There are a number of different ways to navigate a library; the Dewey decimal system seems like an obvious universal method, if there’s a specific book you’re looking for. Or if you’re looking more for information in a more general way, the library is spatially separated into categories such as Philosophy, Religion, Anthropology, and Art History.
But ultimately, the library is a catalogue of ideas. Sometimes those ideas are the end destinations for researchers with particular questions, and sometimes curious minds wander in with the goal of allowing any of the innumerable ideas fill their thoughts. Sometimes ideas are contributed by the library’s visitors, and that is what I’d like to focus this conference project on.
There’s a lot of graffiti on the walls and desks, as I’m sure many of the other students who frequent the library have noticed. But it’s not graffiti like we think of it, as just names written as an attempt to say “so-and-so was here” in some sort of public, urban landscape. The graffiti in our library are uncredited ideas, existential crises, quotes. These are instances of students feeling so filled with information that they need to share it in anyway possible, or of students feeling so beaten down by heavy course loads with high expectations, looking for some sort of release from the pressures of synthesizing the brilliance of others.
My goal with this project is to see what these illicit markings from students reveal about how the library environment inspires certain interactions from its visitors. I will catalogue the markings in public space and document them both spatially and categorically (I’m still working on the category system but I think it will include distinctions like ‘quotes from others’, ‘images’ and ‘questions’).
This project hits on themes we’ve talked about in class, such as mapping the invisible, since the goal here is to deduce some sort of reasoning behind what inspires people to share their ideas or despair in certain areas of the library. I’ve taken a lot of this graffiti at face value and I’m wondering if more can be learned from these small rebellions.
Secondly, the very act of marking up the library touches on the idea of playable landscapes which we covered through our discussions and readings on psychogeogephy.
