THE ART OF GOOGLE BOOKS KRISSY WILSON

Krissy Wilson is a young artist and writer who turned herself into an archeologist of the most ephemeral part of Google Books. This utopian project of scanning the whole human printed knowledge has been questioned by multiple perspectives (institutional, personal, and business ones), but what Wilson does is questioning between the lines the digitalization as an industrial apparatus. So, she’s documenting the fragments of materiality lost in this gigantic digitalization process. Her painstaking attitude to find the different types of “anomalies” in the online digital scans represents then the same process they are constituting, revealing its partially destructive or philologically weakened nature. The “failure” element is then embodied not only by the accidental employee’s fingers left in the scanned picture while turning or pushing a page, but in a classification of technical mistakes as technical (glitches, moire, misinterpreted transparencies, distortions) organic (water marks, worm holes, stains) or human-provided (scribbles, underlining, doodles, dog ears, pressed flowers) and so on. Then her definition of “digitization as rephotography” fuels the feeling of discovery and perfectly pictures the intimate subversiveness of this work.

Krissy Wilson is an artist and writer from Miami, Florida currenlty living in Chicago. She is pursuing an MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and she holds a BA in English from the University of Florida
In her most recent project Detritus: Poems from the Thames Foreshore, Wilson is searching for textual artifacts in London’s river midden and assembling them into public, mosaic poems.
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