Twenty Billion Lightyears b>
This book is entirely made of photocopies: Each page displays a circle, ten centimeters in diameter, which is divided into a black and a white half, and this circle is magnified by the factor two on every page. So the original perimeter projects towards the boundaries of the visible universe, and the visible circle may show an area so small that only a proton could have fitted there in the original circle.
I produced this book in June 1988, and back then computers were large grey boxes with small green screens made of heavy glass. Pictures could not be handled with them, and so the original pages of the book had to be made with the help of scissors, glue, and hundreds of black-and-white photocopies. Only the text could be made with a SHARP PC-7000, one of the first portable computers ever, but you would not want to carry it very far because it was so heavy. So computers were much larger than today, but the universe still seemed smaller and quarks were unpopular.
My brother Jürgen, who died last year, had the basic idea for using the Xerox-machine as a telescope and magnifying glass at the same time, and so the book is dedicated to him then and now. And since I had the first bound copy ready on the fourth of July 1988, I uploaded the reprint I had made in 2009 for the exhibition Insolubles solides in Paris in time for its twenty-fifth anniversary.
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