2014
Self-Sorting Documents
2014
Custom software (Java, Processing, OpenGL), Mac Mini, 4K monitor or projector
Ported to JavaScript, Node.js and Three.js, 2026
www.guess.fr/works/self_sorting_documents
Self-Sorting Documents a real-time, algorithmic 3D environment that visualizes a vast image archive that brings together two fields that, at the time, were largely considered distinct: media archaeology and spirit phenomena. It functions as an autonomous work, yet was originally one component in a larger constellation, the project Media Mediums.
Over the course of researching and amassing images on a wide range of communication phenomena — from ectoplasmic cantilever trumpets to electronic vocoders, from the planchette to the telautograph, from the celestial telegraph to intercontinental satellite transmissions — one of our main preoccupations became both the surprising tenacity of traditional hierarchies and the task of devising strategies to question and undo them, producing unexpected correlations, new knowledge. Self-Sorting Documents was conceived as a way to both visualize the entire archive and rethink these historically hard-wired, hand-me-down, binary definitional operators — rational / irrational, science / pseudo-science, etc.
A mobile camera slowly visits each of the 300 keywords that form the conceptual horizon of Media Mediums, sequentially exploring the image-documents gathered at the current node. Each image surreptitiously hides a set of keyword tags — a semantic potentiality that allows documents to drift from one category to another, poetically automating categorical slippage. In the background things whirl and churn, loosening long-anchored image-text relationships: rebellious documents with a mind of their own.
On occasion, the programmed space is used as a performance tool, becoming Technically Speaking. Using voice recognition to navigate the space, a specific path is sliced out of the mass, evoking my book Voice Signatures by traversing nodes on the history of the mechanization and automation of writing and speaking — documents fleetingly moving in and out of view.
Many thanks to Gwenola Wagon for her help in conceptualizing the project and for part of the iconography.