uncopy

Google Books calls mistakes that crop up in the scanning and copying of books “unexpected peculiarities”. With The Art of Google Books Kristina Wilson takes this phenomenon and collects reproductions that display these peculiarities. Thus on the scanned pages, for example, one can see the hands of the staff who are overseeing the copying process or the movement of the pages that are being turned over. Other scans show marginal notes that have been scribbled as comments on the edge of the page. The fact that the books have been used is also indicated by library stamps, which, with information such as “For use in library only”, grotesquely contradict the idea of Google. In The Art of Google Books Kristina Wilson shows a selection of defective digitalisations and makes them available online as her personal art collection. “The aim of this project is twofold,” she writes on her website: “To recognize book digitization as rephotography, and to value the signs of use that accompany digitized texts as worthy of documentation and study.” In this way the artist questions the quality of digitalised books as well as the “knowledge of the world” that is saved in the books, which is apparently being made freely available and accessible by the global information broker and monopolist Google.

The Art of Google Books (since 2011), by Kristina Wilson