Mondothèque : Manual for a Diffraction Machine

"L’Humanité est a un tournant de son histoire. La masse des données acquises est formidable. Il faut de nouveaux instruments pour les simplifier, les condenser ou jamais l’intelligence ne saura ni surmonter les difficultés qui l’accablent, ni réaliser les progrès qu’elle entrevoit et auxquels elle aspire.".
(Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation, 1934)

Membre de Constant Femke Snelting présentera le projet de la Mondotheque, mené par un groupe d’artistes, chercheurs et archivistes, dans le cadre du Public Library Festival à Zaghreb.

Plus d’informations (en anglais, langue courante de la conférence) :

In 1993, the remains of Otlet’s extensive collection of documents were moved from Brussels to The Mundaneum Archive Center in Mons. Located in a former mining region in the south of Belgium, Mons is also right next to Google’s largest datacenter in Europe. Due to the re-branding of Otlet as a ’founding father of the Internet’, and ’visionary inventor of Google on paper’, his oeuvre received international attention. Simultaneously, local politicians are ceasing the moment, making The Mundaneum a central node in their rhetorical promise of turning the industrial heartland into a home for The Internet Age. Google "” grateful for discovering their posthumous francophone roots "” signed a collaboration contract with The Mundaneum in 2013. The archive center outsourced its digital archives to the search giant, allowing them to publish hundreds of documents on the website of The Google Cultural Institute.

Bringing these ever expanding entanglements gradually to light, a band of artists, archivists and activists formed. Wanting to make a difference from how geographically situated histories are meshed into generic slogans, concerned by faltering local governments pushing cultural infrastructures into the hands of global corporations and perplexed by the apparently still undigested dreams of universal knowledge, we decided to appropriate Mondothèque as a frame of reference. Imagined by Paul Otlet in 1934, La Mondothèque was to be a ’thinking machine’ : archive, link generator, desk, catalog and broadcast station at the same time. The dreamed capacity of Mondothèque to combine scales, perspectives and media started to function as a diffraction device, as a platform to envision our modest but persistent interventions together.


@ Multimedia Institute – mi2

Zagreb (Croatia)