Contents:

Prologue: On the Origins of the Project

How Database is Designed

How the Records are Chosen (The Sampling Problem)

On the Structure of a Record, i.e., What the Fields Contain

How to Think about Fields E as Time-Space Volumes (The Sampling Problem, again)

Appendix 1: How Database May Look if Installed Physically

Appendix 2: Three Time-Space Volumes from "Madame Bovary"
 
 
 
 

Prologue: On the Origins of the Project

In the Fall of 1997 I boarded the train in Linz, Austria in the direction of Prague. Selecting my stop at random, I got off in a small town in the south of the Czech republic. The town turned out to be full of charm, at least for me, as it offered a mixture of special and distinct atmospheres. In the center was a small historical section, beautifully restored, with shops and wine bars. But on leaving the center of the city, one soon encountered a typical post-communist environment, with bland and rather ugly architecture, but, which since the end of the Communist era, has acquired a certain nostalgic charm. I stayed in the small inn next to the canal which circled the old town. I spent a few very pleasant days wandering around, passing back and forth between the old and new parts of town, taking photographs (later it turned out that my camera was broken so none of the pictures unfortunately came out) and re-reading Flaubert's Madame Bovary. This late twentieth century provincial town where I was staying seemed to echo the era described by Flaubert. Away from the major battle grounds and nerve centers of history, towns like these are nevertheless affected by the changes occurring in the metropolis. Yet here the official historical events - revolutions, wars, changes of political regimes - are intermingled with a micro-history of human life: passing of generations, births and deaths, weddings, graduations, feelings of love; gradual change in the texture and color of the walls of the buildings; a new neighbor attracting a conversation in the building; the color of the sky around six in the evening, the same every summer, yet also different because it interacts with the colors of whatever ever political posters happened to be plastered on the walls this year.

During one of these days I took a bus to a nearby castle which happened to contain a small art museum. The 20^th century part of the museum exhibited the paintings of local artists, maybe 40 or 50 in all. Many of the paintings were quite nice although I had never heard of any of the artists. Following these paintings in chronological order was like going through a textbook on 20^th century art: the gradual simplification of shapes and lines ending up with abstraction; Cubism lingered through the 1930s; then Surrealism which had a late start, but continued to control the imagination of a number of artists until the present time; and so on. I was fascinated. Why, I thought, do we always focus on the same few cities and the same few dozen figures when we think of the twentieth century? Why not narrate its history through this town? Everything is here - all the key art movements - and also everything else this century has to offer: trams and cars; the increased average life duration, required school attendance and passports; the ugly monotonous mass housing, the gray blocks, one after another, their only decoration being the patches of colors from the clothes hung to dry on the balconies; the ever present hopes of better life, the move to the big city, the new suit, the new hat; the hurried and spontaneous love making made possible by the new economy of women’ cloves; the sounds and images of cinema, radio, television which filled the silence once and for all, which accompany mornings and evenings, weekdays and holidays, which are present in every apartment to compensate for the drudgery of gray buildings. ( I would choose from some of these details and cut it back). In short, it seemed to me, this town offered a perfect setting for a 20^th century Madame Bovary, even hundreds and thousands of them, each experiencing the same feelings of love, but each suffering in her own unique way.
 
 

How Database is Designed

The Database of Provintial Life (Volume 1: 20^th Century Europe) is constructed as follows.

10 different years in the 20^th century are first selected: 1904, 1911, 1917, 1923, 1927, 1934, and so on.

No particular importance can be attached to the selected years, although some of them resonate with certain well-known historical events.

For every year, a city in Europe is also selected (Europe defined here quite liberally, from Portugal to Ural Mountains).

Each city-year is represented by a record which contains a number of fields. These fields store media material which documents life in a selected city in a selected year.
 
 

How the Records are Chosen (The Sampling Problem)

The material stored in the database has no historical importance in comparison with the events normally recorded in historical records, such as wars, revolutions, deaths of rulers, important technological inventions, and so on.

Yet, as a whole, this material provides an objective and comprehensive map of the 20^th century. Every occurrence, every object, every thought, every image documented here indirectly reflects more famous and "important" events.

