Even more than art—of which Robert Filliou said it first —is a book a thing which makes life more interesting than a book.

—Jan Voss

Jan Voss (born 1945) is a German artist living in Amsterdam where he runs together with friends since 30-some years the artists book store Boekie Woekie.

boekiewoekie.com

We think of very different, incomparable, devices as ‘books’, just as we deem entities that pump water, spin washing machine drums or move cars forward as ‘engines’. And yet there is a distinctive trait in the many things a book may be: a differed, potential existence, waiting to be triggered by reading. Also, printing is a form of ghost binding. Books are silent capture devices oriented to hold in finite linear renderings, line after line, page after page, the infinite experiences, material constraints and whimsical synapses of known and unknown authors. Or, put differently, the replicable existence of the unique time of the mind orderly displayed as words (and images) in the narrow space of folded papers. And thus, books are traps as much as they are maps.

—Agustín Berti

Agustín Berti (Oslo, 1978) conducts research on the changes spurred by digitization in literature, film and audiovisual arts. His most recent work is La Biblioteca Roja. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de los libros [The Red Library. A Short Account of the Destruction of Books] (Document/A, 2017) with Tomás Alzogaray and Gabriela Halac, and From Digital to Analog. Agrippa and other Hybrids in the Beginnings of Digital Culture (Peter Lang, 2015). He is a researcher at the Argentine CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council), lectures in the Masters in Technics, Politics and Cultures at UNC and is head professor of “Analysis and Criticism” in the Faculty of Arts, UNC. He is a member of technology research group Dedalus.

A book is an invitation, and its mere existence is heartening, like the thought of an absent friend.

—David Abel

Poet and editor David Abel is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. Two new books were released late in 2017: Selected Durations, an artist’s book published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada, Reno, and XIV Eclipses, a series of performative poems/scores from Couch Press in Portland; two chapbooks are forthcoming: Sequitur Her, from press-press-pull in Portland, and Equifinality, from Crane’s Bill in Albuquerque. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series (now in its seventeenth year), he is also an occasional curator and educator, and a consultant with the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

passagesbookshop.com

Art, artifact, concept—wrought by hand and mind, hands and minds—the book is our tool and toy for surviving beyond our DNA.

—Books On Books

books-on-books.com

A book is simply a form. Kind of like the word book. Project whatever you want onto, into, or around that word. Marks on a stone. A purse packed with dice. A turkey stuffed with SpaghettiOs. Nucleotides carrying genetic instructions.

—Andrew Norman Wilson

Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist based in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Techne and the Decency of Means at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2017), Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2017), the Gwangju Biennial (2016), the Berlin Biennial (2016), the Bucharest Biennial (2016), Bread and Roses at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2016), and On Sweat, Paper and Porcelain at CCS Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2015). He has lectured at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Yale University, and UCLA, where he is now visiting faculty. His work has been featured in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Buzzed, Frieze, Gizmodo/Gawker, The New Yorker, and Wired. He has published writing in Artforum, e-flux, DIS, and a Darren Bader monograph from Koenig Books.

andrewnormanwilson.com

PERHAPS the best way to think about “What is a book?” is to ask what it is not

PERHAPS it is not a book at all but is something like a desire-engine?

PERHAPS it is something less concrete like a psychically transmitted gaseous Eros

PERHAPS it is not to be found in words but “in itself” AS IF made of words (or not)

PERHAPS it is the last remnants of a communication system whose time has passed

PERHAPS it is the perpetual instantiation of a communication protocol whose time has (and will continue to) come

PERHAPS a book is perpetually coming and we have yet to harness its ultimate form of embodiment

PERHAPS a book just IS and by being-what-it-is we can now be-what-we-are too, also books?

