[----]: Untitled Black Book

Photobook: Published by FUAM Istanbul, 112 Pages, Edition of 20
22×31CM
2016

“You have confused the true and the real.”
GEORGE STANLEY / In conversation*

[----] Untitled Black Book was produced during the artist book workshop entitled "From a Body of Work to the Right Book" by Matthieu Charon and Rémi Faucheux from the RVB books at the Photography Application and Research Center [FUAM] in Istanbul.

*The opening sentence for Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren.

The book contains a composite presentation of artist's produced photographs with saved images on topics such as astronomy, geography, sound, physics, or science fiction studies, which were encountered during daily research over many years.

[----] Untitled Black Book shows an enigmatic/chaotic sequence using the page area of image arrangements as an anti-book. Possible relations of metric dimension eventually create a black hole that collapses into itself and produces a result that emphasizes the meaninglessness of language. In addition to the production of a communication system as a letter or a time capsule, which is not possible as a book object [pulsar], it tries to re-express the fact that human beings have insufficient knowledge in understanding the cosmos and perceive it.

In 1972, at the request of NASA, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake formed a pictorial language on a gold-anodized aluminum plaque that was placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft based on the hyperfine transition of a neutral hydrogen atom. This language includes basic information about the human species and simple information such as the position of the solar system and the planet Earth. This plaque was an interstellar open letter. In the same year, Ernst Gombrich published an article on the plate for Scientific American magazine, which said that the arrow symbol, which indicates that the spacecraft was sent from around the world, is meaningless by extraterrestrial beings. According to this article, it is not possible for non-human beings to understand the image [artifact] of a human being and to know what the image represents.