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.
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.
Dr. Pressman (Bookishness) and Walter Benjamin (“Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting”, trans. Harry Zohn) each describe the fetishism of book ownership, in which symbolic value is attached to the book. I am considering the symbolic value of the book (and the bookish body) in the context of surveillance culture, and in particular relation to my research on sexual violence in fandom convention spaces. I use this post as an opportunity to connect some dots between this week’s bookish readings and my research, as I am presenting it at a conference in a few days.
Benjamin writes that, “for a collector, . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects” (67). “Ownership” as intimacy suggests a close spatial proximity between that which is collected and she who collects, a “nearness” which Dr. Pressman shows is remediated through digital book imagery (Bookishness 10, 35). Following Susan Sontag’s situation of U.S. photography traditions in the colonial pursuit of collecting (On Photography), I consider the practice of (often nonconsensual) convention photography to be a means of “collecting” bodies as datified archival “objects.” By this I mean that the nonconsensual photo documents not only the proximal relationship between the bodies of photographer and photographed subject, but also the photographer’s greater liberty to determine this proximity/nearness through the functions of camera technology. Where the body cannot be literally sexually possessed, the body can be remediated into a collectable visual representation of (forced, coerced, or consensual) compliance with being objectified through the act of being photographed.
For convention culture, this means that the visual archive of the convention overwrites the lived experiences which occur around and beyond the moment of photography / compliance / archival. I am using the convention archive as an entry-point into a larger argument about how surveillance and the “collection” of body-data shapes pop culture practices more broadly. As a class, we have found that the book is a body, and that the body is a book. To build from Nick Couldry’s framework in Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (2003), I want to show how rituals of collecting and archiving serve to “categorize” each body as book or as reader – object or subject – and “naturalize” the book/body as representative of this power relationship. The book and the body are encoded with symbolic value. Dr. Pressman describes the use of the book as a status symbol in the U.S., where reading inherits historic conscription to that position which is “Western, Judeo-Christian, middle class or at least instilled with ideals of bourgeois mobility” (Bookishness 32). This status of reader/archiver is exclusive: the reader is made dominant by their potential to be able to read (they do not necessarily need to read, though this practice would do the ritual work of naturalizing inequality).
Dr. Amira Jarmakani’s Digital and Networked Feminisms course has been a rich complement to our Books class this semester, as each course has offered perspectives on these symbolic and political powers which networked actors produce. Readings on dataveillance have led me to consider the ways in which archival and “collection” practices necessarily datify identities and bodies, producing boundaries and value through containment. When used as a tool (to borrow Amber Rahman’s term) to reinforce violent institutional relationships, archival technologies might also act as technologies of surveillance. Birth certificates, state identification documents, and police drone footage – each what Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah (2015) call a “surveillance apparatus” –archive individuals as data units in value-encoded systems (“Legally Sexed: Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens” 60). The “intimacy” or “thereness” of book collection is perhaps violently remediated through these surveillance practices, which datify people into readable data units that can be ‘opened’ for interrogation at any time. Surveillance is a violent form of archival and meaning production which can be understood as an extension of colonial reading and bookishness.
Benjamin describes that “[t]he most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them” (60). This containment takes on a grim cadence when we consider the collector as a colonial amasser and the archived “individual items” as humans. Jean-Christophe Cloutier more succinctly criticizes this colonial archival framework by critiquing the language of “capture” (Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature 7). My research is also moving towards grappling with collection as an extension of colonialism and surveillance (each key to collection’s obvious grounding in capitalism).
This leads me to my final project for our class, which will mediate the erasure of personhood that is produced when bodies are collected or captured through the colonial “surveillance apparatus” of the medical record. I am deliberating if my project will suggest resistance more obviously, or if its existence will itself serve as critique. Either way, I am inspired by the postcolonial archival critiques which Marlene Manoff describes in “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines”, where creators “reinterpret and recontextualize [colonial archival] information and thus call into question the colonial version of events” (16). I hope that my work on surveillance and sexual violence in the convention space can open up these conversations on the politics of materiality in fandom and pop culture studies more broadly.
In Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (2019), Jean-Christophe Cloutier claims that “archivists are the life coaches of civilization’s undead” (12). This image of the archivist as conjurer brought to mind the experiential Gothic pessimism offered by Maisha L. Wester in African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (2012) and Sheri-Marie Harrison in “New Black Gothic” (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018 — warning for graphic descriptions of anti-Black and sexual violence). As Harrison describes, the New Black Gothic represents “an ever-present and visible lineage of violence that accumulates rather than dissipates with the passage of time” — ghosts that never “move on”, wounds that never heal, and archival absences that are never restored. I consider this traumatic temporality alongside Cloutier’s “boomeranging” temporalities of Black scholarship (15) in order to question how we approach violent archival silences.
Cloutier finds that the “forensic imagination that informs much of contemporary African American scholarship (re)establishes the authority of a collective provenance” which can “allo[w] contemporary black life to imaginatively reclaim irretrievable losses” (9). This “collective provenance” or “conjured kinship” is an affective and political orientation “across time reaching back to a common ancestry in Africa and hurled forward into a speculative future” (10). Lives and sites silenced by the archive might be “reclaimed” through archival kinship, but they cannot be “retrieved.” The temporality of the archival absence must be produced by the archivist, situating silence between the rhythms of extant records. (I was led to this thought by Cloutier’s mention of Margo Crawford’s “‘rhythm’ of blackness in time”, 17). It is also possible, however, to consider the “irretrievable” as outside time entirely.
Cloutier identifies a Black “spectral poetics of anticipation that gestates in and through archivism”, “boomeranging” between temporal sites of “release” and “delay” (17). As Cloutier’s work with Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth shows, the “delay” between production and archival is sometimes lengthy — and sometimes indefinite — for Black authors excluded or expelled from the archival canon. The potentiality of Cloutier’s archival model suggests that archival absences might be understood as delays which can find “release” in the imaginings or archivism of kin across time. This might set those who are erased or eradicated from the archive as existing in an atemporal stasis. If the delay is forever, is it still a delay?
Following Wester and Harrison’s rejection of closure, I wonder if we might frame contact with violent archives as a traversal across both temporalities and atemporality. By this I mean that the archival absence — the indefinite delay — by design contains its victims in a vacuum apart from temporality, and thus apart from kinship’s boomeranging revivals. We need a framework for approaching these voids. What would it look like to embody and move through absences in the archive without seeking to restore them? We know that we can read archival silences, and Cloutier shows that speculative potentialities can be imagined across these lesions. I am thinking of a more embodied integration with the atemporality of archival rupture, one which occurs at the site of contact between traumatized archivist and traumatic archive. What in the archival silence is only possible for the listener attuned through shared or inherited trauma to hear? How does this quiet traversal differ from conventional methods of archival and reading?
I am thinking about this approach for my final project, which I will build as part of my graduate thesis on technology, disability, and trauma. I’m wondering if I could critique the “romance of the archive” through a metafictional experiment with bodily datification and documentation, destabilizing the violent archival voice through the very ruptures that it creates. This would build from my framing of cringe culture as a violent archival project which continues historic practices of racist and ableist archival. To follow Carolyn Steedman’s archival future perfect tense (qtd. in Cloutier 17), it is never going to have been acceptable that this violence has been done. Survivors can sit with that reality and, from this vantage, explore it in ways that generate “kinship” and new knowledge. If the archive is “the site where the past changes at every sitting” (31), then we also need to learn how to sit within those sites outside of time.
Edit: I just read Andrea Miller’s chapter, “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption”, in Ruha Benjamin’s Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019). Miller open possibilities for exploring the “insensible” in a much clearer way than I have, and I thought I’d share their conclusion here: “Maybe it is in thinking with rather than against the insensible that we can begin to inquire not simply into other futures but also into other, perhaps less recognizable or altogether unrecognizable, presents, politics, and historical archives” (101).
Electronic literature scholar N. Katherine Hayles writes in 2007 that contemporary e-lit authors “explor[ed] . . .the Z-axis as an additional dimension for text display, behavior, and manipulation” (“Electronic Literature: What Is It?”). Hayles describes the work of Ted Warnell, whose TLT vs. LL (2006, strobe/flashing warning) “shifts to a dynamic surface in which rising and sinking motions give the effect of three dimensions as the layered letter forms shift, move, and reposition themselves relative to other letters” (Hayles). I am considering this spatial depth alongside our discussions of screen interfaces and my own work with Rufus Butler Seder’s Gallop! (2007), a book which combines leaf layers to produce an animated effect.
