Préface

This Radiated Book started three years ago with an e-mail from the Mundaneum archive center in Mons. In-between exclamation marks it announced that Elio di Rupo, then prime minister of Belgium, was about to sign a collaboration agreement between the archive center and Google.

Ce Livre Radiant-Radieux' est un projet qui à démarré il y a déjà 3 ans à la réception d'un e-mail provenant du centre d'archives du Mundaneum à Mons. Avec beucoup d'enthousiasme le message annonçait que Elio di Rupo, alors premier ministre de Belgique, était sur le point de signer un accord portant sur une future collaboration entre le centre d'archives et Google.

The newsletter cited an article in the French newspaper Le Monde that coined the Mundaneum as 'Google on paper' . It was our first encounter with many variations on the same theme. La newsletter citait un article du Monde magazine qui faisait du Mundaneum un "Google de papier" . Ce fut recontre avec la première de nombreuses occurences de ce thème.

The former mining area around Mons is also where Google has installed its largest datacenter in Europe, a result of negotiations by the same Di Rupo. Due to the re-branding of Paul Otlet as a ‘founding father of the Internet’, and ‘visionary inventor of Google on paper’, Otlet's oeuvre finally start to receive international attention. L'ancienne région minière des alentours de Mons est également le terrain où Google a installé son plus grand "datacenter" Européen, comme le même Di Rupo, l'a organisé Di Rupo seized the moment by turning the Mundaneum into a central node in his campaign to transform the industrial heartland into a home for The Internet Age. Google — grateful for discovering posthumous its francophone roots — sent chief evangelist Vint Cerf to the Mundaneum. In turn, the archive center allowed the company to publish hundreds of documents on the website of Google Cultural Institute. Di Rupo à tiré parti de cette situation pour en faisant du Mundaneum un élément central de sa campagne axée sur l'idée de transformer l'ancienne région industrielle en un pole de l'ère de l'internet. Google - reconnaissant d'avoir découvert de façon posthume ses racines francophones - envoie son évangéliste en chef Vint Cerf au Mundaneum. A la suite de quoi, le centre d'archives a permis à l'entreprise de publier des centaines de documents sur le site internet du Google Cultural Institute.

While the physical resemblance between a row of drawers and a server farm might not be a coincidence, it is something else to conflate the type of universalist knowledge project imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine with the enterprise of the search giant. The statement 'Google on paper' acted as a provocation, evoking other cases where geographically situated histories are being turned into advertising slogans, and cultural infrastructures pushed into the hands of global corporations. Alors que la ressemblance physique entre une rangée de tiroirs et une ferme de serveurs n'est peut-être pas de l'ordre de la coincidence, associer, voire incorporer le projet de connaissance universelle imaginé par Paul Otlet et Henri Lafontaine avec l'entreprise du géant du traitement de données est un tout autre projet.

An international band of artists, archivists and activists set out to unravel the many layers of this story. Meshing the historical Mundaneum project with the mission of Alphabet Inc speaks of manipulative simplification on multiple levels, but to de-tangle its implications was easier said than done. Some of us were drawn by the misrepresentation of the oeuvre of Paul Otlet himself, others felt the urgency to give an account of its Brussels' roots, or to re-insert the work of maintenance and care taking into the his/story of forefathers and founding fathers, yet others joined out of concern with the bleak future of cultural institutions.

Un groupe international d'artistes et d'activistes se sont retrouvés pour débrouiller les nombreuses couches de cette histoire. Il semble clair que l'imbrication du projet historique du Mundaneum avec la mission de Alphabet Inc est une simplification qui ressort presque de la manipulation; cependant, déméler les les enjeux de cette association est plus facile à dire qu'à faire. Certains d'entre nous étaient critiques de la représentation donnée à l'oeuvre de Paul Otlet lui même, d'autres avaient besoin de de rapporter cette oeuvre à ses origines bruxelloises, ou encore de réinstaller la pratique de la maintenance et du soin dans "un" historique qui l'associe à ses pères antérieurs et pères fondateurs, alors que d'autres nous ont rejoint car ils sont inquiets du futur de nos institutions culturelles.

We installed a Semantic MediaWiki and named it after the Mondothèque, a device imagined by Paul Otlet in 1934. The wiki functioned as an online repository and frame of reference for the work that was developed through meetings, visits and presentations. For Otlet, the Mondothèque was to be an 'intellectual machine': at the same time archive, link generator, writing desk, catalog and broadcast station. Thinking the museum, the library, the encyclopedia, and classificatory language as a complex and interdependent web of relations, Otlet imagined each element as a point of entry for the other. He stressed that responses to displays in a museum involved intellectual and social processes that where different from those involved in reading books in a library, but that one in a sense entailed the other. .

