Last year was the year of creating superfluous ties between print and digital, often in the name of creating “augmented reality.” Yet a more homemade project has managed to create an intriguing (if rudimentary) synthesis between paper and the Web.
Elektrobiblioteka, Waldek Węgrzyn’s final project for his master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, is a book that plugs into a computer via a USB port. Once connected, you can flip through the book’s pages, with each paper interaction triggering a change of text, animations, and other actions on screen. And rest assured Węgrzyn’s no paper-hating technology lover – the video below follows his creation of the book from printing the pages to binding them, with a fair amount of soldering in between.
His goal: to remove the strict divide between print and digital, and thus make good on Russian designer El Lissitzky’s concept of the book as the ultimate technology.
