BLACKTOP DOCUMENTS

"Order is... the hidden network that determines the way [things] confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression."

- Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

The ordering devices on which our public libraries are based have sedimented within themselves the promise of something more than mere orderliness. These devices represent centuries of attempts to catalog, and thus know, the All of the universe.

As a storehouse of knowledge and the means to its access, the public library embodies the exploding new infrastructure of information. The concept for this conjectural public art plan is to make visible and legible a library's functions of collecting, storing, classifying, and displaying information. The spine of the plan is a system of order that contains its own microcosmic universe. This system is based on categories of "knowledge" by which to classify art. The categories already used by most library catalogs are the foundation of this order. Categories inclusive of fantasy and unusual specificity are also admitted. By linking together all of these categories, spanning the scientific to the imaginary, the system of order transgresses the boundaries which society places around knowledge. This shifts the consciousness through which we regard the All of the universe, and opens the infrastructure of information to new realms of possibility.

The system of order is expressed on three different levels in this art plan, and allows for participation by numerous artists. The first level is through two-dimensional and literary art, thousands of examples of which shall be solicited from artists. Each artwork shall be made to fall under one of the categories, resulting in a myriad of interpretations of what constitutes the particular "knowledge" of each category. All of the pieces shall be the same size. This vast collection of drawings, paintings, photographs, designs, and short written pieces shall be stored and displayed in two ways, both of which allow for periodic updates of the art.

The first housing device is a filing cabinet of sorts, with separate drawers for the various classifications of order. In each drawer all of the art devoted to one specific category shall be stored. The viewer can pull out the drawers and flip through the art like he or she might peruse a card catalog or a book. This cabinet of visual information shall reflect at a microcosmic level the architecture of the library.

The second manner of housing the two-dimensional and literary art is as part of the library’s world wide web site. Programmed by computer, the ordering system becomes an enormous network of linkages. Each individual piece shall be coded with cross-references so that into a singular universe a welter of disharmonious evidentia of knowledge is indexed.

In housing the exact same information, the two separate devices of storage and display speak to this moment in which information is transitioning from the real to the virtual. The first device looks back at the history of systematizing knowledge, and the second looks to its future.

If the categories of order are the skeleton of the public art plan, this collection of two-dimensional art is its DNA. The artwork that comprises the second and third levels of art builds upon what is expressed in this first level.

The second level of art is sculptural. Each category of knowledge is assigned to a separate individual artist. The artist then studies the examples of two-dimensional art that have been collected for his or her particular category, and uses that visual information as code for a sculptural interpretation of that class of knowledge.

The individual sculptures shall be unified by materials and/or size, so as to elicit a cohesive representation of the universe of knowledge. This system of artwork is integrated into functional parts of the building. Each sculpture lends its particular form of "knowledge" to the building part that constitutes its site, resulting in a weaving together of the visual intelligences of the building and the artwork.

The third level of art is spatial. Here one artist is assigned the task of creating a spatial artwork which incorporates all of the categories of order. This space is the part of the art program that most physically actualizes a microcosm of the universe. It also acts as a folly to the ordering system. In the first two levels of art, the categories of order are kept discrete. Here the orders blend together into a real All of knowledge. This All incorporates a dialectical tension between the library's poles of order and disorder. Philosopher Walter Benjamin says that the counterpart to any systematic catalog of a collection of books is its simultaneous inherent confusion. Despite the library's compulsion to order knowledge, it is within the chaos of information that much inspiration is discovered.