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Part of a series titled Undexed, a Babel-inspired reconfiguration of found text through the composition of anagrams using old library cross-reference cards. The newly-composed texts undermine and obfuscate the intended purpose of the original cards while creating something new, strange and/or interesting.Artist Website
“I loved flipping through the cards in a card catalog! I love how the anagrams ignore the purpose of the cards (order and structure) and bring the adventure of searching for information to the front.
Sarah Palfrey
Director, Morgantown Public Library System
This piece has such depth in its simplicity! To take something almost obsolete from the history of libraries and manipulate it in such a way to make one ponder not only how things migrate from a necessity to "scrap" but how ideas do as well. To jumble the letters and make other words signifies... how differently the same set of characters can be changed in such a way to make such a vastly different... concept while the original still stands firmly in its existence is both enlightening and very sobering.
Danielle
Public Library Director, Paden City Public Library
As a librarian who was a user of card catalogs for my own research as a child and student, but then became a librarian as card catalogs were morphing into digital databases, I love the transformed use of these old cards. I love the whimsy, yet clever creativity of rearranging the letters on the card to make new meaning. It is a visual representation of the morphing of knowledge; the morphing of how libraries have evolved over time; and just a fun and clever way of repurposing the past into something new for the future.
Karen R. Diaz
Dean, WVU Libraries