Nine Live Swimming Pools by Andreas Schmidt Signed by the artist As new 6.75 x 6.75 inches, 18x18 cm hardcover, 22 pages Rare - EDITION: 100 self-published 2011 As featured in VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (page 267) ISBN: 9780262018777, MIT Press · 2013 (Please note - VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS is NOT part of the auction and just illustrated here for further information and scale) Description: Between 9:49 and 10:12 PM, Greenwich Mean Time, on Friday, March 11, 2011, Andreas Schmidt logged on to nine live video feeds aimed at swimming pools in Europe, the United States, and the Cayman Islands. Still images were captured from each broadcast, and these constitute Nine Live Swimming Pools. All of the webcams were accessed via a publicly accessible webcam aggregator. The raison d'être for these live streaming views may be to offer prospective resort guests a view of the luxury that awaits them. Regardless, their availability feeds a culture of surveillance and voyeurism. In less than half an hour, an individual like Schmidt at his computer in London can spy on locations all over the globe. Under cover of night — or any time of day, really — he can watch daylight sunbathers across the Atlantic. The internet and the optical media it facilitates obliterate distance as an impediment to visual perception. Of course, the cameras located in France, Bulgaria and Italy all look on dark prospects at that hour. But an eerie ambience pervades all of the images: even the larger resorts are completely empty of human figures. These "live" pools seem nothing of the sort. Surveying this ominous screen, one wonders what crime scene or disaster is represented. Perhaps even in a post-apocalyptic world the webcams will continue streaming their live feed to an absent audience. Text by Phil Taylor in VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (page 267) Biography: Schmidt received a first class Bachelor of Arts (Photography) degree from Nottingham Trent University, School of Art and Design in 1992, after having moved to England from Germany in 1989. Schmidt's early work consisted mainly of straight analogue photography with a later shift in his art practice from 2008 onward towards appropriation, performance, print-on-demand artist's books and video. In 2005 German fine art and photography book publisher Hatje Cantz, published his first hard-back monograph Las Vegas to international critical acclaim. In the accompanying essay, Christoph Ribbat states about Schmidt's photography: "His work hints at the soberness of the New Topographics, the humor of New Color, the clever objectivity of newer German photo art." Described by J. G. Ballard as "the poet of the hotel corridor", Schmidt's second book, The City, was published by Hatje Cantz in 2009 and presents dystopian interior and exterior photographs of London's financial district. Schmidt was a founding member of ABC Artists' Books Cooperative in early 2009 and left the group in 2014. His work was shown at the 'From Here On group' show at Les Rencontres d'Arles, Arles in 2011, Fotomuseum Antwerp, Antwerp in 2012 and Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona in 2013 curated by Martin Parr, Joachim Schmid, Joan Fontcuberta, Erik Kessels and Clément Chéroux, showcasing art works by 36 artists (Mishka Henner, Penelope Umbrico, Doug Rickard, Corinne Vionnet, Thomas Mailaender, Willem Popelier, Constant Dullaart, Jon Rafman, etc.) The exhibition, included a large panel triptych by Schmidt called "RGB".[8] In 2011, Schmidt's artist book Four Seasons[9] featured in Photo-Eye's books of the year 2011 list and Schmidt's artist book The Cost of Photobooks: A History Volume II was listed by Le Monde as one of the 10 best photo books of 2011. On 14 November 2013 Schmidt launched GESAMTBUCHKUNSTWERKSKULPTUR, a custom-made shelving unit containing 77 artist's books at Offprint Paris. His artist book "The Time Machine" was included in the group exhibition A History of Photography: Series and Sequences at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2015 which also featured work by Nicholas Nixon, August Sander, Eadweard Muybridge and Lewis Baltz among others. Schmidt's work is held in a number of private and public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK, FRAC Centre, Orléans, France, Centre Des Livres Artistes, Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche, France, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis, USA and the Bavarian State Library, Munich, Germany.