“Antonyms” from The Databank of the Everyday
1996

Interactive CD-ROM

Natalie Bookchin has recorded and assembled a vast visual catalogue of common gestures and actions, organized them according to intentionally overlapping categories -- “Wasting Time,” “Nervous Habits,” “Mistakes,” etc.--and woven them into the theoretically endless looping structure of the interactive cd-rom. She writes: “The Databank of the Everyday can be thought of as a catalogue of awed movement studies of the Everyday standing in opposition to historical movement studies of Muybridge [and] Taylor.” She maintains that the piece suggests an alternate reading of the history of photography in which artistic and everyday uses of the medium as inventory or catalogue rewrite the canonical notion of the isolated aesthetic object.