Title: The Scan and the Export
Author: Sean Dockray
Originally published in: Fillip.ca | Issue 12 – Fall 2010
Featuring: Lorna Brown, Jeff Derksen, Sean Dockray, Sven Lütticken, Julian Myers, Anne Pasternak, Keith Wallace
Publisher: Projectile Publishing Society, Jeff Khonsary
Format: 120 pages, 17 x 24.5 cm, English
ISBN: 1715-3212-00012
First paragraph:
“The scan is an ambivalent image. It oscillates back and forth: between a physical page and a digital file, between one reader and another, between an economy of objects and an economy of data. Scans are failures in terms of quality, neither as ‘readable’ as the original book nor the inevitable ebook, always containing too much visual information or too little. Technically speaking, it is by scanning that one can make a digital representation of a physical object, such as a book. When a representation of that representation (the image) appears on a digital display device, it hovers like a ghost, one world haunting another. But it is not simply the object asserting itself in the milieu of light, information, and electricity. Much more is encoded in the image: indexes of past readings and the act of scanning itself.”