I have to post this! This is madness! I am speechless.
More pictures on Gizmodo and Tokyo Bling.

After successfully upgraded the blogging software, I have added two (way overdue) new features to the blog.

ShareThis widget
At the bottom of each entry, you can now click on "ShareThis" to quickly e-mail the blog post or to submit it to most of your social networking sites (Facebook, del.icio.us, Twitter...) If you have a ShareThis account, you can put all your links in one place and your contacts will be memorized. It's way overdue but I finally got around to put it in! I hope you'll find it useful.


reCaptcha
You know captcha? They are those scrambled and distorted text that you need to type in before you can submit comments. I have updated the captcha interface to reCaptcha, a software created by Carnegie Mellon University which uses captcha to "digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows".

In other words, each time you submit a comment or contact me, you will help digitizing scanned words by confirming a couple of words against what the computer thinks they might be. So, please leave more comments and send me more messages, and digitize more words!

I just upgraded the blogging software. If you see any oddities, please drop me a note. Thanks!

A year ago, I completed the book that I have spent the entire month of May working on. It uses entirely paper bags that I have saved, from shopping, of course. (But I definitely wasn't shopping during the entire month to collect bags!) There was a tremendous amount of paper to work from, but I lost count on the number of bags that I have disassembled. I guess it would be around 30.

The book was conceived and created as a respose to Jeannine Stein's recently published Re-Bound: Creating Handmade Books from Recycled and Repurposed Materials, in which I was one of the featured artists. Before the book was published, it has traveled to Purdue University in Indiana and Foundry Art Centre in Missouri.

I have been working on a set of two black and white books. Tonight I finally finished the first one of the two: White cover with black signatures and black stitches.

Artist Nicholas Galanin's created this piece from a 2000-page book. See more pictures of What Have We Become? on Galanin's Flickr page.

Via Boing Boing

Oversized Silver Coptic will be on display from today to July 26 at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in Sebastopol, California. Sebastopol is located in the Sonoma County, and is about 55 miles north-west of San Francisco.

"Bibliophoria" will exhibit artwork created in the form of artist's books using traditional or contemporary bookmaking methods and structures. One thing about the show that is very exciting to me is that gallery visitors will have the chance handle the books after cleaning hands with handiwipes (though I'd much rather they provide white gloves for them, abeit less environmentally-friendly). One of my goals as a book artist is to have the books being touched and interacted with.

Sebastopol Center for the Arts
6780 Depot Street
Sebastopol, CA 95472
http://www.sebarts.org
Opening hours:
Mondays - Fridays: 10am - 5pm
Saturdays and Sundays: 1 - 4pm

Good friends of mine, Dan and Marie, are going to get married in a couple of weeks, and they have offered to buy a big bunch of my books as gifts for their wedding party. Thank you guys! And may you both have a wonderful life together in the coming years.