The Dichotomous Key
Client Information:
Company Name: Bookmarks
Full Address: 1 Bloomsbury Street, London
WC1B 3QE
Contact: 0207 637 1848
Email: info@bookmarksbookshop.co.uk
Website: https://bookmarksbookshop.co.uk/
Client Background:
Known as “The Socialist Bookshop”, Bookmarks hosts books from politics, economics, trade unionism, labour history, the environment, black struggle, women, culture, fiction, radical kid's books etc. Not just selling from their bookshop in London, they ship books all over the world and take part in bookstalls across the country, from Tolpuddle to major demonstrations. They also offer a full mail order service for individuals and trade unions.
Called the “University of Activists”, Bookmarks keeps alive the tradition of radical bookselling, ensuring that activists have access to the most important lessons from history as well as cutting edge political analysis.
They also publish books in relation to trade unions and socialists.
Problem:
People of this generation are getting more and more ignorant of the world and what is going on. There is so much hate in this world, and people are preaching hate instead of love and forgiveness. This stems from ignorance and the inability to recognize facts from fiction and truth from lies. Society has started using their knowledge for their own selfish gains, as can be evidenced through the recent elections and across the board in media.
Creative Strategy:
To make a bold statement by consolidating information and experience together by creating a bible of sorts, and then burning the book, collecting the ashes of it in an urn for display purposes.
This project aims to make a bold statement about the recline of humanity and the regression of the use of knowledge by asking the question, so what if we have all these knowledge in the palm of our hands, how are we going to use it? For positive or negative purposes and how will this affect the people around us and ourselves?
In collaboration with Bookmarks, Singapore this project seeks to question knowledge and human application of it. The project will serve as an opening act during the grand opening of Bookmarks, where the original version of the book will be displayed for members of the public to see and printed copies will be given out for browsing.
This project is created with the intention to respond to the current world situation, of hate, war and turmoil. It is meant to provoke and create controversy.
The idea of book burning has always been a very political statement, associated with the context of burning knowledge, insulting tradition and practices and is a well known negative process altogether. This project seeks to take that notion of such a practice into context and with traditional means, depict a metaphor of how mankind is reclining with our current way of thinking. If society continues down this path of regression, there will be nothing but pain and suffering.
“You might as well destroy all the knowledge and experience you have if you do not put it to good use.”
The way the book is burnt so nonchalantly also depicts how knowledge is not something to be held on so tightly. Knowledge is something to be passed on and you use knowledge to make decisions and exercise them, when you hold on to tightly to what you know, it’s like having a full cup, which cannot be filled even further.