PERHAPS everything in the world exists to end up as a book

PERHAPS the book exists in A World Beyond This Life

—Mark America

Mark Amerika’s artwork has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center. In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME. In 2009, Amerika released Immobilité, generally considered the first feature-length art film ever shot on a mobile phone. He is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007) and the novels The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood (both with FC2/University of Alabama). His artwork Museum of Glitch Aesthetics was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. In March 2017, he was the first American artist to have a survey exhibition of their digital artwork in Havana and his new book, remixthecontext, was published by Routledge in 2018.

markamerika.com

remixthebook.com

A book is an object that vibrates upon contact.

—Danielle Vogel

Danielle Vogel is a writer, interdisciplinary artist and ceremonialist. She is the author of the poetry collections Between Grammars, the forthcoming Edges & Fray and The Way a Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity. As a writer, Vogel explores the bonds between language and presence, between a reader and a writer, and how a book, as an extended architecture of a body, might serve as a site of radical transformation. Her visual works—or “public ceremonies for language”— celebrate the archives of memory stored within language. She teaches at Wesleyan University.

The book, for a very short time, stabilizes what flows through it, with the proviso that some works do not flow, just as some bodies do not progress from one time to the next in fluid or malleable ways. In this case, the book functions differently. It becomes the ground, a nearby or volatile ground for what lies down: upon it. Throw a charnel net over the book. Set out a bowl of water for the unseen beings, the animals and birds, that gather at its boundary. Or brink.

—Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil is the author of five books, most recently Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2016) and the forthcoming Incubation: a space for monsters (a new edition with "extreme notes" and a preface by Eunsong Kim) from Kelsey Street Press (2018)

Website/blog: THE VORTEX OF FORMIDABLE SPARKLES

A book is a time-based medium made up of sequenced pages, bound together, composed to animate a reader with ideas, feelings, information, stories. An intimate and flexible medium, a book can take many forms, be large, small, physical, digital, produced as one-of-a-kind, in editions, and in hybrid platforms. It is usually portable, interactive and haptic. Most commonly, word-laden, a book’s contents can be composed of words, images, shapes, colors, symbols, pop-ups, cut-outs, sounds, smells, and any combination of these.

—Warren Lehrer

Warren Lehrer is a writer, designer and book artist known as a pioneer of visual literature and design authorship. Known for his expressive marriage of writing and typography, his books and multimedia projects help us see the shape of thought and reunite oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling with the printed page, and more recently with the screen and hybrid platforms. Awards include: The Brendan Gill Prize, IPPY Outstanding Book of the Year Award, Innovative Use of Archives Award, International Book Award for Best New Fiction, three AIGA Book Awards, and grants and fellowships from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, Rockefeller, Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. He is a 2016 Honoree of the Center for Book Arts. His books are in many collections including MoMA, The Getty Museum, and Georges Pompidou Centre. A frequent lecturer and performer, Lehrer is a professor at SUNY Purchase, a founding faculty member of SVA’s Designer As Author MFA program, and co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. warrenlehrer.com

trees + river + trees + river

—Terri Witek

Terri Witek's most recent book is The Rape Kit (Slope Editions 2018). Her poetry often traces the breakages between words and images, and her collaborations with visual artists have been featured in museum and gallery shows, performance and site-specific projects in New York, Seoul, Miami, Glasgow, Lisbon, and Rio de Janeiro. She holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University; with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes, she teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson's MFA of the Americas.

terriwitek.com

Not everything we read is “bookish.” The world is full of short, declarative statements, carved in granite, embossed in metal, stenciled on glass or plastic, or else flickering on screens. This is language in its near-instantaneous aspects of signage or spectacle. But the words of a text are another matter, one of duration and absorption, to be sure, but also of an expectancy engaged with another kind of hinge, the page. The absorption of reading arises within a duration of pages, whose successive turnings are slices of time through text. One page starts a narrative, another concludes it. In between, so many parcels of language, each interrupted by the bottom of a page. A text so displayed is inherently partial. Our memory of reading other pages renders each page contingent, bound to other, unseen, pages that open endlessly outward toward the totality of words.

