While the codex format has been with us for a thousand years or so, books of the later half of the twentieth century are a ritual form unique to our era. They are packaged like any other product, and there are specific visual vocabularies used to differentiate reference works from, say, spaghetti westerns, or poetry from pornography. Despite the old adage "you can't tell a book by its cover..." we begin to classify and interact with a book before reading it. In fact, we often develop an emotional response, an aesthetic judgement - even a refutation - by sizing up its appearance and promotional copy. This response to a book is so quick it is all but involuntary.
In these "fictitious texts" I play with the many subtleties which give the books their evocative power: size, bulk, texture, graphics, language, condition, to name just a few. I am particularly fascinated with the how large a subject may be evoked, and how richly it may be embellished, using just a few words and the viewer's prior understanding of books. I also relish the humor available when the text on a book is at odds with some anomalous or improbable element of its appearance. One example of this is the painted relief sculpture of the window in Gallileo's study, on the back of "Diagnosing Uncertainty", another is the misaligned index tabs on the pages of "The Pocket Cyclopedia of Systematic Doubt".
The effect I am seeking is like the textual equivalent of a holograph: we know the holographic image is a projection, but we still get an instinctive emotional response to it as though it were solid. But in my work, the object is solid, and the text - the idea of the imaginary book - is projected, shimmering in the viewer's mind.
