Alterlibrary: a landscape of drifting thoughts and image fragments

What you see today in the Alterlibrary is the outcome of a long, evolving process—one that began with the realisation that artistic practice often demands a certain distance to analyse and reflect on its methods properly. At one point, I found it necessary to ask, What is the fundamental matter of image-making and image-viewing? That line of questioning led me to process the process of constructing images.

In doing so, I engaged in a dialogue, first with Loretta Mesiti and then with Science of the Singularities—the ongoing conversation between Loretta Mesiti and Meike Gleim: a laboratory for artistic research and democratic imagination.

On April 17 2025, we released the first pilot version of Alterlibrary — a digital platform grown out of years of collaborative research, artistic experimentation, and pedagogical practice within the framework of Science of Singularities,

From the beginning, Science of Singularities has challenged fixed ideas of knowledge and authorship. We believe imagination is not an aesthetic add-on but a political and epistemological force — something to be cultivated as a collective practice. Alterlibrary is the continuation of this belief, shaped across multiple workshops, conversations, and speculative environments. It is not a traditional library. It does not store content. It doesn’t teach. It activates. It is a non-linear, regenerative environment, where poetic thought, visual fragments, and speculative cartographies circulate in constellations. Where the act of looking, reading, and thinking becomes participatory, porous, and uncertain.

In this first release, I introduce the Catalogue of Renewable Visuals: a set of images extracted from various sources — documentary, artistic, archival — and sometimes altered through gestures of selection, cropping, and reinterpretation. These images are not illustrations. They do not “say.” They invite.

Alterlibrary is whiteboard of layered entry points. A drift through text fragments, speculative regions, and image constellations. Nothing is fixed. Everything is relational. You stumble, you follow your intuition, and meaning emerges through resonance, not instruction.

This pilot version is just a beginning. Future developments will deepen its interactivity, expand the catalogues, and host contributions from diverse practitioners across disciplines.