COLLECTION NAME:
Artists' Book Collection
Record
Title:
Nova Reperta: New Discoveries and Inventions
Creator:
Drucker, Johanna, 1952-
Creator:
Freeman, Brad
Description:
Hardback, oversize casebound edition in raw purple silk. Limited edition of 75 copies. Artist's statement: "This project was originally conceived when Brad Freeman and I were invited to participate in a project initiated by a curatorial team working with the Smithsonian in which artists were to respond to a work in the Bern Dibner Collection in the history of science and technology. That invitation came as we were moving from New York to New Haven. We put the project on hold, and it took us five years to finish it, though each of us did other things along the way. The project kept to the original Smithsonian parameters -- to create a work in response to one in the Dibner Collection. We had chosen the Stradanus, Nova Reperta (Modern Inventions is a rough translation of the title), because we were fascinated by the suite of prints Stradanus had created, and by his faith in the ability of visual means to depict and communicate knowledge. Our reworkings of the plates and themes about the inventions that had had the greatest effect on modernity took the form of photographs of current technological conditions and texts that translated and reworked the information in the glosses on the plates. Brad Freeman did the photographs. I did the writing and layout designs. The book was also meant to work as a wall piece, but never quite did. The scale of the texts was too small for legibility. But the writing and images were among the strongest we each had produced to that date. In terms of production, a work sitting between digital and offset technology, it is also an interesting hybrid. All the color in the book was produced with photomechanical means, but the were processed from darkroom photography to scanner to high-end digital film output. The texts existed only in the Quark files, with notes and originals from which they were drawn or on which they were based existing as well, but not in final form until the book was printed."
Subject:
Inventions in art
Subject:
Photography
Subject:
Science in art
Publisher:
JAB Books (New Haven, Conn.)
Contributor:
Straet, Jan van der, 1523-1605
Date:
1999
Language:
English
Type:
Still Image
Extent:
66 unnumbered pages : illustrations (some color) ; 51 cm
Format/Medium:
Artists' books
Format/Medium:
Case binding (bookbinding process)
Format/Medium:
Hardcover books
Format/Medium:
Offset lithography
Format/Medium:
Photographs
Format/Medium:
Photomontages (visual works)
Format/Medium:
Silk (textile)
Source:
Nova Reperta: New Discoveries and Inventions, in Artists' Books Collection at SCAD Library, Atlanta, Savannah College of Art and Design.
Rights:
Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Identifier:
b12575781
Identifier:
i11744856
SCAD Location:
SCAD Library (Atlanta)
