Roy Arden's project "The World as Will and Representation" presents a vast collection of over 10,000 images from the web, depicting various aspects of the concrete world. The work is structured around arbitrary entries, creating a state of amazement and confusion due to its sheer volume and diversity. It reflects the impossibility of creating a comprehensive virtual archive, highlighting the limits and incoherence of digital image collections. Schopenhauer's pessimism, with its focus on circularity and sameness, remains relevant in today's world of omnipresent and rapidly circulating images. Arden has collected images since childhood, starting with cutouts from magazines and later developing a mental archive of images. He was fascinated by the visual style of different subjects and how they were ordered. Later, he became interested in visual art and recognized that many artists used encyclopedic or archival models. He was particularly influenced by artists like Hans-Peter Feldmann, who used received images as raw material. Arden has kept files of paper cuttings and started a folder called "The World as Will and Representation" in 1991, inspired by Schopenhauer's work. He intended to create collages from these images but waited until he had a large enough collection. After discovering the internet, he found an almost infinite supply of images, but soon realized that the supply was not truly infinite. He collected images, ordering them in titled folders, and focused on photographic images that clearly showed something real. He preferred vernacular, non-art images and subject-oriented imagery. Arden's project is about the necessity of collecting and ordering images of the world, but also about the folly of such an enterprise. By 2004, he had not yet begun to make collages and decided to return the images to their source, the internet. A QuickTime movie was created, featuring a slide show of the ten thousand images, surrounded by black to take over the computer screen. A sound loop was created from a part of Timmy Thomas's song "Why Can't We Live Together?" to provide a mechanical simplicity and a suggestion of a universal will. The archive continues to grow, and Arden plans to update the web project to include twenty thousand images. He acknowledges the instability of the internet as a medium and the challenges of creating a universally accessible and consistent online experience.Roy Arden's project "The World as Will and Representation" presents a vast collection of over 10,000 images from the web, depicting various aspects of the concrete world. The work is structured around arbitrary entries, creating a state of amazement and confusion due to its sheer volume and diversity. It reflects the impossibility of creating a comprehensive virtual archive, highlighting the limits and incoherence of digital image collections. Schopenhauer's pessimism, with its focus on circularity and sameness, remains relevant in today's world of omnipresent and rapidly circulating images. Arden has collected images since childhood, starting with cutouts from magazines and later developing a mental archive of images. He was fascinated by the visual style of different subjects and how they were ordered. Later, he became interested in visual art and recognized that many artists used encyclopedic or archival models. He was particularly influenced by artists like Hans-Peter Feldmann, who used received images as raw material. Arden has kept files of paper cuttings and started a folder called "The World as Will and Representation" in 1991, inspired by Schopenhauer's work. He intended to create collages from these images but waited until he had a large enough collection. After discovering the internet, he found an almost infinite supply of images, but soon realized that the supply was not truly infinite. He collected images, ordering them in titled folders, and focused on photographic images that clearly showed something real. He preferred vernacular, non-art images and subject-oriented imagery. Arden's project is about the necessity of collecting and ordering images of the world, but also about the folly of such an enterprise. By 2004, he had not yet begun to make collages and decided to return the images to their source, the internet. A QuickTime movie was created, featuring a slide show of the ten thousand images, surrounded by black to take over the computer screen. A sound loop was created from a part of Timmy Thomas's song "Why Can't We Live Together?" to provide a mechanical simplicity and a suggestion of a universal will. The archive continues to grow, and Arden plans to update the web project to include twenty thousand images. He acknowledges the instability of the internet as a medium and the challenges of creating a universally accessible and consistent online experience.