Key Concepts

The Law of the Good Neighbour

"The book of which one knew was in most cases not the book which one needed. The unknown neighbour on the shelf contained the vital information, although from its title one might not have guessed this. The overriding idea was that the books together—each containing its larger or smaller bit of information and being supplemented by its neighbours—should by their titles guide the student to perceive the essential forces of the human mind and its history."

Amanda Du Preez considers finding good neighbours as "Searching as Researching"

"Each book, and each newly acquired book, should stage a conversation with its neighbor: ask a question, provide an answer. The result is a conversation both infinite and coherent: the envy, perhaps, of today’s digitized world and its infinite capacity for information but not for coherence."

Embodiment and Presence

"In order to encounter these good neighbours, readers must by necessity be able to browse the holdings by themselves, rather than rely on ordering material from closed storage via the intermediary of a librarian."

Denkraum

"Warburg’s black panels are frames that allowed for comparison and (hermeneutic) dialog. He referred to this dialogical frame as a Denkraum, (or Andachtsraum)—a frame that allows for thinking and pondering over images. Warburg also constantly re-arranged the order and format of the images to generate different conversations and conclusions, thus proliferating frames."

Searching and/or Finding

"if an analogue archive amounts to a machine for thinking, a computer provides an engine that helps you to search. In this capacity it is unsurpassable, so long as you know, more or less precisely, what you are hoping to find. Computerized searching helps you rapidly to locate the whereabouts of an object, be it a text or a picture. Whereas looking around and thinking with a physical archive can help you in a different sense to find it – that is, to realize and contextualize its significance in and as a broader set of findings."

Memory

"...deaperting from a modern linear notion of time, in which the past precedes the present - memory is understood not as a locus where something past is recalled, but one element of a multi-layered living consciousness."

Interpretation

"There is an aspect of performance to the presentation of the panels in pace and the images on their surfaces. Warburg's intention was not to speak in images but to use images as vehicles for experience and thought. The panels invite the viewer to participate in the production of meaning, moving between panels as if leafing through a book, an in his or her perception forging ever new connections between images."

"The process consciously avoinds defining meanings, while the spaces between the images alludes to the realm of the unknown. In other words, we are navigating without a complete map in spaces that connect the known and the unknown"

Pathosformeln

"[Warburg] expresses the aspiration to outline a 'grammar of the languages if gestures' that highlights a 'morphological law': the experience of rituals, either mythological-religious (in the Greek word) or historical-political (in the Roman world) as 'coining devices' for the 'realm of expressions of tragic passion', in other words a pathos formulas."

Research & Display

"the project offers new forms of association and argument familiar to artists and curators alike, and makes the connections between research and display visible and even vital"

Interactive without being overly Instumental

"The Library is interactive but, as an intelligent organism, it is not so easily instrumentalized. You succumb to its rhythms."