The Book

Structure

First chapter: The lecture space

Second chapter: Process and time based arrangements.

The Stochastic Archives work on the different forms of organization and lecture of information from collecting, recording and making relations between different sources of material like texts, images, newspapers, photographs, drawings, documents, etc. It is important to say that although there are text, theory and document references, they are based on visual classification strategies. It could also seems that the priority is to accumulate and collect images from different sources but in fact the main concern is the constant creation of projects in which the process play the main role, it is closer to a flow of relations than to a collection of objects. In this sense it could look like empty archives or full of projects and chains of ideas, but maybe it is a collection of ways of collecting. It is strange to suggest archives without an enormous quantity of material to be classified.

Our interest does not lie in making public an archive but to discover the maps, the routes that lead us to long term projects, usually without conclusion, or that propose a horizon of possible solutions so that the final result, the art piece, seems only to be a moment, a concentration of intentions and possibilities frozen in a specific object. Maybe that is the reason of our interest in books, because they could offer you an order in these sequences or chains and at the same time the lecture allows multiple itineraries.

After going through our sketchbooks, in the selection process of material for the exhibition, we realize that the most interesting thing was not the amount of ideas in time but the constants series that are repeated in different contexts and formats.

To summarize, it is an archive of the possible, created from a limited number of elements that acquire sense from their relations with the rest. Dictionaries, novels, cookbooks, instruction books, etc., are conceived from a limited and simple code, that generates a great number of different meanings. The real concern is the construction of lecture systems, their reception and ways of access, their transformations and deformations.

Another important element is the digestion of established arrangements, which we retake and distort, allowing us to twist conventions. This review and appropriation of images and information of others is not a collage or a senseless mixture of data but a parasite and anthropophagic process of camouflage and digestion.

The idea of process involves planning, production, mistake, transformation, editing, lecture, etc. Each of these actions have a specific time and space. This is the reason of the first chapter of the book in which relations and concepts with space are studied in detail such as: exhibition space, furniture, designed objects, formats, etc. and distances, scales, classifications. The second chapter deals with sequential actions and process: links, cycles, loops.

The book is considered a collective project, although the work of M, S, R and E will be included as appendix or references to the general concept. There will be a proposal within the ways of lecture and use of information in a clear and precise sequence, and footnotes or references of the art pieces involved in each section with a specific identifying symbol so to make easier the possible links. The structure of the book seems an onion in which the objective is to create transversal routes through it.

Lecture Space

“The Latin root for the word “collect” is colligere, that means to recollect, to relate, to gather, to infer. While the word “reading” came from legere: to harvest, to pick up.

Heidegger makes the question “What does it mean to read?” the fundamental and the dominant in lecture is collection/concentration. “What is that we collect/concentrate? It is the written, it is what the stated or enounced”

The book has an affinity with collection. The catalogue is the simplest way to make a catalogue. The book gives space to information or objects in form of reproductions in a series of pages allowing identification, classification and conservation or series. The structure of a book identifies with the egalitarian spirit of a collection: the equivalence of pages is analogue to objects in order.

Trough out our work, the book besides being a common element, is a space that contains and endless number of narrative, sequential and possible lectures.

The place where all material is going to be gathered will turn itself into a reading room. A place that implies time, disposition and codes to make relations between diverse objects such as: maps and diagrams, notebooks, modular images, personal archives. Each one with a specific function in the process, each format implies a transformation, a code between the object of information and information itself. Usually this relation is named classification. Naming is always to classify and tracing a map is the same as giving names. All description, explication or representation is, in a way, a creation of a map over a surface, matrix or coordinates of all phenomena to describe.

The space of lecture will work as a laboratory of ways of reading.

It is planned different formats to organize information:

a) maps and diagrams

b) notebooks

c) modular images

d) personal archives

e) books of others

f) guest interventions

g) outdoors work