Chipboards, sheet metal, magnets, ca. 42000 sheets;

for #offline at Spazio Pulpo, 2017

A personal computer before the personal computer.

The question of how to arrange knowledge within an organisation system arose when people wanted to store it with the possibility of permanent access. As soon as textual knowledge surpassed the capacity of a single human brain, they began to write down excerpts of relevant passages of textbooks and organize them in different boxes using references. The administrators of said boxes became the greatest polymaths of their time. They grew and evolved hand in hand with the complexity of their external memory. The best example of this is the prominent thinker of system theory Niklas Luhmann with his legendary Zettelkasten (index card box). Used as an external expansion of his brain, the Zettelkasten turned out to be a fundamental base that culminated in Luhmann’s self-awareness who couldn’t work without it anymore. On more than 90 000 cards and countless cross-references, he collected and connected all his readings and complemented them with his own explanations and annotations. “Without the index cards, that is, only by thought, I wouldn’t have developed these ideas”, Luhmann once said about his work and the role of his Zettelkasten. The Zettelkasten was his second memory and an autonomous communication partner that grew with every conversation to create branches – this can be described as an adaptive artificial intelligence hidden in the appearance of simple wood and paper. Like a constantly

growing construction set, its basic elements are ready to create an infinite amount of logical and illogical references – its components network, pass signals and recreate themselves like synapses. Therefore, it does not only store the references, but constantly creates new ones. By filing its content associatively – a deeply human attribute – and organizing itself in a specific chaos, it possesses a kind personality of its own.



The drawers can by opened by a magnetic handle. The user can use post-its to give the faces of the drawers an individual color code.

all photographs by Leonhard Hilzensauer