Mondotheque

A five day research meeting, a wiki-source sprint (September 2015 in Mons/Bergen, Brussels and Ghent) and e-publication (February 2016).
http://mondotheque.be

Mondotheque is a platform for experiments with the legacy of Paul Otlet: drawings, images, systems, ideas.

The  Mondotheque project is inspired by the obstinate spirit of Belgian universalist and documentalist Paul Otlet,  and wants to look at the way knowledge is managed and distributed today  in a way that allows us to  invent other futures and  different narrations of the past. Figure of Otlet as a site/prism to look at intersections of technology, local/global politics, utopian projections on connected knowledge. In context of Google, digital era, Internet on paper. Mons 2015: culture, economy, urbanism. Developing other viable options for reading and writing with and against information technologies.

The project is named after La Mondothèque, Otlet's design for an imaginary device, a research machine that would be at the same time archive, instrument, workstation, catalog and broadcasting machine. To broadcast the archive. Remix.

Background: In 1944, the Belgian universalist and documentalist Paul Otlet died as a disillusioned man. In his lifetime he only partially realized The Mundaneum, an encyclopedic survey of human knowledge, which would ‘progressively constitute a permanent and complete representation of the entire world’. In 2013, The Mundaneum, care-takers of the remains of his archive since it moved to Mons (Bergen), started a collaboration with Google. Recently, Otlet is being rediscovered and rebranded as ‘a founding father of the Internet’. Mons is located in a former mining area in the south of Belgium, hometown of former Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo, but also conveniently located next to Google's largest datacenter in Europe.

Temporality: Mons 2015 Cultural Capital + Otlet oeuvre in Public Domain since 01/01/2015

Methodology: Mondotheque as a project is a artistic 'research machine'. Critical exploration of messy entanglements. Worksession = creating a working environment to gather different types of expertise around a shared interest. Outcomes: prototypes, not finished projects. 
Need to collaborate between technologists, artists, historians.

Interconnected subjects: Media materiality of the (digital) archive, Dreams of universally accessible knowledge, Capital culture/cultural capital and corporate patronage

Initiated by Brussels association for arts and media Constant, in collaboration with numerous international partners who hosted preparatorial meetings, sollicited articles and presentations and will follow up and fuel results through critical interrogation. 
Project involves multiple international partners because not just a local issue, relevance/urgency.

Location: in the archives of the Mundaneum/new building (Mons, Belgium), at Arts2 and in Boekentoren Ghent.
Mondotheque workssession

An international gathering of developers, designers, historians, artists and librarians exploring the potential of The Mundaneum for rethinking information systems (politics, materials, technologies) today. A pre-meeting took place at Schloss Solitude in February 2015 and lead to the establishment of a research platform http://mondotheque.be (see timeline).

Interventions/contributions through lectures/presentations; tests for articles later to be published in e-publication. Excursion to data-center and archives.

Maximum 25 participants; 20 by invitation plus 5 through an international Open Call.

Working language: English

Topics and temporary collaborations established on site. Some elements of the worksession:

Thread: À la recherche de l'UDC
The  Universal Decimal Classification system that Paul Otlet developed with Henri Lafontaine from 1905 onwards, is still in use. Explorations of the multi-directional system, thinking through it's relevance and relations to technologies of today such as 'semantic web' and RDF (Resource Description Framework, possibly in contrast with data-mining/knowledsge discovery technologies. Semantic media-wiki, 
http://islandora.ca/
http://librecat.org/
Prepared by: Nicolas Malevé, Dries Moreels

Thread: Digital objects in the archive
Scraping culture, computer vision, scanning documents, scan vs. document. Scale, zoom. Image processing algorithms. Networked image.
Prepared by: Michael Murtaugh

Thread: Treating the traité
New scan by UGent. Experiments with book on the digital book.
Prepared by: Alexia de Visscher

Thread: We don't live in this kind of world
Experiences with/against corporate collaboration around digitisation and Free Culture, entanglements between access and (corporate) power.
Prepared by: ShinJoung  Yeo + Femke Snelting

Other ideas:
Anatomy of a query
Re-imagining/reconstructing/re-enacting  the material conditions for a search executed with the help of paper  cards and delivered by telegraph.

