The Journal accompanies the Sitterwerk Foundation’s newest project «Transfer—Reading Material, Touching Books, Shaping Knowledge,» which focuses on expanding the system of dynamic order. It functions as an online platform that accompanies and reflects on the course of the project and hopes to stimulate further debate. By means of essays, interviews, and emphasizing project highlights, it addresses past, current, and recurring questions regarding the topic of activating archives and libraries, alternative structures of order, and process documentation.
Further developing the dynamic order and expanding it to include design and production processes can both be understood as processes. “In Process” portrays this conceptual and research-based component of the project “Transfer—Reading Material, Touching Books, Shaping Knowledge.” The potential of dynamic order is thus reflected on as a method and the collections activated in the digital space of the Journal in a playful way.
How can processes, books, and materials be organized and put in relation to one another? What hierarchies determine forms for representing knowledge? How must we think about archives and libraries so that they facilitate open spaces for thought as part of the representation of knowledge? What role do digital formats play in mediating contents? How can alternative systems of order generate new knowledge? So many unanswered questions . . . With their texts, artists, authors, librarians, and guests who have stayed in the guest room of the Art Library inspire additional, lateral, and new thinking.
What role can design and production processes—manufacturing techniques, series of experiments, machine-based and manual methods—play as information media in connection with material samples or descriptions of texts in libraries and archives? How are such processes recorded and presented? Particularly because special solutions and creative approaches are required in the day-to-day life of art production, we have consulted employees of the Kunstgiesserei.
“From the Books” brings together relevant and original ideas revolving around the thematic fields of archive, library, structures of order, handcraft, and digitization in an associative and pointed way as an additional, open space for thought.
