Reference Guide

A growing encyclopaedia on ships, forests and pacemakers.

Reference Guide is a collection of heterogeneous entries ranging from every ship named Authenticity, to plutonium pacemakers, to the effect of sodium light on trees, to the restoration of a 1990's replica of a 17th century Japanese ship, to Canadian lumber export, to a dislodged mirror in the Large Hadron Collider, etc. These entries are connected and fuelled by cross-references that not only determine the characteristics of the encyclopaedia and its use, but that are also the mechanism behind its expansion. All* entries are transcripts of moments when objects and technologies challenge the strict boundaries that apply to them and emphasize their transitory nature.

Reference Guide allows each reader to construct his or her own path through the different entries. This movement is similar to the one you might make within l’Encyclopédie, The Winkler Prins, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia, etc.; a movement that might take you from the entry on the aorta, to the heart, to surgeon, to scalpel, to knife, to axe, to forestry only to end up at silver birch or – with a different turn somewhere along the way – at windmill, oil painting, carbon monoxide, the moon or keel. The only thing connecting the AORTA and the SILVER BIRCH is the reader’s trajectory within the encyclopaedic context.

*Although the main focus of Reference Guide lies within these moments of technological candour, the collection demonstrates a surprisingly high interest in characters and phenomena along the side-lines of these episodes and displays a severe tendency to digress.

Reference Guide
2019
Roma Publication 345
24,5 cm x 30 cm, softcover
ISBN: 9789492811400