Brian Dettmer creates these extraordinary sculptures by amalgamating, modifying and mutating books.
Looking at these images of the physical matter of books, remixed into sculptures, I’m reminded of the process that texts are increasingly going through once digitized: amalgamated, remixed, reformed into new entities.
Dettmer’s sculptures invite us to think about deeply-held taboos around the sanctity of books as objects; a conversation that recurs – especially in the context of e-readers – around discussion of digitized text.
Recycling, reimagining, repurposing the cultural glut amidst which we currently exist feels in many ways an appropriate artistic mode for today. Is authorship really so sacred that remixed works cannot themselves be things of beauty and value? Or, like European villages dismantling local medieval chateaux to build outhouses, are we taking our cultural history so completely for granted that we’re in danger of forgetting or destroying millennia of culture in a thoughtless reappropriation of its materials for our current preoccupations?
Dettmer’s show opens April 3 at the Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago.
(Via Boing Boing)
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
Looks like THIS is the real future of the book. I’m studying to be an editor, and in my humble opinion, I can’t help thinking that I’m learning to fix B&W TV’s. Moreover in Argentina, where the public university tends to present obsolete contents and subjects. Why should we editors-to-be learn how to manage the printing and distribution process, if it’ll disappear in no more than 20 years? How could we stand against Google? Is there any future for us? Yet more annoying is the fact (assumed by several companies) that an HTML master is ready to be a sort of online editor. They give programmers the authorization to choose whether this or that text will be published or not, but under which criteria? Ain’t we, editors (or editors-to-be) the appropriate for that task (as well as many others)? If we want to keep on being editors for, e.g., 2040, we need to tell the world that we’re not just book sellers (or failed writers suicide promoters), but content selectors, text guardians, quality information facilitators, etc.
If we want to have a long professional life, we have to build it. Otherwise, any programming nerd will wipe us off.
I always die a little inside when I see books mangled.