—Buzz Spector

Buzz Spector’s art makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception. He has had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Orange County Museum of Art; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; and many private galleries and alternative spaces. Spector’s poetry and experimental writing has been published in various journals and reviews since the 1970s, including Benzene, Café Solo, Piecrust, River Styx, and WhiteWalls. In 2012 a volume of selected interviews of Spector plus new page art, Buzzwords, was issued by Sara Ranchouse Publishing, Chicago. Spector holds degrees from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale and the University of Chicago. He is professor of art in the College and Graduate School of Art of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

A book is a place of knowledge-exchange—and always more expansive than we imagine it to be.

—Bonnie Mak

Bonnie Mak is associate professor at the University of Illinois, jointly appointed in the School of Information Sciences and the Program in Medieval Studies.

ischool.illinois.edu/people/bonnie-mak

The book (member of the genus liber) is neither flora nor fauna. As a species, it conveys art and information, reproduces asexually, inhabits virtually all regions, and is especially prevalent in libraries, bookstores and the homes of readers. The book’s plumage dazzles potential suitors with an array of colors, shapes and formats, including codices, scrolls, palm leafs and tablets. Chameleon-like by nature, the book can be realistic, fantastical or conceptual. It can speak for itself and others, soar like a bird, traffic in fiction or fact or remain stubbornly opaque. Bred chiefly by the writers and artists with whom they coexist, books are at their best comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Though often endangered, the book continues to thrive.

—Miriam Schaer

Miriam Schaer is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She exhibits extensively and is represented in numerous public and private collections, including those at Yale’s Sterling Library, Florida Atlantic University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard University, Duke University, the Tate Gallery in London, and the University of California. A U.S. Fulbright Scholar, Schaer has also earned a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, inclusion in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum, and an artist residency at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. Her series of works, Baby (Not) On Board: The Last Prejudice?, about societal bias against childless women, has been exhibited by the International Museum of Women. She is represented by the Central Booking Art Space in New York and Vamp and Tramp Booksellers in Birmingham, Alabama.

miriamschaer.com

A book is a place for ideas that need to survive and thrive, a mansion of the mind. It makes room for the stories, arguments, and images that deserve to change the world, now and in the future. The publication of a book marks the birth of something utterly original and distinct, but with deep connections to existing knowledge. Books often begin with thanks to those who have sacrificed on their behalf. Books ask a lot of their readers, too. They require our sustained time and attention. In return, the book communicates, entertains, generates, teaches, preserves, and advances knowledge. It focuses the mind. It changes the world by changing what we know.

—Gita Manaktala

Gita Manaktala is the Editorial Director of the MIT Press, a publisher of scholarship at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology. Known for intellectual daring and distinctive design, MIT Press books push the frontiers of knowledge in fields ranging from contemporary art and architecture to the life sciences, computing, economics, philosophy, cognitive science, environmental studies, linguistics, new media studies, and STS. Gita’s own acquisitions are in the areas of information science and communication. Until 2009, she served as the Marketing Director with responsibility for worldwide promotion and sales of the press’s titles. In this role, she helped to develop CISnet, an online collection of the Press’s computer and information science titles (now on the IEEE Explore platform. She serves on the board of directors of the Association of American University Presses and co-chaired its first diversity and inclusion task force. She is a regular speaker on topics in scholarly publishing and communication.

What a Book is is portable, tangible, burnable Readable-Ness able to command action and/or devotion from humans and machines.

Fine Print: For burnable, read also breakable/transformable. For devotion, read also imprint/addiction or exactitude/rigor. For machine, read also (unwise) intelligence.

