Week 8: Book as Interface

Posted on by
1

When I read Michelle Levy and Tom Mole’s The Broadview Introduction to Book History, one passage stood out to me. On pages 5 and 6, they describe how reading has changed over time, from people reading intensively, focusing deeply on a few important texts, to people reading extensively, moving quickly through many different books. They explain that reading styles have always adapted to social and technological change. This idea made me stop and think about how I read today.
In the past, reading was slow and careful. Books were expensive and rare, so readers returned to the same text again and again, often reading aloud or in groups. Today, we have access to more information than ever before. We read messages, posts, articles, and ebooks every day. I realized that my own reading feels more like “extensive” reading. I move quickly, searching for key points and jumping between sources.
Still, I miss the feeling of being completely absorbed in one book. When I take time to sit down with a printed book, without my phone nearby, I notice more. I read slower, but I understand better. Levy and Mole’s passage reminded me that how we read reflects the world we live in. Maybe the goal isn’t to go back to the past but to find balance to keep the deep attention of older reading habits while embracing the variety and access that modern reading gives us.

The Page as Space

Posted on by
1

Let’s be honest… Who among us has ever thought about the page? Reading Bonnie Mak’s “How the Page Matters,” I realized that the page plays a central role in the history of thought. Mak shows that the page is not only a carrier of text, but a medium in itself. She writes: “The page has remained a favoured space and metaphor for the graphic communication of ideas over the span of centuries and across different cultural milieux.” The page is therefore not merely a material object, but a cultural tool that shapes thought.

Mak takes us through different eras to show how each generation has developed its own forms of reading and writing. From antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and up to the present day, the relationship has changed radically. From foldable papyrus to scrolls and finally to our conventional page, it has evolved into an orderly and tangible medium. The idea itself took on a new structure. This development is not only technical, but also cultural. Every material form, such as papyrus, parchment, paper, and screen, is an expression of a particular understanding of knowledge. She emphasizes: “So accustomed to its form, we no longer notice how the page is fundamental to the transmission of ideas and that it shapes our interpretation of those ideas.” We think in the forms in which we read.

What is particularly exciting is how Mak applies this perspective to the present day. Digital “pages” on smartphones and tablets have once again changed the way we read. Their fleeting nature, mobility, and infinite repeatability reflect our society, a society in which information is no longer fixed but constantly in circulation. Mak reminds us that what we take for granted is always also a cultural decision. The form of knowledge is never neutral. When the context changes, what we understand as “knowledge” also changes.

Ongoing Life of Books

Posted on by
Reply

When I was reading Michelle Levy and Tom Mole’s The Broadview Introduction to Book History page 6-8 was interesting for me. They talk about how printed books used to be the main way people shared knowledge and stories, but even as new technologies appeared like the radio, film, or the internet books didn’t disappear. Instead, they learned to live alongside all these new forms of media.

When I think back on the discussions from the last few weeks about whether books are really threatened by new media, it makes me imagine books as living things that adapt to survive. Even now, when most of us read on our phones or tablets, books are still here, quietly holding their own space. Some people talk about the “death of the book,” but Levy and Mole remind us that people have been saying that for centuries. Every time a new technology arrives, there’s this fear that reading will change forever, and yet the book always finds a way to remain part of our lives.I can feel that in my own reading habits. I also love scrolling online and reading on screens because it’s fast and easy, but holding a real book feels different. The weight of it, the texture of the pages, even the sound of turning one it makes me slow down and focus. Reading a printed book feels calmer and more intentional, like I’m connecting with something that’s been here for hundreds of years.What I love about Levy and Mole’s idea is that it makes me stop worrying about the future of books. They aren’t going anywhere. They’re just changing, like they always have. Maybe that’s what makes them so special, books don’t fight against new media, they grow with it.

Week 8: Designing the Book as Event

Posted on by
1

In Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (2018), Alan Liu activates ephemera as “event-artifacts” which form analyzable “networks” (16). The networks of Liu’s “network archaeology” are each and together a “swarm” of this “dynamic, event-driven information” (138). Liu’s paradigm of media as difference-producing events reminds me of Brian Massumi’s Parables of the Virtual (2002), in which Massumi theorizes media networks through their “event potential.” As I’m arguing at a conference next month, Massumi implies that events cannot be replicated, because a replication is produced through different conditions and with different elements than those which produce its referent (81). When the conditions and elements of an event — or work — differ, a new event or work with new potentialities is produced or performed. In conversation with Liu’s network archaeology, which itself finds meaning in the Foucaultian “discontinuities” of media history (14), I’m considering my bibliography work as a close engagement with event production across the media network.

