Books Scapes
A series of landscapes made up of fragments of digitized books
2012
See artwork online here : http://www.julienlevesque.net/books-scapes/
On the Internet, we are now just a click away from an inimaginable number of books, more than we could read in a lifetime. Book Scapes focuses on these digitized documents, which present a potentially infinite new material.
By digitizing these books, we are also digitizing images, which in turn become accessible. These images reveal a great wealth of textures—paper, layout, illustrations—whose particular characteristics expose the materiality of their physical format.
Book Scapes is a series of landscapes composed of 100 parts of images excerpted from various books (free of copyright). Online visitors can see a landscape that appears to be half-engraving, half drawing, revealing an imaginary view of a country that does not exist.
If at first sight the landscape seems to be unique, in reality it is a meticulous collage of multiple elements of a number of books. This is manifest once the visitor clicks on any part of the large image, which then brings them to the page of the book in question, leading elsewhere…
Screenshot of a page in Google Books in which we see the section of the image corresponding to the detail of the landscape.
