Library Science:
Notes on a Conversation with Rachel Gugelberger
Interview by Claire Ruud
...might be good
Issue #178, "Any Port in a Storm"
November 11, 2011
In the paragraphs that follow, I recall an hour-long Skype conversation with Rachel Gugelberger, curator of Library Science at Artspace, New Haven. In the context of the exhibition, it is fitting that my computer did not save the majority of our conversation; technology’s memory having failed, I was left to rely on my own. Gugelberger points out that a work in the show by David Bunn explores this reliance on the analogue in the event of digital failure. When the library of the Brooklyn Museum invited Bunn to do a project with its recently discarded card catalogue, he arrived to find that the replacement online catalogue (Voyager) had crashed and the electronic backup had been erased. Bunn’s No Voyager Record (2008), included in Library Science, projects the physical cards marked with the librarians' annotations to restore the lost and missing entries. The work captures the digital’s continued reliance on the analogue, despite rapidly advancing technology. [READ MORE...]