I've loved Wilmot's Warehouse mostly from afar since it's release, occasionally picking it up for an hour until reaching around 100 items, getting overwhelmed, and shelving it again. Over the past few weeks, however, and after five years of my living space becoming increasingly chaotic (particularly throughout the pandemic), renovations have been underway and are almost complete. With more clothes than dresser space, more books than bookshelves would allow, and a collection of tchotchkes, bulky controllers, and piles on top of piles of things that my cat kept knocking over, reorganisation was crucial just as more storage was. Within that context of shuffling everything around, not simply moving it out and plopping it back in, Wilmot's Warehouse finally made sense.
The shuffle of the warehouse is ongoing as mental categories ebb and flow across artificial boundaries. A bottle of liquid goes from my medicine area to the science area to the food area to the liquids area back to the medicine area. A tent goes with outdoor paraphernalia on the side for temporary shelter (opposite my weather conditions), itself abutted against permanent structures, construction goods, and patterns. An influx of tree stumps upsets the spacing of all my botanical wares, so much so that I move them with other measurement iconography (tree rings show time, are they not the calendars of nature?).
Like the pillars cleared with my performance stars, those new vast storage spaces let me categorise my own collection. Books with books, sure, but with academic texts in a place of their own, art books elsewhere, historical tomes too receive a space, writing on games adjacent to other books but also physical games. Those, of course, are near my music CDs. My archival cases of X68000 print media and diskettes stay with texts on games because they too are referential works.
It sounds innocuous and almost childlike to describe this in such a way, but these spatial allocations are the product of manoeuvring things around other things for a fortnight. It approaches a completeness, but the few remaining things threaten to displace other things meaning a potential collapse of this established order of things. If necessary, I'll dedicate a weekend to my own stock take, laboriously but methodically getting everything back into its place. For now.
Every collection of things is ultimately a self-serving system of chaos teetering on the brink. Archives, libraries, stores, warehouses, attics, bookshelves, museums, landfills, mechanics, grocers, blogs, directories, transit systems. With my post-graduate studies in library and information science beginning in the autumn, I too will be a cog in the machine of sorting one of humanity's warehouses. Like Wilmot, I hope to have a smile on my face all the while. :^)
The shuffle of the warehouse is ongoing as mental categories ebb and flow across artificial boundaries. A bottle of liquid goes from my medicine area to the science area to the food area to the liquids area back to the medicine area. A tent goes with outdoor paraphernalia on the side for temporary shelter (opposite my weather conditions), itself abutted against permanent structures, construction goods, and patterns. An influx of tree stumps upsets the spacing of all my botanical wares, so much so that I move them with other measurement iconography (tree rings show time, are they not the calendars of nature?).
Like the pillars cleared with my performance stars, those new vast storage spaces let me categorise my own collection. Books with books, sure, but with academic texts in a place of their own, art books elsewhere, historical tomes too receive a space, writing on games adjacent to other books but also physical games. Those, of course, are near my music CDs. My archival cases of X68000 print media and diskettes stay with texts on games because they too are referential works.
It sounds innocuous and almost childlike to describe this in such a way, but these spatial allocations are the product of manoeuvring things around other things for a fortnight. It approaches a completeness, but the few remaining things threaten to displace other things meaning a potential collapse of this established order of things. If necessary, I'll dedicate a weekend to my own stock take, laboriously but methodically getting everything back into its place. For now.
Every collection of things is ultimately a self-serving system of chaos teetering on the brink. Archives, libraries, stores, warehouses, attics, bookshelves, museums, landfills, mechanics, grocers, blogs, directories, transit systems. With my post-graduate studies in library and information science beginning in the autumn, I too will be a cog in the machine of sorting one of humanity's warehouses. Like Wilmot, I hope to have a smile on my face all the while. :^)