—Stephanie Strickland

Stephanie Strickland’s eight books of poetry include Dragon Logic and The Red Virgin. She has also published eleven digital poems. Zone : Zero, a book and accompanying CD, includes the poem slippingglimpse which maps text to Atlantic wave patterns. Two books are forthcoming in 2019: Ringing the Changes, a code-generated project for print based on the ancient art of bell-ringing, from Counterpath Press, and How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected from Ahsahta Press.

stephaniestrickland.com

My definition of an artist's book has changed over the years. My first definition was consecutive pages- bound or unbound. Then I opened it up to say it was a book-like object that changes from its closed position to its open position. Then I decided it was merely the artist's intention- "If I say I am making a book, then I am making a book." And at cocktail parties when pressed to define an artist's book I will say, "Imagine a painter expressing an idea by making a painting. Some artists express themselves by making Artist's Books. The book might have pages or not,covers or not, text sometimes, imagery sometimes, form of some kind, made of any material. One can only begin to imagine the possibilities.

—Rebecca Goodale

Rebecca Goodale makes unique and limited edition books, many with sculptural components. Her current project, Threatened and Endangered, is inspired by Maine’s rare plants and animals. Her wok is in numerous collections including Bowdoin College Library; The Maine Women Writers Collection; New York Public Library; Herron Art Library, IN; Smithsonian African Museum of Art; Library of Congress; Hawai’i State Art Museum; Portland Museum of Art, ME; and the White House Ornament Collection. She is the Faculty Director of the University of Southern Maine’s Book Arts at Stone House program. Rebecca is represented by the Turtle Gallery in Deer Isle and by Vamp and Tramp Booksellers, Birmingham, AL.

A book is a container: a package that contains matter and is matter, an object that at once holds and is held.

—Jenni B. Baker

Jenni B. Baker is an experimental poet and book artist based in Baltimore, MD. She is the co-founder of Container, a small press publishing text objects and other words in nontraditional forms.

jennibbaker.com

A book is a setting for what travels through it in spacetime. What travels through a book is a projection of four-dimensional spacetime, where the three dimensions of space meet the dimension of time, on a lower-dimensional plane. If what travels through a book is a projection of five-dimensional spacetime on a lower-dimensional plane, the book is hyperdimensional. The writer and reader determine the number of dimensions with which a book is capable of interacting.

—Amy Catanzano

Amy Catanzano explores the intersections of literature, science, and art in an integrated artistic practice and theory known as quantum poetics. Her creative and scholarly research, including visits to CERN and other scientific research centers, spans the history of the avant garde and contemporary literary and artistic subcultures in parallel to physics and its under-acknowledged relationship to poetics and the philosophy of language. She is the author of three books. Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella, received the Noemi Press Book Award. Her second book, Multiversal received the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry and was selected by Michael Palmer for the Poets Out Loud Prize at Fordham University Press. In April 2018, she was the visiting Poet-in-Residence at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. She is an Associate Professor of English in Creative Writing and the Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

The book is an attempt to model what quantum neural blockchain artificial intelligences (i.e. human beings) are building. Books are extracts, error messages and stack traces. At this stage of 21st century late capitalism, a specific subset of knowledge workers are obsessed with the creation of machine learning agents that make decisions based on black box models that are, for all practical purposes and due to entropy, impossible to interpret. Assuming that all human creations inherit a trace of our thought processes, it is not unreasonable to imagine that humanity operates as a kind of AI. In essence, books are to humans as models are to AI.

—Eyemole (Eyemole Arts and Technology Co-operative)

Eyemole is a co-operative that believes in a society defined by increased connectedness, solidarity and imagination. We provide technological platforms, networks, and a community for members to share technical and artistic resources. We produce high quality digital media and provide services to third parties.

eyemole.io

The book is an event, beyond the mere representation of it.

A momentary stay of the transience of time.

A tree interleaved with other trees in a forest of dreams.

A dance of matter and anti-matter.

A story that objects tell, returned to object.

A refuge, a river rock—an author’s mind tumbled, now smooth in your palm.

A binding illusion, a moon. A silver pan of photons from the center of chaos.

A myth of self-radiance. Surface reflects each thought, each photon from the center of sun,

but not its awful journey. Gathered now as if it always was. Now it always will be.

