The Fragment Corpora by Allan F. Parker

Description

“The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or women whispered”

— Charles Babbage – Inventor of the Difference Engine (1821)

The images and texts in The Fragment Corpora include a variety of seemingly random elements referencing aerial views, coding, psychological tests, allegories, art history, astronomy, poetry, micro and macro environments, images of wholeness and fragmentation, and the mathematical sublime.

Early collections of knowledge about the world, such as libraries and encyclopaedias also included Cabinets of Curiosities. These collections prefigure the museums of modern times, when collectors began to favour taxonomies based on science and history. The digital world, in which we can include AI, is perhaps the most recent episode in this story of ‘completist’ projects which attempt to lay out the world before us.

The book embraces the limitations of such attempts to construct meaningful images of the world we inhabit, acknowledging the optics through which such descriptions are necessarily determined.