Virtual Machines: Culture, telematics, and the architecture of information at Centre Beaubourg, 1968-1977
This doctoral dissertation examines the way in which the architecture of the library and museum in the late 1960s was conceived as a technology for the organization and dissemination of cultural information. It considers the overall history of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, from its origins in the mid-1960s to its opening in 1977. In particular, it looks at ways in which the verbal, graphic, and built statements of the project’s creators, apologists, and critics engaged the discourses of the post-industrial information society. [More...]
The early 20th century World-wide Web
The New York Times recently ran this feature on Paul Otlet, the Belgian information scientist and utopianist. You can also view a short documentary on Otlet that was made for Dutch television here. The article is a helpful overview, cribbing primarily from Françoise Lévy’s essential, detailed, but very hard-to-find film, The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World. It doesn’t, however, clarify what has always seemed to me the primary difficulty of Otlet’s project: the often confusing distinction between collecting original documents (in the form of paper or evidentiary objects) and cataloging them. Otlet’s Mundaneum did both.
ELO Directory of Electronic Literature
In the capacity of Technical Director of the Electronic Literature Organization, I am coordinating a major rebuild of the ELO Directory of e-Literature (to be launched later in 2008). During the past year we have also been working as a partner in the Library of Congress digital preservation initiative, where we have been working on the problem of preserving web-based, born-digital works of e-lit.
Engineering Beaubourg’s information spaces
From the outset, the Centre Pompidou was to be a live center of information. This paper situated the challenges posed by that vision in the context of emerging models of technical expertise in architecture.
The Informational Built Environment
I taught this upper-division architectural history and theory seminar at UCLA in 2008. Focusing on case studies between the early 19th century and the postwar period, it examined ideas, models, and metaphors shared by the architectural culture of modernity and the information society. [More...]