created with reference to his photo-installation referring to Aby Warburg's pictorial atlas principles. It presents a complex academic index for a collection catalogue that does not exist, but could emerge as a permutation of the index, similarly to Dan Graham's «Poem-Scheme». This reveals a dual strategy: firstly, we are not ‹reading› a text through its main text only, but more through its periphery and specific textures like the notes apparatus, the selection of pictures, the quotations and references, the imprint, the binding or context for an essay etc. Academic texts present this subtext and context apparatus very consciously. The second part of the strategy is that the index, relieved of its referential quality, has now become the main text.

These artists ‹liberate› images (Piller) and words (Blau) from their original indexicality of reference to an original system, so that they can be re-ordered and opened up to a new way of reading. The generative quality of the text apparatuses and the logic of the library (as a store for all reference structures), make the archive into a producer and into an archive of potential texts. Text and image are not just placed in

the archive as an ‹Akte› (document) but become ‹Akteure› (actors) in their own right. It is misleading to talk about a knowledge store when in fact we are dealing with a knowledge generator.

Distributing knowledge

The Russian Constructivists were quick to realize the potential of new distribution paths for information, right down to the new concept of a book as an image store: «The traditional book was torn into separate pages, enlarged a hundred-fold, coloured for greater intensity, and brought into the street as a poster. […] If today a number of posters were to be reproduced in the size of a manageable book, then arranged according to theme and bound, the result would be the most original book. The cinema and the illustrated weekly magazine have triumphed. We rejoice at the new media which technology has placed at our disposal.» [11] Russian Constructivism was just as concerned with dynamizing the distribution process as was American capitalism, with the difference, as El Lissitzky notes, that the Americans brought posters into the public sphere specifically for the passing