Nous avons installé un MediaWiki: une infrastructure du logiciel libre, qui permet d'organiser de large quantité de contenu et d'en modifier le contenu collaborativement. Nous l'avons nommé Mondothèque, du nom de l'appareil imaginé par Paul Otlet en 1934. Le wiki fonctionne comme un dépositaire en ligne et un espace de référence pour le travail qui a autrement été développé durant nos rencontres et au cours de présentations publiques. Pour Otlet, la Mondothèque devait être une "machine intellectuelle": à la fois une archive, un générateur de liens, un bureau d'écriture, un catalogue et une station d'émission. Il s'agit pour lui de penser le mundaneum, la bibliothèque, l'encyclopédie, et le language de classification comme un réseau complexe de relations interdépendantes, Otlet imaginait chaque élément comme un point d'entrée vers un autre. Il mettait l'emphase sur l'idée que le rapport avec une présentation muséale méttaient en jeu des des processus sociaux et intelectuels différents de ceux engagés par la lecture d'un livre dans une bibbliothèque, mais il assurait que d'une certaine manière, l'un engageait l'autre. .

The dreamed capacity of the Mondothèque was to interface scales, perspectives and media at the intersection of all those different practices. For us, by transporting a historical device into the future, it figured as a kind of 'thinking machine', a place to analyse historical and social locations of the Mundaneum project, a platform to envision our small but persistent interventions together. The speculative figure of Mondothèque enabled us to begin to understand the situated formations of power around the project, and allowed us to think through possible forms of resistance.

L'objectif rêvé de la mondothèque était d'interfacer les échelles, les perspectives et les médias, se positionnant à l'intersection de ces différentes pratiques. Nous pensons que, transporter une machine historique dans le présent, lui fait prendre la place d'une "machine à penser", un lieu ou l'on peut analyser les positions historiques et sociales du projet du Mundaneum, une plateforme à partir de laquelle nous pouvons envisager nos interventions respectives et communes parfois à petite échelle, mais toujours consistantes. La forme spéculative de la Mondothèque nous a peu à peu permis d'envisager les modalités des formations de pouvoir localisées qui se cristallisent autour du projet, et nous permet de penser de possible formes de résistance.

The wiki at http://mondotheque.be grew into a labyrinth of images, texts, maps and semantic links, tools and vocabularies. MediaWiki is a Free software infrastructure developed in the context of Wikipedia and comes with many assumptions about the kind of connections and practices that are desirable. We wanted to work with Semantic extensions specifically because we were interested in the way The Semantic Web

Le wiki de http://mondotheque.be croit rapidemment, devenant un labyrinthe d'images, de textes, de cartes et de liens sémantiques, d'outils et de vocabulaires. MediaWiki développé originellement pour les besoins de Wikipedia, présume dans son fonctionnement notamment sa manière de déterminer les liens, un certain nombre de pratiques "désirables". Nous voulions travailler avec des expressions sémantiques, car nous étions particulièrement intéressés par la manière dont le Web Sémantique

seemed to resemble Otlet's Universal Decimal Classification system. At many moments we felt ourselves going down the rabbit-holes of universal completeness, endless categorisation and nauseas of scale. It made the work at times uncomfortable, messy and unruly, but it allowed us to do the work of unravelling in public, mixing political urgency with poetic experiments.

ressemblait peut-être au système de classification Universel pensé par Otlet. Comme son auteur, nous avons failli nous perdre plusieurs fois dans les tunnels labyrinthiques de la connaissance universelle, l'univers infini des catégorisations, et les nausées des rapports d'échelle. En conséquence, le travail était parfois peu confortable, désordonné et sans règles, mais cette structure nous à permis de débrouiller ces questions en public, associant l'urgence politique aux expérimentations poétiques.

This Radiated Book was made because we wanted to create a moment, an incision into that radiating process that allowed us to invite many others a look at the interrelated materials without the need to provide a conclusive document. As a salute to Otlet's ever expanding Radiated Library, we decided to write, edit and generate the publication directly from the MediaWiki platform which explains some of the welcome anomalies on the very pages of this object.

Ce "Livre Radiant-Radieux" a été fait parceque nous voulions organiser un moment, une incision dans le processus iridescent qui nous a permis d'inviter de nombreux autres à observer le matériel entrelacé, sans la contrainte de production d'un document final. Comme une visite à bibliothèque toujours "croissante" de Otlet, nous avons décidé d'écrire et de générer la publication directement depuis la plateforme MediaWiki, ce qui explique les différences innatendues et bienvenues sur les pages même du projet.

