For four years, I photographed, indexed and classified my entire house

[smokel]

I once made a large pencil drawing of my living room using only words.

Each word depicted a "thing" at the position I found it. It taught me a lot about what things are. A chair is obviously a separate entity and easy to list, but what about the floor and the separate floorboards? I listed the wall, but I didn't list the paint on the wall.

The bookcase took a lot of effort, because I found that each book in it was a thing by itself and should get listed separately. However, when I was nearly finished, I found a bag in a cabinet, holding ~200 pins. I just counted them and noted down "207 pins"; I didn't feel that each pin was unique enough to warrant separate entries.

I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.

[huehehue]

This is pretty much Van Inwagen's argument in Material Beings -- recommended if you haven't read it!

Copied from wiki:

"Every composite material object is made up of elementary particles, and the only such composite objects are living organisms. A consequence of this view is that everyday objects such as tables, chairs, cars, buildings, and clouds do not exist. While there seem to be such things, this is only because there are elementary particles arranged in specific ways. For example, where it seems that there is a chair, Van Inwagen says that there are only elementary particles arranged chairwise."

[eCa]

> I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.

And so are we.

Interesting thought on the books vs pins, made me think. A sheet of paper is a thing. So maybe the book is the bag rather than the shelf.

[s_m_t]

You don't actually act or behave in accordance with that "belief". You would be incapable of perceiving anything, taking any action, or making this post.

[aspenmayer]

> I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.

This is the way. The real and/or important things have a tendency to impinge upon your perceptions in such a way as to render your belief in them or lack thereof moot and/or meaningless.

[layer8]

The things are real, they are emergent patterns. Both each individual pin as well as the whole bag are real. See also https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23307/1/wallace_rp%20for%20....

[Daub]

> I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.

That is some hardcore disassociation right there. Interesting that you use the word 'try' which implies that it requires effort to overcome the faith in the meaning of things.

[lukan]

Deep philosophical insights gained through pedantic accounting - I genuinly love it.

[theendisney]

I love this idea. You could generate a 3d world like that so that you can zoom in and out combining the objects like pins in a map.

You could also run the drawing by an image generator and get a livingroom both like and unlike your own.

[snowwrestler]

There is for sure a difference between things in language, and things in fact. Cool project.

[Pikamander2]

Some constructive feedback to the site owner: Instead of having the webpage spend several minutes slowly loading thousands of barely-compressed 500x500 JPG images, please consider this advice:

1. Convert the images to WEBP or AVIF or at least run them through something like TinyPNG to compress them better.

2. Save two versions of each images; a 75x75 version that gets used for the 75px thumbnails shown on the page, and a 500x500 version that appears in the lightbox after a thumbnail is clicked.

3. Only load a few dozen thumbnails at first and then load more after the user scrolls down or clicks a "show more" type button.

[netsharc]

I'm still dreaming of an image file format where the file begins with the, say, 75x75px image, and then continues with higher and higher resolutions, where the browser can decide when to stop downloading. Ideally they wouldn't be redundant either, e.g. the 2nd block would contain just the data to upscale the 1st block to twice the resolution.. so the "75x75" thumbnail in a hidpi display would just need blocks 1 and 2..

[codingdave]

I'm not sure optimization is her goal. If you just load the page and let it sit without scrolling down, it slowly counts the number of photos she has taken. That is not the design choice of someone seeking speed. So she might be deliberately allowing it to be slow. That would track with her other works, one of which specifically says she finds beauty in imperfection.

[firecall]

For points 1 and 2:

I recommend and use Cloudinary. Cloudinary can take care of all that for you!

For point 3:

You can add laoding="lazy" to the image tag, and get lazy loading for free, supported by the browser:

* https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Performance/Laz...

[mtlynch]

Oof, just loading this page caused my browser to download 170 MB of content. I hope she has a good CDN.

[opyate]

Trying it now for the first time, and getting an HTTP Basic Auth pop-up. They caught on.

[gazchop]

Looks like it's all on yourhosting.nl. "Unlimited" traffic. Of course until we hug it to death...

[kragen]

That's more than three times my daily data allowance on my cellphone connection!

[b112]

So... a typical node.js page size then?

[tra3]

I've thought of doing something similar. Add a barcode to everything, designate a "home" and then create a catalogue. I even found an app that supports this.

No more "where does this go" or "where do I find X"..

[HPsquared]

Maybe a phone camera could be trained to recognize the objects and locations.

[Animats]

There was once a startup product for that. Came in a box "Now you can barcode everything in your house". Saw it at Fry's Electronics in the DOS era.

There's a modern version.[1]

This is a bit much for a house, unless you have way too much house, or several houses.

[1] https://www.intelliscanner.com/products/scanabout-home/

[ninjin-carh]

https://archive.is/S9a64

[kmoser]

I was expecting to see detailed photos of the house itself, but this is even cooler!

[Daub]

I teach art and over the years I have come to understand that many people use art to subsume their neurosis (well duh I hear you say). What TFA describes is familiar to me as a typical form of this phenomenon - the cataloguer: artists who feel the need to give a home to that which is homeless, to elevate that which is humble. A highbrow example of this would be the work of Mark Dion.

Interestingly, by her own admission Barbara Iweins (the artist whose work TFA features) self describes this project as being rooted in neurosis, specifically one that seems to be a response to lack of stability in her life.

Similar projects seem always to have an unbound quality... like the labors of Sisyphus. So I guess my question to her would be "how would you know that this project is complete?" Is it complete now? According to TFA it is, yet I suspect that even with all the effort she has put into it, the itch is not yet scratched.

[felipeqq2]

The site is down right now, but there's a nice behind the scenes video hidden in the background: https://katalog-barbaraiweins.com/BEHINDTHESCENES/marbles.mp....

(or archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240624140531/http://katalog-ba...)

[ChoGGi]

Is the landing page full of hundreds? Of full size images shrunk into little thumbnails?

[Liftyee]

Judging by how they progressively loaded top to bottom on my usually fast (350 Mbps) internet, yes. Each tiny image was barely 128*128 on my phone screen but they still loaded very slowly.

[HelloUsername]

On Firefox on macOS, I get a pop-up module saying "This site is asking you to sign in." and then Username and Password field, on top of a blank page...

[zamadatix]

I noticed there is a gray dress in twice with the "same" image (separate files but clearly generated from the same photo). I went to go do an automatic search to get some fun stats on things like that but the site is inaccessible for now :) commenting as a self reminder.

[halyconWays]

Imagine the dread when he realizes he should've taken short videos of each object from different angles, so that an AI could create 3D models to go along with a photogrammetry/gaussian splat/NeRF recreation of his home.

[beaugunderson]

reminds me of Michael Landy's similar work called Break Down--he not only cataloged all of his possessions, he also destroyed them all using an industrial shredder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hYUnkW4sNA

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jan/27/like-wi...

[tantalor]

This isn't a "house", this is the contents of a house.

[RockRobotRock]

This would be great motivation to buy less useless crap

[vunderba]

If she ever decides to get into learning/flashcards, this would make a helluva setup for an incredibly detailed memory palace.

[Crontab]

That really touches the comic and book collector inside of me. Very nice site.

[a1o]

Very slow to load. Also, I find these about written in third person very weird.

[prawn]

I think third-person bios are reasonably common in the art world.

[xvfLJfx9]

Cool. But... why?

[RadiozRadioz]

Because it's cool.