The Seven Bridges of Königsberg
The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a card reading system. 49 memory images hang on the walls of a room. Visitors are invited to choose seven cards with representations of those 49 images and engage in a dialougue regarding about themselves and their present state of mind. No single selection brings the same interpretation, and the system can be used to answer questions and formulate answers, whether of a personal or general nature. This project brings together mechanisms and fields such as narratology, the art of memory, hermeneutics, topology, divination, and symbolic systems of order and chance. The title of the project is taken after a famous mathematical problem from the XVIIIth century that became the foundation of modern graph theory. Using the city of Königsberg as an example, the problem asks to find a walk through the city that would cross each one of its seven bridges only once.
The Seven Bridges of Königsberg was presented in October 2008 in downtown Manhattan as the inaugural exhibition of the alternative space Forever & Today. For a month, the gallery was turned into a card-reading parlor into which street visitors would enter and pay for a card reading.
Tags: Language, Memory, Occult, Sociology, Transpedagogy