In a comment on Micaela’s post last week, Sierra mentioned otome games – a subgenre of visual novels, which themselves emerge from interactive fiction games. It’s made me think about the conventional display interface of visual novels, which generally overlay narrative text and selectable options over illustrations. While considering how Gallop! produces animation and sequence through interactions between bound layers, I’m realizing that I haven’t attended to the “Z-axis” in screen media like 2D visual novels, animation, or even the computer screen interface itself. The backlit LCD display of my computer also produces animation via interactions between layers of light and crystal. This is a 3D process. Because the computer interface produces media through X, Y, and Z axes, even what appears to be 2D screen media is materially 3D.
We therefore don’t look at a screen, but through its layers. Interactions between layers produce optical effects, much like the Scanimation barrier-grid effect produced in Seder’s Gallop!. N. Katherine Hayles has already explored computer backlighting’s “media-specific” influence on e-lit through texts like “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis” (2000), but I’m only now realizing the implications of the Z-axis to electronic literature. How does an e-lit work engage with the 3D spatiality of its medium?
Amaranth Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen (2005) mediates the 3D spatiality of print books by inviting co-reading between human and computer readers. As the human user physically moves the book’s QR-coded pages in view of a computer reader’s camera, the computer retrieves and displays 3D visuals that are mapped onto the visual feedback. As Dr. Pressman argues in “Reorienting Ourselves toward the Material: Between Page and Screen as Case Study” (2018), Borsuk’s augmented reality book shows that “technology is not only part of the work but also part of the text to be read and compared” (323). Borsuk’s “3D concrete poem[s]” (323) reflect the 3D spatiality of “page and screen” interfaces. Following Dr. Pressman’s example of “the piggy poem” in Borsuk’s project as an allusion to the animal skins used in medieval manuscripts (326), we might consider how animal skins themselves form outer layers over complex interior systems, and how the reduction of these systems to a single, ‘2D’ exterior layer reduces the complexity of their multidimensional, mediated bodies.
From now on, I’ll view media objects as assemblages of layers. This is kind of blowing me out of the water in terms of reframing my approach to e-lit and animation studies. Engaging with the materiality of Gallop! in concordance with Hayles, Borsuk, and Dr. Pressman’s e-lit studies reveals the multidimensionality of media and media activation. The medium cannot be flattened. How might e-lit engage with this spatiality, and with the illusion of flatness, as narrative and material conflicts?
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.
Artist Erica Baum defines the book by defining the verb “contain” (qtd. in Amaranth Borsuk, “Essential Knowledge: The Book”). Following Baum, I’m considering “book” as a verb: to book a reservation, to “book ‘em” in a police databank, “[t]o record in a book, and related senses” (Oxford English Dictionary). To be “booked” in these senses is to be produced as information that is variously legible across what Robert Darnton (1982) calls the “communications circuit”, which models the associational “life cycle” of a book object across prosumer actors (“What is the History of Books?” 67). In each instance, the booked referent is recorded and “contained” as data in an information system. This system is distributed across a communications circuit of readers, producers, and other actors — not all of whom (or which) read the booked information as content, but all of which interact with and entangle the book object in a web of temporal and spatial signifiers. We can thus examine the book as a network which materially reproduces time signatures.
The thinkers profiled in Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka’s introduction to Media Archaeology (2011) variously frame time as a medium which intersects with other media: books, film, social gatherings. “Archaeology” itself entails the reading of bodies across time, which theorists like Marshall MacLuhan, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Zielinski apply to media studies (5, 6, 10). These theorists understand media as circuits which interconnect with other media and bodies through material, temporally-situated exchanges. In writing our bibliographies, we approach media archaeology to record the historic, circuited interactions that are “contained” in, by, and as the book object. Our prosumption expands the book’s circuit through our own temporal interactions with its body, the exchange forging future contexts.
