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).