Swing! Scanimation as Old-New Media
Seder’s toy books react to digital media’s perceived encroachment on the book as a technology of instruction, knowledge production, and defining the limits of children’s bodily mobility. These inflect the pop cultural conflicts between what is perceived as “old” and “new” media. The media model which Bonnie Mak describes as “technological supersession” (10) shaped children’s literature and education in early 21st Century U.S. culture. As Liu, following Foucault, suggests, the functions of media can be more clearly cast into relief when examining such periods of perceived “ruptures” in media and cultural norms.
Gallop!, however, invites the child reader to move across these networked media histories. Despite the increasing mobility of video game consoles in the handheld-heavy early 2000s, the perpetual new/old media debate took aim then at shifting mobilities in the reading practices of child consumers. Play scholars Patrick M. Markey, Christopher J. Ferguson, and Lauren I. Hopkins (2020) describe the pervasive early-2000s fear that childhood video game use would promote “obesity” among the digital generation (“Video Game Play: Myths and Benefits” 89-91). (I follow fat activists in rejecting the medicalist term “obesity”, preferring the inclusive fat. See The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, 2009.) The veracity of these claims is less important than what they say about how early 21st Century U.S. pop culture framed video games, bodily movement, and bodily difference as contingent nodes in a network of reader/media activation.
New media move differently than the old do, the claim seems to go, and this causes their users to move differently. In this new media mythos, the use of “new” media would redefine not only how children move their bodies, but would reshape these bodies themselves. It is significant that even Markey, Ferguson, and Hopkins use qualifiers of “physical activity” and “body size” interchangeably (90). Fatness becomes indicative of a particular type of reader: a new, immobile, and unproductive consumer whose body is inscribed with abject difference. “Childhood obesity’s” media-deterministic myth defines the video game and the fat body as correlates, differentially valuating bodies based on their perceived ways of reading. This schema situates the child reader as signifier of the future of reading – with its attendant values of normalizing education and institutional knowledge production – in a digital age. [ Jessica Pressman describes, “The book is . . . a symbol of and a tool for producing a particular type of learned subject” (Bookishness 32). ] “New” media require “new” ways of reading, which produce a “new”, and inferior, relationship between reader and media. For our purposes, I focus on how Seder presents the book as a technological remedy to these intermedia anxieties, but also how his Scanimation books specifically instruct readers in ways of moving which rehearse normative expectations.
In a reflection on his networked production of Scanimation’s antecedents Lifetiles and Kineticard, Seder imagines that “sometimes—with a little effort and luck—maybe we can make the old seem new” (“Optical Experiments”). This principle guides Scanimation’s embodiment of intermedia reading practices. In his patent petition, Seder describes his aim for Scanimation to “be hand held [sic] and manually operable” (11). By situating the book as a “moveable animated display device” (12), Gallop! frames bodily movement as an always-on analog alternative to electronic animation. The aspect ratio of Gallop!‘s Muybridge panels resembles not only the landscape ratios of conventional film and television screens, but also the screen size of “hand held” “animated display devices” like the Nintendo DS (released 2005). Seder notes that Scanimation’s animation layer can be constructed from “any suitable material” of any opacity (13), but Gallop! uses black-and-white cardstock for its animation layers. Combined with its semiopaque acetate overlay, each black-and-grey Scanimation panel then visually and tactilely resembles the plastic surface of an inactive CRT television or LCD screen. Compare the landscape acetate panels of Gallop! to an inactive Nintendo DS screen:
Unlike the CRT and LCD screens referenced in its design, the Scanimation panel only moves if the reader moves: it cannot be passively watched, but must be actively produced in accord with its user’s movement. The normalized process of reading – flipping the page – becomes a solution to inactivity and disengagement, united with calls to physical movement that suggest playful exercise. Mechanically reading what appears to be a conventional book — flipping the single-layer pages of a bound duodecimo — is hypermediated as an exercise of both body and mind. The possibilities of mobility expressed through the book are calls to movement beyond the interface: “let’s go out and play!”