So I’m considering the book object as something which may or may not outlast me, but that which operates by a specific temporality. The book I’ve chosen for my bibliography was published in 2007, but its context expands before and beyond this date. It is generative to consider how the life cycle of the book object differs from your own — it might be a bit like mindfully approaching nonhuman animals with an understanding of how their behavior is shaped by their life cycles. I make this connection not only because the organic materiality of many books situates them as ecological artifacts, but because it is limiting to treat the book object as being removed from organic body-temporalities.
Dr. Pressman writes in “Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes: Memorial, Fetish, Bookishness” (2018) that “[f]etishism . . . involves attributing to an object the ability to possess and exert powers rather than seeing that object as part of a larger system of programmatic operations” (106). The fetishization of the book displaces it from its context or communications circuit, meaning that it displaces the book from its “life cycle” as a networked object. As a cultural and ritual artifact, the book’s “ability to possess and exert powers” is also the ability to possess and exert a value of atemporality. In a sense, the fetishization of the book vacates it of its life cycle by removing it from its communications circuit. Practically, this might involve a reader or bibliographer failing to notice signs of historical interactions that could reveal the temporal information “contained” in/as the book body. It’s important that we approach book objects with a mind to their communications circuits across time, including our own interactions with them and the possibility of interactions between future actors and the book.
This temporally-mediated approach can guide our readings of book objects as containers of time signatures and material interactions. We should not only read a book, but read that which has been booked. That sounds goofy, but it’s helping me ground my approach to handling book objects and bibliography.
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).
Johanna Drucker and Amaranth Borsuk each center the book’s reader as its activator. Artist’s books, “which integrat[e] the formal means of [their] realization and production with [their] thematic or aesthetic issues”, hypermediate material production and interactivity (Drucker “The Artist’s Book as Idea and Form” 2). As both Drucker (14) and Borsuk (174) show, this meta function of the artist’s book is remediated in much electronic literature and interactive fiction. Following my interest in undertaking bibliographies of the Electronic Literature Studio’s collections, I’ve begun to read Drucker and Borsuk for guidance in bibliographing transmedia book objects. I had intended to codify these methods into personal guidelines for bibliographic work with objects in Special Collections and the E-Lit Studio, but I realized that I have more questions than answers regarding good bibliographic practice, and especially regarding the bibliography of inaccessible media.
For Drucker, an artist’s book is identified in part when “the informed viewer . . . determine[s] the extent to which a book work makes integral use of the specific features of [its] form” (9). Following this, Borsuk argues that artist’s books “remind us that books are fundamentally interactive reading devices whose meanings, far from being fixed, arise at the moment of access” — or inaccess (The Book 147, 188). Inaccessibility is intentionally encoded into many artist’s books, and, whether by artist design or tech companies’ designed obsolescence, it permeates digital media. The bibliographer’s context might itself create this inaccessibility, as in the case of a CD-ROM that can’t be played for simple lack of playback equipment. Such a bibliographer’s limited access to the object might actually invite closer documentation of what features are available for analysis, like the CD-ROM’s surface, jewel case, or related ephemera. This context also emphasizes that the CD-ROM should not be approached with assumptions that it is meant to be played or read in a singular, specific way (ex. by playback in a disc reader). Just as “‘bad’ printing” makes more obvious the materiality of printing processes (Drucker 17), digital inaccessibility makes obvious the systems on which a work is dependent for functioning. The limitations of the bibliographer’s activation invite connections between contexts.
…but where is the line between meaningful connections and presumptive conjecture? My main struggle is in balancing the positioned activation of a reader with the archival project of the bibliographer. The distinctions between speculation and inference are often ambiguous to me. What is the code for identifying conjecture versus evidence, particularly when informed speculation is the only way to connect historical gaps? Will my bibliography fail if I overly situate my own positioned interaction with the object, or is this an essential aspect of responsible bibliography?
When my group and I examined a sixteenth-century codex in class, we carefully flipped its pages, moved it through light sources, and felt its cover to try identifying its materials. These were activations made possible and necessary by our positions in relation to the book object. Even documenting the book sculptures of Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube would involve moving around the objects and examining them — breathing in their space and context, connecting ocularly with their positions. Just as Borsuk shows that a reader’s movement through a book is a movement through time, space, and meaning (156, 178), the bibliographer has to move with the book, and this means that their subjective bodily experience is the contextually significant position for their activation.
