Database of Provincial Life: Database

Arles, France 1904
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602 × 425

San Sebastian, Spain 1911
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675 × 483

Trondheim, Norway 1919
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639 × 897

Klaipeda, Lithuania 1923
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624 × 414

Linz, Austria 1934
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625 × 503

Brno, The Czech Republik 1957
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528 × 675

Turku, Finland 1966
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144 × 144

Vitebsk, Belarus 1979
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144 × 144

Vitebsk, Belarus 1979
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544 × 750

Vitebsk, Belarus 1979
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639 × 825

Wroclaw, Poland 1991
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451 × 575

Database of provincia life
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640 × 480
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Database of Provincial Life uses digital computers to accomplish a task which was impossible to achieve using any previous representational medium: documenting EVERYTHING which happen to EVERYBODY who lived in the 20th century. By focusing on the typical rather than the exceptional - provincial existence rather than the major cities and major historical figures - Database of Provincial Life is able to achieve unprecedented level of representational compression: reducing the whole of the 20th century just to ten samples.

This project is a part of the trio of projects Software for the 20th Century. The other two projects are Freud-Lissitzky Navigator and Reality Generator.

How Database is Designed

The Database of Provintial Life (Volume 1: 20th Century Europe) is constructed as follows.

10 different years in the 20th century are first selected: 1904, 1911, 1917, 1923, 1927, 1934, and so on.

No particular importance can be attached to the selected years, although some of them resonate with certain well-known historical events.

For every year, a city in Europe is also selected (Europe defined here quite liberally, from Portugal to Ural Mountains).

Each city-year is represented by a record which contains a number of fields. These fields store media material which documents life in a selected city in a selected year.