Revision as of 23:33, 14 December 2015

Maybe this timeline would need some explanation......

The timeline in Brussels is an attempt to situate some of the events related to the life death and revival of Mondotheque in a broader context with regards both to local events and international situation. This timeline attempts to fix events from several geographic locations at different scales, and hopefuly provokes cqrrelations in time and space, that could help us formulate questions about the ways all those local events take place and reformulate themself in a global context.

The large archive ofthe Mundaneum was though by Paul Otlet with support of Henry Lafontaine at a time when occidental colonialism was at its high and the first tensions where only starting to manifest themselves, while at the same time war was at the door of modern european societies. The general Mundaneum project was mainly motivated by a ambitious ideal of peace It is in between war that the communication systems associated to Mundaneum were conceived. Some of them were thoughtas prospective possibilities, such as Mondotheque, but others were already implemented and formed the basis of an international communication network, based on postal services and telegraph networks. Otlet and Lafontaine's Project took place in an era of international aggreements over communication networks, associative structures, that acted as networks of information-sharing organising modalities of exchange to the general benefit of civil society. It was also a time of the rise of international countries aggreements; some of these structures are still the basis of our actual globalised organisation, but they are all chalenged by private capitalist structures. How does this relates to the comparison between the Mundaneum and the actual knowledge economy.

Links: some timelines:

1. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union