Photos from ScanOps, an ongoing project by Andrew Norman Wilson, started in 2012. Wilson collects images of mistakes—image distortions or the hands of Google workers slipping into view—in Google Books as a means of highlighting the hidden labour behind the project. Though the pace of the scanning effort has slowed in recent years, an estimated 25 million books have been scanned by Google employees.

ScanOps gets its name from Google’s book-scanning operations, which has its own facility, isolated from other departments at the Googleplex, the corporate headquarters of Google in Mountain View, California. Norman conceived the idea of ScanOps while working at the Googleplex, where he noticed that ScanOps employees—often people of colour who wore yellow badges—were not granted access to the same privileges as other Google employees.

ScanOps appeared in the Something More than Nothing exhibition this summer at The Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford, BC. Andrew Norman Wilson lives in Brooklyn and at andrewnormanwilson.com.

Images courtesy of the artist.