Monday, July 20, 2009

Hermann Zschiegner








Hermann Zschiegner

Work from 34 Parking Lots.

Zschiegner makes some incredibly interesting Google art (primarily Google image searches, etc, but tactile representations of Google info regardless).

"This self-published booklet is the first in a series of artist books dealing with photography in the age of Google image search. This one pays homage to Ed Ruscha's 'Thirtyfour Parking Lots' originally published in 1967.

The original book contains 34 areal views of empty parking lots taken by areal photographer Art Alanis. The aerials were taken during a one-and-a-half-hour shoot on a Sunday morning, when the lots were empty resulting in a survey of the Los Angeles urban landscape of the late sixties.

Ruscha included a detailed address for all but one parking lot, the only text that accompanied the pictures, thus the book became a roadmap to revisit the original places, transforming the original book into a programmatic device for my project 'Thirtyfour Parking Lots on Google Earth'.

Using Google Earth I simply typed in the exact addresses for each parking lot featured in the original book and took a screenshot from the resulting image query. I substituted Ruscha’s black and white images with the color screenshots, not changing any other aspect of the original book. I applied the same logic of using Google as my only image source and did a search for the original book cover and found a low-res image from the artnet database." - Hermann Zschiegner

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for posting this...I did this project back in 2006 in a limited run of 20 books for a few friends and colleagues (incl. Ed). I have since started to collect Ruscha-inspired book and have found close to 50 different artist books. Some of my favorite Ruscha-esque books include Jeff Brouws "26 Abandoned Gasoline Stations" and "Macintosh Road Test" by artists Corrine Carlson, Karen Henderson and Marla Hlady.

    Lately more and more people had asked me for copies of my little book, and I gave away all extra copies I still had. I finally decided to put the book up on Blurb and copies are now available here

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