LOGISTICS OF THE HISTORIOTHÈQUE
The Workspace Surfaces & Stacks-Project @ The Historiothèque by A.G.
I. THE CHANGING 3D SURFACE OF THE HISTORIOTHÈQUE:
- The Historiothèque, my art studio and research/sound design laboratories, are an abstract “WORKSPACE”;
- The Workspace is treated essentially as a “3D Surface” or “Curve”, called a “Historiotope” or “Historiotopia”;
- That is to say, the Historiotope or Historiotopia is the three-dimensional configuration of the Workspace (Historiothèque) at any given moment in time;
- The Art Operation at the Historiothèque, orchestrated by the Chief Art Operator, A.G., is a complex and multifaceted endeavor, functioning as a unique amalgamation of art studio, office, and creative space. At its core, it revolves around the concept of “Historiotopia,” representing the ever-changing three-dimensional surface of the workspace;
- The Ever-Changing Workspace: The Historiotopia encapsulates the current state of the workspace, subject to constant change. Each day, the workspace exists in a particular configuration, denoted as a “work-state.” Notably, the transition from one work-state to another is marked by an appreciable change or “delta.” The concept of adiabatic accessibility ensures that each subsequent state is reachable from its predecessor through interactions with the environment;
- Deltas in the Workspace: Deltas, symbolized by Δ, signify changes occurring over time within the workspace. These changes are integral to the artistic process, resembling a mutation process denoted by the function M, where M(A) produces a mutated workspace A’ (“A’ = M(A)”.) This emphasizes the importance of being hyper-sensitive to changes as they signal essential developments and contribute to the evolution of the workspace.
II. “SORTING” THROUGH STACKS VIA SPONTANEOUS ORGANIZATION ALGORITHMS
- The Art Operator looks upon or sees into the evolving, abstract Workspace an its many continuously changing Work-States;
- It is a form of Abstract Cartography, seeing through the many self-presenting geo-grammatical forms, i.e. the Surfacesas-Floating-Land-Masses Inspire New Concepts, Projects, Series, Sub-Series, and Collections;
- Scan The Surface of The Historiotope: The 3D Workspace only has “Surfaces” exposed; scan the “surfaces” for orientation/re-orientation in the Workspace (SEE: Mircea Eliade, “A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries”, the concept of “orientatio”);
- Take work off the nearest, most “proximate” surface; choose a task pseudo-randomly; work on task for 5–10 or 15 minutes; switch tasks every so often, indefinitely;
- SEE: “Dynamic Task Assignment in the Creative Workspace: Unraveling the Switchboard Method”.;
- “The Switchboard Method” is much more productive and it eliminates time spent in decision/indecivions/expectation — is essentially a “decisionless” process — and avoids unnecessary “waiting-times”;
- Game Theory in The Workspace: An iterative game between an Art Operator, their Art Operation, Workspace, Task List, and The Constraints of Space, Time, and Potential Interruptions in Flow States;
- SEE: “Strategic Intermedia Arts” => “One move at a time. Humanity, please.” => “Hang the painting, not the painter.”; it’s called “intermedia” because it is the connecting-point or “fulcrum” BETWEEN disciplines, not “multimedia” but “intermedia”; it is “strategic” because it’s a form of “Information Operations Art” or “Info-Ops Art”, because art must always be “communicated”;
- The A.G.-Method, dubbed “ALX”, a finite number of “moves”, an iterative, serial, project-based “Game”;
- Binary choices such as for every task that Surfaces; from the Work-Surface, or Historiotope, which is made up of sedimentary layers, or “Stacks”, i.e. to work (on it) or not to work (on task), i.e. also the choice between dichotomous options dissolves the “mystery” or “paradox” (SEE: Kierkegaard);
- Strategic Intermedia Art: “Info-Ops Art” => “One move at a time.”; The Art Operator is playing a game against: space and time, other constraints (“resistance in the materials”), factors of organization/disorganization of the Creative Work-System and the changing surface of the Workspace or Historiotopia, also working “against” History or the “Archive”, working against immanence/immanent reality;
- It is a game of strategic interaction with time and space and the anxieties of their existence; The Historiothèque or “Witness-Box” is likened to a “mobile lifestreaming radio station”.
