The book is a mobile technology which moves across media and time. Following these movements was the collaborative exercise of the under/graduate “experimental” course BOOKS!!, taught by Dr. Jessica Pressman and Anna Culbertson at San Diego State University (“About/Class Info”). In visits to SDSU Library’s Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), I wrote my first bibliography of Rufus Butler Seder’s toy book Gallop! (2007). I now narrate the traversals through creative project design which directed me back to the materiality of Gallop!, situating my embodied learning in what Alan Liu (2018) terms the “media network” through which the book and its sister text Swing! (2008) move. Seder’s “Scanimation” books mediate the colliding movements of intermedia histories between the book and screen media in relation to the physical reading processes of human bodies and their media network. Examining the media networks of Seder’s books necessitates examining the bodily movements of their readers – including myself – and models how materiality and network studies might be used in bodywork like disability studies.
(Captions forthcoming.)
Stumble! My Project Prototype
In reading Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s augmented reality book Between Page and Screen (2012), Pressman describes how its “network of animate and inanimate actors”, “one of whom is you . . . , work together [to] produce a literary performance that highlights simultaneously the thingness of the book and also the book’s capacity to participate in a digital circuit” (Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age 70-1). Scanimation books enact a parallel networking in which the “thingness of the book” – extending to its reader’s physical acts of reading it – embodies the book’s “capacity to participate” in an intermedia audiovisual circuit. This circuit model expands through the lens of Alan Liu’s network archaeology, in which “a ‘work’ [is] not . . . an item to be transported or linked in a network but instead as itself a micro-network.” By “treating works as internally networked structures”, a network archaeologist might trace a constellation of interactions and histories which ripple through time and place. When we consider a book as “dynamic, event-driven information”, we reveal the significance not only of its immediate material body but of that body’s movements, interactions, and convergences across “events.” In this paper, I rehearse how the design of Gallop! and Swing! act on the bodily movements of Seder’s readers – myself and others – to hypermediate the reading of the book as an intermedia network event.
Gallop! hypermediates reader activation: movements of the reader incite and parallel the movement of the book’s illustrations. I expand on my earlier bibliography of Gallop! to examine the Scanimation book’s materiality in the pages below.