Plotting the Island of the Day Before
An installation that transforms Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before into an immersive, data-driven narrative. Drawing on the novel’s 4,959 sentences, segmented and lemmatized into a corpus, it maps the text against five reference categories, connecting characters, objects, and actions through algorithmic ordering. Presented within the exhibition at Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan, on the tenth anniversary of Eco’s death.- Time
- Location
- Milan
Plotting the Island of the Day Before is a video installation and a web tool within the exhibition dedicated to Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before, presented at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan on the tenth anniversary of the author’s death. Developed for the Fondazione Umberto Eco, the exhibition draws on the library’s collection of rare books and materials, and stages the novel’s core preoccupations: the book as a map of Western culture, the pursuit of longitude as a metaphor for control over knowledge, and the tension between scientific truth and credulity.
The exhibition unfolds across three narrative landings that speak to one another: the ship Dafne, a floating wunderkammer of collections, taxonomies, and encyclopedias, reflecting how humans have always tried to order reality; the open sea and the search for longitude, the 17th and 18th centuries’ great technical and political obsession, where dominating time and space meant dominating trade and colonial power, and technology is never neutral; and Father Caspar’s machine, which produces and reshapes metaphors, a theater of memory bridging the novel’s world with present-day questions about natural and artificial intelligence. The exhibition does not simply narrate a novel but transforms it into experience, giving shape to the questions Eco scattered through his text: how do we catalogue the world, dominate it through science, and build the maps of the possible?
Plotting the Island of the Day Before is made up of five projections, structured around the ship as the novel’s fixed vantage point: an island always visible, always at the same distance, never reached. The novel’s text, 4,959 sentences, is segmented and lemmatized into a corpus. Five reference categories are built from it, each with its own lexicon of recurring terms, characters, objects, and actions, against which every segment of the text is weighted. This corpus also drives the web tool La macchina delle metafore, an interactive version of Father Emanuele’s Aristotelian machine, the cabinet of drawers and rotating cylinders through which the novel imagines wit as something that can be indexed, repeated, and assisted by a combinatorial protocol. Visitors pull a cord and a drawer opens, offering a batch of quotes from the novel ordered algorithmically according to the same five categories.
