Elastic System

Elastic System was a giant, interactive mosaic of book spines created for Richard Wright and the British Library. The final piece had to be a 2,500 megapixel composite image of 5,0000 book spines made to resemble the face of Thomas Watts, inventor of the elastic book retrieval system at the British Library. Visitors could zoom out to see Watts’ face in the mosaic, or zoom in close enough to read the details on the spines. As users selected books they were removed from the mosaic, revealing an image of British Library staff. The developed application organised and resized source book spines to create the mosaic. It also de-duplicated the tiles, deployed background tiles and an image-overlay, and clipped low-quality source tiles to remove errant pixels. The piece was also made available as an interactive web app.