Guests

*Lori  Emerson (works at  the Department of English at the University of  Colorado at Boulder and  is Director of the Media Archaeology Lab.  She  writes about media  poetics as well as the history of computing, media   archaeology, media  theory, and digital humanities)
*Dries Moreels (Development & Innovation Coordinator at Ghent University Library)
*Delphine Jenard (Adjunct-director of Mundaneum, responsible for managing partnership with Google)
*Stéphanie Manfroid (Responsible archivist at Mundaneum)

Participants

*ShinJoung Yeo (Researcher at The Graduate School of Library & Information    Science,  Department of Communication, University of Illinois.   Published  with Dan  Schiller: Powered by Google?. USA)
*Robert M. Ochshorn (studied computer science at the Cornell University in  Ithaca, NY/USA. He worked as a research assistant with Krysztof Wodiczko in the Interrogative Design Group at MIT and Harvard. His background includes media and journalism, electrical engineering, and activism. USA)
*Tomislav Medak (philosopher with interests in contemporary political philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He co-ordinates the theory program and publishing activities of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA, is a free software and free culture advocate, an urban activist and author and performer with the Zagreb based theatre collective BADco. Croatia)
*Alexia de Visscher
*Nicolas Maleve (artist, researcher, data activist, Spain/Belgium)
*Dick Reckard (hangs around at the bordering territories between politics, technology and art. Belgium/Italy)
*Dušan Barok (artist, writer and cultural activist involved in critical practise in the fields of software, art, and theory. Norway/Slovakia)
*Natacha Roussel (artist, researcher. France/Belgium)
*Catherine Lenoble (author. France/Belgium)
*An Mertens (author, storyteller. Belgium)
*Sînziana Paltineanu (historian, filolegist and novelist. Romania/Germany)
*Femke Snelting (designer, artist developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and Free Software. Belgium/The Netherlands)
*Michael Murtaugh (Belgium/USA)
*Silvio Lorusso (artist and designer, investigating experimental publishing informed by digital technology. Italy/The Netherlands)
*Ludivine Loiseau (designer, typographer, amateur bookbinder. Belgium/France)
*Pierre Huyghebaert (Belgium)
*Loraine Furter (Belgium/France)
*Barbora Sediva (Slovakia)
*Annet Dekker (The Netherlands)
*Marcell Mars (Croatia/Germany)
*Ippolita collective (Italy)
*Open Call
*Open Call
*Open Call
*Open Call
*Open Call

Participant(s) from Hamina (South of Finland) ?? (= partner with Google and Mundaneum; 'has a data-center too')


Treating the traité (Traitement du traité)

Wiki-source sprint with participants from Arts² École supérieure des arts (Mons), Ecole de recherche graphique (Brussels), La Cambre (Brussels). 
Find collaboration with Wiki-source.
Working language: French
Location: Arts²

*Bookscanning workshop
*Wiki-source sprint, completing https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Trait%C3%A9_de_documentation
*Experiments with digital/physical readings of Le Livre sur le livre

Coordination: Alexia de Visscher + Michel Cleempoel

Digital publication: Mondothèque

An experimental e-pub, a Mondotheque of sorts. Context: post-digital print, from Semantic MediaWiki to e-pub
Contributions in FR, EN + NL, images. 
Editor: Constant Verlag. 
Published under a Free Art License http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/
Distributed through platforms such as http://p-dpa.net

Editing and design: Femke Snelting, Alexia de Visscher

*Scraping culture RMO + Michael Murtaugh research report
*À la recherche de l'UDC Alexia de Visscher + Nicolas Maleve research report
*L'"afrique" aux "noirs" Text by Paul Otlet re-published with an introductionary note from Bambi Cueppens
*The empathic archive. Sinzeana Paltineamu. Nationalism and Eurocentrism, archives, feminism (fiction?)
*Radical libraries/librarians ShinJoung Yeo
*We don't live in this kind of world Transcription/edit discussions with University Library of Ghent, Royal Library, Mundaneum.
*Mundaneum meets cybernetics Dick Reckard
*Ideographies of mapping knowlegde Dusan Barok (or: 4AM – Barbora Sediva / Dusan Barok). Article based on/resulting from residency http://www.mons2015.eu/en/node/869
*Fathers of the internet Femke Snelting
*Capital culture (Tomislav Medak?)

Partners

*MAMMA (Zagreb, Croatia) Public Library project/memoryoftheworld.org + presentation (support letter)
*Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany) Research support (support letter?)
*Constant (Brussels, Belgium) -- Technical and production support (support letter)
*Mundaneum (Mons, Belgium) -- Archive materials, presentations, expertise
*Ghent University Library (Ghent, Belgium)
*Piet Zwart Media Design (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) -- Publication and participants
*Bergen Center for Electronic Arts (Bergen, Norway) -- Presentation and publication (support letter)
*Wikimedia Belgium/Wikisource -- technical support sprint
*Arts², École supérieure des arts (Mons) -- Hosting worksession and sprint

Timeline

2013
December
Fathers of the internet (presentation, Verbindingen/Jonctions, Brussels)

2014
May
Public Library meeting
Otlet Walk

November
Public Library event (presentation, Stuttgart)

2015
February
Mondotheque pre-meeting (meeting, Akademie Schloss-Solitude, Stuttgart)

March
Internet on paper (presentation, Bergen Center for Electronic Arts)

May 
Public Library festival (presentation, Mamma, Zagreb)

September
Worksession + wiki-sprint (not 

December
Editorial meeting (meeting, Akademie Schloss-Solitude, Stuttgart)

2016
February
e-publication Mondotheque