– A Series of Workshops on Site-specific Vocabulary
In the workshop series «Art Production Language,» we tried out the idea of developing a site-specific vocabulary for the Kunstgiesserei, Kunstbibliothek, and Werkstoffarchiv and interrogating its potential. The intention was to clarify what terms are central for the location: a place that is both a collection and an art library, both a material archive and a research center—where, artworks made from various materials are produced and restored in the nearby Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen. The Sitterwerk Foundation and the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen, and thus processes relating to providing services, mediation, research, and production, reciprocally permeate and are reciprocally related to one another. Is it possible to depict the knowledge on site and to make it able to be found in the catalogue by means of a site-specific vocabulary, and hence to create new approaches to the collections? With what search terms do we find contents? What might a site-specific vocabulary portray, and what not? On what categories is it based? Can we come up with new categories and keywords that are characteristic for the location and its collections?
Since being established in 2006, the Sitterwerk Foundation has endeavored to mediate knowledge based on a non-hierarchical structure, for which we thank, et al., the dynamic order developed here. As a result of its collection of books and materials, as well as its proximity to the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen—and thus to a production site for contemporary art—the Sitterwerk Foundation regards itself much more as a competence center for questions relating to material, art, and production than as a pure locus of memory. The mediation and generation of knowledge are interwoven on the one hand through the use of the Art Library and the Material Archive, and on the other as a result of the exchange with the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen. With the aim of expanding the system of dynamic order, we are increasingly asking ourselves the question of where orders and hierarchies arise, how they manifest, which orders they are and how we can react to them, where we can find innovative forms for acquiring and preserving knowledge and can create alternative approaches to accessing information as well as new narratives.
The dynamic order depicts the physical arrangement of the books on the shelves. They can be taken from the shelves at random and put back on the shelves again in new combinations. The personal handsets that remain behind invite visitors to immerse themselves in this research on the shelves and to encounter both thematically related titles as well as the surprising and the unexpected. When we want to find a specific title, material, or literature on a thematic area, the search is structured in a different way. What we find depends not only on the accuracy of the terms entered, but also, et al., on the keywords saved in connection with the objects.
Keywords in library catalogues are, however, never neutral, since they label, classify, and index. An act of interpretation is thus connected with them. They frame and define how books and materials are found—and, to a certain extent, how they are read as well. They are what we regard as part of systems of order in libraries and archives, consult as the smallest building blocks of catalogues, and want to put in relation to the search on the shelves through shedding light on various practices of searching and finding. Central to this is the question of a system of keywords that, analogously to the dynamic order, facilitates not only the matches desired, but also surprising and unexpected discoveries, and can be used contrary to its actual function.
“Site-specific Vocabulary: Crafting and Production Processes,” March 31, 2021
In the first workshop, “Site-specific Vocabulary: Crafting and Production Processes,” we addressed questions regarding what we want to know about particular production and crafting techniques and how we arrive at this knowledge. Under the leadership of the information scientist Jasna Zwimpfer, we, along with our guests Hanna Baro, Michael Günzburger, Julia Lütolf, Franca Mader, Lothar Schmitt, Mara Züst, and employees of the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen, as well as an interested public, jointly reflected on identifying concrete process-related terms. One question that arose was where we can situate this vocabulary in the Art Library and the Material Archive, how it becomes visible and can be used, and what function it fulfills for us. On the one hand, a site-specific vocabulary must be familiar to external users, thus visible or even annotated so that external users are able to make use of the corresponding terms. On the other, it must, however, also be linked with the holdings, which are embedded, owing to the circumstances, in a standard keyword abstracting.
Keywords are guides to how information is interconnected. But are words themselves the only option? At the beginning of a search—even if what are concerned are questions relating to production possibilities—we generally do not know what exactly we are and/or should be searching. Which process, which material will lead us to the result desired, and how do we find the information corresponding to it? Might videos, interviews, or animations that illustrate or present processes and production techniques become elements of an alternative system of keywords and give rise to new points of access?
“Site-specific Vocabulary: Books,” April 29, 2021
The focus of the second workshop, “Site-specific Vocabulary: Books,” was on searching on the shelves, in which we took a targeted look at mechanisms that influence how we search. In the first part of the workshop, we invited our guests, Anne-Laure Franchette, Roland Früh, Franziska Koch & A. Frei, Izet Sheshivari, Jan Steinbach, and Gloria Wismer, to create compilations of books and to observe how they searched for them: Why do we take a book from the shelves? How do we structure our search when it takes place directly on the shelves, and how to we come across related titles? Where do searching in the catalogue and searching on the shelves enter into interplay, and/or as of which moment to we begin to translate the individual criteria into categories and terms? In the second, public part of the workshop, they shared their reflections and we jointly discussed moments when meandering along the bookshelves turns into a systematizing of the act of searching. In the Art Library, searching on the shelves facilitates a type of access that the catalogue does not, since it makes the traces of previous users visible, brings to light aesthetic, haptic, or content-related similarities that one is able to understand through moving in the space, through seeing and touching. Izet Sheshivari, a graphic designer and founder of Boabooks, thus showed fascinating approaches and the differences between the database and the shelves. A central moment of both systematizing and the interface between the holdings and the database is how they are put into words. The artists Franziska Koch and A. Frei addressed the challenges that arise in the forming of categories. They asked questions regarding which specific selection we are searching through here, in which narrative the contents are embedded, and which order we adhere to. They emphasized that what is in a specific library is just as central as what is not.
“Site-specific Vocabulary: The Catalogue,” May 20, 2021
The question regarding the conditions of the site-specific, as it was considered in the second workshop, was addressed in the third and final workshop, “Site-specific Vocabulary: The Catalogue,” which was led by the artist and author Lucie Kolb. The focus was on the library catalogue, the database, in which books are found through searching for titles, keywords, and other metadata. Guided by the question of how a site-specific vocabulary can be reflected in the catalogue, we discussed fundamental questions regarding the requirements of the catalogue. Central to this was the recognition that the traditional library catalogue has limited possibilities to depict context, i.e. the site-specific, or the complex structure of the Sitterwerk as a site, which comprises the location, the architecture, the individuals, as well as the history of the library and the examination of alternative systems of order and dynamic order. Along with an interested public and our guests, Philipp Messner, Axelle Stiefel, Eva Weinmayr, and Jasna Zwimpfer, against this backdrop, we took a closer look at the catalogue as an instrument that depicts socially and historically developed systems of order, so as to elaborate possibilities for how, on the one hand, the foundations of the catalogue, which determine how we search, can be made readable for users, and, on the other, how context might be brought into the library catalogue.
The workshop series gave rise to many ideas that will also occupy us in the ongoing development of the project to further develop the Werkbank and the dynamic system of order. In particular, we will work further on the question of a readable and writable catalogue in the exhibition “Reading the Library,” which will be presented from August 29 to November 7, 2021.