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limn

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About

Limn is an experiment in outlining.

It combines the collaborative focus of a special issue of a journal with the spontaneity and interactivity of new media. Limn focuses on reconstruction and recomposition of concepts in contemporary culture. Limn is modeled on the convivial and critical features of a studio in art, architecture or design. Each episode differs from the last-different curators bring different problems and approaches to the basic concepts and tools developed in and through the process.

The Total Archive

Articles

Preface: The Total Archive

Archives make the future. Editors Boris Jardine and Christopher Kelty explore how archives govern us.

Keeping the Books

Finn Brunton goes inside the Bitcoin blockchain to explore the weirdly meticulous collective archive, and how it might someday govern us.

The Bombing Encyclopedia of the World

How do you plan for the sudden onset of total war? Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff describe the construction of a vast collection of data about the vital, vulnerable systems of every nation in the world in the aftermath of World War II.

Unpacking Google’s Library

Google wanted to digitize all the world’s books but eventually abandoned that goal. Mary Murrell explores the rise and fall of one utopian library project and the emergence of new ones in its wake.

Duplicate, Leak, Deity

Lawrence Cohen de-duplicates the complex story of India’s Biometric Archive(s).

The Totality of True Propositions (Before) (2008-2009)

Like a cartographic exercise, Julien Prévieux traces the outlines of a completely uchronic parallel future, not without wit.

Just What Are We Archiving?

What kind of people will we become if we keep trying to archive everything? Geof Bowker reports from inside the Skinner Box.

How to be open about being closed

How does the Internet forget what it should not remember? Reuben Binns dives inside the rules for Biographies of Living Persons at Wikipedia and the right to be forgotten.

The Origins of Happiness

Boris Jardine tells the story of a little ladder intended to tell us what everyone wants. Where on the ladder are you?

The Genomic Open

Leaders of the Human Genome Project promised a genomic total archive. Jenny Reardon argues that their quest inspired visions of freedom and imprisonment vital to understanding today’s ambivalences around open genomic data.

Blood, Paper, and Total Human Genetic Diversity

Jenny Bangham explains how the attempt to create a supply of all possible types of human blood gave rise to genetic diversity research in the 20th century.

Unending Archives

Aleph or Library? Work from the UA Artist Collective explores whether art can be an archive, or an archive art.

What Escapes the Total Archive

Rebecca Lemov relates how the stories in the a “database of dreams” leak out of the edges, and sometimes overwhelm totality with particularity.

Fragments of Plague

Branwyn Poleykett, Nicholas HA Evans and Lukas Engelmann are rethinking the role of the visual in the creation of a total archive of the Third Plague Pandemic.

In the Name of Humanity

The total archive is already here, Balázs Bodó finds it hidden in the shadows and run by pirates.

Archiving Descriptive Language Data

Judith Kaplan explores the possibility of a new GOLD standard for archiving the world's endangered language data.

A Hoard of Hebrew MSS

Ben Outhwaite tells the stories of the people who immerse themselves in one of the most valuable total archives in existence—the Cairo Genizah.

Selections from the Valaco Archive

Vadig de Croehling, Director of Ideation, Process, and Interface at the Group for Research on Experimental Accumulation and Speculative Archives (REASArch), offers a sampling of elements from one of his organization’s most inscrutable archival projects.

Alan Lomax and the Temple of Movement

Alan Lomax wanted to catalogue all human movement. Whitney Laemmli explores the high modern utopianism of the Choreometrics project.

Zebras, Blanks and Blobs

How can we work with vast digital collections? Artist Fabienne Hess explores the content and scale of an online image database

Exhibit: The Entropy Archives

What does a perfectly random archive look like? Finn Brunton explains.