thinking about reinstalling duke nukem 3D to recreate matt hancock’s office in the build engine featuring a working security camera pic.twitter.com/0sAEeuztQI
— Dan Douglas (@dandouglas) June 27, 2021
First, and foremost, this is a work of art; its aim and its main value is intangible enrichment. It's titled Why I Want to Quit Librarianship in no small part because I have felt the urge to flinch from that aim, the sense that intangible enrichment is an unorthodox goal for library work - a risky goal, in fact.
Organization is intellectual; organization is ideological; organization is subjective. We all know these truths, I hope; and yet, I feel that I often don't see them reflected by the field of librarianship as we know it. Organization is intellectual, but corporate profiteers have largely succeeded in seizing the reins of that intellecual project. Organization is ideological, yet no one seems to have any better ideas for how I might weather the current wave of library-focused trans panic than "look for work someplace where it's not so bad yet."
Organization is subjective, but the implications of such subjectivity sometimes feel to me like a wide open door that we're collectively pretending is a wall. Subjectivity means emotion, reflexivity, esotericism, humor, provocation, not just in what we organize but how we organize, why we organize, what we make organizing to be. As reflected by this project's bibliography, this kind of creative organization is already all around us - in abstract, philosophical forms like poetry and narrative; but also in more concrete forms which are often directly adjacent to Librarianship on a mechanical level, like game design and internet culture.
That biblography is a collection with no catalog or index, whose items can only be called at random and viewed alone. In the absence of some usual library structures, you encounter the citations in a scattered and unpredictable way, and must actively form your own understanding of how they relate to each other and the four main artworks, and at that probably an esoteric and fragmented understanding of which you might not feel confident. My organizational gestures make grasping or collating the organized information "more" "difficult," maybe, but this does not mean the information is any less organized - my organization gestures intend to convey an intellectual and emotional impression of how I myself came to collect these resources and my own understanding of their relationships, an impression much truer than if I had arranged them alphabetically by medium on an APA-formatted PDF.
Similar exploratory organizational gestures appear all throughout the four main artworks. The cataloguing at Riverside Branch Library is literally cartoonishly poor, but their details reveal a narrative even if they're uneven as finding aids. Crash Into Me and This Emptiness is Normal are both repositories which variously antagonize your access to them. And I personally view "Dendrochronologist"'s recursive structural elements as a kind of cataloguing practice - though what's being indexed, I can't quite put into words.
This is one of many ways I engage with the theory, practice, and politics of librarianship with this work. There's concrete ideological messaging - parallel to its radicalization narrative, "Dendrochronologist"'s seven segments are elliptical responses to the corresponding tenants of the ALA Bill of Rights - and technical experiments too: Crash and Emptiness are both written using an experimental method of portable HTML pagination as well as Base64 media encoding; taken together, these methods allow both artworks to act as paginated websites within a single file that can be stored and accessed offline with no errors or media loss. I believe this coding method could be extremely useful in certain digital archiving situations - and that's without mentioning that I manually coded these files under such design constraints as an argument in favor of non-outsourced, lower-featured, lower-complexity library systems--
Do you see what I mean about the urge to flinch from focusing on intangible enrichment?