Encyclopedia
November 4 – 27, 2004
Inherent in any collection is the problem of organization. There are currently 137 single still photographs in the Encyclopedia data base and I thought that it would be interesting to organize them using visual armatures here shown as Encyclopedia Map IV, as a baseline plus four iterations.
Surprising analytic structures emerged with the application of a few simple rules. These involved: the original naming of the photographs, imposing an alphabetical hierarchy to the list, and (for example) creating four themes of animals, people, maps, airplanes, then delineating more specific criteria within those themes.
Encyclopedia Map IV was originally conceived to be shown as a video. In addition to that, a more complete presentation would include some of the baseline 137 photographs, previous videos with a respective video print, and this book.
Working on this survey project has helped me to interact with, think about, and speculate upon a small part of the current cultural landscape. I would like to think that in the future there may be some anthropological value as to how things were done in this still growing body of work.
