The Fragment Corpora
The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are forever written
all that man has ever said or women whispered
Charles Babbage1
Books, installations, prints, small screens and projections
The title of this work, The Fragment Corpora, originates from on-line dictionaries which, in addition to supplying definitions and synonyms, also often provide a Corpus – a set of examples of how, and in which context, words are used. Originally, this was for the benefit of linguists to help track changes in word usage and meaning over time. The Corpus for the word “Fragment” provides exhaustive examples of the use of the word and its derivations from across the sciences and humanities as well as from fiction and the arts.
The chapter headings derive from the Corpus for the word ‘fragment’ and are taken from a number of on-line dictionaries. They have been laid out to suggest the beginnings of a novel by a deceased novelist – researchers seeking to reconstruct the document that she was in the process of writing at the time of her death.
The short texts in The Fragment Corpora are embedded in continuous blocks of code. For the general reader they occur as islands of meaning, in a sea of glyphs. They are chosen as representing texts which might be found in searches either on-line or in libraries during which process a researcher would sift items of interest from the sea of irrelevant material. The range and type of these inclusions sets the tone of the book. Often, either directly or indirectly, they form resonances with the images, lending the texts context and atmosphere.
As such, they reflect the autobiographical nature of retained knowledge – the texts and images have become pieces of a puzzle to be assembled to construct the world in the mind of the author. A Large Language Model (LLM) requires a Corpus, containing as much material as possible relating to the particular subject in which the AI is trained. A corpus could contain, for example, all the works of a particular author. The Shakespeare corpus would not only contain all the writers plays, sonnets and letters, but also the related commentaries, reviews and details of productions. Everything, in fact, pertaining to the oeuvre, so that searches can be made and questions answered. More controversially, it also suggests the possibility of creating texts “in the style of” based on machine learning of the of the corpus content.
The word “Fragment” and its derivations suggests the divisions and distinctions made in descriptions of the world to assign meaning to its composite parts – parts which are sometimes under the auspices of specialist interests and therefore come with their own discourses and proprietary languages. This implies a divergence from the pre-enlightenment notion of the world as a seemlessly interconnected whole. The fragment is such a universal theme in contemporary culture that we frequently describe ourselves as “living in a fragmented world” – which leads to the question of what a “whole world” might look like, and how it might be experienced
The images and texts include a variety of seemingly random elements; enclyclopaedias, aerial views, coding, allegories, references to art history, micro and macro environments, mathematical figures; images of wholeness and of fragmentation. In fact, all kinds of stray content which might go towards the construction of the work the author was in the process of creating. To create an image of ‘the whole world’ we know to be an impossibility, although we are constantly obliged to inhabit worlds created by others. Our environment is, and has been, conditioned by these strictures and descriptions.
Efforts to construct an ‘image of the world’ or an exclusive description of it have been frequent in historical memory and attempts generally fall short of the hopes and expectations which inspired them, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
“In the 3rd century BCE The Ptolomies, the last dynasty of ancient Egypt, dreamed of gathering all the books in the world, without exception, in one universal library. It might have been the last and only time that this could have been possible. The library at Alexandria was famously destroyed over a prolonged period by fire, wars, ideological and religious conflicts and theft”.1
A list of early collections of knowledge such as libraries and encyclopaedias might also include Cabinets of Curiosities, popular with aristocrats and rulers in the early modern era;
“The cabinet of curiosities is synonymous with delight and surprise, with marvels and rare objects, but is also the mirror and representation of the world in its entirety”2
Apart from being collections of objects, Cabinets of Curiosity differed from encyclopaedias and other kinds of compendiums in the sense that they were more personalised and contained a kind of autobiographical portrait of the interests and world view of the collector. These collections prefigured the museums of modern times, when collectors began to favour taxonomies based on scientific and historical understanding.
The desire to understand the shimmering spectacle of history and the world by means of the systematic ordering of objects, art and knowledge is at the root of the modern concept of the museum, and was equally the guiding principle behind the creation of the cabinet of curiosities”.3
Museums have benefited from donations of these private collections over the years, which has enabled them to represent a more comprehensive picture of humanity. The digital sphere, in which we can include AI, is perhaps the latest in this story of ‘completist’ projects committed to constructing an image of the world, and contributing to the map of our autobiographically constructed territories.
NOTES
1Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Charles Babbage (1837)
2‘Theatre, Technics and Writing’ Samuel Weber on Walter Benjamin (2008)
3 Papyrus 1Irene Vallejo – (2022)
4/5 Cabinet of Curiosities Massimo Listri – (2022)
The algorithm for the Ulam Spirals were by Dr. Richard Christian
The Fragment Corpora was created by Allan Forrester Parker
“We have the Idea of the World, but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it. We have the idea of the simple (that which cannot be broken down, decomposed), but we cannot illustrate it with a sensible object that would be a ‘case’ of it. We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ the absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. …those are the ideas of which no presentation is possible, …they can be said to be un-presentable.’
What is the Post-modern?’ Jean-François Lyotard (1979)