My artist’s book mediates the erasure of personhood through archival in the media apparatus of colonial psychiatric records. Inspired by my study of Rufus Butler Seder’s Gallop! (2007), I use multilayered bindings to produce a barrier-grid animation which activates with the turn of the page. The reader is implicated as both eraser and witness of individual and collective memories through the act of reading the archive ‘between the lines’ of the barrier-grid. The turning of the page, as in Seder’s work, hypermediates the physical interactivity of normative reading practices. Even as the turning of the page erases the illustrated body, another movement might bring her back.
Conversely, the animation technique’s allusion to children’s toy books situates the erasure of marginalized bodies as a violent form of readerly play. The reader is thus invited to consider reading as an action with material consequences, questioning the ways in which naturalized reading practices might produce erasure. The position of the illustrated body is also framed as a precarious existence dependent on future generations for re-humanization. What will you choose to do with the precarious disabled body?
A larger project would present multiple illustrated bodies across several pages, emulating a medical dissection archive. For this single-illustration prototype, however, I am faced with the dilemma of choosing a single bodily representative for the position of archival precarity. I therefore run the risks of presenting systemic erasure and violence as targeting a single exceptionalized body, and of positioning a marginalized body in relation only to systems of violence (without the kinship that a grouping of multiple bodies would suggest). It would vacate the project of its political intent, however, to generalize the illustrated body as aracial or otherwise illegible in the categorizing language of the medical archive. So that I do not erase the archival kinship described by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, I use a visual subject similar to myself as illustration in this prototype.
Annotated Bibliography
Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. MIT Press, 2016.
Borsuk’s sweeping overview of book history includes helpful references for binding and printing methods, which I reference in my book’s design. Borsuk’s definition and exploration of the book as a technology informs my material approach to engaging critically with the book as record. The Book includes the section “Book as Animation”, which inspired my early approach to animated books on which I expand here.
Liu, Alan. Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Liu investigates William Gibson’s ‘destructive’ poem Agrippa as case study of time and memory constructions in what he calls “media networks.” My project mediates Liu’s argument that a media network – like an archive – “is . . . by its own rhythms and structure . . . both rupture and continuity.” Liu’s engagements with archival erasure, destruction, and overwriting inform my explorations of these functions in histories of disabled persistence and institutional power production.
Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature. Columbia University Press, 2019.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier reveals the racialized discursive functions of media-body associations like the archival “lifecycle” framework. I foll ow Cloutier’s problematization of media and archival models which construct a normative body as reader/user and othered bodies, particularly racialized and disabled bodies, as technologies to be used. Cloutier’s model of Black kinship which “boomerangs” across archival silences also shapes my mediation of decolonial and crip archival practices.
Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books, 1995.
I am inspired by Drucker’s charting of the artist’s book as media which “interrogates the conceptual or material form of the book as part of its intention, thematic interests, or production activities.” Drucker’s inclusion of the reader in her circuit of artist’ book creation shapes my consideration of the reader’s function in materially “using” my book and its archived body.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic, translated by A.M. Sheridan, Routledge Classics, 2003.
Foucault, as Liu describes, analyzes psychiatric institutions as media institutions. Foucault describes “knowledge” production using media, which necessarily naturalizes the differential placement of subjects in a matrix of power. Foucault’s biopolitical media theory informs much work on relationships between bodies, media, and institutions – including, following Liu, my terms “apparatus” and “matrix”.
Hylton, Antonia. Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Hatchette, 2024.
Madness is of the most recent and thorough treatments of the U.S. psychiatric institution as an eradicating media institution. Hylton’s experiences with researching the racist and materially deteriorating archive of the hospital are also relevant.
Seder, Rufus Butler. Gallop! Workman Publishing Company, Inc., 2007.
I model my project’s design after Seder’s “Scanimation” book, also engaging with its cultural status as a toy book.
Seder, Rufus Butler. “Moveable Animated Display Device.” US 7,151,541 B2, United States Patent and Trademark Office, 19 Dec. 2006. USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database, https://ppubs.uspto.gov/api/pdf/downloadPdf/7151541?requestToken=
eyJzdWIiOiI1MGRiOWJkYi04NmYwLTQ5NjUtODA5Ny02ZGU5Nzk1Zj
JlOTYiLCJ2ZXIiOiJlODY1OWI2MS1lM2UyLTQwYTEtYjk0OC1mODQ2
YTQxNzIzNGMiLCJleHAiOjB9. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025.
One of Seder’s many patent petitions, this document includes diagrams of the Scanimation binding methods that I adapt for my book.
