The center for book arts, Manhattan, New York, US © C. Bouissou

The center for book arts, Manhattan, New York, US © C. Bouissou

SUBCONSCIOUS

photographs

6 colour photographs 42 x 60cm

Search for formal correspondences within a gigogne shooting system. Open books, image repetition, progressive blurring of the first images, addition and loss of data... Patterns upon patterns and a creative process that creates pattern through its very repetition.

The book is a form of machine, and so are we. We take in information through our eyes if we have sight, and our fingers if we do not. As a conveyer of information, books are magical, but only if you understand the language. Babel’s surface is scored by the geometric marks of a book laid open. Its pages are peppered with braille text, inverted as holes instead of raised dots. Scattered about are brass and wire shapes that resemble bits of punctuation, like periods and parentheses. Seen from the side, a thin steel wire runs just above the surface, suggesting the contour of an open book’s profile. Magnets rotating beneath the surface pull the curved parentheses around the landscape of the pages, feeling their way as a finger would, but with a bit of trouble. They experience the braille as letters they fall into, and the open pages as an obstacle course. They drop into holes, they get stuck on the wires. They assemble into packs, break up and regroup. Some make it all the way around, others hit an impasse and wait for the next wave to carry them. They are tripping on words, misunderstanding. Theirs is a confusion of tongues, endlessly confounded. John Roach

- Internal machine, The center for book arts, Manhattan, New York, USA
  by invitation of John Roach
- Internal machine, book,  The center for book arts, Manhattan, New York, États Unis

with
Andras Borocz, Shannon Mattern, Seph Rodney, Doug Deube, Nick Yulman,
Caroline Bouissou, Douglas Paulson, Mary Ziegler, Ranjit Bhatnagar,
András Böröcz, Gillian Brown, brian Dettmer, Juan Fonative, Arnaldo Morales, Alexander Rosenberg, Claudia Schmitz, Kaethe Wenzel, Benjamin Wright

SEE TOO :
- Mirage
- Pôle d'écoute boréal
groupe de recherche Arts / Sciences 7MA