How and why do we sort what we sort? What’s going on in our decision making process?

A selection of artworks exploring the history of taxonomy and classification systems, how they have shaped our world, the ideologies behind them. Linnaeus’ binomial nomenclature, Roget’s thesaurus.

Including:

Documentary photo series with Chan-yang Kim. Documenting people who arrange things for a living - shopkeepers etc. Interview them about their thought processes.

Interactive installation - the sorting table - visitors are put into one of two groups, the sorters and the shufflers. One side of the table has things being sorted, the other shuffled. Around them on the walls, video clips,images, sound items that prompt dialogue about what it means to sort. What it means to disarrange. Entropy. Etc. After a couple of minutes, they switch sides. Then repeat.

Series of prints elucidating alternative taxonomies - instead of sorting books by Dewey decimal, they’re sorted by smell. Items are sorted by level of heat vs cold. Public interactive activity - try sorting colours by temperature only, or by pitch. Try sorting words by softness to hardness.