—Roxi Power

Roxi Power is a poet and performance artist who teaches at UC Santa Cruz, where she edits an inter-arts book series entitled Viz. Inter-Arts: A Trans-Genre Anthology. The newest edition, Viz. Inter-Arts: Interventions enacts genre and art/activist interventions.

viz.ucsc.edu  (peak inside)

Extrapolating material from material. A code embedded in a surface. Follow line of thread towards textual interlacing. A visual interlacing. A readerly experience. A reading prompt. A passage revealed through the process of making.

—Francesca Capone

Francesca Capone is a visual artist, writer, and textile designer. Her books Text means Tissue (2017), and Writing in Threads (2015) focus on textile poetics. They are available for purchase via Printed Matter, and are available for viewing at the MoMA library. She has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in London, LUMA/Westbau in Switzerland, Textile Arts Center in NYC, and 99¢ Plus Gallery in Brooklyn. She has been an artist in residence at the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. More of her published work can be found at Gauss PDF, Tunica Magazine, and in The New Concrete from Hayward Press. Her academic work includes lectures and workshops at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Reed College, University of Washington, and Alberta College of Art and Design, among others.

francescacapone.com

The book is co-created by writer and reader. The reader fills in the white spaces between the author’s words with their imagination.

—Kate Durbin

Kate Durbin is an artist and writer. Her books include the forthcoming HOARDERS (Spork 2019), E! Entertainment (Wonder), The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), and the collaboration ABRA (1913 Press). ABRA is also a free, interactive iOS app that is "a living text," which won the 2017 Turn On Literature Prize for electronic literature. In 2015, Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia. Her work has been featured in Art Forum, The New York Times, Art in America, and elsewhere.

katedurbin.la

In the most traditional sense, a book is portable, intimate, personal and interactive. Conversely, it can be loud, two-dimensional and off-limits. A book might consist of pages or not and words or images, or neither. As an interactive device, experiencing a book is often a performative act. Some books are highly revered while others are considered dangerous. The versatility of a book is that its sculptural qualities can be exploited in a manner that relays an idea on multiple levels. At its most powerful, the ability to discern the content of a book can bring personal esteem or destruction, incite action, or provide revelation.

—Alisa Banks

Alisa Banks is a visual artist whose work centers on issues concerning identity. Her work, which often references traditional crafts, incorporates fibers, plants, and other found materials. Alisa’s work has been exhibited in venues in the U.S., Canada, England, and Laos, and is housed in several private and public collections, including the U.S. Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Museum, and the New York Public Library. Alisa received her BS from Oklahoma State University and her MFA from Texas Woman’s University. She lives in Dallas, TX.

alisabanks.com

The Book is 1. a technology that applies and advances material and sensory knowledge and experience, 2. a culture, i.e. a process or ongoing occurrences involving human communications. It survives best when physically disseminated as widely as possible or when singular enough to achieve rarefied status.

—Tate Shaw

Tate Shaw is an artist and writer living in Rochester, NY. Cuneiform Press published a collection of his essays on artists' books, Blurred Library (2017), and his books are in international collections including the Tate Modern, London, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale Special Collections, George Eastman Museum Library, amongst others. Shaw is the Director of Visual Studies Workshop, and an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Brockport where he directs the MFA in Visual Studies at VSW.

BOOK. s. [boc, Sax.] 1. A volume in which we read or write. 2. A particular part of a work. 3. The register in which a trader keeps an account. 4. In books. In kind remembrance. 5. Without book. By memory.

VOLUME. s. [volumen, Lat.] 1. Something rolled, or convolved. 2. As much as seems convolved at once. 3. A book.

WORK. S. [werk, Dutch.] 1. Toil; labour. 2. A slate of labour. 3. Bungling attempt. 4. Flowers or embroidery of the needle. 5. Any fabrick or compages of art. 6. Action; feat; deed. 7. Anything made. 8. Management, treatment.

COMPAGES. S. [Lat.] A substance of many parts united.

BOOKFUL. a. Crowded with undigested knowledge.

