Media artist Geert Mul has been researching for more than ten years now the possibilities of combining as many images as possible from his rich archive in installations. For this purpose he has built not only the hardware but also the software: programs that ensure an endless varying combination of images and sound. It all began in 1995, when Mul with Nighttown developed the concept for the club ´The Future´. By using video to create a lightshow of monitors, Mul became one of Holland´s first VJ´s.
This was the start of a very successful and informative career. Mul learned how to create visual and physical installations for a number of different locations such as ´Lowlands´ and the ´Drum Rhythm´ festival, ´Diesel´ fashion show and the Museums of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Kyoto, He performed with the National Symphony Orchestra of France, Speedy J and presented an extensive project at the Biennale for emerging artists in Turin. Mul approached video more and more as an ordered stream of images, or rather information, in relation to location, music and the public space, or architectonic and social space.
In 2003 Mul presented the installation ´The Library of Babel´, based on the story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges about an infinitely large library. The inhabitants of this library can, in this situation, only attempt to discover the reason behind this unending mass of information. It is this ordering of information that emerges as the theme of greatest significance. This is exactly what Mul does: the creation of a database full of images from a wide variety of different areas (political, commercial, actual, historical, sexual, but also portraits and landscapes). The images are sorted by theme and visuals. The interactive floor of the ´Library of Babel´ reacts to those walking on it and creates patterns from all this information. Through their physical presence, viewers disrupt and therefore create the collection of images, so that the meaning of these images change. ´The Library of Babel´ attempts to explore to what extent a machine, by means of ordered information, can generate meaning.
