Ice is the Envelope, Section

'Extending outwards for two or three yards from the bank were the long splinters of what appeared to be crystallizing water, the angular facets emitting a blue and prismatic light washed by the wake from their craft. The splinters were growing in the water like crystals in a chemical solution, accreting more and more material to themselves, so that along the bank there was a congested mass of rhomboidal spears like the barbs of a reef, sharp enough to slit the hull of their craft.'

(J G Ballard's The Crystal World, 1966, Jonathon Cape Ltd, UK)

In 'The Crystal World' the crystal growth like a virus spreads through the West African jungle. As it comes into contact with trees, buildings, rivers, bodies, the subject undergoes a crystallization process that begins like an icy frost which spreads until it engulfs the whole body. The body is both frozen in time and yet proliferates and grows as a crystal does.

Ballard explains this phenomenom using the relationship between matter and time. As time 'leaks' away, molecules produce 'spatial replicas of themselves'.

'It's as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced through refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light.'

The analogy between leprosy and the crystallization are drawn, '... the virus, with its semi-animate, crystalline existence, half in and half out of our own time-stream, as if intersecting it at an angle...'.

There are parallels between the crystallized forest, with the trees, birds, plants, beasts, and people frozen within it, and the Archive, where time has been suspended and deterioration and death arrested.

The protagonist Dr Sauders writes 'Here we have always associated movement with life and the passage of time, but from my experience within the forest near Mont Royal I know that all motion leads inevitably to death, and that time is its servant.'

The drawing above tries to represent the dark heart where the object may be embedded, the idea of refraction, light and the prism.

Site Plan

Above is a sketch of London waterways and detail plans of the Battlebridge Basin and Kingsland Basin. The basins are potential containers or constraints for crystalline growth.

This growth or accretion is represented by the red construction lines.

Computational Model

As a computational model, if Ice is the 'hardware', the 'software' is the system by which the 'information' is embedded into the ice. The software is a series of switches, a regulatory system not unlike proteins or enzymes in a cell.

Conversation with Paul Dyer, Archivist

On The Personal Archive & The Archive of a Publishing House

Three Collections from his Personal Archive:

1. Jewellery & Jewellery-esque Objects.

2. 'Street Sweets' Photographs.

3. Betting Shop Pens.

The collections are of objects that have been lost or discarded on the street. The object found is transformed by re-framing, through the frame of the photograph or the container of the archive.

Street Sweet [Photo Credit Paul Dyer]

The photograph transforms the scale and context of the object. The archival container allows the object to reconfigure itself in relationship to adjacent objects; the object is 'free' to be whatever is it, wander around the box, attach itself to other objects.

Jewellery [Photo Credit Paul Dyer]

The collections inform a collective memory. The objects tell a story about the person who dropped it, and about the condition of the society it exists in. There is a 'forensic aspect', the object can be analysed and identified, there may be traces of the last person who touched it.

Street Sweet [Photo Credit Paul Dyer]

As topographical traces, an increased frequency of betting pens on the ground signifies the presence of a betting shop, an increase in sweets signifies the presence of a corner store or a bus stop approaching.

Street Sweet [Photo Credit Paul Dyer]

The categorisation method is a photograph of the object, a micro-plan of object on the site.

Storage is by zip-lock bags (sealed, transparent, exhibited), and boxes (protective, opaque, masked).

Betting Pens Bagged [Photo Credit Paul Dyer]

The Archive of a Publishing House.

The flow chart above shows the process of archiving and the process of retrieval of this Publishing House. The archival system has evolved with changing technology of the both the artwork and means of categorisation. Within this system there also exist offshoot archives, which capture an archival impulse in time.

Bound Volumes [Photo Credit Paul Dyer]

The Archive houses hand drawn illustrations, transparencies, prints, occasionally fabric samples, digital photography, bound volumes, and mark-up copies of magazines.

The Mark-up copies of the magazines are like a map of the archive, encoding directions to where the original artwork can be located.

Original artwork is stored in archival standard containers: plastic sleeves, glassine bags, envelopes, boxes.

The Archive is ordered chronologically by magazine name, month, year.

There are also offshoot or auxillary archives within the overall archive which follow their own logic. Hidden within the stacks are curious card index drawers and filing cabinets of prints by a particular photographer. The archival impulse here is where the artwork has been pulled from the main archive for republishing at some point in the past, and then retained as a group in an auxillary sub-collection.

There are the 'Personality Files', photographic prints of notable persons, filed in alphabetical order by name of person captured. These original prints have a beautiful weathered quality, marked with old tape and torn corners. Other filing cabinets contain the 'Contributors Records', early typed contracts and letters

[Photo Credit Paul Dyer]

Conversation with Bopha Chhay, Editor, Arts Researcher, Book Pusher.

