These pieces were created to decorate the three meeting rooms of the new offices of Mendeley/Elsevier at the Alphabeta Building in London’s Finsbury Square. The rooms are named after three common elemental gases, Nitrogen, Oxygen and Hydrogen.
The artworks illustrate the difficulty that scientific researchers have finding the papers that they want to, as shown by researchers fishing for topics (Nitrogen) and using Claw Grab machines (Hydrogen). The central artwork (Oxygen) illustrates how Mendeley’s algorithm extracts relevant metadata from papers to assist researchers with paper searches. Analysis of the data of papers already in a researcher’s library also allows the algorithm to suggest papers that they might want to read next. The hooks attached to metadata in the illustration are attached to strings that are made up of the original Mendeley application code.
