Just four pages after the Ellul spread, a video still with oversaturated, thermal imaging-like colours plunges us into abstraction. Digital processing by Benoit Aquin’s alter ego has remade an image viewed countless times around the world into something unfamiliar. The index informs us that it depicts the moment United Airlines Flight 175 came crashing into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Other highly aestheticized images of historical events—the Iraq War, the Fukushima tsunami, the Baltimore riots, Islamic State militants—are deliberately arranged in one long sequence in the heart of the book; certain images seem almost to slip from the book’s frame and bleed through to other pages.

Surprisingly, Bequii does not claim full authorship of these images. “While it is true that these images were created using a spontaneous process whose techniques I control, it is equally true that my own feelings in no way circumscribe their meaning.” In other words, Bequii accepts that the algorithms he so dreads are also, to some extent, the authors of his work.

A patchwork narrative

In the ways the images and discursive layers intertwine, La dimension éthérique du reseau par Anton Bequii turns the codes of the photobook upside down. Book design often makes itself felt precisely where the designer’s involvement is least noticeable. While the layout is somewhat spare, the book’s editorial structure creates sense out of disorder to render the multiple layers of entanglement in this touching, complex story—a story Benoit Aquin took six years to weave.