PAUL J LORENZ

LIBRARY IN BUSHWICK

YSoA Studio with Michael Szivos
Nominated for publication in Retrospecta 38

This project queries the difference between the organizational structure of the library and the emergent structure of machine learning algorithms. The arboreal, authoritarian, ultimately brittle Dewey Decimal system is organized around categorization while the rhizomatic structure of text-to-text relationships within, for example, amazon.com ultimately knows nothing about categories. Machine learning forms predictions from the history of a visitor’s interaction with the website’s digital space.

How can a library interact with a visitor without falling back on categories; without an a priori, extant hierarchical organization, and without a specific spatial association with a particular assigned subject?

In this proposal, the library gains the ability to reorganize itself constantly. Each volume of the library’s entire collection can be transported through a network of Kuka KR-6 material handling robots. Any requested volume can be moved from one shelf location to any other shelf location.