LA CARTE OU LE TERRITOIRE - STÉPHANIE VILAYPHIOU

Stéphanie Vilayphiou is a young artist and designer investigating how software (transparently developed) can deeply question the fixity of the printed page and the whole defensive copyright practices historically consolidated.
In « The map or the territory » she selected a controversial book, Michel Houellebecq’s « The map and the territory », which became renown for its evident quotes from Wikipedia, non-acknowledged by the author nor by the publisher. She took the book’s digitized text and wrote a software filter, which looks for each sentence (or part of it) in Google Books, finding the same sequences of words in other books. Visually the book transforms then in a digital collage of quotations (whose context is maintained in the background), loosing even the last bit of originality.
Vilayphiou embodies her sharp irony within a functional mechanism, exploiting Google’s industrial collection of texts and smartly expanding the mediating properties of language through the networks.

Stéphanie Vilayphiou is a Brussels-based graphic designer, member of the collective Open Source Publishing. She is especially interested in sharing of knowledge, questioning its social accessibility and alternatives to copyright. Through commissioned and self-initiated projects she explores manipulation of text: typography, code, vocabulary, translation. She currently works, in the frame of the European research project Libre Graphics Research Unit, on the editing of a reader on the mutual relation between tools, practice and free culture in graphic design.
http://stdin.fr/