How to think about your library
A primer for practitioners. Not a technical manual.
From work to node
In Beriah, every piece you upload — a recording, an image, a text, a research file — becomes a node. A node is not a file in a folder. It is an entry point into your library: it has a title, a context, and a place in a network of relations.
A node can be a finished work or a fragment. A master and a draft have the same standing in the system. What matters is that each node is identifiable and connected to others.
When you upload your work, ask yourself: what is the object I want to make visible? That is your node.
Layers and stems
A finished work is rarely a flat surface. A mix contains tracks. An illustration has process stages. A print has colour separations. Beriah lets you show this depth.
Each node can contain layers — the constituent parts of the finished thing. Visitors to your library can navigate between these layers, unfold the piece, understand how it was made.
Layers are not required. Some works present themselves as a whole, and that is perfectly fine. But when the depth is there, Beriah gives you a way to make it visible without explaining it — simply by showing it.
Connections
Works do not live alone. A recording echoes an image. Two texts answer each other across time. A project from 2019 carries the seeds of the one that followed. Beriah lets you make these relations visible with three kinds of connections.
Window
Two works that reflect one another. Not a path to follow, but a resonance — each throws light on the other, and in both directions. To look at one is to see the other differently.
Passage
A threshold between two Spaces. The visitor moves through the work itself to pass from one Space to another — the connection is spatial, physical, felt. The work is the passage.
Reference
A citation, an influence, a source. The relation has a direction but no itinerary — it says "this nourished that" without drawing a path.
Passage
A sequential link. One leads to the other — a continuation, an evolution, a before/after. The visitor follows a path you have drawn.
Reference
A citation, an influence, a source. The relation is directional but not narrative — it says "this nourished that" without imposing a route.
These three relations are sufficient to describe most connections between works. Together, they weave the network visitors move through.
Spaces
A Space is a composition. You choose nodes and arrange them on a canvas. The arrangement carries meaning — proximity, distance, grouping become gestures of presentation.
Visitors enter a Space and navigate it freely. They can zoom, move around, open the nodes that interest them. A Space does not impose a reading order — it proposes a territory.
You can create several Spaces within the same library. One Space for an album, another for a residency, a third for a thematic selection. Each Space is a different doorway into the same body of work.