Digital print
44″ x 34″ x 0″
2020
This work, v122n896, is one segment of a larger project: a deconstruction of the page layouts of twelve issues of the academic journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, formerly published by the University of Chicago Press. By focusing on only the graphic content of each issue, the layouts and structural forms of the issue are revealed through interactions between lines, shapes, and colors. The pages are laid out algorithmically; the results reflect the choices made by journal management in favor of speed, efficiency, and lower costs over aesthetic. The image here shows a kind of x-ray of one printed issue, the color-coded graphic elements of each article interacting between layers of pages to reveal the algorithm’s page layouts combined as a whole.
When combined, these interactions yield new forms that show the issue as a reassembled whole. This work explores how scientists share information with one another, but in a visual and aesthetic sense rather than an epistemological one, once there is no manuscript text to read. These abstractions run counter to the source material’s concrete presentation of an interpretation of data. Science wants to get closer to truth, but these images encourage the viewer’s truth to manifest.
– Daniel Martin, Kenosha, WI