Search Engine – of which this book is a reproduction – is a series of ‘catalogue cards’ featuring photographs sourced from the London Library, one of the world’s largest independent lending libraries. These images are ordered as the London-based artist, Louis Porter, encountered them – alphabetically by subject – on shelves that make neighbours of Sleep and Smuggling and bring together Pleasure, Poaching, and Poisons. The result forms an archaeological exploration of the systems of knowledge that we often take for granted. The construction of Search Engine took place between November 2021 and May 2022 amongst the stacks of the library’s Science & Miscellaneous section. Unlike most libraries, which use alphanumeric classification systems, the London Library is organised by sections and subject headings – primarily focusing on the humanities – with Science & Miscellaneous providing the overflow for an eclectic group of subjects, many of which echo the interests of the Victorian men of wealth who founded the library in 1841. For example, when entering the section, on the left-hand row one would encounter: Advertising, Aeronautics, Agriculture, Alchemy, Anatomy, Animal Lore, Arbitration, Archery, Arms & Armour, Artillery, Astrology, and Astronomy. Whilst Search Engine presents disparate subjects – Cats, Famine, Rubber, and so on – the frame upon which they are tethered resonates with an optical authority born of a rationalist world order. This hold on us not only lingers, as the ‘photographic’ is consumed and stochastically regurgitated by black boxes, but seems to be intensifying; much like a coin as it spins on a table, moving faster and faster, approaching the point where, suddenly, it stops. Taken as a whole, this book – Porter’s first for Perimeter Editions – could be understood as an archaeological dream of the photographic spirit from which we are assembling many of the perceptual models of our future experience of reality.