But, more importantly: do such famous events really let us appreciate the special texture of life in the 20^th century, particularly its human feelings, moods and psychological states ("sostoiania")? The answer is no; they do not tell us anything about what it really felt to live in this century.

On the other hand, the objects and the events which comprise TSD portray the texture, the feel of the 20^th century. They are chosen somewhat arbitrarily, and it is this arbitrary nature of choice that assures their typicality. Thus, through them, the particular and seemingly random types, patterns and major vectors of the 20^th century are revealed.

(Of course, I will admit that my sampling method is somewhat arbitrary – but no more arbitrary than any other accepted by modern contemporary scientific and humanistic disciplines.)

As far as the particular choices are concerned, I could have of course chosen "Warsaw, 1957" as opposed to "Warsaw, 1958"; or "Dresden, 1923" as opposed to "Dresden, 1925." Let me simply state that I had my own reasons for selecting places and years as I did. Partly my reasoning was simply poetic: for me, "Warsaw, 1958" evokes a nice feeling. But I also was governed in my choices by another logic which I will not reveal myself but which a careful user will soon uncover.(Note that both years and cities selected include well-known and historically "marked" years and cities as well as unknown and "unmarked" years and cities.)
 
 

On the Structure of a Record, i.e., What the Fields Contain

Each record which corresponds to a particular year-city pair contains 5 fields numbered A through E. These fields store historical information in the following way:

A). A written text object, created during the selected year in the selected city, for instance: a personal letter, a receipt, official correspondence, and so on.

B). A map of the city, published in the selected year (or close to it in time). If the map of the city can't be obtained, a map of the country is used.

C). A photograph of a painting created in the city during the selected year by a local artist. (The user will soon notice that the style of each painting in the database usually corresponds to what the official history of art textbooks singled out as the one key artistic movement of the decade to which the selected year belongs. However, the official textbooks represent each art movement through the works of a small group of artists who happened to live in an art center like Paris or New York. In reality, each movement was also practiced by numerous artists in many countries although often with some time delay. So, for instance, the database includes a surrealist painting under "Prague, 1937" and a timid looking abstraction under "Volgograd, 1979.")

D). A fragment of an interior monologue, one minute long, transcribed from somebody who happened to live in the selected city in the selected year.
 

E). A recorded moving image (film or video), one minute long, of something which took place in the selected city during the selected year. For instance: a man in his 40’s lighting a cigarette and looking at the barman as he is making a drink; a woman sitting at her desk typing a letter for her boss; a couple, naked in bed, embracing in the early hour of the morning; raindrops, seen in a close-up of a window of a barber shop; and so on.

The recording media varies from year to year, beginning with black and white film and ending with digital video. NOTE: in contrast to professional movies, where human life appears nicely framed by a cameraman, the moving image recordings contained in TSD are random samples of reality. Each is an arbitrary fragment of what simply occurred during the selected 30 second interval inside the selected "space" (see below). Therefore, in some cases the recording presents no actions or events at all, while in other cases these are fragmented. For instance, in a recording from 1944,we first see a table top with a cup of coffee and two pieces of sugar lying on a napkin. For most of the recorded duration nothing happens, although an attentive viewer may enjoy subtle movements of air just above the cup,which apparently is quite hot; towards the end, somebody’s hand suddenly enters the frame and lifts the cup. Only two of the selected years have a more traditional composition with action taking place close to the center of the frame.
 
 

How to Think about Fields E as Time-Space Volumes (The Sampling Problem, again)

Consider now the material in FIELDS D of the database (i.e., one minute moving images). We can think of them as being organized using the following time-space hierarchy:
 

Because of the hierarchy of time-space objects, each of the volumes becomes a kind of Russian doll, with progressively smaller volumes contained within each other.

(In mathematical terms, these volumes are samples over the 20^th century.)

The century as a whole can be thought of as consisting of a great number of such volumes, each containing whatever happened within a limited period of time and limited volume of space.

