Name: 【TED】Brian Dettmer: Old books reborn as intricate art
Uploaded: 2015-02-11T08:03:07.000Z
Duration: 6 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

It's called "Alternate
Route to Knowledge."

I wanted to create a stack of books so
that somebody could come into the gallery

and think they're just looking
at a regular stack of books,

but then as they got closer they would
see this rough hole carved into it,

and wonder what was happening,
wonder why,

and think about the material of the book.

but I'm more interested in the text
and the images that we find within books.

In most of my work, what I do is I seal
the edges of a book with a thick varnish

so it's creating sort of a skin
on the outside of the book

so it becomes a solid material,
but then the pages inside are still loose,

and then I carve
into the surface of the book,

I'm just carving around
whatever I find interesting.

So everything you see
within the finished piece

is exactly where it was
in the book before I began.

I think of my work as sort of
a remix, in a way,

because I'm working with
somebody else's material

in the same way that a D.J. might be
working with somebody else's music.

This was a book of Raphael paintings,
the Renaissance artist,

and by taking his work
and remixing it, carving into it,

I'm sort of making it into something
that's more new and more contemporary.

I'm thinking also about breaking out
of the box of the traditional book

and try to push the structure
of the book itself

so that the book can become
fully sculptural.

I'm using clamps and ropes
and all sorts of materials, weights,

in order to hold things 
in place before I varnish

so that I can push the form 
before I begin,

so that something like this
can become a piece like this,

which is just made
from a single dictionary.

Or something like this
can become a piece like this.

which who knows what that's going to be
or why that's in my studio,

So I think one of the reasons
people are disturbed by destroying books,

and nobody really wants
to throw away a book,

is that we think about books
as living things,

and they're created
to relate to our body, as far as scale,

but they also have the potential
to continue to grow

And I also think of the book as a machine.

This is a full set of encyclopedias
that's been connected and sanded together,

So with encyclopedias,
I could have chosen anything,

but I specifically chose
images of landscapes.

And with the material itself,
I'm using sandpaper

and sanding the edges
so not only the images suggest landscape,

but the material itself
suggests a landscape as well.

So one of the things I do
is when I'm carving through the book,

I'm thinking about images,
but I'm also thinking about text,

and I think about them
in a very similar way,

because what's interesting
is that when we're reading text,

We're sort of creating images
when we're reading text,

and when we're looking at an image,
we actually use language

in order to understand
what we're looking at.

So there's sort of
a yin-yang that happens,

So I'm creating a piece
that the viewer is completing themselves.

And I think of my work
as almost an archaeology.

I'm excavating and I'm trying
to maximize the potential

and what's happening now that most
of our information is intangible,

and this idea that not only is the format
constantly shifting within computers,

now that we don't have a physical backup,

has to be constantly updated
in order to not lose it.

And I have several dictionaries
in my own studio,

and if I need to look up a word,
I'll go on the computer,

because I can go directly
and instantly to what I'm looking up.

the right format
for nonlinear information,

which is why we're seeing reference books

becoming the first to be 
endangered or extinct.

So I don't think that the book
will ever really die.

People think that now that we have
digital technology,

and we are seeing things shifting
and things evolving.

and just like people said
painting would die

when photography and printmaking
became everyday materials,

but what it really allowed painting to do