For Katja Stuke the camera is never just a machine for depicting reality. It is instead a problematic instrument for coping with worlds of images, which explains why her new small publication is a guidebook, an ironic commentary and a low-key artist’s book in the tradition of Ed Ruscha’s self-published books. Marshalling generic and generated images to examine the invisibility of Internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo Stuke has produced a slim soft-cover book with black-and-white photographs and short texts. In addition to the pictures Stuke made in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, there are images extracted from the Internet: portraits of Google employees, exterior views of the headquarters of the major players, simulated pictures form the Sims, Second Life or satellite images.

The reader gradually learns more about these pictures, their sources and their content through subheadings and information provided about locations and the individual companies. As Paul Virilio once said about the nature of knowledge in the Internet age, the seeds of the apple can now found on its skin. Netizen can use this tightly edited book to explore those seeds and the manifestation and new topographies of the Web. Sebastian Hau, FOAM Magazine #23

Katja Stuke, Lonely Planet
A Guidebook to the Internet
artist book, 2011, b/w digital-print
120 pages 12,7 x 20,4 cm
Ed. #150

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