Mondothèque

Mondotheque is a platform for experiments with the legacy of the universalist and documentalist Paul Otlet such as drawings, images, systems, ideas.

The project is named after La Mondothèque, Otlet’s 1934 design for an imaginary device, a research machine that could be at the same time archive, instrument, desk, catalog and broadcasting station.

Mondothèque is inspired by the obstinate spirit of Paul Otlet, and wants to look at the way knowledge is managed and distributed today in a way that allows us to invent other futures and different narrations of the past.

Mondothèque mailinglist: https://listes.domainepublic.net/listinfo/mondotheque

For The Mundaneum archive center in Mons/Bergen, please go here: http://mundaneum.org


Related events

Mondotheque::a radiated booklaunch

2016
In 1919 the Mundaneum occupied half of the majestic Cinquantenaire building in Brussels. The ambitious project was imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine as a mix between documentation (…)

Workshop: Le livre sur le livre

2015
In 1934, Paul Otlet published the Treaty of documentation - The book on the book, in which he envisaged the organization of the intellectual work of documentation, and the future of books. More (…)

Ideographies of knowledge

2015
"Once one read; today one refers to, checks through, skims." - Paul Otlet, 1903 Mondotheque contributes to Ideographies of knowledge, an event that brings together a number of digital (…)

Mondothèque at Otlet Salons

Femke represents Mondothèque at the Mundaneum Edition of the Otlet Salons, a "network event that aims to foster new cooperation across the borders of disciplines, institutions and society." With (…)

Mondotheque: Manual for a Diffraction Machine

2015
(Presentation in the context of the Public Library Festival) "Humanity is at a turning point in its history. The mass of available information is formidable. New instruments are necessary for (…)

We don’t live in this kind of world

2014
For the seminar Public Library. über Infrastrukturen der Wissensbildung (Public Library. About infrastructures of knowledge formation), Femke prepares a new episode of Fathers of the Internet, (…)

Fathers of the Internet

2014
In 2013, Belgium universalist, pacifist and feminist Paul Otlet was recognized as ’a founding father of the Internet’. Simultaneously, Google adopted the remains of Otlet’s archive at the (…)