2013): 15-20.
[3] Francis X. Blouin, Jr., âThoughts on Special Collections and Our Research Communitiesâ RBM 11:1 (Spring 2010): 25. The 2014 World Library and Information Congress promises to feature a session focusing on âinnovative design solutions for the use, presentation, teaching and exhibition of special collections as well as address appropriate security issues and storage facilitiesâ; see âCall for Papers: Session Title: Special Places for Special Collections: for 80th World Library and Information Congress, Lyon France, August 16-22, 2014â: http://blogs.ifla.org/library-buildings-and-equipment/2013/11/29/call-for-papers-session-title-special-places-for-special-collections/
[4] Michele F. Pacifico & Thomas P. Wilsted, Eds., Archival and Special Collections Facilities: Guidelines for Archivists, Librarians, Architects, and Engineers (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009).
[5] Diane Vogt-OâConnor, âArchival and Special Collections Facilities: Guidelines for Archivists, Librarians, Architects, and Engineers,â Helsinkis: IFLA – International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, 2012: http://conference.ifla.org/past/ifla78/programme-and-proceedings-full-printable.htm
[6] Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, Trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
[7] Jae Jennifer Rossman âBuild It and S/He Will Come: A Reflection on Five Years in a Purpose-Built Special Collections Spaceâ RBM 14:2 (Fall 2013): 111-120.
[8] Ellen R. Cordes, âA Response to Traisterâ RBM 7:2 (Fall 2006): 107.
[9] Overholt: 17-18.
[10] C. Davis, personal communication, October 1, 2009.
[11] Beasley acknowledges that, while these distributed digital resources do enhance access, there are certain aesthetic experiences that they preclude, including the objectâs âprovenance, its design, its weight, its size, its color under different light, its smell, its texture, its material, its watermarks, its structure, its binding, its evidence of age, its evidence of use, its evidence of misuse.â Sure, you could create metadata for all these variables â but why not also consider the distinctive affordances and limitations of this digital infrastructure, and allow the digital surrogate to drive patrons to the physical object for the fully embodied aesthetic experience?
[12] This year Iâm partnering with the Architectural League of New York and the Center for an Urban Future to organize a design study of New Yorkâs three public library systemsâ branch libraries; weâre encouraging our competing design teams to consider modular âkits of partsâ that can transform the aesthetics and functionality of branches without requiring major renovations and budgets that the libraries simply donât have.