Alchemy
Yale SOA, Sunil Bald Studio, 2013
How to handle the paradox? By official mandate, the Japanese National Center for Media Arts must collect and trumpet the value of manga as an art form while, at the same time, an individual manga rapidly loses its value as it ages. Impossibly then, this museum must synthesize value by transforming hordes of aging books into cultural capital.
To answer this this alchemical challenge, I proposed a half-buried machine that cycles manga as a cultural product in order to replace its fading monetary value with a new form of personal or cultural value.
Archive vs. individual collections
Unreleased manga—the most valuable sort—starts its journey in a jewel box archive above the landscape. As items in the collection age and lose value, they are transferred to the subterranean library.
Here, reading rooms allow individuals to move manga from the library to their own shelves, establish individual collections, and leave out manga they find particularly interesting. Such rooms establish a second and entirely unique organizational structure for the museum’s collection. In this network of reading rooms, manga is not organized rigorously by a catalog but rather arranged subjectively by individuals.
The result is an inner labyrinth demanding to be explored and a collection distributed in manner that encourages browsing and discovery. Here one wanders, potentially discovers something new and entirely unfamiliar, and thereby establishes new value in what was once the dross of the archive.
A machine to create cultural value
As this new value is created, the upper cube comes back into play, recapturing a manga that has found new meaning. Thus the two cubes are tied together in a reciprocal relationship constantly cycling material back and for as it gains and loses value.