BOOKMATE. s. Schoolfellow.

—Brian Reed

Brian Reed is the Milliman Endowed Chair of Humanities and the Chair of the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of three books, most recently Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics (2013), and more than thirty articles and essays on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics.

faculty.washington.edu/bmreed

Book: a set of pages written or printed on both sides (recto and verso), bound, for the most part, on the left and placed inside hard or paper covers. The spine (the external part of the binding) usually contains the name of the book and its author and identifies the book on library shelves and in bookshops. A book is a solid object: it has height, width, and volume, and hence we continue to yearn for books even in this digital age because we can hold a book in our hands and grasp its totality. Electronic books are fine for travel, but I really don’t like reading books on Kindle or my iPhone otherwise; it’s too difficult to go back and forth and to reread. Books vary enormously as to quality of paper, print font, layout, and illustrative material: all of which contribute to the meaning of the book in question. But not all books are valuable: 9/10 of those currently published in the U.S.—e.g. political exposés, but also many novels and how-to books—are throw-aways: I call these BLOOKS.

—Marjorie Perloff

MP has held endowed chairs in English at both Stanford and USC. She is the author of many books on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and the avant-garde and of a memoir, THE VIENNA PARADOX, as well as, most recently, a study of Austrian Modernism between the World Wars.

marjorieperloff.com

English leaf and Latin liber "book" are etymologically cognate, deriving ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *lewbʰ- "to cut off," while the word page—which comes to English from Latin via French—derives from *peh₂ǵ- "to attach." The word book itself derives from the word for the beech tree, whose bark was peeled off to make a surface for writing. Etymologically, then, a book is a superposition of what can be separated and what comes to be stuck together; a book is (to paraphrase Quine) undetached book parts. Or as Robert Frost might put it, a book is "dead leaves stuck together"—leaves that steps have trodden black.

—Allison Parrish

Allison is a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet, with a focus on artificial intelligence and computational creativity. She is a Teacher at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she earned her master's degree in 2008. Her first full-length book of computer-generated poetry, Articulations, was published by Counterpath in 2018.

decontextualize.com

a cover

a page

an ounce

a word

a page and two spreads

seventy-four pages

a PDF

an image

bound 

stolen

a website

a diary

unavailable

folded

a title 

two hundred twenty-six pages

a sculpture 

a dog’s breath

free

wrapped

heavy

a page and five spreads

read

pulped

a shim

a nap

forty pages

glued

a poster

a video

burnt

—Antonia Pinter

Antonia Pinter is an artist based in Los Angeles, California. Formerly the Co-Director of Publication Studio Portland, Oregon, she is currently an Editorial Board Member of Fillip. She is the author and editor of Women’s Autobiographical Artists’ Books, an ongoing bibliographic index publication, and the author of several artists’ books including Light Levels (Bronze Age, 2015), her water, and A Grave For Bobbi Doten.

It is difficult to top I.A. Richards: “a book is a machine to think with.” But, more concretely, a book—codex—is a collection of words, letters, and other typographical symbols inscribed on what is by convention termed pages that are bound together by some means. If it is the object that we most likely all agree upon as being such, at least one of said pages will contain bibliographic information and codes for the legal rights of ownership, and the whole thing will be wrapped in such a way as to generate the interest of prospective consumers. Digital forms of books will retain the inscriptions and the idea of a writing surface, but expand the means of claiming property rights. “Ebooks” eliminate the entire navigational apparatus and as a consequence of having undone all of the labor that went into the design of the original object, reading—the intended use of all books—becomes distinctly unpleasant.

—Rita Raley

Rita Raley teaches in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published on subjects ranging from Global English and universal alphabets to tactical media, dataveillance, machine translation, and electronic literature.

raley.english.ucsb.edu

As a network of embodied interactions, the book invites us all to delve into the spatial, temporal, visual, verbal and tactile experiences it brings together.

