Before I knew nothing about the New York gallery American Fine Arts, Co. which was founded and headed by Colin de Land (1955-2003)! But I was attracted by the Walter Benjamin quote in the title of the talk. Through the talk and the visit of the exhibition I learnt that the library of the gallery has been transferred to Germany and was shown during the exhibiton. During the talk and the discussion afterwards interesting statements and questions have been raised:

• Has the collection/library lost its subject when the galery was closed after the dead of the founder?
• The statement "The library is a document" brought to my mind Michael Buckland’s papers "What is a document?" and "What is a ‘digital document’?"
• When is a collection of books called a library?
• The American Fine Arts library has also been used a little bit like a public library when artists borrowed books for their work.
• The library now, can it be viewed itself as a work of art, as an artifact?
• Can the library now be viewed as self-contained actant in the sense of Bruno Latour? (See also a post about Latour in my German blog)
• The smallest book in the library has been a little books about dogs, "Das kleine Hundebuch" from the publisher Heyne, which was shown during the talk.

More on the gallery American Fine Arts, Co. see here: "American Fine Arts – If culture means anything" curated by James Fuentes, essay by Jackie McAllister.

But art is made by people, isn’t it!?

Some videos on this special piece of art and also the descriptions of the other artworks can be viewed at the website.

The art project was "part of Leuphana University’s orientation programme for new students".

Starting their study at Leuphana, students have the so-called Leuphana Semester which is unique for German universities and also includes special introductions into scholarly work as well as the promotion of information literacy.

The article is available at the personal website of Roald Hoffmann who contains some further interesting articles on art or poetry and science, teaching and research, e.g.:

• Thoughts on Aesthetics and Visualization In Chemistry, Hyle 9(1), 7-10 (2003)
• Under the Surface of the Chemical Article, Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed., 27, 1593-1602 (1988)

In the writings of the film maker Joost Rekveld articles can be found with titles like “Symmetry and Harmonics” or “Transformations of Colour”.

See also Catarina Caetano da Rosa’s German paper with the title “Bibliotheken von Babel: Wunsch- und Albtraum des unendlichen Wissensraumes (Libraries of Babel: great dream and nightmare of the infinite knowledge space)” at the Workshop called “Architekturen der digitalen Weltbibliothek aus historischer und aktueller Perspektive (Architectures of the digital world library from a historical and actual view)” at a computer sciences conference in Germany in 2007 (37. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)).

Hierarchy is an entrenched social concept. The Internet however, presents the possibility of envisioning social relations as a level or ‘flat’ configuration. The Internet fosters relationships that are networked, heterogeneous and horizontally distributed. This article contemplates the surface features of networked structures like the Internet by using topographic imagery.

“Creations and Structures – Relation between art and science” is the title of an excerpt of a bilangual book by Dietrich Schulze (Viaduct : Kunst und Wissenschaft – Art and Science. Dresden : Saxonia-Verl. für Recht, Wirtschaft und Kultur, 2006). Ostwald is mentioned!

The conference itself has been a place of Creative Combinatorics. Architects, computer scientists, engineers, information specialists, historians of art, historians of science, librarians, urban planners exchanged their views on analogous, virtual and digital spaces, on structure, form and architecture in information, knowledge and memory as well as on intellectual and social networks. The conference itself gives form and structure to a community of people which similar interests starting from a Belgian Renaissance Man and polymath Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and his activities, a community which met the first time in 2002 at Mons for a colloquium at the Mundaneum with the title “Architecture of Knowledge: the Mundaneum and European Antecedents of the World Wide Web” and the second time in 2005 at Urbana-Champaign within a conference titled “European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the past”.

Personal pictures from the conference and the tour that followed:

• Ghent conference pictures
• Tour: Visiting the traces of Paul Otlet

Creative combinatorics is the subject of this blog as well as this blog is a way to explore this subject through creative combinatorics. So feel free to browse through using the categories or tags on the right or use the contents page which gives a short systematic overview.