As in my earlier reading of Friedberg’s filmic “invisibility”, the barrier-grid effect of Scanimation vacillates between redaction and revelation. Seder describes that Scanimation is an optical illusion in which the viewer’s “parallax perception” infers correlation between gaps to perceive a silhouette in sequential movement (Gibbs 2003). The “analytic insight” which Friedberg claims is lost to filmic movement is preserved through Scanimation, where the reader’s movements can isolate individual frames (“the frozen moment”) with physical manipulation (92).
These books also reveal the politics which shape expectations of how reader bodies will, should, or can interact with media – which, to follow Liu and Pressman, determine readers’ agentic mobility in intermedia networks. The user produces animation by animating their own body, and is by extension animated by the book. This networked relationship is in fact an exercise in compliance. It is the mobility of the (child) reader, and their compliance with expectations of normative processes of moving, which verifies the child reader’s right to navigate the network of intermedia.
I remain interested in the dual erasure/reveal function of barrier-grid animation, and in the symbolic significance of this function being caused by the reader’s physical obedience. Seder’s following Scanimation book, Swing! (2008), expands on this appeal. This book also draws from Muybridge’s athletic photography, suggesting further applications to disability history. Swing! exchanges the animals of Gallop! for silhouettes of children playing sports, riding a bike, and cartwheeling. I take this opportunity to follow the network of Gallop! towards Swing! and a larger reflection on the importance of this project to my studies.
Seder’s calls to movement in Swing! recursively reveal the normative expectations of movement inscribed into Gallop! Designed and phrased in the same patterns as the text in Gallop!, these texts instruct the reader in literal physical activity: “can you run a relay race?”, “can you swim across a pool?” Through the lived knowledge of disability experience, Reading with a mind to disability experiences, Seder’s provocations – however inadvertently – read almost as taunts. After all, the goading questions of the text indicate possibilities both for imitation and for failure. One qualifier for the cumulative question at the end of Swing! even specifies, “if you can . . . ride a bike without a fall…” These are questions of ability, rooted in the phrasing of “Can you…?” In the extended question of each book, the conclusion synthesized from an affirmative response is one of approval: “a superstar is what you are, now let’s go out and play!” In my position as a disabled reader, I wondered: what is the unseen other conclusion if the answer is, “No, I can’t”?
It is certainly not a coincidence that the child silhouettes of Swing! are uniformly four-limbed, independently mobile, and thin. I do not propose that Seder’s toy book is designed to maliciously exclude disabled child readers, but rather to denaturalize the normative politics of reading, movement, and rehearsal that are mediated through Seder’s books. This exclusionary function struck me as an apt expression of how mediated instruction and rehearsal operate more broadly. The books instruct us to flip the page, and our compliant movements produce a way of reading that mechanically animates a normatively moving, animated body. The looping effect of the animations, which stir to life so long as the reader rehearses their own compliant movement, suggest a continuous reality within the viewport: the reader moves as directed, so the silhouette moves as directed. By instructing play, the book produces a surprising and pleasing reward for rehearsing normative reading movements.
Unlike filmic projection or screen backlighting, Scanimation is activated by continuous user movement. When the reader stops moving, so too does the illustrated silhouette. The ability to read the animations, possible only when they are made legible through movement, is bound to the ability to move and see the page. Seder’s book is certainly not the first to be inaccessible to vision-impaired readers, but I note the visualizing component to emphasize the specific relationship of bodily (presumably hand) movement and opticality necessary to reading Scanimation. Pointedly diverging from its filmic inspirations, the Scanimation book does not die when the projector or cord falls loose. The book is powered by reader motion – specifically motion in compliance with its text’s instructions.
To comply with the book’s instructions to “flip” the page is to comply with physical norms of how reading is done. It is not only this compliance, but the ability to comply, which determines the reader’s access to the network of Gallop! as a node of intermedia mobility. I do not mean to argue that Seder’s book is a maliciously ableist work.1 I rather recenter my earlier creative project back in the work which inspired it, and I am revived at the vantage this media- and network-specific study brings. Examining the networked materiality of Gallop! and Swing! offers a case study in the examination of media as agents of mobility. I am left with the broader question: How do books shape the way we move?
Essay continues on next page.