06.13 - 10.03.26

DIE PLEK
8758 Holloway Drive 
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Calibbration is a new body of work by Los Angeles based artist Kim Schoen. The exhibition, which takes its name from an image-to-text artifact—when large-scale diffusion meets zero comprehension—presents two interlocking series.

The first is a photographic series of still lives. The subjects are book blanks—empty volumes manufactured by the Moser factory, a facility located near the Black Forest in Germany. Starting in 1966, after being a book bindery for several generations, the company started producing decorative and prop volume blank books. Under the solemn hum of industrial machinery, books are made that will never be read. These are not blank books in the common sense. They bear titles. They possess spines, covers, and the full architectural dignity of literature. They are, to all outward appearances, books. And yet they contain nothing. No sentences. No paragraphs. No footnotes that trail off into speculation. They are perfect vessels for ideas. The practice of the book blank has precedent: Walter Benjamin, in an unpublished 1931 correspondence with Hannah Arendt, described his own fantasy of a library composed entirely of unwritten books as "the only honest library, which does not pretend to have resolved what remains open."  

The second part consists of press proofs printed in Liquid Electrophotography (LEP), a digital printing technology developed by HP Indigo. Schoen fed Thomas Moser's invented titles into an AI image-generating system, asking it to picture what these non-existent books might contain. The machine obliged with full confidence. Schoen began this strange dialogue, refining the images into something that approximated her own desires, curious about images generated by text for books that contain none. 

At some point in the process of making printer’s proofs, AI produced the word Calibbration—a rendering of calibration, the technical term for the precise alignment required before a book with images can be printed—except that here, the alignment was imprecise. The internet is full of warped, pixelated, and out-of-focus text—and AI models were trained on these images. Through that process, they absorbed a vision of language in which letters are inherently unstable. 

Calibbration is part of Schoen's broader, ongoing project The Empty Library—a growing institutional fiction in which books exist without contents, shelves accumulate without knowledge, and the act of reading is replaced by the act of looking at something that looks like something that could be read. The Empty Library, which has been acquired in partial form by Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was most recently part of the exhibition 'Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising' in 2022.