The book · Works 2025–2026
What Our Tools
Cannot Capture
Forty works about the tools that shape us, and the presence they cannot fully carry.
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An artist’s book
What remains
when everything
can be captured?
From the first light of a phone screen to the afterimage it leaves behind, this book follows Avery Lake’s work across sculpture, installation, moving image, and participatory forms.
Forty works meet essays and reflections on memory, language, identity, and attention. Together, they return to breath, presence, and lived experience: what a medium can point toward but cannot fully contain.
Selected pages from the proof
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The structure
Seven principles.
One human signal.
The seven chapters follow The Age of Beauty: Art in the Intelligence Age, Avery Lake’s 2025 manifesto. The book opens with the first light of the day and closes with the last.
- We are beings of breath
- Art is any (human) intentional action
- Machines can mimic, but they cannot mean
- Creation is collaboration, not surrender
- Authenticity is not in the medium
- Beauty still matters
- To create is to resist
“I make work about the media we live inside without noticing, the way we live inside weather.”
Avery Lake · From the book
The artist
Avery Lake
A Swiss-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and ethicist based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Avery Lake works across sculpture, installation, moving image, and participatory forms.
His practice asks how our tools shape memory, language, identity, and attention, and what remains beyond their reach.
Explore the artist’s practiceThe book at a glance
- Title
- What Our Tools Cannot Capture
- Artist
- Avery Lake
- Works
- 2025–2026 · Forty works
- Extent
- 116 pages total, including covers
- Format
- 8 × 10 in · 20.3 × 25.4 cm
- Language
- English
Details reflect the current book proof. Final production specifications are still to be confirmed.
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