Read through light of ideas
Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2011 7:54 am
Artist Airan Kang’s “109 Lighting Books” uses LED lights to create a dynamic, colorful homage to the written word. The “books” in this piece are actually made from resin and LEDs and don’t contain any actual text, but the artist has chosen to display titles by authors, poets and philosophers that have inspired her along the way.
Recently, Kang expanded her Digital Book Project through an exhibition at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York. Instead of creating exact replicas of the books she wanted to display, she appropriated key elements from the cover art, and added scrolling quotations of the book’s original content across the cover using LEDs. The “hyper books” as she calls them, seem to be commenting on the way knowledge acquisition has evolved thanks to technology. We live in the age of the Internet, in which information is attained quickly through short sound bites and quick snippets (think: Twitter), while the pastime of sitting down to read a book is becoming less common by the nanosecond.
Besides the exceedingly relevant message of the Digital Book Project, it’s also just really pretty to look at. The color changing LEDs shift, fade and pulsate as you admire the exhibit, creating an astonishing display of eye-candy that proves that books can be as beautiful on the outside as they are on the inside. Maybe you can judge a book by its cover, after all.
Recently, Kang expanded her Digital Book Project through an exhibition at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York. Instead of creating exact replicas of the books she wanted to display, she appropriated key elements from the cover art, and added scrolling quotations of the book’s original content across the cover using LEDs. The “hyper books” as she calls them, seem to be commenting on the way knowledge acquisition has evolved thanks to technology. We live in the age of the Internet, in which information is attained quickly through short sound bites and quick snippets (think: Twitter), while the pastime of sitting down to read a book is becoming less common by the nanosecond.
Besides the exceedingly relevant message of the Digital Book Project, it’s also just really pretty to look at. The color changing LEDs shift, fade and pulsate as you admire the exhibit, creating an astonishing display of eye-candy that proves that books can be as beautiful on the outside as they are on the inside. Maybe you can judge a book by its cover, after all.