JUDGE ME BY MY COVER
Maria Koch
The serendipitous encounters of the physical library
If you’re looking for a specific book, you could buy it or possibly find and read it online. Another option is to go to the library, a place in which you could find and read your book and even borrow and take it home if you want. If you go for the latter option, you may find more than you were looking for. Wandering beside the bookshelves, it may be that your attention is subconsciously going to a book you were not looking for at all. Perhaps you would grasp it from its place and while you judge the book by its cover, you consciously decide whether you would like to read it from the inside as well. This might result in a true unplanned fortunate discovery, an act of serendipity.
Unfortunately, we can hardly serendipitously encounter and judge books by their covers while libraries are closed. Since a global pandemic has provoked a domino effect of some serious ‘unplanned, unfortunate discoveries’, serendipity has become extremely rare. At the same time, the feeling of spontaneity, joy and play serendipity facilitates has turned out to be exactly what people miss the most. The project ‘JUDGE ME BY MY COVER’ aims to reverse engineer the serendipitous encounters of the library outside its physical space.
Asking for judgement
via a Quick Response
Books have their covers and sometimes even book jackets. Outside the library, people cover themselves in jackets, depending on the weather. To explore whether wearable jackets can evoke similar serendipitous encounters to those of the library, I chose to digitally embroider a QR-code on a jacket. QR stands for ‘Quick Response’, something that is often part of a judgment too. Considering QR-codes would be present in the unconsciousness of people's minds, since the appearance has increased due to several coronavirus measures, this image could prompt encounters with other people.
In February 2018, I played the ballet Petrushka, composed by Igor Stravinsky with a hundred-strong orchestra in The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. Three years later, a bizarre kind of water ballet now takes place in the form of riots in the museum square, in front of the Concertgebouw.
It surpasses man's imagination to understand this, but I would like to give it a try. During the tour of which this concert was a part, I wrote a piece about how the orchestra breathes the music. Now that we are in a lockdown again, it struck me to see how I referred to the film The Shawshank Redemption. After the main character Andy rebels by turning on a record and playing it throughout the prison, he says to his friends:
“I had Mozart to keep me company, it was in here. That's the beauty of music, they can't get that from you. Haven't you ever felt that way about music? Here’s where it makes the most sense. You need it so we don't forget. That there are places in the world that aren't made out of stone, that there's something that they can't get to.That they can't touch, it's yours.”
With this project, I wanted to be a bit like Andy. Show that we, and institutions like the library, can bring out and share what we carry deep inside us. For the library these are the serendipitous encounters, the books you weren’t looking for that caught your attention. By strolling around in this design, I wanted to mimic the library's serendipitous encounters and collect the untouchable songs stuck in people’s heads. Together these songs form a playlist of serendipity.
Athenaeum, 2021