BOOKSCAPES

‘The Wi-Fi Is Weak’, ‘No e-scape from Inter-space’, and ‘Our Mental Space Is The Database’ are titles attached to some of the new BOOKSCAPE series. Mitrentse transforms actual hard backs from ‘ATML - Bibliographic Data Flow’ into colourful flat canvases, as if they were paintings referencing Mondrian , Rothko or Anne Ryan but here they are surfaces on which to often explore post-internet text based ‘landscapes’/‘mental-scapes’ and particularly how the digital world seems to function as a ‘referee’ between humans and nature. They imply a parallel between the unstable logistics of both scriptorium and ‘E-scapes’ lifestyle. For nearly 600 years in-between though, the hallowed physical book has reigned supreme, monopolising academic and popular culture, only now assuming a different sort of role in response to a new kid on the block: digital literature and the post-human internet. Indeed as if in response to the challenge of cyberspace, the history of the book has also emerged as a legitimate, brand new discipline, the beginnings of a specialised and hugely fertile archival recapitulation of the phylum.

The Instagram and Facebook most popular hashtags abbreviations, which are pop- up algorithmical codes, also used to provoke ‘hot’ communication amongst their users, are a global daily language. In the Bookscape series these are used as a new Logos, as if the artist archives the Internet language - a meditation on the nature of digital abundance. Aiming to achieve beautifully inventive reorganizations of the book, and in turn how the book as diagram grapples with and shapes what it gives rise to: memory, thought, orthodoxy, belief, insight, compulsion, arousal, imagination, authority. 

Michael Hampton, Arts Writer Art Monthly / Frieze , London