[----]: Untitled Black Book
Photobook
22×31CM, 112 Pages, Edition of 20, Published by FUAM Istanbul
2016
“You have confused the true and the real.”
—George Stanley, in conversation*
Produced during the artist book workshop From a Body of Work to the Right Book led by Matthieu Charon and Rémi Faucheux of RVB Books at Istanbul’s Photography Application and Research Center (FUAM), [----]: Untitled Black Book assembles a fragmented visual lexicon drawn from astronomy, geography, physics, found image studies, and science fiction. The work juxtaposes the artist’s photographs alongside collected imagery accumulated through years of daily research, creating an enigmatic sequence that interrogates the limitations of human communication and knowledge.
Positioned as an “anti-book,” the project subverts conventional narrative structures by collapsing images into a nonlinear, chaotic arrangement. Metric dimensions of the page area are manipulated to evoke a visual analogue of a black hole—a gravitational pull toward entropy, where coherent meaning disintegrates. This formal instability mirrors the futility of language as a tool for comprehending the cosmos, emphasizing gaps in human understanding. The book operates as a speculative artifact, oscillating between a failed letter to an unknown recipient and a time capsule of fragmented semiotics. Its pulsar-like rhythm—alternating bursts of clarity and obscurity—reflects the paradox of attempting to encode universal truths within inherently subjective mediums.
The work engages with historical precedents of interstellar communication, notably the 1972 Pioneer plaques designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. Etched with symbolic representations of humanity and Earth’s location, these gold-anodized aluminum plates were intended as universal messages aboard NASA’s Pioneer spacecraft. Yet their efficacy relies on assumptions of shared cognition, a critique underscored by Ernst Gombrich’s contemporaneous analysis in Scientific American. Gombrich argued that the plaque’s arrow symbol—a directional marker meant to signify origin—would hold no inherent meaning for extraterrestrial beings. This tension between intention and interpretation permeates [----]: Untitled Black Book, which similarly questions whether images can transcend the cultural or biological frameworks of their creators.
By embedding scientific diagrams, speculative fiction references, and cosmological data into its unstable visual field, the project exposes the hubris of anthropocentric epistemologies. Just as the Pioneer plaque’s hydrogen hyperfine transition diagram presumes knowledge of atomic physics, the book’s collaged fragments reveal how human attempts to map the cosmos are constrained by terrestrial logic. The result is not a cohesive treatise but a meditation on entropy—a reminder that every act of communication risks collapsing into noise, every symbol into ambiguity.
*Opening sentence of Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren.
