Shearer's grid-like presentation

Although Shearer's grid-like presentation of his found materials suggests the rule-bound world of the archive, their contents speak to the collaborative spaces produced by fan communities, as well as the improvised collections of contemporary virtual researchers. Nigel Prince has argued that the "plethora of images [found] via the Internet [...] speak of directness of experience." Metal Archive (2001) assembles a range of Black Sabbath memorabilia retrieved by the artist from the online auction website eBay. Whereas the tabular presentation of these materials calls to mind conventional representations of the archive, the image of the artist that emerges from Prince's representation of Shearer's process of selecting, cropping, sorting and cataloguing resembles the unscripted discovery behaviours of a 21st-century library user. Likewise, the creators of the found images that represent the raw materials included in Shearer's piece emerge as participants in a process of community knowledge creation and sharing that does not jive with the exclusive framework of the archive. The heterotopic community spaces mapped by the artist's remediation of virtual readymades thus speak more to the performative conception of the library incarnated by Warburg's organic, personal library than to the disciplinary rituals of the traditional archive.