2017, fibreboards, sheet metal, magnets, approx. 42,000 cards, height approx. 148 cm, width approx. 77 cm, depth approx. 23 cm. (DRAX)

No. 1 from the limited edition of 7.

Exhibited:
Spazio Pulpo, Vienna, 2017 Vienna Design Week

“A computer before the computer: The question of how to systematically organise knowledge has existed ever since knowledge has been archived and made retrievable. When the knowledge captured in writing became too big to be memorised by a single person, people began compiling excerpts of relevant passages from books and store them away in boxes using reference systems. The administrators of said boxes became the leading polymaths of their time. They grew and evolved hand in hand with the complexity of their external memories. The best example is probably the systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, with his legendary index card box. An external extension of his own brain, the index card box became a fundamental pillar for him to rest on, which led him to the recognition that he could no longer work without his index card box. Luhmann collected and cross-referenced the entire knowledge accumulated during his own reading on more than 90,000 cards, complementing it with his own notes and interpretations. “Without my cards, that is, solely by thought, I would not have arrived at such ideas,” Luhmann once said when asked about his work and the role the index card box had in it. For him, the index card box represented a second memory and became an autonomous partner with which to communicate and which grew and ramified over time, developing into an adaptive artificial intelligence in the form of plain wood and paper. Similar to a constantly growing construction set, its basic elements imply infinite possibilities of logical and illogical reference variants – components networking, coordinating and recreating like synapses. The system therefore not only archives connections, but constantly creates new ones. Based on an associative and thus profoundly human approach to work and archiving, the index card box maintains its specific disorder – something like a human character.”
(breadedEscalope)