Reference guide

de Michiel de Cleene

"'Reference Guide' is a collection of entries, connected and fuelled by cross-references. These not only determine the characteristics of the collection and its use, but they are also the mechanism behind its expansion. Although the main focus of 'Reference Guide' lies within moments of technological candour, the collection demonstrates a surprisingly high interest in characters and phenomena along the side-lines of these episodes and displays a severe tendency to digress. 'Reference Guide' allows each reader to construct his or her own path through the different entries. This movement is similar to one you might make within an encyclopedia; a movement that might take you from the entry on the aorta, to the heart, to surgeon, to scalpel, to knife, to axe, to forestry only to end up at silver birch or--with a different turn somewhere along the way--at windmill, oil painting, carbon monoxide, the moon or keel. The collection incorporates modified carousel projectors, two pacemakers taking each other for a heart, transcripts, framed pictures, manuals, short films, a giant billboard, recordings, altered batteries, a collection of low pressure sodium lamps, a carpet, a pronouncing dictionary, postcards, eighty pigeon rings on a rope, seven scale-models of a Himalayan mountain, etc. This book is the reference guide to this collection: for each entry, it gathers both the DIN A4-page(s) and--in the margins--the provisional set of cross-references." --Publisher's website, viewed December 3, 2019.