Website
Please visit Changing Paradigms to view the website. What we collectively define as truth is slowly but constantly changing. Any work, literary, artistic or otherwise, encapsulates the specific paradigm under which it was created. Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie not only gathered vast amounts of information, but inevitably imprinted its unique world view, ideals and beliefs. Likewise, present-day Wikipedia is an embodiment of ideals and how we currently perceive the world. Together with Daniel Hernández, we are interested in how paradigms change over time and how deeply they can influence the way we think and the content we create. In order to compare the content of the Encyclopédie and Wikipedia, we created an algorithm which analyses the texts and finds the most common word connections in the text, highlighting the central topics of the articles. This way, the user of the website is presented with the main differences between the two texts.This work was part of the Declaring Reason exibition in the Museum Meermanno. It consisted of 23 installations that raised questions about contemporary political issues, taking six books from the Meermanno collection as a starting point.