The Platonic Network : "Art Talk" door Alex Wright

On Wednesday, 3 September at 5pm CET (11am EDT), join Alex Wright, author and former User Experience director at The New York Times, now at Etsy.com, for an Art Talk about “the Platonic Network” and Paul Otlet’s plan for a “worldwide web.”

In the 1920’s and 1930’s a Belgian entrepreneur and utopist dreamed of what we now experience everyday: a global communication network enabling the sharing of knowledge. Paul Otlet, with his friend and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henri La Fontaine, developed the first paper search engine, but Otlet went further and used bibliography to describe notions of network, data linking, hypertext language and web semantics, decades before the Internet was invented. Alex Wright explored his visionary but mostly forgotten ideas in his latest book, Cataloging the World : Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford University Press, June 2014), shedding a new light on the genesis of information technologies.

Follow #ArtTalks and +Mundaneumasbl for updates and ask questions during the live video talk using the hashtag #AWrightTalk.

Watch the talk in English on YouTube