Light Reading by Airan Kang

About the project:

This virtual world was created as an homage to specific books that are her current sources of inspiration. Kang traveled around the world to visit and photograph different bookstores and famous libraries in order to then recreate each environment as digitized versions of the original simulacra. The familiarity of these places gives Kang’s lurid universe an unexpected and sublime sense of organic beauty.

Each of Kang’s unique book covers are modified appropriations of the original covers rather than an exact replica. The “hyper books” are then arranged in stacks to show Kang’s growing interest in the relationship between text and the imagined literary space that the texts represent. This is further asserted as quoted text from each books in LED scrolls across the surface, making the information contained readily available and accessible to the viewer. Thus the content of each book is automatically visible, suggesting an ultramodern view of knowledge and intellect that is predetermined and entitled, rather than learned over time.

Read more…

The Power of Books by Mladen Penev 

Blackboard paintings from Vernon Fisher’s series The Long Road to Nowhere

About the project:

Fisher’s preoccupation with archive, information transmission, memory, and taxonomy stems from an early interest in how people make sense of the world. His hallmark blackboard paintings recall pedagogical lessons or speculative renderings, oftentimes replacing sequential logic with “disordered notations” analogous to excerpts from an unrepressed mindscape. Often weaving literary references, pop cultural imagery, and cartography with his own symbolic lexicon, Fisher renounces the convention of a singular, autonomous narrative in favor of a seemingly endless metonymic chain.

Still life photography by Elena Kolesneva

You Are Stardust by Elin Kelsey and illustrated by Soyeon Kim is a children’s book filled with charming dioramic art and big ideas.

About the book:

You Are Stardust begins by introducing the idea that every tiny atom in our bodies came from a star that exploded long before we were born. From its opening pages, the book suggests that we are intimately connected to the natural world; it compares the way we learn to speak to the way baby birds learn to sing, and the growth of human bodies to the growth of forests. Award-winning author Elin Kelsey — along with a number of concerned parents and educators around the world — believes children are losing touch with nature. This innovative picture book aims to reintroduce children to their innate relationship with the world around them by sharing many of the surprising ways that we are all connected to the natural world.

Discover the wonder-filled world of photographer Joel Robison (aka Boy Wonder).

Book sculptures by Gareth Spor

Spor on his work:

Often fixating on the physics of light, the cosmos, and the geometries of space and time, I work across a diverse range of media to explore the states of wonderment achieved when people contemplate things larger than themselves. My work is a means to feed my own curiosity and to share some of the wonderment I feel with others.

Stacks by David Harper

About the project:

The theme for Harper’s installation: “these trees shall be my books,” comes from William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” but the goal of the work goes far beyond Orlando’s wish to immortalize Rosalind. Harper seeks to immortalize the love of knowledge, and the homage owed to the living things we use to create stores of knowledge for all to study. “STACKS” captures the transformation from living tree to store of knowledge.

Body of Knowledge by Dana Albany for Burning Man 2000 was constructed with out-of-date textbooks and discarded library books.

Tiny books from modulem on Etsy

These gifs demonstrate how a zipper and a constant velocity joint work. You can find more instructive gifs in Twisted Sifter’s gallery of 20 Animated Gifs that Explain How Things Work.

Retro Science by Nate Williams

Williams on his project:

Retro Science is about old school science … you know rockets, white jackets, short hair cuts, atoms, mainframe computers, thick black standard issue glasses … okay and some new stuff like DNA strings.

The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science is a book of unconventional science illustrations assembled by Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe, a group better known as Also Online. 

About the book:

A science book like no other, The Where, the Why, and the How turns loose 75 of today’s hottest artists onto life’s vast questions, from how we got here to where we are going. Inside these pages some of the biggest (and smallest) mysteries of the natural world are explained in essays by real working scientists, which are then illustrated by artists given free rein to be as literal or as imaginative as they like. The result is a celebration of the wonder that inspires every new discovery. Featuring work by such contemporary luminaries as Lisa Congdon, Jen Corace, Neil Farber, Susie Ghahremani, Jeremyville, and many more, this is a work of scientific and artistic exploration to pique the interest of both the intellectually and imaginatively curious.

I highly recommend watching the delightful animated book trailer:

The Where, the Why, and the How from ALSO on Vimeo.

The Synoptic Scheme of Shapes by Pop Chart Lab is “A comprehensive charting of geometric shapes! including polygons, quadrilaterals, deltoids, hypocycloids, triangles, rhombuses, superellipses, and many more.”

“Book Mountain” is the nickname given to this public library in Spijkenisse, Netherlands by MVRDV, the company that designed it. Needless to say, I want to climb this mountain.