I’m writing my bibliography of an animated book, Gallop! by Rufus Butler Seder, in part to think through these ideas in a mediated way. Borsuk’s section on “The Book as Animation”, combined with Meggs’ relation of book design to film media movements (761, 765, 927), invite comparisons between print and film. Following Liu, though, I’m considering the discontinuities between these media histories, and how Gallop! produces networked “event-artifacts” to hypermediate our activation of the book’s potential for producing action.

That thesis will be cleaner in the final draft. I’m taking the chance to think through this more before I engage again with the book physically. Gallop! produces visual animations when the user physically manipulates the book. (I won’t be able to say this in my submitted bibliography, so let me take the chance to say that this rules.) The effect is produced by the activator’s movement and interaction, using a trademarked “Scanimation” technique that I will be researching in the weeks ahead. Muybridge-like sequences of a horse and other animals on the move characterize the book as cinematic, with the activator’s own physical manipulation of the book producing sequence and meaning. The reader is made hyper-aware that their reading of the book is an event, produced through interactions of bodies in a media network. Technically speaking, the Scanimation technique seems to reflect and block light (binary!) using interlaced bars. (I first thought it was lenticular plastic, which is a medium I experimented with in costumes as a teen — maybe it is, but I’m not sure the bars would be necessary. Excited to research further and analyze the panels closely!)

What histories are traced when this book depicts movement in interaction with readers? Cinema didn’t kill the book! Gallop! produces its own event in reference to — but never replicating — the network of film history. New event, new potential. My bibliography of this book, informed by network archaeology, strives for “historical awareness of the relevant material, technical, structural, and socio-cultural differences of networks then and now, here and there” (Liu 42, emphasis original). I think I’ll have to keep myself from wandering too far into writing on film history, but it is as essential to understanding the book’s material design.

Bonnie Mak calls attention to the significance of blank space in reading (How the Page Matters 17). For Mak, blank space produces “visual and cognitive breaks, employed by designers and readers as a way to moderate the pace of engagement with the page.” Blank space and text operate like the light blocking/revealing interlacing of the Scanimation panels (binary…!) in that their “architecture” communicates the idea of motion when read together. I’ll be thinking more about this interrelationship, particularly considering Gallop! as an “event-artifact” which produces its sequential motion through its reader’s movement through space and time. The speed of panel movement is determined by the activator’s speed. I am inspired here by Meggs’ description of the designer Piet Zwart: he “considered the function of time as an aspect of the reader’s experience as he planned his page designs” for quick readability (Meggs’ History of Graphic Design 1028). How do we see that the reader’s experience of time with Gallop! is considered in its design towards producing an event? How are the techniques of Scanimation production networked with a living “swarm” of event-artifacts? How does this book hypermediate my own activation of it as mediated event?

I think I might only start to understand what I mean once I physically begin my bibliographic study on Monday. This maybe does not make much sense yet. Until it does…let’s all believe in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s “theory that the essence of art and design was the concept, not the execution, and that the two could be separated” (Meggs 1013).

Is novelty physical or psychological?

Posted on by
2

After this week’s readings and viewing the artist books during our lab on Tuesday, I began to realize that nothing I was seeing or reading about was exceptionally unique. No, I am not trying to discredit the artists of these wonderful pieces. I am, however, challenging their concepts and originality. Surely, the artists were inspired by something, encouraging them to implement varying devices into their art. However, I would have to argue that diversity, more than anything, is what creates “novel” ideas.

As we have read, most of the artists “inventing” art forms such as cubism, proun, and dada didn’t come up with these movements out of nowhere. There was a context in which they were constructed, whether it be from the industrial revolution or wars or other art. For instance, when futurist painters described their purpose, they said it was to “totally invalidate all kinds of imitation.… Elevate all attempts at originality,” yet in the very same quote, they explain they will only “support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science” (“The Influence of Modern Art”). In essence, these artists are looking toward something, supporting it and glorifying it as some sort of model. Rather than invalidating imitation entirely, it seems to me they are, in one way or another, imitating the art and beauty of science.

Art is a revolution. While we use art in our day-to-day lives to inspire more creativity, it is also a medium of political and social expression. Art is more than the visual component, and becomes more of a concept. What I am trying to say is that we have not invented art but only put a name to it. It becomes significant to us in the contexts in which it arises and succeeds. Art is all around us, in everything we do, see, and experience; it is only when we find its relevance that we truly recognize it for a “novel” idea, even though it’s always been there. Perhaps, rather than saying the art is novel, it is more accurate to say the way we think about the art is novel. That is how we begin transforming our mindsets to appreciate a version of something that has been here all along.

