Kodex

July 2nd, 2014 I must write down what I saw in Paris, on June 28, 2014, in a dark office in the Institut d'études politiques de Paris. It’s an encyclopaedia. It is bound in old brown leather, which has softened with time. It shows burnished marks along the edges and spine, and still holds the musky, birch bark, animalistic and floral notes of tanned hide. The cover bears a debossed blind Cyrillic title – the spine only a roman numeral I.

The half title page has the loosely penned word Kodex, on the verso is a copywrite page declaring: an indecipherable edition number and a date that’s scratched away. There is a notation in an unrecognizable script, formed from short deliberate strokes and simplified pictographic shapes. The pages hold the musky smell of bookshop basements, the sweetness of degrading paper, and forgotten cardboard boxes. The pages are square and true though yellowing towards the edge. It feels heavy and comforting to hold.

Flashing through the pages nothing is immediately legible, merely line after line, hundreds of rows, in two columns, forming indexical lists of the unknown. The pages are thin but not brittle, with a translucent waxy appearance, like cigarette paper with a beeswax coat. Holding thin pages in my hands I realize the entries are infinitely interrelated in the 3-dimensional construct of this book – the entries run both left to right and down the page, but also through the Z access to connect entries through the virtual space of the book.

It’s a book not of words, names or descriptions, but of the mediums and flows of all things and all their interactions. I am holding a map, constantly changing, of every connection – of every thing. Such an object has folded the ontological notion of three dimensionality downwards, into a singular space, while also opening a rhizomatic extra dimensionality of knowledge I had never experienced. All of this I understood without the use of language – without the ability to read.

On the final page, I found another marking, unnoticed or missing at the time of the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry. Written in Spanish and roughly translated: “From where does the thundercloud come with its black sack of tears?”

#include <spanish.h>

      void loop() {

           //run translate script translate.spanish

(De dònde viene el nubarrón con sus sacos negros de llanto?);

serial.println(spanish); }