Class Description

Cataloged Responses: Archives and Libraries as Laboratories

Librarians and archivists manage and mediate information, and thus will furnish access to your production in the future, whether you are self-conscious of it or not: your books, videos, letters, photographs, MP3s, etc. All of the information and data which will ultimately amount to knowledge of and about you is analyzed and mapped by these individuals according to time-tested professional standards.

Some artists are fascinated with this, and/or stand it on its head – registering an ISBN number for a stone, performing traceable library acts, creating unbound signatures (book sections) in lieu of a finished book for the user to finish, for example. The conversations that art librarians are having with artists alight on issues like the difference between the videos on their websites and the editioned ones that gallery prices place out of reach of a research and reference context.

Ultimately, artists must wrestle with many of the same issues as librarians – ideas of distribution, audience access and preservation.

This will be a conversation about how the art and science of organization and access provide a well-spring of possibilities for the artist to think in new ways about the library catalog and an opportunity engage meaningfully with it.

The objective of the class is to expand the artists-librarian dialog and commemorate the effort by creating a work that responds to/engages with an online public access catalog [OPAC].