Book Art

I have undertaken the task of scanning all of my technical books at work so that I no longer need to carry them about on my back in the event that I might need them. Once they are scanned I will be able to keep them cached on my tablet, have electronic copies at home and work, and move them across the network in the event that I "forget" one.

The easiest way, by far, to accomplish this task is to destroy the books: bandsaw off the binding and feed the resulting pages into a bulk scanner. I am freeing my books from their physical reality, to make them more useful.

This bothers a good friend of mine. It particularly bothers him to be confronted with the corporeal remains of recently liberated books.

These pieces utilize some of those corporeal remains to explore the tension between books as intellectual work and books as physical artifact.

The pages are recognizable excepts from a seminal work on computer vision. Here are the front cover, and the relelvant pages from the book in DjVu format.

Update: Last of the 2005 Birds

I reconnected with a friend at a conference recently and was telling him about the birds. I've made one more bird for 2005: the classification bird in David's honor. Another page from Horn's book. Hopefully the Hallowthanksmas traffic will die down in the past office eventually, so I can mail it to him.

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