Tag Archives: Intermedia

Stumble! Moving with the Media Network of Rufus Butler Seder’s “Gallop!”

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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.

Watch My Project Demo Here

(Captions forthcoming.)

Stumble! My Project Prototype

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.

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Intermedia: The Fusion and Mimicry of The Book

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Throughout this class, I have learned and re-learned so many new things about The Book as a medium. It is more than just a single medium; if anything, it is an ever-changing form that reflects culture and society: “By bringing its interface into focus, they draw our attention to a deeper history of mutation and play with book form. Dick Higgins coined the term ‘intermedia’ to describe such works, a word that sounds to contemporary ears like a description of an augmented reality or touchscreen reading experience.”(Borsuk 257). These books are snapshots, time-capsules oozing with marginalia that speaks volumes of certain moments: culture, social and political climate etc…And what isn’t stressed enough is the remediation aspect of this medium. One doesn’t influence the other, it is a nature and process that is cyclical in form and content. It is at once dictated by the ones using but also birthed in the need that arises from mutation and evolution. Borsuk further quotes Higgins and his coined term: “Intermedia works, by his definition, involve ‘a conceptual fusion’ of the elements that constitute them. For him, the artist’s book is intermedial because its ‘design and format reflect its content-they intermerge, interpenetrate. … The experience of reading it, viewing it, framing it-that is what the artist stresses in making it.'”(257).

The importance of this notion is the fact that in recent years, audiobooks and podcasts have seen a surge in popularity as a new, fast, and easy way to digest information in whatever manner we crave, Borsuk writes, “Some scholars consider this period of textual fixity and enclosure the Guttenberg parenthesis, rather than the Guttenberg era, suggesting that we a re returning to a culture that values orality and ephemerality, no longer needing ideas bound between covers or owned in quite the same way.” (258). This new shift is once again posing us a question about what the book is. And the fact that we have so many scholars with different definitions not only speaks to its complexity but its malleability: “The term’s slipperiness, far from a liability, proves its greatest asset. It is a malleable structure through which we encounter ideas.” (Borsuk 258). It is almost paradoxical in the sense that the book as a medium, is so prevalent yet it is un-pinable as a singular definition, “-the book changes us as we change it, letter by letter, page by page.” (Borsuk 258).