It's called Lacuna and if all goes well this spectacular homage to books, libraries and public space will be open for business at the Bay Area Book Festival that will be held in June. Commissioned by the Bay Area Book Festival and created by the FLUX Foundation Lacuna is hailed as an interactive art installation, a library, and a monument to books. It is constructed with 50,000 books that can be removed from its walls and taken home for free. Why Lacuna? Lacuna is about rekindling that sense of wonder we all have experienced with books. We want people to be enthralled and captivated...
Books meet robotics in the Book Hive
[youtube]http://youtu.be/tUR3mEp26eE[/youtube] Welcome to the Book Hive, a large-scale interactive sculpture created by Rusty Squid to celebrate 400 years of public libraries in Bristol, UK. The Hive is a swarm of animated books within hexagonal cells that open and close. The Hive will continue to expand until it contains 400 books, one for each year. The project was funded by Arts Council England, whose regional director Phil Gibby states: We believe that everyone, particularly children and young people, should have the opportunity to experience the richness of the arts, museums and libraries, and by supporting excellent projects like Book Hive, we can bring together the...
Negative Art: Not At This Library
Artist Douglas Gordon.(Image courtesy of The London Times.)What is art? When confronted by that tricky question often the best answer the average person can come up with echoes Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous statement about pornography: "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it." Library administrators at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland see it this way: if it isn't uplifting, positive, and celebratory, it isn't art.To add a final flourish to the December 2009 unveiling of the remodeled ground floor of its main library, the University commissioned a work of art. The...