The Phantom Library is a project developed by Christine Dong during her residency at the UWE Bower Ashton Library in 2024. The project is to revisit the identity of books and their relationship with the materiality of sheltered spaces.

The relationship between scanning and reading is ever-present in libraries. We cast the act of reading performed by machines rather than the human eye as scanning, which, like human reading, is characterized by linear engagement and a process of decoding.

Christine created more than a hundred “fake” books by using a portable scanner to scan various tangible elements within the library: signs, furniture, facilities, carpets, trash, books, posters, and even people passing by. These captured images transform familiar, three-dimensional environments into two-dimensional, alienated pixels, while, on the other hand, honestly documenting how machines engage in a form of reading. These images possess no physical thickness yet envelop the materiality of the library in the form of symbolic covers. They are phantom books that can never be found on any existing bookshelves but only haunt the space, housed by the Phantom Library – an entity from a divergent reality within this physical setting.

This is a library truly “in use,” with a new call number system based on these altered interpretations, allowing the location of the phantom books. Different from traditional systems, which rely on human intellectual frameworks to describe a book’s relationship to other works and the broader collection, this new system describes the relationship between books and the fluid materiality of space.

For more information about the project, please visit the website where Christine has catalogued the phantom book collection and offers guidance on how to search for them.

This exhibition is open to the public Monday – Friday 9am-5pm. No booking needed. The library is on the first floor of B block. Public parking on meters on main road or at Ashton Court.

For more information on Bower Ashton Library, visitor access and campus map, see the library website. You can also follow the library’s Instagram feed.

UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT.