AUTOMAGIC

Automagic is a book-object by Dutch visual artist Anouk Kruithof (b. 1981, Dordrecht, the Netherlands), which contains images drawn from her “automagic archive,” taken with iPhones and small digital cameras over the past twelve years. The book does not seek to present a clear narrative, which is created rather by the viewer’s own memories and associations provoked by the nine visual stories presented in nine different books, joined together with a book of text in a transparent acrylic glass box. Automagic is an exploration of an image archive transformed by means of analog photomontages, screenshots, reproductions, editing, and the addition of text. The diversity of topics and concepts in each book is highlighted by the use of different papers, which make a multi-layered sculpture of this book-object. It demonstrates the resourcefulness, the adventurousness, the sheer infinity of possibilities of the medium of photography, and shows how the computer and the human mind can act as processors of ways of looking look at our world.