The spatialization and spatial arrangement of knowledge subjects represents a particular practice of the organization of knowledge and memory. The ancient art of memory, handed down from the Roman rhetoric, has already established with its loci-method the routines of organizing things spatially. The loci-method itself can be considered as the internalization of a technique, which has been performed in the surrounding countryside as well as in urban space, namely the localization of collective knowledge and memory in a concrete spatial environment. The environment thus turns into a configuration of significant places. Correspondingly, the order of space is interconnected with the symbolic order of cultural knowledge. Urban space as a place and storage system to be imagined has been used by the ancient art of memory, too. In the field of spatial knowledge organization it serves as one of the most preferred order models. This is demonstrated not only by the literary ideal and knowledge cities of the 16th and 17th century, amongst them the Città del Sole by Tommaso Campanella and the Christianopolis by Johann Valentin Andreae, but also by recent approaches to spatial knowledge organization, which came up in context of computer-based data management. Since the 1980s numerous 'Information Cities' have been projected. The revival of space as an organizing principle in the computer age has also brought an adaptation and extension of the traditional techniques. Besides the spatial localization of knowledge objects, perspective procedures, which with different views and arrangements of data stocks can be generated, play a dominant role. With these approaches other, hitherto prevailing order procedures, for example those of historiographic chronology and diachrony, have been qualified. Simultaneously, spatial knowledge organization has been opened to a critical reflection. In this context, space as medium and problem of the presentation of knowledge has come to the fore.
On this background the research project 'Library, Map, City: Spatial Models of Knowledge' investigates two particular knowledge spaces and their arrangements: 1.) urban space, 2.) library. The corpus consists of libraries of the 16th to the18th century as physical knowledge spaces as well as of literary concepts and descriptions of urban and topographic knowledge arrangements. With this corpus a comparison between imaginary and physical spaces and their typical problems of ordering and presenting the subjects of knowledge is intended. In the triad of library, map, and city, the concept of 'map' takes an epistemological function. Together with the concept of 'tour' or 'walk' it serves the description and analysis of two elementary modes of the development and representation of spaces.
The primary focus of the research project lies in the fact that the spatial organization of knowledge--which is not restricted to static arrangements and classification schemes but depends on varied processes of action--is a performative practice. Spaces of knowledge are also dynamic spaces of action. They are places of permanent arranging and reorganizing, of subdividing and structuring, of cataloging and indicating, and they are places, where complex, partly directed, partly roaming search movements occur. As such a performative practice the spatial organization of knowledge has fundamentally affected the cultural production of meaning as well as the history of science and media. The project 'Library, Map, City: Spatial Models of Knowledge' is the follow-up project of 'Computer as Memory Theatre'.


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