“It was while looking at Google’s scan of the Dewey Decimal Classification system that I saw my first one—the hand of the scanner operator completely obscuring the book’s table of contents,” writes the artist Benjamin Shaykin. What he saw disturbed him: it was a brown hand resting on a page of a beautiful old book, its index finger wrapped in a hot-pink condom-like covering. In the page’s lower corner, a watermark bore the words “Digitized by Google.”
There are several collections of Google hands around the Web, each one as creepy as the one Shaykin saw. A small but thriving subculture is documenting Google Books’ scanning process, in the form of Tumblrs, printed books, photographs, online videos, and gallery-based installations. Something new is happening here that brings together widespread nostalgia for paperbound books with our concerns about mass digitization. Scavengers obsessively comb through page after page of Google Books, hoping to stumble upon some glitch that hasn’t yet been unearthed. This phenomenon is most thoroughly documented on a Tumblr called The Art of Google Books, which collects two types of images: analog stains that are emblems of a paper book’s history and digital glitches that result from the scanning. On the site, the analog images show scads of marginalia written in antique script, library “date due” stamps from the mid-century, tobacco stains, wormholes, dust motes, and ghosts of flowers pressed between pages. On the digital side are pages photographed while being turned, resulting in radical warping and distortion; the solarizing of woodcuts owing to low-resolution imaging; sonnets transformed by software bugs into pixelated psychedelic patterns; and the ubiquitous images of workers’ hands.
The obsession with digital errors in Google Books arises from the sense that these mistakes are permanent, on the record. Earlier this month, Judge Denny Chin ruled that Google’s scanning, en masse, of millions of books to make them searchable is legal. In the future, more and more people will consult Google’s scans. Because of the speed and volume with which Google is executing the project, the company can’t possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface. There’s little doubt that generations to come will be stuck with both these antique stains and workers’ hands.
Shaykin was an M.F.A. student in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design when he was given an assignment to choose a book from Brown’s library that would serve as the basis for a series of projects. Even though he had the physical books readily available, he found it easier, as many people do, to access them through Google Books. Once he came across the first hand, he was hooked, and started digging deeper into Brown’s special-collections library, which was digitized by Google. He came upon many more anomalies. “In addition to hands and fingers, I found pages scanned through tissue paper, pages scanned while mid-turn, and fold-out maps and diagrams scanned while folded,” he explained. “The examples were everywhere. I quickly became obsessed, and filled my hard drive with gigabytes of downloaded PDFs.” He collected his strangest findings in a book called “Google Hands,” which ended up as one in a series of a dozen small hand-sewn books, each focussed on a different type of glitch. Through social media, he came into contact with like-minded collectors, and they began swapping artifacts.
One of those was Paul Soulellis, the proprietor of the Library of the Printed Web, which is housed in a pristine industrial space in Long Island City. Earlier this year, Soulellis, a graphic designer turned book artist, began to build his library, which consists entirely of stuff pulled off the Web and bound into paper books. One book is nothing more than dozens of images of highways rendered flat by flaws in Google Earth’s mapping algorithm. There are grubby, stapled zines consisting of printed Twitter feeds, books of CAPTCHA codes presented as visual poetry, collections of photos of dogs with glowing eyes culled from Flickr, and lots of books where the “authors” have selected uncanny moments from Google Street View, including a book of prostitutes on roadsides caught by Google’s cameras. While most of them are cheap, print-on-demand editions, a few are highly produced art books. One of the most beautiful books in the library is a collection of hundreds of crummy JPEGs of variations on the Mona Lisa (think the Mona Lisa morphed with E.T., made by a fourteen-year-old), printed on thick, handmade paper, and accordion-folded into an expensive slipcase; the combination of the crappy and the crafted is weirdly effective. Then there are absurdly large projects, such as a ninety-six-volume set called “Other People’s Photographs,” which scoops up material from random Flickr pages.
Amusing and titillating as these images are, it’s easy to forget that they’re the work of an army of invisible laborers—the Google hands. This is the subject of an art work by the Brooklyn-based artist Andrew Norman Wilson called “ScanOps.” The project began in 2007, when Wilson was contracted by a video-production company to work on the Google campus. He noted sharp divisions between the workers; one group, known as ScanOps, were sequestered in their own building. These were data-entry workers, the people to whom those mysterious hands belonged. Wilson became intrigued by them, and began filming them walking to and from their ten-hour shifts in silence. He was able to capture a few minutes of footage before Google security busted him. In a letter to his boss explaining his motives, Wilson remarked that most of the ScanOps workers were people of color. He wrote, “I’m interested in issues of class, race and labor, and so out of general curiosity, I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs.” In short order, he was fired.
His video later became an art installation called “Workers Leaving the Googleplex,” a play on the title of the first film ever shown in public, the Lumière Brothers’ “Workers Leaving the Factory” (1895), as well as a remake by the German filmmaker Harun Farocki with the same name. Wilson’s Google experiences have also resulted a series of beautiful gallery installations, with large, saturated color photos of those same workers’ hands. Wilson reminds us that we, too, are contributing our own labor to the company’s bottom line. He writes, “Everyone who uses the free Google perks—Gmail, cloud-storage, Google Books, Blogger, YouTube—becomes a knowledge worker for the company. We’re performing freestyle data entry. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value in this process. Google, as we know it and use it, is a factory.”
Soulellis calls the Library of the Printed Web “an accumulation of accumulations,” much of it printed on demand. In fact, he says that “I could sell the Library of the Printed Web and then order it again and have it delivered to me in a matter of days.” A few years ago, such books would never have been possible. The book is far from dead: it’s returning in forms that few could ever have imagined.
Kenneth Goldsmith’s latest book is “Seven American Deaths and Disasters.” He teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Above: “Special Collection” (2009), by Benjamin Shaykin. Photo by the Library of the Printed Web.