The Machine is Here to Stay. Should We Expoid it?

Posted on by
1

The world is constantly changing, adapting, and transforming in new ways daily. Philosopher Aldous Huxley argues that a person can either expend all their energy to stop it, or they can accept the changes and attempt to use them to their advantage. As seen in Philip Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, chapter 16 states, “It is obvious,” wrote Aldous Huxley in 1928, “that the machine is here to stay. Whole armies of William Morrises and Tolstoy could not now expel it.… Let us then exploit [it] to create beauty—a modern beauty, while we are about it.” (Meggs) This passage is extreamly robust and uses strong language and imagery. First, the phrase “the machine is here to stay.” This quote may have been stated in 1928, but it is just as or even more relevant to our society now. This immediately reminded me of AI technology and the example where schools have accepted that AI is not going away anytime soon, so they are endeavoring to use it to their advantage. Additionally, the word “exploit” was a very strong word used in this passage. Exploit meaning: to make full use of and derive benefit from. This begs the question: do we exploit technology, or is it exploiting us? We use it to our advantage, but to what cost? Do we exploit the machine at the cost of exploiting ourselves? Some other great quotes by Aldous Huxley that I found are, “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think,” and “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” These quotes are extreamly telling and have come into full fruition. Our smartphones and ChatGPT do, in fact, make humans less intelligent. Therefore, we are exploiting these machines while at the same time exploiting our own right to think on our own and think independently of the machine.

How The Page Matters

Posted on by
1

Typically I would not give much thought to the page, it presents ideas, depicts stories and art, and is sometimes a blank canvas for expression. A blank page can be marked on any number ways, drawn on, written on, painted on. However, anything that is put to the page is hence affected by the page, borders are imposed, not decided, making anything put on the form influenced by it’s shape. The form and singularity of an unbounded page suggest to any reader that “there is noting more to read than what is on the page” even if the author of the work had not intended for it to be the end. (How the page Matters, p.14) The page, when not presented or bound by the person who place their work on it, defines the meaning and end point of what is on it on it’s own.

When a work is displayed on a page the sheet enhances the ideas presented and in part informs the reader or viewer about the work, if a story is written on one lined piece of paper, one might assume it was a draft written by a student from a notebook, however if that same story is typed and spaced with 1” margins on a sheet of paper, a reader might believe it is a final copy. Because of the pages materiality and specific form, viewers and readers will regard a work differently. As explained by Mak, the page, “significantly influences meaning by its distinctive embodiment of those ideas.” (How the Page Matters p.5). The page which has an expected form, allows for the transmission of ideas from one person to another, it works both within physical and digital spaces, presenting information to various audiences. But before any information is read or viewed, the form that it takes on the page already speaks for it. Even when a page is simply differently formatted by APA or MLA standards, the reader may already change their expectations or opinions on what they are going to read and take away from a text.

The page matters because it is one of the principal conveyors of information in our world, it presents ideas and the work of anyone. It’s shape and form that follow a variety of standards affect how readers and viewers of that page will understand the information featured on it.

Art to Book to Art Again

Posted on by
2

Books have not always been a form of art. When they were first created, they were meant for easier compilation of contents. There were massive folio books in churches containing handwritten iterations of scriptures. Books weren’t portable for owners until mass-production made materials more accessible to the public. Public libraries and mechanical inventions contributed to the popularity, accessibility, and standardization of books. Therefore, it wasn’t until very recently that people began making a new art out of books.

Because certain books have a conventional structure to them from their font, font size, and formatting, there is a lack of creativity, and increase in experimentation for book creators. Ulises Carrion took this ordinary marketable object as an inspiration to step outside the covers that bind together the archetype of a book. He wanted to play with expectations and oppose the industry that promoted sameness. His bookstore, Other Books and So, introduced me to an array of anti-book ideas like “non books, anti books, pseudo books, quasi books, concrete books, visual books, conceptual books, structural books, project books, statement books, [and] instruction books” (Borsuk 141). Carrion, among other authors and artists, wanted to promote books that challenged the norms of what society expects based on marketability.

One thing that was mentioned that I think I could understand the best was how books are spatiotemporal and, in that way, an animated medium. We like to think of books as static: when a book is published, we expect to see the same version of that book everywhere. There is no variation, no unique features that differentiate one book from another of the same book. We talked this past week about how Percival Everett’s Telephone is an example of a novel that dismantles the idea of sameness. As an author myself, I would also like to experiment with fiction writing and participate in the avant-garde forms of literature and books.

