2.3 Mock-up
Now, let’s fill this perhaps a little bit elusive conception with more practical content and outline a hypothetical alternative knowledge management for VW Bib. Suppose we feed the library's entire collection in digital form together with the entire output of TU and UdK into an algorithm. Through the adjusted use of metadata and AI-based algorithms it’s conceivable to not only integrate conventionally accepted forms of written knowledge, like digitalized books, papers, or e-journals. (Digital media today makes the narrow concept of knowledge obsolete because it functions as a wholistic medium by combining the historically separated forms of media into one. On this fundamental digital infrastructure text, image, sound, and video are incorporated in codified form and therefore rendered exchangeable. Works of art have always been always delicate engagements with reality. As cultural artefacts they do contain softer (rather subjective) forms of knowledge that sometimes speak to us even more because of that. In the past artworks couldn’t be part of the scientific undertaking because there was no clear way to establish a direct communication between let’s say a painting and a book. Only when the painting got interpretated by an art historian it could then circulate as text amongst other texts. Digital media doesn’t differentiate between image and text. Everything is coded into zeros and ones.) To correspond to the manifold collection of actual knowledge that is stored in both universities, apart from bachelor's and master's theses also digital representations of artistic works of any kind will be incorporated. Personal profiles of students and staff will be added and linked to their own works. As result, we gain a multimedia database with text, images, video, and sound. The algorithm then brings all these elements into the high-dimensional vector space – into a relational, networked system. Parallel to the sphere from the previous example, we now use a search function to determine a point within the high-dimensional space and then determine its nearest neighbors.
2.4 Curriculum
A short thought experiment regarding a speculative curriculum: Students from both universities autonomously initiate joint research projects. With help of the search function outlined above, they can access the virtually stored knowledge of the library regardless of disciplines or subject areas. Furthermore, they can also access another great knowledge source which is very much available in the universities: themselves, the students, and their teaching staff. Humans are great catalysators of knowledge and there is hardly a more effective way of transferring knowledge than a conversation with another expert. The library now constitutes the central place where these people come together and interact with themselves and with all other various forms of multimedia content. With help of this technological mediation through the interface they form transitory bubbles that then extend into the physical space. By drawing together humans, text, video, sound etc. high degrees of complexity are created within those bubbles. All outcomes of these necessarily transdisciplinary collaborations, whether they last for a day or several semesters, are then uploaded back onto the database.
Via this closing of the feedback loop, an emergent, collective system is created. In this sense, the Volkswagen library, as a service institution for academic work, ultimately becomes the Ideathek. From a place of linear knowledge storage and consumption, it becomes a viral space for the undetermined generation of new ideas and thoughts where data, information, knowledge in all their forms are seamlessly brought into interaction – creativity through complexity, so to say.