Author: Pedro Andrade

Title: THESAURUS ART

Date: 23th March 2004.  

Dimensions: 40 x 30 cm 

Medium / style : digital painting  

Abstract:  

There is an artistic sense in the organization of theory.

Here a star web shows the aesthetics of a thesaurus that underlies a Jean Baudrillard text about photographic images.

A thesaurus, in information theory, is a theoretical tool for organising an area of knowledge. For this aim, a thesaurus is structured by concepts from that area, connected with relationships.

This idea is different from the usual thesaurus, which organize the meaning and the basic relationships of a national language, like the English.

Each concept represented in this image is a monade inside the star web.

Its position in the web is aesthetically significant.

Each text has one or several ‘gold numbers’.

In this case, let’s ignore the concepts which occur just once.

For the ‘precedent concepts’ situated before the central concept ‘image’ , the ‘text gold number’ is the sequence 4-3-2-2, that is, a series which contain the frequencies of the most common concepts in the text: ‘real’ (4), ‘materiality’ (3), ‘power’ (2), ‘photography’ (2).

As for the consequent concepts, the ‘gold number’ is 3-2 (respectively, for ‘materiality’ and ‘world’).