Books and Art

“From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!” – Printing Wikipedia for art’s sake

The latest exhibition at the Denny Gallery features a sampling of Michael Mandiberg's wild project called “Print Wikipedia.” Here's the skinny: Print Wikipedia is a both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Mandiberg has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand.   Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention...

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‘Bookfighting’: Art with books gets physical

If you've hung around Book Patrol long enough you know I've got a hankering for the representation of books in art. Now thanks to the French artist Yves Duranthon the relationship between books and art just got a whole lot more physical. It's called 'bookfighting' and earlier this month about 40 people gathered at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to get it on. Think dodgeball in a cage as combatants throw the book at each other trying to score points. And where might such a wild idea come from? Duranthon credits the Japanese writer Yuichi Yokoyama whose novel Combats...

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Remembering Mary Ellen Mark, the photographer who immortalized Seattle’s street youth

“I’m interested in people who aren’t the lucky ones, who maybe have a tougher time surviving, and telling their story” – Mary Ellen Mark When we think of Seattle and the movies we usually start with the box office hits like You've Got Mail or Singles that were shot in Seattle and prominently feature our fair city but it is the documentary Streetwise, that grew out of a LIFE magazine piece by the noted photographer Mary Ellen Mark, that provides us with one of the most powerful film depictions of the Emerald City. From the preface: In April 1983 reporter...

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There’s a reader on the loose in Prague

Books Calling is series of self-portraits from Prague-based photographer Jakub Pavlovsky. His tagline is "Make Time For Reading. Anywhere, Anytime. No matter how much stress you have, it all just slips away when you lose yourself in a great book." And to prove his point Pavlovsky has snapped a plethora of smart photos showing himself lost in a book at various locals throughout Prague and beyond.   Book's Calling on Instagram Source: BOOK'S CALLING

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