This work revolves around an intense effort to catalogue the collection of amateur radio identity cards that Paulo V. compiled over the course of his practice and stored in a filing cabinet.
In total, he collected roughly 30,000 cards from all over the world that display the details of connections established with other radio amateurs and contain a whole host of codes and graphic elements. I decided to undertake the task of digitally photographing the cards. In essence, O Arquivista (version 1.0) currently brings together (only) about a tenth of the collection, approximately 3000 cards for visual presentation.
Subsequently, the focus moved onto the question of organisation and the system of cataloguing and indexing, given that there were various possibilities. The lack of any certainty led the artist to embark on a semiotic study in order to identify signs that allowed him to establish connections.
During this process i found as a reference the French writer Georges Perec, author of the book Life: A User’s Manual, that tells the story of a man who is looking for a way to organise a set of five hundred hotel labels, until he reaches the conclusion that he is going round in circles and that his efforts are useless, due to the subjectivity of analysis and multiple possibilities of articulation.
Having begun to experiment with the identification of the cards used in this first version of the installation, i chose to group them in a database with indicators structured around six main groups: place, date, colour, illustration, code and digits.
The crossing of data between the image bank and the glossary of the database was generated using processing software and an audio interface.
The final result comprises two video projections and an interface. One video displays the aforementioned indexing glossary, while the other video exhibits the cards referring to each term from the glossary created in the database, as the latter are announced on the interface; Paulo V’s original microphone, the interface, is placed between these two projections, assuming its condition as an object/artefact adapted to new technologies. There is interaction with the visitor when the latter, by giving the voice command of one of the glossary terms, activates the selection of cards that were indexed for this term. The visual display of a set of cards is arranged in a grid on a black background, or appears on a slide version.
