Gallop! Materiality Analysis

Gallop! is a technology of bookish play. A filmmaker, inventor, and toymaker, Seder was commissioned by Workman Publishing to adapt his “Moveable Animated Display Device” technology (“U.S. Patent #7,151,541” 2006) for use in children’s books (Seder, “Optical Experiments” 2003). Through tightly binding layers of cardstock and acetate, the resulting “Scanimation” technology produces barrier-grid animation effects as its user turns its page. The upper cover of Gallop! instructs the user to “Open this book to see the animals move!” When the verso is flipped, movement between bound leaf layers produces an animated effect in each accompanying recto’s acetate display. In each of eight interlaced acetate panels, illustrations of a different animal appear to move via this barrier-grid animation technique. Large text in primary-color lowercase font asks the reader if they can move “like” each animal (“can you gallop like a horse?”). One acetate panel simulating Eadward Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion (1878) forms the frontispiece; a die-cut on upper cover reveals this frontispiece panel when Gallop! is closed.

Gallop! hypermediates reader activation through bodily movement. To follow Seder’s patent petition, it is the “relative movement” of book features and reader bodies which together produce Scanimation’s effect (13). Following the book’s lower cover instructions “to flip and flip and flip [each page] again, the reader activates the book even as the book activates the reader. The volume’s illustrations of animal locomotion are animated through the reader’s own bodily movements, with the motion of the reader producing animation by creating interactions between the book’s bound features. For Gallop!, this means that the reader “flip[s]” the book’s pages to produce movement between Scanimation layers. Gallop! is not only watched, but produced; there is no simulation of movement without reader movement. Gallop! thus hypermediates the function of the reader in producing meaning from books.

Amaranth Borsuk identifies the book, and particularly “the accordion book”, as “a recombinant structure [that allows] readers to create new juxtapositions within it” (168). The binding of Gallop!, in disguising multilayer assemblages as individual accordion folds, visually normalizes the exterior design of Gallop! as a board book. Gallop! does not offer readers the easy “ability to completely open this [accordion binding] structure” (Borsuk 168), a blockage necessary not only to maintain the “pressure” of Scanimation layers but to protect Seder’s patented construction process. Rather than unfolding the complex leaves, the reader flips these as one to produce animation within the limits of the page and panel. The “recombinant structure” of Gallop! occurs across book and reader bodies, with its binding mechanism producing juxtapositions between the animated Gallop! and the other media technologies that it references.

Describing Muybridge’s film technique in the context of interface history, Anne Friedberg writes: “The analytic insight that is made visible in the ’snapshot’ or the frozen moment is lost when the frozen moment is returned to motion. As projection commences, the visibility of moving-image projection depends on a form of invisibility” (92). Since Scanimation occurs at the speed of its reader’s movement, this “invisibility” is reversed; the reader can examine in detail the frame-by-frame processes of screen animation. The book medium here functions to illuminate the underlying processes of later media forms. Without the need for “projection”, the animation and the reader move at the same speed and through the same actions (repeatedly flipping the page begets repeatedly galloping across it). The reader, book, and screen media form an intermedia network that is hypermediated as an embodied and rehearsed interaction.

Seder’s book invites media-specific attention to the shared functionalities of film and book technology, but also suggests that the book remains more legible, more mobile, and attuned to the reader’s bodily rhythms than screen media. The “inherent delay and playback” that Friedberg identifies in film media is instead navigable by the book reader’s hands (93). The book is cast as more conducive to close reading and ‘natural’ human pace than are “new” digital or screen media. Gallop! models the book in its intermedia network: it is activated to life through intermedia connections, including with the reader’s body as mechanism. When Gallop! questions if the reader “can” move “like” the pictured animals, the reader is invited to movement through the mechanics of reading. Scanimation’s “relative movements” reflect the interactions between bodily “actors” in broader networks of variously mobile media.

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