encyclopedia of Kurt Caviezel

For the past 15 years, from his studio in Zurich, Kurt Caviezel has been monitoring 15,000 publicly accessible webcams located all over the world. By taking screenshots of any situation he found interesting he compiled an archive of more than 3 million images, categorizing them for recurring patterns and subjects. The dust jacket of the book contains all 15,000 web-links used by Kurt Caviezel to create this body of work.

From the foreword by Joachim Schmid:

Through years of camera surveillance the artist has compiled a virtually unreal amount of images, which have all been harvested from webcams. The quantity of images is of crucial importance here, because quantity (as is the case with many collections of things) at some point turns into quality. Only abundance enables the detection of recurring patterns. May the single image be just funny or banal or vacuous, in a series of similar ones it becomes a building block of knowledge. By sequencing kindred images, Caviezel makes order emerge from the torrent of images.