The physical metadata project was presented at the opening of the Flickr Peep Show at Mediamatic in the summer of 2005

Classifying objects is no longer a responsibility for a torturous team of meticulous librarians. On the internet, users freely classify each others websites, images and texts by adding tags, which other users can browse and use to find things.

Users can tag URLs (on http://del.icio.us), photographs (on http://flickr.com) soundsamples (freesound project) and undoubtedly a myriad of other online objects. Online this creates a open structure of information about information otherwise known as metadata, but what happens offline? How can things in the real world be democratically defined?

The Physical Metadata project attempted introducing tagging into the real world. 55 words were printed on cards (tags, really) and could be attached to real objects in the physical world.