Stumble! My Project Prototype: Continued

My first intention for this project was to create an artist’s book which imitated the functions of Seder’s Scanimation technology in the context of disability studies. In The Century of Artists’ Books (1995), Johanna Drucker defines artists’ books as “a genre which is . . . about itself, its own forms and traditions” (“The Artist’s Book as Idea and Form” 14). In this case, I was inspired to make an artist’s book “about” the book’s use in oppressive institutional knowledge production. During my study of Gallop!, I was struck by Scanimation’s ability to erase and reveal visual elements based on the reader’s flipping of the codex page. It called to mind Alan Liu’s transmedia “micro-network” of study, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos, Jr., and William Gibson, 1992). Liu notes that designer Ashbaugh “intended the overprints [of text] to fade with exposure to air once the book was opened” in mediation of Gibson’s poetry on (among other things) traumatic memory loss. Relating this possibility to my interest in spectacle studies and mediations of trauma in disabled art, I wondered if I might adapt Seder’s Scanimation technique and Ashbaugh’s vision to mediate the erasure of disabled personhood through institutionalized reading practices.

This vision might seem distant from Seder’s playful Scanimation books, but I in fact drew from the media network of Gallop! – more specifically, from its lively allusions to Muybridge. Reflecting photography’s function in producing the biopolitical relations of the state (Sontag), Muybridge photographed disabled people who were incarcerated in asylums (Amy Miller 2000). These photographs of naked, incarcerated people archive their disabled bodies as medical maps for anatomists and other human experimenters to observe, or, to mediate that Foucauldian term, to read. This violence is reproduced – however contextually significant – through the University of Pennsylvania Libraries University Archives & Records Center’s Eadweard Muybridge Collection. In this archive, photo slides depicting disabled subjects are positioned between nondisabled human subjects and nonhuman animal subjects. (Consider that no personal names are documented of the “patients”, but that of the horse in the next batch.) The archive preserves the organization of the previous owners’ slides, and this organization is significant information in what it tells us about how Muybridge viewed, processed, and commodified disabled subjects. This arrangement does, however, duplicate the violence of spectacular dehumanization enacted through the original photographing and archival. There is an ethical dilemma which is inflected through the archive’s organizational practices.

I appropriated these archival materials to construct my own artist’s book. I manipulated Muybridge’s archival photograph sets of three subjects: the smiling child in Infantile paralysis; child walking on hands and feet; the distressed young adult in Disabled person walking; and the graceful adult in An obese woman walking. I have since come to discard this project out of repulsion with my enaction of spectacular violence, namely in my consumption and reproduction of what I realized are mediated abuse. Clearly I had to reconfigure my relationship to the violent archive.

I used calculations, blades, and a cutting board to score strips of black electrical tape for my glass viewport. A day went towards this effort. What became increasingly clear to me is that it is difficult to create an aesthetically regimented object using my tremoring, waxy-coordinated body. I created cutting guides and used a variety of tools to attempt the straight, precisely-measured lines of tape needed to produce a seamless barrier-grid effect, but each effort emerged wobbly, uneven, and decidedly imperfect. I had neglected to consider my own body in planning my material project. In fact, I had delimited my own body from its networked context as a “node” of materially specific experience. It was this realization that directed me to reapproach Seder’s book with a mind to how its network is shaped by the mobility of its readers’ bodies. First, however, I had a few more stumbles to take.

Rethinking my approach to the artist’s book, I followed as advice Drucker’s remark that “[a]rtists use what they have access to and knowledge of” (6). I went digital to draft the elements and processes needed for my Scanimation imitation in a medium that is more familiar and time-efficient for me. Whichever software I chose for (what I thought would be a) previsualization, it still needed to accommodate my thesis on institutional knowledge production and delimitation. If it turned out that couldn’t make the physical book object, the project would need to work rhetorically-materially as a PowerPoint object. PowerPoint is an institutionalized technology of knowledge production with formalized norms of expression, instruction, and rehearsal. The software mechanizes basic processes of multimedia object manipulation, animation, and hyperlinking across nodes. Building my archival critique within a software made industrially synonymous with business and academic knowledge production seemed like an act of imaginative play which suited my project’s ethic. The more I played in this undervalued game design software, however, the more I realized my burgeoning intention to move away from recreating the delimiting archive and towards imagining the political possibilities of the animated book in the digital archival medium.

Since I no longer needed to copy the pressurized bindings of the Scanimation book (described below), I rethought how bodies of information are contained and retrieved in the digital archive. Inspired by Seder’s toy designs, I intended to adapt the Scanimation technique to allow for different animated silhouettes to be inserted into the digital interface, like data-cards. (This design does not make sense to me now – I had the media crossed.) My cards were meant to show how Liu’s expansive networks of intermedia connections might be restricted through unethical archival practice: the archived disabled body is isolated as a solitary ‘work’ to be studied, and one with a discrete beginning and end. What media events can the body experience or incite when it is segmented apart from what Liu sets at the center of all media: “sociality”?

As Bonnie Mak says of page corners, “The four edges of the page, perhaps papyrus, parchment, or paper, tell both the designer and reader where the space of communication begins and ends” (14). By bordering a photographed subject, the photograph – and the book in which it moves – severs the body from its lived network. This reflects mediated systems (per Liu’s reading of Foucault, apparatuses) of medicalist containment and incarceration more broadly. The bars of the interlaced grid have their grimly obvious reflection in apparatuses of human containment. Since the fragmented silhouettes of the cards can only be read as human when they are processed by the book-machine and the reader, this means that the human must make network connections to produce a moving — or living — human figure. The card as a bordered unit of curated information, and the delimiting bars of the interlace panel, represent these imposed limits.

I show my PowerPoint drafts and discuss some of my process in the accompanying video presentation. I imagined my project with the stylings of institutional digital archival to satirize the obfuscation of archival violence through design strategies. As I developed an increasingly game-like, digital remediation of Scanimation’s functions through digital reading functions, however, I realized that the specificity of the computer medium made it impossible to remediate Seder’s techniques. While I was following Mak in satirizing the impossibility of reproducing an unmodified “facsimile” of book objects through digital ‘recreation’ (Mak 65-6), the already-dubious clarity of my thesis was quickly becoming mired in the complexity of intermedia. I chose to draw back and instead closely examine Seder’s Scanimation books in the context of what these experiments revealed to me about the function of movement in the media network. I would close in on a single object within the archive and examine what this “micro-network” (Liu) might tell us about its always-moving connections.

Essay continues on next page.