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PRODUCT
Book from the Ground: from point to point (Mit Press)
Product Description:
Price:
$21.67
Detailed description:
A book without words, recounting a day in the life of an office worker, told completely in the symbols, icons, and logos of modern life.
Twenty years ago I made Book from the Sky, a book of illegible Chinese characters that no one could read. Now I have created Book from the Ground, a book that anyone can read.
—Xu Bing
Following his classic work Book from the Sky, the Chinese artist Xu Bing presents a new graphic novel—one composed entirely of symbols and icons that are universally understood. Xu Bing spent seven years gathering materials, experimenting, revising, and arranging thousands of pictograms to construct the narrative of Book from the Ground. The result is a readable story without words, an account of twenty-four hours in the life of “Mr. Black,” a typical urban white-collar worker.
Our protagonist’s day begins with wake-up calls from a nearby bird and his bedside alarm clock; it continues through tooth-brushing, coffee-making, TV-watching, and cat-feeding. He commutes to his job on the subway, works in his office, ponders various fast-food options for lunch, waits in line for the bathroom, daydreams, sends flowers, socializes after work, goes home, kills a mosquito, goes to bed, sleeps, and gets up the next morning to do it all over again. His day is recounted with meticulous and intimate detail, and reads like a postmodern, post-textual riff on James Joyce’s account of Bloom’s peregrinations in Ulysses. But Xu Bing’s narrative, using an exclusively visual language, could be published anywhere, without translation or explication; anyone with experience in contemporary life—anyone who has internalized the icons and logos of modernity, from smiley faces to transit maps to menus—can understand it.
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Product group:
Categories: Arts & Photography
Product name:
Book from the Ground: from point to point (Mit Press)
Price:
$21.67
winter –
Spannende Idee- Super witzig v.a.wenn 2 Personen gleichzeitig „übersetzen“
John J. Wall –
😍📘
Juan M. Gimeno Illa –
Aunque aún hay “párrafos” que no he podido acabar de entender, es realmente sorprendente la cantidad de información que el autor transmite en base a iconos. Hacía mucho tiempo que no “leía” algo tan original.
Juliana Vermelho Martins –
O livro é ótimo. Experiência super interessante. Demora apenas alguns minutos pra se acostumar e logo estamos “lendo” perfeitamente. É incrível! É como aprender uma nova língua rapidamente.
Bee King –
Surprisingly easy to read!
💣 Da Bomb 💣 –
Best to not let your youngster read this book without supervision as you may be faced with some interest questions! Page 16 highlights elements of appropriateness. It’s a novelle book, a bookshelf keeper. The story isn’t anything to write home about but that depends on how you perceive the book. It’s certainly art. Again, not for youngens.
Terrell Miller –
This book was published in 2012-2013. The idea is to tell a complete story using no written words, just pictograms like you see in airports, etc. Anyone in the world with some basic experience in a modern city should be able to follow along, even if they cannot read and write. Apparently the author was also working on a related translator program that could convert text in one language into pictograms that anybody in the world could read, regardless of which language they speak.
Great idea, but…apparently the book has only been published in a few countries (irony meter offscale high) and has basically been forgotten. There are only a few reviews here on Amazon, mostly from the first year or two after publication.
Similar arc as the “S.” multimedia set from J.J. Abrams a few years later, which was a novel-within-a-mystery-game. That seems to have gone nowhere too, which is a shame.
This book itself is an interesting exercise, and it’s fun to get going with the “language”. But the story itself is banal…a day in the life of a young office worker in a big city, told in tedious detail.
Still well worth “reading”, but to get the most out of it you should also get the companion volume that goes into a lot of detail about the concept and execution…making-of special features in book form.
sfsherpa –
This book is the other side of the coin for Xu Bing’s art installation Book From the Sky. Book From the Sky was designed to look like writing, but ultimately it’s gibberish.
Book From the Ground is attempting to create a universally accessible text by eliminating language. So, conceptually it’s interesting.
However, this approach limits the character development. Bing presents his protagonist as an unhappy, procrastinating, materialistic office worker who likes to go on dating sites while at work–then complain about deadlines. It’s shallow material.
Ultimately, the conceptual objective fails. This is NOT a text that anyone can read. The only people who can understand this are living in the early 2000s and have access to the internet. This audience is far from universal.
Q –
Gave it to my artist/engineer friends they all loved it.