The book is a mobile technology which moves across media and time. Following these movements was the collaborative exercise of the under/graduate “experimental” course BOOKS!!, taught by Dr. Jessica Pressman and Anna Culbertson at San Diego State University (“About/Class Info”). In visits to SDSU Library’s Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), I wrote my first bibliography of Rufus Butler Seder’s toy book Gallop! (2007). I now narrate the traversals through creative project design which directed me back to the materiality of Gallop!, situating my embodied learning in what Alan Liu (2018) terms the “media network” through which the book and its sister text Swing! (2008) move. Seder’s “Scanimation” books mediate the colliding movements of intermedia histories between the book and screen media in relation to the physical reading processes of human bodies and their media network. Examining the media networks of Seder’s books necessitates examining the bodily movements of their readers – including myself – and models how materiality and network studies might be used in bodywork like disability studies.
In reading Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s augmented reality book Between Page and Screen (2012), Pressman describes how its “network of animate and inanimate actors”, “one of whom is you . . . , work together [to] produce a literary performance that highlights simultaneously the thingness of the book and also the book’s capacity to participate in a digital circuit” (Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age 70-1). Scanimation books enact a parallel networking in which the “thingness of the book” – extending to its reader’s physical acts of reading it – embodies the book’s “capacity to participate” in an intermedia audiovisual circuit. This circuit model expands through the lens of Alan Liu’s network archaeology, in which “a ‘work’ [is] not . . . an item to be transported or linked in a network but instead as itself a micro-network.” By “treating works as internally networked structures”, a network archaeologist might trace a constellation of interactions and histories which ripple through time and place. When we consider a book as “dynamic, event-driven information”, we reveal the significance not only of its immediate material body but of that body’s movements, interactions, and convergences across “events.” In this paper, I rehearse how the design of Gallop! and Swing! act on the bodily movements of Seder’s readers – myself and others – to hypermediate the reading of the book as an intermedia network event.
Gallop! hypermediates reader activation: movements of the reader incite and parallel the movement of the book’s illustrations. I expand on my earlier bibliography of Gallop! to examine the Scanimation book’s materiality in the pages below.
Gallop! By Seder, Rufus Butler. New York: Workman Publishing Company, Inc., 2007. First edition. First book by Seder.
Gallop! demonstrates Seder’s “Scanimation” technology. The upper cover 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. A tenth panel animates a cutout star shape. Large text in primary-color lowercase font asks the reader if they can move “like” each animal (“can you gallop like a horse?”).
Duodecimo with 12 leaves, nine being composed of multiple folded or adhered layers. Conjugate leaves adhere atop of six-layered gatherings in a variation on the duodecimo folding style. Interior hinges are overlain with a perforated crease on the conjugate leaves, allowing the movement of the verso to also move the recto back and forth between card and acetate layers. Nine acetate sheet panels are each layered between a recto and verso of opposite leaves. The Scanimation effect is produced when the book’s verso is moved along its hinge, creating a Moiré illusion as the recto’s illustrated underlayer and interlaced overlayer interact. 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.
The book’s unusual folding technique creates six pages in a 5×1 formation. These leaves fold multi-directionally and adhere to tightly stabilize the interior acetate panels. Leaves are unattached to hinges, with endpages instead adhered to the board binding. Interior paper strips bind all gatherings together by their outer folds, resembling a simpler accordion fold when viewed from the edge.
The copyright page notes that Scanimation holds “U.S. Patent #7,151,541” under Seder’s EyeThink, Inc. toy company, with “Additional patents pending.” The copyright acknowledges that “some illustrations in this book are based on the motion photography pioneered by Eadward Muybridge.” Book is “Printed in China”.
Stamped as library copy of San Diego State University Special Collections, Toy Book collection. Pencil handwriting on the copyright page records the book’s Library metadata.
Scholarly Analysis
As indicated by the book’s place in SDSU Library’s “Toy Books” collection, Gallop! is a technology of bookish play. Gallop! hypermediates reader activation through its bindings, which produce unconventional animated effects through the normalized reading process of ‘flipping’ versos. Only through physically interacting with Gallop! could I activate – and be activated by – its mechanical functions. Following the book’s lower cover instructions “to flip and flip and flip [each page] again”, I observed in my time with Gallop! that contact between its perforated edges produced a creaking sound with each of my flips. I consider these creaks to suggest little use before I interacted with Gallop!, as greater use (even that of my own gentle turnings) wears the creases into silence. As my examined copy contains no marginalia apart from the SDSU Library Special Collections’ identifying metadata, I infer that this Special Collections copy of Gallop! has not been frequently used for its instructed use in “flipping.” This is perhaps not a played-with copy, but a show piece donated to SDSU Library’s “Toy Books Collection” as a relevant object in toy book history. Considering this possible provenance, I analyze the materiality of Gallop! to theorize why the book is maintained as a significant object to SDSU Special archive.
