Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

not a representation of the actual content (there are no scores or other
musical data) but merely of its complete index. Here too, the author
reflects on the notion of space (both real and virtual): the paper catalogue
is incomparably larger than the actual musical content of the tiny
MP3 player. Significantly, the installation was constructed as a classic
wooden 19th century-style filing card cabinet with a brass knob, reminding
us that the paper catalogues we have been using for centuries
in old libraries can still serve to represent knowledge in a universally
recognisable format – while on the other hand, the actual workings of
something like a hard disk are still completely invisible and arcane to
most of us. This aspect was further emphasised by ordering the cards
chronologically, according to the history of the artist’s listening selections,
thus creating an even closer correspondence between the invisible
data and its paper index.
This physical imbalance between digital content and its physical
(printed) representation is also a theme of two other artworks: Rob
Matthews’ Wikipedia, 287 a 5,000-page book collecting articles featured
on Wikipedia, and Mike Bouchet’s Almost Every City in the World, 288
a 30,000-page “list of almost every city, town, village, or named liv-
ing location in the world”. In the first case, the question we are invited
to reflect upon is mostly one of scale: the content which was invisibly
registered on magnetic memory becomes excessively abundant once it
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Clockwise starting left
Rob Matthews,
Wikipedia, 2009
Mike Bouchet, Almost
Every City in the World,
2005
A detail of the Amazon
Noir installation, 2008