Apparition of a distance, however near it may be (2013)
40-page zine
Digital print-on-demand
Saddle-stitched
8.5 in. x 11 in.
Edition of 50
Apparition of a distance, however near it may be is a collection of found images that reveal Google Books employees physically interacting with books inside the digital space of the book scanner. The collection is gathered into a 42-page print-on-demand publication. As accidental recordings, the images mistakenly add human physicality, movement, and distortion to the experience of consuming static books in browsers. These anomalies are usually corrected or removed algorithmically, but sometimes errors remain, becoming spectral additions to the Google Books library and permanently altering the viewer’s perception of the content. I search for these mistakes and work with them as found photography. They expose deviations in the algorithms hiding deep within the data.
As a printed book work, Apparition of a distance, however near it may be proposes value in the extended translation of print to digital, and then back to print: a wider view of the book as an object that exists simultaneously in digital and physical realities.
The project was featured in ELSE Journal in August 2013 (issue No. 6), with a text by Joachim Schmid, The Operators’ Invisible Hands