So how do I reconcile my function as activator with the documentarian function of the bibliography? Isn’t the bibliographer’s context essential to document? If an artist’s book is only identified by “the informed viewer”, and if a book’s meaning only manifests “at the moment of access”, then an objective bibliography (as all objectivity) is impossible. What makes a bibliography functionally useful, and which actions of the bibliographer might damage this function? Is this really a question of objectivity versus subjectivity, or might it be more generative to foreground the function of the bibliographer as a subjective activator?
I realize that this is one of the most basic questions of archival and historian work, but it is also among the most essential to continually ask ourselves. I’d appreciate any thoughts that you all have on this, as I was hoping to come to some guiding conclusion but am still uncertain. Isn’t it only ethical for a book’s bibliographic activator to disclose the context of their activation?
Sick again, so sorry for the weakest post of all time.
I was out sick and missed Tuesday’s practice in descriptive bibliography, as described by Terry Belanger (1977 qtd. in “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” 2025). (Thanks to Vide for keeping me in the loop.) Now I’m typing this week’s post informally because my mind is slow-simmering with sick. I note this because it’s offering me insight into how sickness influences energy and modes of functioning in a way that, like the language and probable typos in this post, can be read in comparison with other posts to signify my material circumstances as a creator. Considering the scope of bibliographic methods described in the Bibliographical Society of America’s “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” (2025), I’m thinking about how a disabled or sick bibliography would operate.
Following Lisa Maruca and Kate Ozment’s “critical bibliography”, I want to approach bibliography as culturally situated and potentially radical work. I’m thinking of a disabled or crip bibliography, which is a familiar practice in disability studies. There’s a quandary of identification in disability studies: How can we determine that a creator is disabled when there’s no hard evidence of this? Using bibliography, I think that we can elide this unnecessary (and at times medicalist) question and instead center how the materiality of a created object holds traces of disabled ways of being and production.
While it’s common to encounter a work and “just know” that you’re encountering crip kin, what you’re really experiencing is the recognition of familiar material behaviors in their media. The manically-typed scroll of Jack Kerouac, the multiple hands of blind Jorge Luis Borges and his assisting mother, the smudged and slanting correspondences of Frank’s Kafka during his late institutionalization, and the frenetic journal infodumps of Ada Lovelace can all be read for traces of disabled production practices. We might not know the affective experiences with which actors approached a book object, but we can read what G. Thomas Tanselle calls “physical clues [that] reveal details of the underlying production process” (2020 qtd. in “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” 2025). There is some uphill work, I think, in defining and asserting ways of reading disabled production to a broader audience, but understanding the book as a technology means that we can understand how actors adapt it for disabled use.
This approach to bibliography is not limited to the processes of writing or printing a book object. The ways that people use books, as we’ve seen, are shaped by material circumstances; reading is, and has always been, transformed through disabled adaptations. Physical production processes are shaped by bodily limits on energy, time, and access. Charting these processes through crip bibliography can recenter the prevalence and importance of disabled life across history, resisting the dehistoricization and erasure of disabled life in dominant histories. This is critical when the erasure of our histories is used to justify the eradication of our futures.
I follow the bodily attunement of disability and affect theories in centering this way of experiencing the world as I practice bibliography from home. I’m looking over my journals and (in comparative readings with the aforementioned letters) observing how (re-)inking, formatting, and medium reflect how I was evidently using sketchbooks, notebooks, Post-It’s, and other ephemera both as existing books (mostly store-bought) and as creative adaptions. I will not be doing this project before a more foundations-based attempt at bibliography, but I do want to give it a try: I’ll write a bibliography of my written journals across my changes in health. Here I am trying out a disabled bibliography that can only be done in a disabled way. I’m thinking on this as my fever has exacerbated my memory issues, and approaching my journals does not come with memories of their creation. I would here undertake bibliography of objects that I know the context of (I modified them at some point) but not the actual processes of creating (those memories are gone). This would invite critical insight into doing disabled (auto?)bibliography, using immemory to investigate the fractured but continuous relationship between bibliographer, book object, and trace actors.
