Pump Out the Volumes: 50,000 free books form 1 art installation

2015-07-08T18:58:00-04:00

Libraries tend to house their stacks indoors, which makes FLUX's art project Lacuna something of a first: a series of nook-friendly triangular wooden shelves, lightly canopied by pages suspended on wires, Lacuna was designed specifically for this year's Bay Area Book Festival. Better yet: the project had no late fees. The intent of the project was to encourage people to permanently take away 50,000 books donated by the Internet Archive while simultaneously creating a space conducive to reading. According to the Mercury News, FLUX art director Benjamin Anderson saw the project not only as a means of pumping out the volumes, but also of creating greater aesthetic engagement within the public realm. "We as a society often see art as strictly hands-off," he explained. "It's OK to look, but not touch. One of the benefits of doing big art is that we get an opportunity to push that innate hesitation."

FLUX is no stranger to specific behavior-inducing structures, having previously designed i...

The physical architecture of the Internet Archive

2013-05-08T15:08:00-04:00

This film was shot in October last year when the Internet Archive celebrated a landmark --10 petabytes of stored media. Tour the space, which still looks more like a church than a library and see where millions of books are digitized and stored in a facility in Richmond, CA.

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Pump Out the Volumes: 50,000 free books form 1 art installation

The physical architecture of the Internet Archive