- “Sorting” in the Historiothèque Work-Space means actually moving “Stacks” of books and piles of papers/folders around; it also involves the organization/re-organization of collections of index cards tentatively called “CARDBOXES”, as well as all the other “raw materials” of the Art Operation, i.e. art materials, paintings, and materials in the Archive;
- As we will see in the next section, this algorithmic implementing of things like “Sorting” in the physical Workspace of The Historiothèque, is taking concepts and structures from theoretical computer science and applying them to the contemporary Art Operation.
III. “THE DATATYPES PROJECT”; OR, ABSTRACT ASSEMBLY
- I think that I explained this project very well in my original formulation of “The Datatypes Project” back in May, 2013, on the Datatypes blog:
“After my Writing-Without-Writing Project, it became clear to me — esp. when I began coding — that Code was just Text and that Text was fundamentally a Social Object around which people and meanings could gather. That is, however complex a piece of software might be, it can still be printed onto paper, meaning that it is textual. Even more so, it is textual be design and specification: A line of code is made up of characters of a given alphabet, something which hasn’t changed since clay tablets were being inscribed with cuneiform script by ancient Sumerians of the 4th millennium BC. The only real difference is we traded the clay tablet and reed stylus for a keyboard and a computer.
“Text, then, as written language, is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Writing systems may change, but Text stays the same.
“Therefore, what will heretofore be referred to as “The Datatypes Project” is really an extension of the “Writing-Without-Writing” Project, which was an extension of “The History-Project”, which in turn was an extension of “The Exhibition in Tonal Cinema” Project. For the last 20+ years, I have been working on strategic intermedia art projects; intermedia because I am committing to a singular Expression through at least three different media, Word, Image, and Sound; strategic because the underlying concepts — the “Message” to be expounded — were carefully chosen through a critical process of discourse analysis, media ecology, and other “Critiques of Currentness”. The Datatypes Project is the culmination of this work where I will try a hand at a new kind of Abstraction: a cross between multiple forms of Abstraction, from abstraction in mathematics, to abstraction in computer science (ex. data abstraction), to abstraction in philosophy and in arts & culture.
“In other words, I want to make “abstraction” of “abstraction” itself, break it down into its components, its constituent parts, and visualize “abstract data types” in an aesthetic, painterly manner. I want to make my paintings a form of information design, themselves a kind of “abstract machine” whose language and mechanics are the language and mechanics of Painting.” — Ref. “The Datatypes Project: Abstract Assembly”.
- What I wanted to do was taking data types and data structures from theoretical computer science and mathematics and “explain” them or “expound” on them using analogies from every day life;
- For instance, in the case of “The Stacks-Project”, I’m taking the actual “stack” abstract data type — serving as a collection of elements — and finding examples of it in my Workspace;
- In this sense, I am performing a kind of “sorting algorithm” when I manage and maintain my archive, as well as when I do research, manipulating actual “stacks” of books and folders of notes, and boxes of index cards as well; I’m ACTUALLY sorting, classifying, tagging, documenting, not only my PRACTICE, but the actual CONTENT OF THE ARCHIVE; so I am also DOCUMENTING THE DOCUMENTATION PROCESS;
- It’s all about ORDER(s) and DISORDER; the configuration of work-states of The Historiothèque is more or less always in a state of high complexity and disorder/entropy; as it grows more complex, its entropy and disorder go up; up beyond a certain “complexity ceiling”, where that level of complexity can no longer be sustained, i.e. new energy inputs cannot be found, then THE COMPLEXITY HAS A FUNCTIONAL COLLAPSE;
- I then clean up the art studio and office space, I “close down” The Historiothèque and keep it closed until I “start it back up” in the next Season; SEE: “Relaunch and Subsequent Closing Down of The Historiotheque Semantic Version 3.0.4.”; SEE ALSO: “Official Declaration of Production-Year 2024–2025” AND “Official Declaration of Production-Year 2025–2026";
- More to come… (“On Experiment in Spontaneous Creation of Organizational Heuristics”).
A.G. © 2023. All Rights Reserved.
