Lonely Planet - A guidebook to the Internet by Katja Stuke

LAST COPY!

Katja Stuke, Lonely Planet
Artist book, 2011
A Guidebook to the Internet
b/w digital-print
120 pages 12,7 x 20,4 cm

More Info: Please copy and paste.
https://katjastuke.de/works-11/

#9

Katja Stuke, Lonely Planet, A Guidebook to the Internet
Böhm Kobayashi, 2011

It has to be here somewhere. I browse through our bookshelf in the section of books without printed images. I look in two places. Among other things, our books are arranged by size to save space.
Between Eugenides, Heike Geißler and William Gibson on the right, and Paul Auster, Carver and Chamadi on the left, it should be there: Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. Small correction: Chamadi includes twelve photographs by Herbert List printed in the book.
The internet is to blame. Trust the cloud. Book vs. internet – the internet does not forget. Today will already be yesterday tomorrow.
In Berlin, at a friend of Wladimir Kaminer’s, in his snack bar, the internet is said to be painted on the wall. We actually wanted to see that sometime.
San Francisco, 2009. Just attended a hardcore concert and took photos.
Let’s visit the internet. We’re not far from the garages of the people in Silicon Valley who shaped it. Let’s drive to the addresses and look at the doorbell nameplates. We park in front of a diner from the fifties and drink a milkshake.
Just around the corner are the addresses of Facebook, YouTube. And Twitter. And Myspace.
Google Street View. How cool is that. Doug Rickard. A New American Picture. Wonderful book, first published in 2010 by White Press in a small edition. Thanks Markus. Thanks Helge.
Without electricity there is no remembering and no forgetting. I’m still looking for the book. Then I find it in our studio.
Next to Katja’s desk, between one of her artist’s books (Mechanical Brides), a manual for a Sony video camera, and Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual.
On the inside front cover: hiragana exercises in pencil. That must have been around 2006, when we started learning Japanese. In the book's margins, lots of little white bookmark flags. There must be a lot of conversation going on there – in the car, on the freeways.
Microserfs, as I recall, was something Katja and my good friend Laurens talked about euphorically. How the protagonists in this book sit at creaky desks built from Lego bricks: IBM, Microsoft, Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, Stanford, data highways.
Laurens and Katja were the first people I knew with an Apple Macintosh. New conversations with new words about new things like: this modem, more RAM, or maybe even more of that, or a different one?
In the corner of my eye, the fax machine, which occasionally cut into our conversations and thoughts to spit out images that we then first had to discuss on the phone in order to understand what we were seeing. There was a certain freedom of interpretation in that. I liked it.
The idea of deliberately degrading one’s own images to see what minimum of quality is actually needed developed from that later on.
When did we start emailing? I don’t remember. I always liked talking on the phone better. I did that a lot with Laurens. You won’t find him on the internet. Neither my parents.
What isn’t on the internet doesn’t exist. It surprised me that I recently discovered a photograph with my mother hanging on a wall in an exhibition – a print from 1952, photographed by a photojournalist from Düsseldorf. I’ll have to look into that.
Now I have to write all the time. If I want to call someone, it’s better to write an email or a text message first.
Lonely Planet – A Guidebook to the Internet was produced at Blurb, an internet book platform. This book format is actually intended only for text publications. But it was worth trying it with images. On the slightly warm, uncoated paper and in the handy format, I like it more and more – after all this time. Similar to the edition of Café Lehmitz that was published as a Fischer paperback.
Online and print-on-demand – self-publishing at its best.
The cover: a motif with markings of all internet companies at the time, recorded with Google Earth.
First page: Google traffic sign, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway. Employees wait in front of the headquarters for the Google car and wave. First approaches in the Google parking lot. Katja photographs the license plates and googles the faces of the owners.
Java is not far away, and neither is the Stanford Industrial Park. No visit to the internet without a car. 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, is another nearby address – like many others. Irvine isn’t far either. New Industrial Parks is one of my favorite books by Lewis Baltz.
Katja visits Venice Beach in Second Life. I’ve often wondered why people build the same things there as in real life.
Neighbourhood Mapping in The Sims at the end of the book as text, shortly before the final image in the book takes us to Bangalore, to RMZ Infinity.
Finally, a suggestion from Katja: on the weekend, close the internet and delete all comments. On Sundays, then on Mondays.
As always, the book will be available in the shop for one week.
Sebastian Hau writes a text about it in Foam Magazine.