Burgess Meredith in the book-drenched Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough At Last"They speak (I know) of the “feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.” - Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of BabelFront: Richard Artschwager. From left to right: John Stezaker, Richard Prince, Stephen Prina The exhibit is organized in cooperation with noted curator and director of the non-profit alternative art space White Columns, Matthew Higgs.“The Feverish Library” brings together a number of artworks whose premises are predicated on the book as a conceptual, psychological, and cultural form. In...
aMAZEme: The Ultimate Book Labyrinth
The Craigslist ad by the Brazilian artists' Marcos Saboya and Gualter Pupo asked for volunteers to help build a maze of books for the London 2012 Festival, a 'Cultural Olympiad' being held during the Olympic games.The parameters were simple enough: "walls of up to 3 meters high will be built from 250,000 books to create a maze of more than 300 meters in length!"But mind you this not an ordinary book assemblage but "an art project that unites literature, performance, installation, image and cinema." whose conceptual design is attributed to Jorge Luis Borge's fingerprint! By participating in the installation, the audience...
The Encyclopedia Britannica in the Hands of Simryn Gill
A couple of months ago it was announced that after 200+ years the Encyclopedia Britannica would cease publishing a printed edition. The granddaddy of all encyclopedia's had finally succumbed; becoming the latest casualty of the digital revolution.So what to do with all those sets of bound knowledge that are strewn across the planet?How about turning them into a flotilla of paper boats!In her 2008 installation Paper Boats Australian artist Simryn Gill offered up the 1968 edition of the encyclopedia to the public and invited them to turn its pages into origami boats.In a review of an exhibit of Paper Boats...