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Vanitas book (Bottom figure) is a contemporary reinterpretation of the Vanitas still life Dutch paintings. Vanitas makes literal the allegory of a book as a portrait of its author’s inner world. With the help of clinical technology of Magnetic Resonance Im­aging (MRI), the author’s brain anatomic representation becomes the book content. The skull and the brain are ‘imagined’ by software after a complex process that fa­cilitates the ‘readings’ of brain’s molecular frequencies. In this regard, the skull and the brain are first computer generated and finally materialized into a modular and se­quential architectural paper ‘body’. The result is a representation of the ‘architecture’ of a human brain, which emphasizes the ‘ineffable space’ of the mind. The book size follows the skull size of its author.

PROJECT MOTIVATION
Vanitas book series is inspired on the seventeenth-century Vanitas still life Dutch paintings. These paintings were a representation of the transience of life as expressed by the Latin phrase memento mori: ‘remember that you must die’ or ‘remember to die’. Their origin has been also related to the Calvinist notion of predestination highly influential during the Dutch Golden Age.

Vanitas genre often represented a series of objects that are believed to have a precise meaning related to the impermanence of life. In these still-lives, a skull usually rests near a book. The two symbols interact to state that human work transcends human nature.

Book design technology also plays an important role in this project. The book Vanitas is the outcome of three different design and visualization software (Figure 1). The resulting representation has later been printed and bound into a book with the utmost technological as well as manual craft development present in the Netherlands in the printing and binding industries.

This book was produced on the edge of what was is technically possible nowadays, as the spine is 14cm H., a measurement that follows his author’s skull proportions 1:1