The four chapters that we propose each mix fact and fiction, text and image, document and catalogue. In this way, process and content are playing together and respond to the specific material entanglements that we encountered. Mondotheque, and as a consequence this Radiated book, is a multi-threaded, durational, multi-scalar adventure that in some way diffracts the all-encompassing ambition that Mundaneum strived for.

Les quatre chapitres que nous proposons mélangent les faits et la fiction, les textes et les images, les documents et les catalogues. De cette manière, les processus et les contenus s'agencent mutuellement répondant aux contraintes matérielles que nous avons rencontrés. Mondothèque, et ce "Livre Radiant-Radieux" est une aventure à plusieurs trames, s'écoulant dans la durée, et à plusieurs échelles, ce qui d'une certaine manière rend une image difractée des ambitions multi-inclusives du Mundaneum.

Embedded hierarchies addresses how classification systems, and the dream of their universal application actually operate. It brings together contributions that are concerned with knowledge infrastructures at different scales, from disobedient libraries, institutional practices of the digital archive, meta-data structures to indexing as a pathological condition.

Disambiguation dis-entangles some of the similarities that appear around the heritage of Paul Otlet. Through a close-reading of seemingly similar biographies, terms and vocabularies it re-locates ambiguity to other places.

Location, location, location is an account of geo-political layers at work. Following the itinerant archive of Mundaneum through the capital of Europe, we encounter local, national and global Utopias that in turn leave their imprint on the way the stories play out. From the hyperlocal to the global, this chapter traces patterns in the physical landscape.

Cross-readings consists of lists, image collections and other materials that make connections emerge between historical and contemporary readings, unearthing possible spiritual or mystical underpinnings of the Mundaneum, and transversal inclusions of the same elements in between different locations.

The point of modest operations such as Mondothèque is to build the collective courage to persist in demanding access to both the documents and the intellectual and technological instruments that interface and mediate them. Exactly because of the urgency of the situation, where the erosion of public institutions has become evident, and all forms of communication seem to feed into neo-liberal agendas eventually, we should resist simplifications and find the patience to build a relation to these histories in ways that makes sense. Only then can we go beyond the current techno-determinist paradigm of knowledge production, and for this, imagination is indispensable. This Radiated Book started three years ago with an e-mail from the Mundaneum archive center in Mons. In-between exclamation marks it announced that Elio di Rupo, then prime minister of Belgium, was about to sign a collaboration agreement between the archive center and Google. Ce Radiated Book est un projet qui à démarré il y a déjà 3 ans à la réception d'un e-mail provenant du centre d'archives du Mundaneum à Mons. Entre deux points d'exclamation le message annonçait que Elio di Rupo, alors premier ministre de Belgique, était sur le point de signer un accord portant sur une future collaboration entre le centre d'archives et Google.

The newsletter cited an article in the French newspaper Le Monde that coined the Mundaneum as 'Google on paper' . It was our first encounter with many variations on the same theme. La newsletter citait un article du Monde magazine qui faisait du Mundaneum un "Google de papier" . Ce fut notre première recontre avec la première de nombreuses ittérations de ce thème.

The former mining area around Mons is also where Google has installed its largest datacenter in Europe, a result of negotiations by the same Di Rupo. Due to the re-branding of Paul Otlet as a ‘founding father of the Internet’, and ‘visionary inventor of Google on paper’, Otlet's oeuvre finally start to receive international attention. L'ancienne région minière sise autour de Mons est également le terrain où Google a installé son plus grand "datacenter" Européen, comme cela a été négocié par le même Di Rupo. Di Rupo seized the moment by turning the Mundaneum into a central node in his campaign to transform the industrial heartland into a home for The Internet Age. Google — grateful for discovering posthumous its francophone roots — sent chief evangelist Vint Cerf to the Mundaneum. In turn, the archive center allowed the company to publish hundreds of documents on the website of Google Cultural Institute. Di Rupo à choisi ce moment en faisant du Mundaneum un élément central de sa campagne pour transformer la zone industrielle en un pole de l'époque de l'internet. Google - reconnaissant de la découverte posthume de racines francophones - envoie son évangéliste en chef Vint Cerf au Mundaneum. En échange, le centre d'archives a permis à l'entreprise de publier des centaines de documents sur le site internet du Google Cultural Institute.

