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"machines" Tag


Fly or not to fly?


Sunday, December 6, 2009

My third search in the library, this time not limited to the design section. I wonder, if I should start looking at art, or the section ‘normal’ books in the library. It tickles my curiosity, what kind of ‘normal’ books would a library of an art school have?

The first books I see, are books about airplanes. One of them pops out of the bunch. It’s a thick green book, way too heavy to bring home. The spine of the cover shows part of the structure of a wing. Inside the book I see detailed, structured drawings of airplanes and other flying objects. It looks really old-fashioned, out-dated maybe. I see big machines, which sometimes look like alien-things, that don’t even exist. Especially drawings like the Apollo Lunar Module descending to the moon’s surface, or ‘Egg’s Folly’, a dolphin shaped balloon from the 18th century. Probably this balloon indeed never existed. From the first human attempts to make flying machines untill the last.

659.2 gib 1

More Human, Less Machines


Sunday, December 6, 2009

My second search in the library, this time with a whole list of tag-words in the back of my head. I try not to search for something precise, but rather let it come to me. I pick up a lot of books, not knowing what feels right. Then I see a book with an interesting structure on the cover. It looks like a computer-drawn structure, like a cheap 80’s wallpaper. On the first page I read that this publication is part of a numbered series, from 1-1000. While making this book, by using different techniques, 1000 different books were made. Each unique book has its own number, this one is numbered 756. I expected this book to be about production techniques, but instead it’s about human behaviour and how we perceive things. More human than the cover. More human, less machines.

772.9 suy 1b


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