Fari Shams’ project European Civilization, Peter the Great and the Order of Things presents itself in various ways: as art installation (2014), a post-Internet speculative data calculator, and finally in the form of a book. The artist took the risk of confronting big data strategies, by dissolving the borders between objective/subjective, text/image, and archive/algorithm with respect to historical systems of classification. From alphabetisation to Diderot’s Enclyclopedia and Adanson’s classification of plants in Senegal; each attempt at organising knowledge, though obsolete for today’s science, generates unexpected connections and iconographies in its contemporary re-processing. The three essays published here take this work as a starting point for travelling the space of human culture that always seeks to delineate and classify in order to understand and eventually take control.
100 pages, 15 x 21 cm, softcover, Spector Books (Leipzig).
100 pages, 15 x 21 cm, softcover, Spector Books (Leipzig).