THE ARCHIVE OF IMAGINARY EPISTEMIC DEVICES IS A RESEARCH PLATFORM DEVOTED TO FICTIONAL, SPECULATIVE, METAPHORICAL, AND UNREALIZED MACHINES FOR PRODUCING, ORGANIZING, COMMUNICATING, VISUALIZING, REMEMBERING, AND PREDICTING KNOWLEDGE.

The Archive of Imaginary Epistemic Devices (ARCHIMEDE) is an international research project and evolving digital platform dedicated to fictional, speculative, metaphorical, and unrealized devices for producing, organizing, communicating, visualizing, remembering, and predicting knowledge.

The project uses the term “device” in a broad sense. An imaginary epistemic device may be an apparatus, architecture, system, interface, or conceptual construction. What connects these devices is their promise to transform knowledge: to make it visible, calculable, accessible, transmissible, memorable, or predictable. They often combine and translate between different modes—including text, image, sound, number, diagram, gesture, space, and bodily sensation.

ARCHIMEDE approaches imaginary devices neither as technological curiosities nor simply as inaccurate forecasts of future inventions. It treats them as conceptual artifacts that reveal historically and culturally specific ideas about information, perception, classification, intelligence, evidence, and authority. Even when a machine has never been constructed, its imagined operation can tell us how a society understands knowledge, which senses and forms of communication it privileges, and who or what is permitted to participate in its production.

The Archive brings together examples from philosophy, literature, cinema, art, science, technological speculation, media theory, and intellectual history. Its corpus ranges from Ramon Llull’s combinatorial figures, Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theatre, Leibniz’s universal symbolic language, and Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon to Paul Otlet’s electric telescope, H. G. Wells’s World Brain, Vannevar Bush’s Memex, Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, Buckminster Fuller’s Geoscope, and Stanisław Lem’s phantomatics. It also encompasses more recent popular and cinematic devices, such as the PreCrime system and gestural interfaces of Minority Report or the Pokédex.

Placing such different examples alongside one another makes it possible to identify recurring aspirations: perfect communication, universal classification, total memory, remote presence, comprehensive vision, accurate prediction, and transparent control. It also exposes the exclusions and asymmetries that accompany these aspirations. Who can operate the device? What does it recognize as valid evidence? Which forms of labour sustain it? How does its interface position the user? What kinds of access, surveillance, governance, or authority does it establish?

Every entry in the Archive follows a shared analytical framework. In addition to describing a device’s source and historical context, entries examine its construction and imagined operation; its inputs and outputs; the media and sensory modes it combines; its interface and model of the user; its epistemic promise; and its political and social implications. Bibliographies and relevant visual or audiovisual materials provide paths for further research. Structured metadata, comparative categories, filters, and exportable data will allow the Archive to function both as a public research resource and as an analytical tool.

ARCHIMEDE is also conceived as a participatory research environment. A moderated contribution system will enable invited researchers and members of associated academic networks to propose new devices, submit references and media, and extend existing entries. Contributions will be reviewed and edited in accordance with shared scholarly, accessibility, and media-rights standards. In this way, the Archive can grow across disciplines, languages, national traditions, and historical periods while retaining a coherent comparative method.

ARCHIMEDE is an initiative of MULTICOM—the Potential Field Multimodal Communication at Goethe University Frankfurt. Its initial development was made possible by a seed grant from MULTICOM. The grant supports the development of the catalogue and its technical infrastructure, the preparation of pilot entries, and the project’s collaborative research activities.

The current development phase includes an international workshop at Goethe University Frankfurt on 24–25 February 2027. Researchers will discuss different paradigms for describing imaginary devices, examine cultural variations in technological imagination, and identify gaps in the Archive’s developing corpus. Selected entries will be circulated in advance and revised in response to the workshop.

The workshop will coincide with the exhibition (Re)Imagining the Homunculus: Bodies, Senses, and Imaginary Machines, taking place in Frankfurt am Main from 24 February to 7 March 2027. Beginning with the artificial intelligence enclosed in a glass phial in Goethe’s Faust II and the sensory homunculus used to represent the body’s cortical organization, the exhibition will explore alternative arrangements of bodies and senses. It will address sensory translation, embodiment, nonhuman perception, imaginary organs, machine perception, and technologies that make otherwise invisible forces perceptible. The exhibition is organized by WAHRTA e.V..

Further outcomes will include a shared taxonomy and editorial standards, revised case studies, a methodological essay, a reusable research dataset, workshop documentation, and a curatorial dossier.

Ultimately, ARCHIMEDE asks what imagined machines can teach us about the ways knowledge is constructed. By studying what these devices claim to see, remember, calculate, or predict—and the interfaces through which those claims become persuasive—the Archive makes technological imagination available for historical comparison and critical inquiry.

Project team:

• Andrey Logutov — Founder and Project Lead, Goethe University Frankfurt

• Boris Podoroga — STL Laboratory, Université de Lille

• Tomáš Dvořák — Department of Photography, FAMU Prague

• Andrey Alexeev — Design and Development, pod ✜ agency

• Tommaso Tassoni — Founding Consultant