THE HISTORIOTHEQUE

My Art Studio: What is it, how did we get here, where is it going?

The Historiotheque Concept Design by A.G. © 2016–2023. All Rights Reserved.

Historiotheque

• The Historiothèque is the name that I have given to my Atelier, French for art studio;
• I am in the process of revamping the space and want to annotate, document, and archive the process of putting it together;
• Hopefully, in keeping this record of the building of the first official Historiothèque in human history, others will be able to follow suit and build their own;
• The Historiothèque, the name, is inspired in part by Paul Otlet’s concept of “Mondothèque”, in his conception of the Mundaneum in general;

History of The Historiotheque Concept:

• In the city of Montreal, Quebec, in the summer of 2008, I lived in a duplex with 5–6 other people;
• These people had founded a non-profit organization which “did philanthropy through the arts & culture”;
• They were having their Board Meetings upstairs in my apartment and I was the official Note-Taker;
• I took the minutes and then had a quick 15-minute private meeting with the President to give him a breakdown of what I heard and saw during the meeting;
• I ended up also writing their Mission and Vision statements, for their organization, as well as all of the textual content for their website;
• I was also in charge of information security in the Main Office;
• At one point, I was asked to build an Art Studio or Atelier in a section of the inner courtyard which was covered with a ceiling (the rest of the courtyard was an open space, exposed to the elements);
• In the process of building the Atelier, I came up with the concept of a complete Art-House;
• Others must have had similar concepts before, but my Vision was unique;
• The Art-House was going to have a) an art studio and b) an archive;
• In essence, it would function as a kind of Workspace as well as a Museum of sorts;
• I envisioned the Museum as being The Museum of Modern Antiquity;
• The Art-House would have two floors, one for each storey of the duplex that would house it until we could build our own;
• The Concept For The Art-House quickly became the concept for my own Art Studio, which I came to called The Historiotheque;
• Later, I realized that my Atelier had always been a Historiotheque;
• That is to say, I had been living in, and then moving, my Art Operation in a studio space, i.e. The Historiotheque;

What is the Historiotheque?:

• The term Historiotheque is a term I made up, basing myself on the Greek ἵστωρ (hístōr, “witness”) and θήκη (thḗkē, “box, chest”), essentially making it a Witness-Box;
• The simple idea was as with the original conception of the Art-House, namely, that it would house a studio space a.k.a. The Art Operation as well as an active Archive;
• The Archive would contain the entire documentary of the Historiotheque as well as kind of be a History-House for the local culture of The Historiotheque, and by active archive I meant that you would have archivists working in the archives every day;
• The Archivists would have the basic function of bringing value to the archive, essentially being like a Library for all the Documentation of the art practices and work methods of The Historiotheque;
• In my new vision of The Historiotheque, you could have a multiplicity of Historiotheques distributed across the land;
• It was a new kind of Cultural Institution, similar to a Museum, Art Gallery, Historical Society, and Art Studio/Atelier, yet different;
• What made it different was that you had both The Art Operation AND Archives housed in the same building;
• Later on, closer to 2009–2010, I began working with another non-profit organization which had a Workshop Space;
• I tried to integrate myself into the Team, but was never really able to do anything concrete with them;
• I did want to provide my services to clean up and rearrange their Workspace to make it more efficient and streamlined;
• I had been studying the principles and theory of Axiomatic Design and wanted to apply these to their Workspace;
• I never got to doing this, so I just focused on my own Workspace and so founded the first official Historiotheque;

What happened after that?:

• Then what happened is that I designed my workspace to be MODULAR, with what I called variable geometry, to borrow a term once used in Quebec for a new theater they built;
• The space was modular in the sense that I could rearrange and reorganize the space any way I wanted, to do anything I wanted;
• The space was an Art Studio/Atelier during the day, and a Recording Studio/Sound Laboratory at night;
• I had already come up with a Vision Statement years prior for what I called The DesignWebLabs, which I called THE PILLARS OF DESIGN, a name which I later found out someone else had begun using, so I scrapped that idea;
• I wanted the DesignWebLabs to literally be a design studio, for visual and sound design, that was distributed over space, over any amount of space, i.e. Globally and so forth;
• All the design work would be done over the Internet, so in essence it was a Distributed Virtual Workspace;
• When that idea failed, after writing a functional specification, sharing it online, and trying to get people to help work on this Project, I took the Web out of WebLabs and just made it a Design Lab, which I called my Laboratory or Art Operations Control Center, or just Art Operation;

Where is it going?:

• The Historiotheque has been in a new location for the last 7 years;
• It was the first thing I set up when I moved here, the Studio Space AND the Archives;
• Now it’s running The Historiotheque Official Release v.3.0.2;
• The Official Releases are like the Operating System for the Art Operation;
  I’m going over the Archives with a fine-tooth comb, looking at all of the interdisciplinary art-research projects to find all the golden nuggets that resurface;
• I am publishing new and old works almost daily on social media, mostly images with accompanying, elucidating text, but also music and sound design;
• I’m also working on brand new projects which will officially be launching soon;
• I’m trying to write longer pieces on Medium about the complex conceptual systems behind The Historiotheque and its many Projects;
• More to come…

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A.G. © 2016–2023. All Rights Reserved.