Purpose of this project was to engage with the collections in the Library of Congress, as a part of Jer Thorps's Artist in the Archive class at NYU ITP. The result of this engagement is an exploration of a very specific subject, Alexander Graham Bell, presented through the combined interaction of a digital and physical interface. The choice of presenting the material in a manner that requires the user to access the information both digitally and physically mirrors the research process structurally required by the institutional decisions of the Library. The nature of the archives at the Library of Congress is such that access to our collective memory is neccessarily mediated by programmatic interfaces reflecting cataloguing practices that are as much an accident of history as they are systemic or the intervention of subject experts.
The documents point to the ways in which technology and its inventors remain illegible to the public, and how meaning-making from our collections are necessarily an esoteric act.
The project utilizes a few collections across the Library:
Some images are souced from Google Patents and data from USTPO.