Using computers, it is, in principle, possible to create a database containing all such volumes; but it would require many years of work, by a very large research institute employing thousands of researchers. Even if a number of research institutes from different countries could work together on this project, the task would probably prove to be too Immense. We can also anticipate that disagreements would soon transpire. Different institutes will propose different methodologies for collecting and processing data. Disagreements would occur over the data that should be included, with each country suspecting that the others are trying to diminish its weight in the database. Soon, each city in every participating country would learn about the project, and would lobby to be included. They would base their eligibility on the basis of their particular suitability for sampling, due to their "typical historical lack of significance" (thus, small cities would proudly proclaim their "provinciality, historical insignificance, and relative backwardness" just to be included). The whole project would undoubtedly become a big mess and would never be completed. And even if all these political problems could be miraculously overcome, the constant innovations in computer software assure us that a project of such magnitude could not be pulled off, for gradually researchers would end up devoting more of their time to translating already collected data into newer formats, rather than collecting new samples.

Therefore, rather than entrusting the task to some large institute and risking the project completion, I decided to solely rely on my own efforts, limiting myself to just 10 year-city space-time volumes. It should be noted that, for obvious statistical reasons, and also given the advances in modern database techniques, my rather small set of volumes presents as incomprehensive and inaccurate (optional) map of the 20^th century as many thousands of volumes. The advantage to the user is that the potentially incomprehensible and un-navigable corpus of data is reduced to just 10 space-time volumes; ten small cubes positioned at a certain distance from each other within the event space of the 20^th century; ten small cubes which can be easily transported and which the user can touch and even lift in her hands, thus establishing a personal and "material" relationship to history. In this way, everything which happened in 20^th century, all of its numerous (but not infinite!) events are compressed into just ten boxes.
 
 

Appendix 1: How Database May Look if Installed Physically

The arrangement of 10 time-space volumes needs to convey the idea that they are just samples from the 20^th century; i.e., that the whole of the 20^th century lies between them. Therefore the volumes are arranged on a flat surface in an irregular pattern. Some details are painted on the surface suggesting a city block seen from above: paths; benches here and there, a few trees. Thus the whole scene looks like a mass housing complex from the middle of the century, which is probably as good an image for this century as any other. Such complexes can be found outside the historical centers of most cities in the 20^th century; thus they are typical in a way in which the spatial organization of the city’s center is not. Quickly and cheaply built, they are slowly becoming a particular kind of ruins, with erosion happening on a micro-scale, not in a grand or picturesque way. The passage of time and the presence of its inhabitants simply add details to the originally standard constructions: a line of cloves being dried; a plant on a balcony; peeled-off paint; a group of children playing in front of one of the buildings; a cat sleeping on a patch of green grass.
 
 

Appendix 2: Three Time-Space Volumes from "Madame Bovary"

The following passages are from Gustave Flaubert’s, Madame Bovary. Patterns of Provincial Life, translated by Francis Steegmuller (New York: Random House, 1957; Vintage Classics Edition, 1992).

1.

"My wife never gardens," said Charles, "She’s been advised to take exercise, but even so she’d much rather stay in her room and read."

"So would I," said Leon. "What’s more delightful than an evening beside a fire with a nice bright lamp and a book, listening to the wind beating against windows…?"

"How true!" she said, her great dark eyes fixed widely on him. [p. 99.]
 
 

2.

"Anyway," he said, "when you live in the country…"

"Any trouble you take is wasted," said Emma.

"Completely," replied Rodolphe. "Think of it: there isn’t a single person here today capable of appreciating the cut of a coat."

And they talked about the mediocrity of provincial life, so suffocating, so fatal to all noble dreams." [p. 163.]
 
 

3.

A kind of intoxication was wafted up to her from those closely packed lives, and her heart swelled as though the 120,000 souls palpitating below had sent up to her as a collective offering the breath of all the passions she supposed them to be feeling. In the face of the vastness her love grew larger, and was filled with a turmoil that echoed the vague ascending hum. All this love she, in turn, poured out – onto the squares, onto the three-lined avenues, onto the streets; and to her old Norman city was like some fabulous capital, a Babylon into which she was making her entry. [p. 310-311.]