Katja Stuke, Lonely Planet – A Guidebook to the Internet, 2014

For Katja Stuke, the camera has never been just a machine for imaging, but always a problematic instrument in the management of image worlds. Thus her new small publication, dedicated by means of generic and generated images to the invisibility of the companies that dominate the internet, such as Facebook, Google or Yahoo, is both a guidebook, an ironic commentary and a small unobtrusive artist’s book in the wake of Ed Ruscha’s own publications. It is a handy paperback with black and white photographs and small texts. Alongside the pictures Ms Stuke took in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley are images grabbed from the web: Portraits of Google’s employees, exterior views of company headquarters of the big players, simulated images from Sims 2, satellite images. These images, their sources and contents gradually reveal themselves to the reader, also through intertitles, location and company information. As Paul Virilio once said about the nature of knowledge in the age of the internet, the cores are now spread over the skin of the apple, so the net citizen can trace the manifestations, the new topographies of the net in this rigorously edited book.