To create new art, Brian Dettmer trashes old books.

The painter-turned-sculptor takes outdated reference materials such as textbooks and encyclopedias, seals them with varnish, then carves away at their pages with a knife.

Dettmer explores our relationship with information. He adds no colour or text; it’s all what he calls “a subtractive sculptural process.” These are some of the amazing results.

Two dictionaries are given new life in “Webster Two Point Oh”

Hundred year old encyclopedias recycled as art in “Organized Knowledge in Story and Picture”

How to turn a book into a living document

In “Absolute Authority”, Dettmer shows a medical textbook from the

1930s.

In “New Books of Knowledge” Dettmer reveals geographic images to show this encyclopedia as a landscape.

A neat way to reinvent an encyclopedia

Make your comments about the following quotes from his talk.

“People think that now that we have digital technology, the book is going to die.”

“I think one of the reasons people are disturbed by destroying books, is that we think about books as living things.”

“I think of my work as almost an archaeology.”

“Now that most of our personal and cultural records are in digital form, it's really allowing the book to become something new.”

After watching Brian Dettmer’s Ted Talk get into pairs and decide which everyday objects are on the verge of becoming obsolete and could be turned into something else. In what way?