Gallop! hypermediates the book as a display interface that is activated by its reader. Though book scholar Amaranth Borsuk refers to text when she notes that book “[a]nimation is not . . . limited to images” (The Book 160), we might also conceptualize the material bindings of Gallop! as animated in that their interactions produce the movement of both Scanimation and 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.
The perforated crease of Gallop!’s bindings facilitates the repeat movement of “flip[ping] and flip[ping] each page again.” The patent identifier provided in the book’s copyright page corresponds with Seder’s United States Patent petition, which details the mechanics of this “Moveable Animated Display Device” technology (2006). Seder’s petition refers to these perforated folds as “crease biasing formations” which hold together the “pressure plate and the animation layer” of the Scanimation apparatus (13, 12). If, as Seder stresses in his petition, his Display Device technology can be implemented across a variety of print media for “widespread market success” (11), then its manifestation as a toy book in Gallop! invites closer consideration of Scanimation’s specific relationship with book media.
Fig. 4 of Rufus Butler Seder’s “Moveable Animated Display Device” patent illustration, depicting the folding process for his Scanimation mechanism. 2006.
As pictured in Seder’s patent petition, each page of Gallop! is composed of a leaf folded into six layers, which together hold an adhered acetate panel. These multidirectional bindings are necessary to hold these elements in alignment and with pressure, producing clear images as the leaves are activated by reader 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). When the text questions if the reader “can” move “like” the pictured animals, the reader is invited to movement through the mechanics of reading.
The back-and-forth sliding of Gallop! layers retools the mechanics of the pull tab as demonstrated by the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking (“Movable Mechanisms”). As with a pull tab mechanism, Scanimation animates printed illustrations when the reader physically moves an activatable feature of the book. In Scanimation, however, the sliding of layers occurs covertly beneath each page’s upper card layers. The production of animation becomes an unconventional effect of operating what is designed to appear as a single-layered board book. The normalized process of flipping book pages is hypermediated as a mechanical interaction between user and book.
Gallop!’s bindings perform conformity with the mass-market convention of single-layer pages, normalizing the book’s appearance to hypermediate reading as a transformative activation. While hypermediation makes conscious the normalized processes of engagement with a medium, Gallop!’s design is a performance: it simulates conventional board book bindings (single-layer pages, accordion folds) to hypermediate ways of reading books that do not share its interior mechanics.
Visual emulation of accordion binding in Gallop!.
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.
This containment of animation within its bindings frames Gallop! as a screen interface. Unlike lenticular animation, which Seder would later copyright for use in toys, Scanimation technology does not ‘activate’ legibly upon changing one’s perspective of the book object. The Scanimation effect is produced only through the physical activation of the book’s pages in relation to each other and to the reader, as the acetate overlay blocks and reveals portions of the underlying animation layer. The reader produces meaning from this optical effect as they interpret continuity between the revealed image fragments. Following this juxtaposition-based reading, Seder’s choice of Muybridge’s iconic Horse as the cutout display for Gallop! constructs the book’s bindings as a pane into an interface. Gallop! continues a tradition of books as animated “proto-movies”, as in flip-books (Borsuk 157). Borsuk identifies Eadward Muybridge’s own “sequential photography” prints as a parallel technology to books, suggesting the way that collected images like Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion might be read or operated as book technologies. The choice of Muybridge’s iconic Horse as the cutout display for Gallop! connects Scanimation with film technology and history. This media association expresses the capacity of the book for literally and figuratively mediating “the persistence of vision” effect. This effect enables viewers to simulate sequence by inferring associations between keyframes.
In his patent petition, Seder describes his aim for Scanimation to “be hand held 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 the inactive Nintendo DS screen pictured here.
The visual association between Gallop!‘s animated display and that of the Nintendo DS occurs in the context of 2007’s anxieties surrounding childhood inactivity and screen use. Unlike the CRT and LCD screens referenced in its design, Gallop! 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. Reading a normalized book — flipping the single-layer pages of a bound duodecimo — is hypermediated as an exercise of both body and mind.
Gallop! is read physically, and is thus hypermediated: readers are made conscious of their role as activator of and by the book as we “flip” its pages and activate its Scanimation mechanism. The user produces animation by animating their own body, and is by extension animated by the book. By engaging readers in physical play with the boundaries of movement and sequence, Gallop! models the book and reading as technologies of activation. The examined copy’s position in the SDSU Library Special Collection’s Toy Book archive reflects Gallop!‘s function as a technology of book play.
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).
