Eric van Hove, ‘Exonomie’ (2010)
A recomposition of an original bookshelf (Section 2A) which disappeared some 40 years ago during the splitting of the Universiteit Leuven following the franco-dutch linguistic separatist movement in Belgium in 1971.
1000 borrowed books from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL) and 1000 books borrowed from the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL).
‘Archive’ (2013) by Jonathan Minard
A documentary focused on the future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale.
Part one features Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and his colleagues Robert Miller, director of books, and Alexis Rossi, director of web collections. On a mission to create universal access to all knowledge, the Internet Archive’s staff have built the world’s largest online library, offering 10 petabytes of archived websites, books, movies, music, and television broadcasts.
The video includes a tour of the Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco, the book scanning center, and the book storage facilities in Richmond, California.
‘Einstein Rainbow 1’ (2009)
‘Every leaf from a tree’ (2009) by Aspen Mays.
The projects ‘Einstein Rainbow’ and ‘Every leaf on a tree’ by Aspen Mays are closely connected. For ‘Einstein Rainbow’ Mays collected every book about Einstein from all the college and university libraries of Illinois. She made a bookshelf in the shape of an arc and started to sort the books (over 1500) according to their color. Thinking about the linguistic connection between a leaf in a book and a leaf on a tree she decided, as a response to this project, to photograph every leaf on a tree next to her studio. This resulted in 900 prints of every single leaf. Both projects were presented together. See more images below.
Warren Neidich
Warren Neidich, ‘Book exchange’ (2010)
Neidich designed this rotating book shelf to hold all the books Sarah Palin supposedly wanted censored from her local library in Wasilla Alaska. All these books were bought off the internet and placed on the shelf. The members of the community were sent an invite to come to the gallery carrying a red book which they were asked to exchange for one of the shelved books. When all the books have been exchanged for and the work becomes a red monochrome the work is completed.