The Book Time Capsule

Death of Print, End of the Century
New York // 2011



The book time capsule is a historic cache of goods and information, intended as a method of communication with future people and historians. The book time capsule is closed airtight for 100 years and will be opened on the 1 January 2111. The time capsule contains the book ‘Denkwurdigkeiten’ from ‘Glueckel von Hameln’ (https://www.archive.org/details/denkwrdigkeite00glueuoft), which had been divided into elements. The Text of the book is removed and in its place three little bottles are added to the book to encourage the viewer in the future to explore the materiality of books.

In the digital age, the physical connection to a book disappears. The human being reduces its senses, to nearly just one: the sight. The access to the knowledge of humanity is through databases. The most important books are digitalized. It’s content can be found very quickly via the network. Rather than keeping the sensuality of a product in your hands, the reader swims in the data stream. Of course there are catchwords or notes which the searcher can easily look for but he can also get fairly lost in it.

Books are in general very different in terms of equipment and language. Books are witness of the time period in which they are printed. Successive generations starting to loose their sensuality, as they are not trained to use them anymore. For us, the memories of our feelings, we experienced in different moments in life remain. What happens to our future generations which are not able to have a sensual relation to books anymore. Will they ever experience books as we do at this moment: the haptic of a cover, the layout, the quality of paper, the smell of glue and ink?