Book as dataset

A book is a collection of pages bound together, and so inherently becomes a collection of things-- concepts, events, definitions, or literal objects. Collections create bonds between the items in them, find commonalities, express horizontality or hierarchy in turn. They inform our understanding of those who choose to collect, as well as the circumstances that produce that which is collected. Experiencing these collections within the format of a book shifts our experience with and reaction to the data at hand, creating physical and temporal scope and making us experience the formation of these bonds firsthand, including the reader in the narrative-forming exercise of curation.

In her practice, Heidi Neilson has often used public information on astronomy and space travel in order to explore the implications and nature of our obsession with outer space. Pictured above, 'Details from the Least Popular' gathers "the most plain, uninteresting detail areas from the one hundred least popular images in the Hubble Space Telescope image gallery, in order with the least popular first." Its stake in the process of collecting ends up telescoping out through the history of its publication-- a collection of images, curated from a publicly available collection of images, part of a collection of books about space by the same artist (many of which also highlight collections, like 'Home Planetarium Index'), which is also part of the Library of the Printed Web, a collection of printed matter "gathered around the casual concept of 'search, compile and publish.'"

Why bother? If these images are of so little interest, why compile them into a book, print and bind them? In a way, the existence of the book makes the argument that the images become more interesting when they've been proven unpopular: in compiling them in increasing order of popularity, Neilson creates an expectation of identifiable hierarchy that is inevitably unfulfilled. They are all static, grainy, not conventionally beautiful images. The internal expectations within 'Least Popular' lead us to consider the external expectations that affected the images' popularity in the first place. What is 'interesting' about an image from outer space? What do we seek out in these images? What do we reject? Its role as a work printing the internet adds to these questions, making it as much a document of the content and nature of information shared digitally as one of our relationship to space. These once uninteresting images become potent carriers of meaning-- what do we want them to be? Of visual interest? Scientific or anthropological importance? Perhaps even poetic resonance?

The nature of a physical book format also means that a large collection of information will create a large object. Catalog Press has produced a variety of artists' books which play with the uncountable, especially within the realm of medical data. '60,000 immortal individuals' is a particularly extreme example of this, with its multitudinous spiral bindings, several pound weight and 4.75 x 14 x 8 dimensions. The 'immortal individuals' alluded to in the title are gathered from public databases of cell lines used in scientific research. The book's scale might suit our cultural ideas about the magnitude that 'immortality' has, but at the same time, it shows how this scale 'zooms out' the amount of information is retained on each specimen. Most entries in the book are labeled by demographic markers (age, race, sex), some defined by genetic diseases present in the sample. So rarely are names known and visible, that it takes hundreds of pages for the pink slips of paper tucked into the binding that represent them to become visible to the reader, otherwise lost in a thick, unwieldy stack of bright yellow pages.