Page 69 - The Venice Biennale 2001 issue of World of Art Magazine

eLiTe umbeRTO eco
Travels In Hyperreality (1990). The limits of Interpretation (1990). foucault’s Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1988). leonardo cremonini: Paintings and
Pendulum (1989). on the Medieval Theory of Signs (1989). The Aesthetics of Watercolors 1976-1986 (1987). Semiotics and the Philosophy of language (1984).
chaomos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce (1989). The open Work (1989). The Sign of Three: dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1984). Postscript to The name of the
The Bomb and the general (1989). The Three Astronauts (1989). Meaning and rose (1983). The name of the rose (1983). The role of the reader: Explorations in
Mental representations (1988). The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (1988). the Semiotics of Text (1979). The Theory of Semiotics (1976)

Eco picks up a pile of papers from the desk in front of him and waves books that I pick up. But this is a very random thing.
them. “But it is also very much based on your past experience, obviously?”
once I used to go to the library and take notes. I would work a lot, but at oh, sure, it is random, but based upon past experience.
the end of my work I had, say, 30 files on a certain subject. now, when He reaches for a book from his desk and begins to thumb through it.
I go into the library - this has happened frequently to me in American ok, now I am able to open this at the first page, to look at the summary,
libraries - I find a lot of things that I xerox and xerox and xerox in order to see the bibliography and to understand if the fellow is reliable or not;
to have them. When I come home with them all, and I never read them. if there is something new there or not. And since I have long experience,
I never read them at all! my decimation is oriented. I sense it is better that I read this, and not
“You never seem to have the time, do you? once you know that it is there, that etceteras.
you feel reassured, and so you don’t read it.” “So you are able in a way to recognize newness, or innovation?”
Exactly... In a way, in a way. I can commit mistakes of course, but if I make a mistake
“xeroxing then can paralyse your reading activity? That’s another risk?” today, I probably won’t do that tomorrow. Possibly I may choose to disregard
Sure...That’s another risk which is sometimes very real. some book or other and that may be a mistake, but the next week I will
“Yes, well then, what do you think about the idea of these personal come across yet another book, and so on. But a student of 20 years old, or
information filters. This idea that you can kind of make a personal profile, and even of 30 does not have this kind of filtering ability. We have to invent a
the system will search Internet on the basis of this?” practice, a theory. A practice or training in decimation.
This is what I call the art of decimation... “Well now, how do we do that?”
“decimation?” Eco leans forward eagerly in his chair.
decimation. You kill only one person out of ten... Well, it still has to be invented. There must be some rules. There are
He gestures towards the well-filled bookshelves again. some very elementary rules such as: control the dates of the bibliography
The number of books that only concern my specific domain, not to for instance. If you are working on a certain subject you may find many
speak of the other ones that I receive weekly certainly, exaggeratedly, references from 1993 and 1994. But in relation to other subjects finding
overwhelms my reading... only references from 1993 and 1994 might be negative, you ought to be
“Your capability, capacity?” finding some older dates.
...my capability, my time. If you have a certain experience you are able So if you read a book on kant and you have only a bibliography from
to... well, you can make a very random decimation. on this or that subject the nineteen-nineties then this is suspect. The author is working from
for instance, there may be no more than ten possible new ideas. It is rare secondary sources. If you are reading a book on hypertext and you find an
that that is the case. old bibliography then this is suspect, because every day there is something
“And the working hypotheses you make are based on these?” new about this particular field. So there may be some first, elementary rules
So .. if I read only one out of ten books, probably there will be an idea in you can use in order to isolate certain things immediately.
there I can find, and if it is not there, then it will be in the next group of ten (to be continued in the next number)
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