When understanding books as a film of information and ideas taking up time and space, we begin to use our imagination more creatively. For instance, in a novel, the words make the story and force readers (more or less) to only picture what’s in front of them. We have been trained as readers to consume the words as what they mean, rather than what they might mean. We have not learned how to make use of the empty space on the pages, of which we now have abundance. We have not learned to care for how the font or the punctuation matters in every aspect. We simply read to consume information rather than to actually think about how it even matters. After all, what is the point of reading if you can’t even grasp why it’s important?

Week 7: Book as Idea

Posted on by
2

In Chapter 3, “The Book as Idea,” in Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, Borsuk explores how the physical appearance of the book, along with content, has continually changed alongside human culture and technology: “as the history of the book’s changing form and its mechanical reproduction reveal, it has transformed significantly over time and region” (Borsuk, 110). This transformation not only reflects materials or printing methods, but the shifting relationship between readers, creators, and the physical objects we hold. The book’s form has always mirrored values, artistic or commercial, and tells us about the world that produces it. 

In our current moment, the relationship between material and meaning has become more estranged, “as contemporary publishers seek to embrace digital technology, we find ourselves at a moment in which the form and content of a work bear little relation to one another. Amazon offers us the same ‘book’ in paperback or Kindle edition…” (Borsuk, 112). As books become interchangeable across various platforms, they increasingly lose their physical identity. “When books become content to be marketed and sold this way, the historic relationship between materiality and text is severed” (Borsuk, 112). The book, once a tangible object reflecting human touch, becomes purely information, designed for easy consumption, lacking the once physical and intimate engagement.

Borsuk brings in Romantic poet William Blake, who “undertook every stage of their production”, resisting the industrialization of books and “‘dark Satanic Mills’ of eighteenth century London that emitted toxic fumes, employed the poor and children in horrendous conditions, and made books into mass-produced commodities” (118). Instead, returning to “an earlier idea of the book—one steeped in mystery, beauty, and visionary language that bears the marks of its creator’s hand” (Borsuk, 118). Borsuk brings in Blake to show that books can be both a vessel for creativity, and “a means of spreading social justice” (Borsuk, 124). The meaning of a book can be found in how it presents physically, an aspect that we often lose today. The form a book takes can reflect care, individual artistry, and even resistance to commodification. 

At the end of chapter 3, Borsuk concludes that “defining the book involves consideration for its use as much as its form. Our changing idea of the book is co-constructive of its changing structure” (Borsuk, 195). Blake’s work demonstrates this, his books were both personal artworks and social justice statements, shaped by not only how they were meant to be read, but experienced. In today’s digital age, Borsuk reminds us what we lose when books are no longer able to be held, with physical pages to flip. 


The Artist’s Book

Posted on by
4

As I begin each introduction, I must rewrite and rephrase about thirty different ideas spiraling in my mind, knowing that whichever sentence I end with, that’s the one. As far as this post goes, my voice exists no farther than the words on the screen. I can’t illustrate anything, speak it a certain way, nor can I even pick my font. Then, upon reading about William Blake in Borsuk’s chapter 3 of The Book, I realized how much ownership of my work I’ve given over. Going over chapter 3 and a work by Doug Beube, I pose the question: how much of a book is really our’s?

The first line that caught my attention from Borsuk told of artists “who saw the book as a means of circumventing the power system of the art world. (69)” This implies the artists are not in power already, which I personally have come by with publishers pitching unreasonable prices for their services. This idea extends so far that a term had to be invented, called an “artist’s book,” implying that the book was not already the artist’s.

One dedicated man, William Blake, found a way to circumvent the power system. While it’s noted that Blake created his printing method partly for financial reasons, it’s also important to account for his societal and political motives. Against child labor, urban squalor, and slavery, refusing to use print shops was an act of defiance just as much as a stylistic choice. In fact, his style is his defiance. We know this work is Blake’s because it represented his ideas. 

Borsuk states his work, “brought the hand back into the book. (73)” So, I wondered, is my hand missing? Rather, is my hand essential? Answers may vary, so too as times change the answer, but looking at the portfolio of Doug Beube, I understand the artist’s book may take any form, so long as the artist deems it so. This is further illustrated by the long list of book forms Borsuk includes, like Craig Dworkin’s work. While a part of me may idolize the craftsmanship put into a book, I believe the book only takes form when it truly represents you. If that comes in the form of novels written on a chalkboard or in the form of handcuffs, so be it. At the end of the day, it’s called the “artist’s book” for a reason.