Copenhagen
(Jan) 2024
Archive Design Information Architecture Content Curation Communication Design Interface Design Search Design
Contemporary Art Archives
“Contemporary Art Archives” is a modular search system documenting contemporary artists, projects, publications, curators, galleries, institutions, and collections worldwide. The project is based on the idea that search engines are not a map of what people think as much as a map of how they think. As such, the archives are not a content repository per se but an instrument that enables access to relational content and modes of inquiry.
A search system design
“Contemporary Art Archives” is an open-source tool that transforms categorical organization and creates dynamic content relations, enabling users to unlock associative thinking patterns. The project currently counts over 75k items in its open index repository, with an estimated 150k items available by launch in 2024. In building this instrument, we employ a strategy of sourcing and resemantization where simplicity, efficiency, flexibility, and modularity embrace ambiguity and unpredictability. As a radical online object, the archives are critical, and the software, interface, and interaction design are a means to generate associative thinking patterns. “Contemporary Art Archives” functions as a genotype—an instrumental online object whose specific qualities and structural realities are abstracted to be used as elements of different types of questioning, inquiry, and association. “Contemporary Art Archives” launches January 2024
