Fuck Yeah, Book Arts!

picturedept:

The Art of Google Books

Somewhere between medieval marginalia and the Google Street View based works of Jon Rafman and Doug Rickard lies The Art of Google Books.

The manuscript digitization process, along with the gestures of the scanning archivist’s hand, and the idiosynchracies of the printed page, can occasionally lead to strange and beautiful new images—”re-photographs” as described by Krissy Wilson, the creator of the blog.

The rephotography I am talking about is what happens when you take a photograph of a photograph — the idea that, were one to take a photo of the Mona Lisa, you would not have a copy of the Mona Lisa, but a photograph, authored by the photographer. I see the images produced by Google Books employees as photographs, in that sense.

The above is a selection of recent discoveries:
1. Marble paper endsheets, from the Bavarian State Library, digitized January 26, 2010.
2. “Poor scanning creates text whirlpool,” from Oxford University, digitized August 2, 2006.
3. Hand Transit, via microecos.
4. Extreme text-stretch, submitted by microscopic.
5. “Who is to blame (for this distortion)?” from the University of California, digitized July 13, 2007.
6. Armand Seguin, Les fleurs du mal, 1892, as found on the digital cover of Dario Gamboni’s Potential images: ambiguity and indeterminacy in modern art, via mythologyofblue.
7. Elaborately designed endpapers digitized in high contrast, from the University of Michigan, digitized May 29, 2007.
8. “Apparently the front and back cover of the book.” from the Bavarian State Library, digitized September 27, 2011.
9. Intermittent autolinking on the title page, from the Bavarian State Library, digitized February 6, 2012.
10. Aurora Borealis plate with neon color distortion, from the New York Public Library, digitized February 2, 2009.

To submit your own “unexpected peculiarities” found in Google Books, or to browse the archive beyond the above selection, visit theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com.

(via bookron)

modernizing:

Google – The first Google image for every word in the dictionary

If a picture says more than a thousand words – and current internet dynamics tend to agree – what would a visual guide to the English vocabulary, contemporary and ‘webresentative’, look like? Ben West and Felix Heyes, two artists and designers from London (UK), found out when they replaced the 21,000 words found in your everyday dictionary with whatever shows up first for each word in Google’s image search. Behold Google – a 1240 page behemoth of JPGs, GIFs and PNGs in alphabetical order.

“We used two PHP scripts my brother Sam wrote for us,” says Ben about the process in an email. “The first one takes a text list of dictionary words and downloads each image in sequence, and the second lays them out into columns and outputs a PDF.” The PDF was then printed into a beautiful book – handbound, thumb indexed pages held together in a marbled paper hardcover, the golden Google logo clearly indifferent to whatever internet horrors it may contain.

“Conceptually it’s whatever you make of it,” writes Ben. The sad reality of shrinking attention spans, collective media fatigue or how an expert reference book is no match for the convenience of Google, for example. “It’s really an unfiltered, uncritical record of the state of human culture in 2012,” concludes Ben. So, how are we faring? “I would estimate about half of the book is revolting medical photos, porn, racism or bad cartoons.”

(via tchaumodernizing-deactivated201)

myalphabet:

google maps alphabet

(via brothelart)