Tupaia, Kybernetes & Lara Croft

This artist book is available in three editions only slightly differing from another, challenging the single-object status of a design

This book materialises in three genuinely different ways: it exists in the form of a hand-made screen-printed leporello limited edition, a digital print colour leporello copy and a free e-pub, which can be accessed here:

download pdf

Making use of artistic research and spatial philosophy, this book investigates modes of navigation: it juxtaposes archetypical vessel-based movements characteristic for Polynesian navigator Tupaia, ancient Greek steersman Kybernetes and Lara Croft’s avatar.

The book allows for juxtaposing and establishing new links between the three characters with regard to their peculiarities around the topic of navigation. A book chapter is dedicated to each of the characters, outlining the particularities around each character’s lived model of space. The artistic research dwells on practices of enactment and re-enactment—to develop alternative readings of avatars, the role of Margaret Mead in second order cybernetics and Oceanic navigation and to underline the limitations of Western concepts of space concerning the framing of digitally supported practices.

All three versions of the book are authored by Eva Sommeregger and published by Breite Gasse Publishing, 2022:

The B-Sides. Tupaia, Kybernetes and Lara Croft, ISBN 978-3-9504111-9-5, the handmade, screenprinted edition in the format of a leporello, printed onto both sides of a 6.7 metres long scroll (edition of 20)

Tupaia, Kybernetes and Lara Croft. Bodily Perspectives on Postdigital Spaces, ISBN 978-3-9505219-1-7, the print-on-demand physical edition, also in colour, features a contextualising text running as a single line across the bottom of the 13.4 metre long leporello

Tupaia, Kybernetes and Lara Croft. Bodily Perspectives on Postdigital Spaces, ISBN 978-3-9505219-0-0, the digital edition comes in colour and is a green open access publication

please find here the different open access formats: pdf, epub, html

The book has been financially supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Civil Service and Sport (BMKOES) and the Art magistrate of the City of Vienna (MA7). It has first been presented in a lecture at Depot, Kunst und Diskussion, Vienna, on 31st January, 2022.

cover of the screen-printed edition
opening the screen-printed edition

Posted in A-Z