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.

The post Looking through a window on an unpacked library! first appeared on Creative Combinatorics.

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)

The post Combinatorics and art in chemistry first appeared on Creative Combinatorics.

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)).

The post Combinatorics and the Library of Babel by Borges first appeared on Creative Combinatorics.

The post The private library of Wilhelm Ostwald in Großbothen first appeared on Creative Combinatorics.