...On conceptual art.

Is all art equal?

Bopha likes the work of Christoph Buchel, a Swiss artist who reconstructs 'labyrinthine' spaces within spaces, art at a massive scale and vision. The audience walks, crawls or climbs through the installation. Through this audience involvement the art becomes accessible.

Photo copyright Paul Dyer

Photo copyright Paul Dyer

Every art form has codes. Paintings carry codes of symbols, religion, colour... with conceptual art the meaning can come later as you carry the art around with you, and make connections with other art you see.

The more challenging the art is, the better, art that makes you want to investigate more. Not a decorative piece. Conceptual art - you can't use it as a decorative piece.

'Nothing is new'. Conceptual art is a code of reference. Different types of media are used to forge new pathways and channels of understanding.

Gabrielle Orozco, a Mexican artist, works with the everyday, how it can become transformative.

Orozco intervenes in everyday situations to draw attention to what happens in the margins.

Photocredit DanPhiffer : flickr

'Art exists in a different dimension'. Art collectives are autonomously run, small scale, and not controlled by art market forces. It frees the artists reliance on dealer galleries, which in turn rely on the large institutions to purchase work.

Italo Calvino and Borges 'Labyrinthine': He structures chapters in a way that may resemble natural / scientific processes such as 'crystallisation'. Or sometimes ... it's kind of like a mathematical equation. Concepts upon concepts = formula.

Text that appears random and unplanned, like the everyday, or like conceptual art, and you choose the information you wish to keep, and carry with you.

The Ice Archive

These drawings are about the crystallisation of water to create an Archive for things which may be lost in the future.

The archival information is embedded and released through phase change.

The site is the Regents Canal, a fluid pathway along which the crystals form a gradual accretion through their growth and self assembly.

The Archive can store personal memories, which can take the form of smells, images, sounds.

There is a 'Reading Room', analogous to Haruki Murakami's library in the 'End of the World' (Hard Boiled Wonderland), a personal space where there is enacted the future release of information through phase change.

The crystals are a synthetic molecular construction, similar to Vonnegut's 'Ice-Nine', an ice which is stable at room temperature, with a high melting point.

Conversation with Anna Boyer, Librarian.

1. A Book Graph

2. Public libraries vs Archives

3. Categorisation

4. What will we need to collect that may disappear?

5. The future architecture of Libraries: Futurists vs Architects.

1. Book Graph - Value against Time

This graph shows how the perceived value of a book changes over time, from the point of view of a Library and an Archive.

A book is first published - the origin point on the time line. It has a high value for the library, it's new and it attracts users. The value then declines over time as it's newness wears off, and quantity of the book increases. The curve can bottom out and turn upwards over time, as copies of the book become scarce and book attains a collectors or archival value. At the low point on the curve, the public library may need to make the decision whether to retain or discard the book. The decision may depend on the libraries need to attract users with newly releases, or pressure on shelving space, weighed up against the predicted value of the book for the library in the future. For example a book may be retained as it has particular history about the local community.

2. Public Libraries operate at the beginning of the time line, Archives tend to operate towards the end of the time line when the book has become scarce and collectable.

Important to archivists is the provenance of the information - where it came from - and how it makes connections to other archives. Archivists draw parallels from one collection to another.

3. Thus categorisation of archive material is multilayered to enable these connections to be found. Archival categorisation is able to locate specific information within a larger document, for example a statement minuted and transcribed on a particular date, by a particular committee, within a certain council.... as opposed to Library categorisation for a book, where a book is more of a stand alone item, identified by author, subject, and keyword.

4. The Berlin Library is both a public library and a repository. These two co-existing states are therefore concerned with the acquisition of the New and of Everything, and hoarding and collecting Everything. The Library / Repository needs to ask the question, what will we need to collect for the future?

Formatting of information, ie music, is a challenge for the two states of the Library / Repository, as the format of information is constantly outdated. To access the information the user needs technology which may be obsolete, or the information needs to be reformatted. Reformatting each time the technology shifts is expensive and there is a change in quality of the information. For example, the original format of some of the music collection is on vinyl. Digitalisation makes them more accessible and proofs against deterioration, yet there is a loss in quality of sound. By preserving the original format the library is also preserving a quality and depth of sound from the past, that the future may not have access to.

How would a library preserve smells which may disappear - artic air, fresh air, the smell of a forest which disappears, a plant which disappears?

5. What is the future architecture of the library? In the 1990s the phenomena of monumental libraries paralleled the rise of digitalisation of information, a seeming contradiction as digitalisation means millions of books can be contained in hundreds of CDs, accessed from anyplace.

What is the significance of the library in the future, does it exist as a civic institution, or an archival storage space for digital information?