While the physical resemblance between a row of drawers and a server farm might not be a coincidence, it is something else to conflate the type of universalist knowledge project imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine with the enterprise of the search giant. The statement 'Google on paper' acted as a provocation, evoking other cases where geographically situated histories are being turned into advertising slogans, and cultural infrastructures pushed into the hands of global corporations.

An international band of artists, archivists and activists set out to unravel the many layers of this story. Meshing the historical Mundaneum project with the mission of Alphabet Inc speaks of manipulative simplification on multiple levels, but to de-tangle its implications was easier said than done. Some of us were drawn by the misrepresentation of the oeuvre of Paul Otlet himself, others felt the urgency to give an account of its Brussels' roots, or to re-insert the work of maintenance and care taking into the his/story of forefathers and founding fathers, yet others joined out of concern with the bleak future of cultural institutions.

We installed a Semantic MediaWiki and named it after the Mondothèque, a device imagined by Paul Otlet in 1934. The wiki functioned as an online repository and frame of reference for the work that was developed through meetings, visits and presentations. For Otlet, the Mondothèque was to be an 'intellectual machine': at the same time archive, link generator, writing desk, catalog and broadcast station. Thinking the museum, the library, the encyclopedia, and classificatory language as a complex and interdependent web of relations, Otlet imagined each element as a point of entry for the other. He stressed that responses to displays in a museum involved intellectual and social processes that where different from those involved in reading books in a library, but that one in a sense entailed the other. . The dreamed capacity of the Mondothèque was to interface scales, perspectives and media at the intersection of all those different practices. For us, by transporting a historical device into the future, it figured as a kind of 'thinking machine', a place to analyse historical and social locations of the Mundaneum project, a platform to envision our small but persistent interventions together. The speculative figure of Mondothèque enabled us to begin to understand the situated formations of power around the project, and allowed us to think through possible forms of resistance.

The wiki at http://mondotheque.be grew into a labyrinth of images, texts, maps and semantic links, tools and vocabularies. MediaWiki is a Free software infrastructure developed in the context of Wikipedia and comes with many assumptions about the kind of connections and practices that are desirable. We wanted to work with Semantic extensions specifically because we were interested in the way The Semantic Web seemed to resemble Otlet's Universal Decimal Classification system. At many moments we felt ourselves going down the rabbit-holes of universal completeness, endless categorisation and nauseas of scale. It made the work at times uncomfortable, messy and unruly, but it allowed us to do the work of unravelling in public, mixing political urgency with poetic experiments.

This Radiated Book was made because we wanted to create a moment, an incision into that radiating process that allowed us to invite many others a look at the interrelated materials without the need to provide a conclusive document. As a salute to Otlet's ever expanding Radiated Library, we decided to write, edit and generate the publication directly from the MediaWiki platform which explains some of the welcome anomalies on the very pages of this object.

The four chapters that we propose each mix fact and fiction, text and image, document and catalogue. In this way, process and content are playing together and respond to the specific material entanglements that we encountered. Mondotheque, and as a consequence this Radiated book, is a multi-threaded, durational, multi-scalar adventure that in some way diffracts the all-encompassing ambition that Mundaneum strived for.

Embedded hierarchies addresses how classification systems, and the dream of their universal application actually operate. It brings together contributions that are concerned with knowledge infrastructures at different scales, from disobedient libraries, institutional practices of the digital archive, meta-data structures to indexing as a pathological condition.

Disambiguation dis-entangles some of the similarities that appear around the heritage of Paul Otlet. Through a close-reading of seemingly similar biographies, terms and vocabularies it re-locates ambiguity to other places.

Location, location, location is an account of geo-political layers at work. Following the itinerant archive of Mundaneum through the capital of Europe, we encounter local, national and global Utopias that in turn leave their imprint on the way the stories play out. From the hyperlocal to the global, this chapter traces patterns in the physical landscape.

Cross-readings consists of lists, image collections and other materials that make connections emerge between historical and contemporary readings, unearthing possible spiritual or mystical underpinnings of the Mundaneum, and transversal inclusions of the same elements in between different locations.

The point of modest operations such as Mondothèque is to build the collective courage to persist in demanding access to both the documents and the intellectual and technological instruments that interface and mediate them. Exactly because of the urgency of the situation, where the erosion of public institutions has become evident, and all forms of communication seem to feed into neo-liberal agendas eventually, we should resist simplifications and find the patience to build a relation to these histories in ways that makes sense. Only then can we go beyond the current techno-determinist paradigm of knowledge production, and for this, imagination is indispensable.