—Tatiani Rapatzikou

Tatiani G. Rapatzikou is Associate Professor in the Department of American Literature, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her publications (monograph, articles, edited volumes) focus on contemporary American literature (fiction and poetry), technological uncanny, cyberpunk/cyberculture (with emphasis on William Gibson) as well as on digital and print narratives. In 2009, she was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Scholar grant for her research in contemporary American fiction and digital media (M.I.T. Comparative Media Studies program). In 2012, she was a visiting research scholar at the Literature Program (Duke University), and winner of the Alumni Engagement Innovation Fund international competition for her project ‘Urban Environments in Transition’ (www.asrp.gr/urban). She has co-edited with Philip Leonard, NTU, UK, a special issue for Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism with the title "Digital Literary Production and the Humanities" (http://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/gramma). In 2016 she was a visiting research scholar at York University, Toronto, Canada, for her research in urban narratives and digital literary practice. http://www.enl.auth.gr/instructor_en.asp?Id=81

We come to language on and beyond the page—articulations of the book: snapshot, found object, film, and field. Bridges between beings and beliefs. Embodiments in the sensual infrastructure. More practice than performance. Our witness, the anti-binary, beating between.

—Deborah Poe

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections keep (Dusie Press), the last will be stone, too (Stockport Flats), Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (Furniture Press). Her visual works—including video poems and handmade book objects—have been exhibited at Pace University (New York City), Casper College (Wyoming), Center for Book Arts (New York City), University of Arizona Poetry Center (Tucson), University of Pennsylvania Kelly Writers House at Brodsky Gallery (Philadelphia), and ONN/OF “a light festival” (Seattle), as well as online with Bellingham Review, Elective Affinities, Peep/Show, Trickhouse, and The Volta. She lives in Seattle.

A book is a protean kaleidoscope.

—Zuzana Husárová

Zuzana Husárová is a researcher and author in the field of electronic literature, teaching at Comenius University (SR) and University of Applied Arts (AT), an ex-Fulbright scholar at MIT, USA (2011). She is the author of experimental literature across various media, has created sound poetry, interactive digital poetry, poetic performances and transmedia poetry. She has collaborated with Ľubomír Panák on interactive literary pieces (with the use of Kinect: Enter: in’ Wodies, I: *ttter, Android application Obvia Gaude, digital literature BA-Tale, Pulse). She has co-authored with Amalia Roxana Filip transmedia projects liminal and lucent 2012-2014 (visual poetry books, sound poetry and live performances www.liminal.name), with Olga Pek a book Amoeba, has collaborated on interdisciplinary performances. She co-edited theoretical publications V sieti strednej Európy (with Bogumila Suwara) and ENTER+ Repurposing in Electronic Literature (with María Mencía).

zuz.husarova.net/

What is a book? It stinks. B.O...O.K. Like a drunk. L'IVRE. Each one is a long island, brother. L.I. BRO. A kit full of As and Bs. KITĀB. Latin LIBERation & Saxon BOG. The Taíno language would not have had a word for it but it had GUAROCO = to know, but also to remember (see petroglyphs). A book is a way of knowing, re-membering what is forever lost in translation.

—Urayoán Noel

Urayoán Noel is a South Bronx-based writer, critic, performer, translator and intermedia artist originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is an associate professor of English and Spanish at New York University, and also teaches at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. Noel is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press, 2015), as well as the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the LASA Latina/o Studies Book Award. As translator, his works include the bilingual edition Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearsman Books, forthcoming) and the chapbook No Budu Please by Wingston González, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. His non-print work ranges from durational performance and text-sound-video installations to collaborative projects with musician/composer Monxo López, artist Martha Clippinger, and dancer/choreographer Alethea Pace, among others. Noel has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and CantoMundo. His vlog is wokitokiteki.com.

urayoannoel.com

urayoannoel.bandcamp.com

A book is whatever you want it to be or don’t want it to be.

For the artist, it is a medium to be used to explore an idea and tell us something new about the world.

For the writer, it is a sequence of pages, one after another, one before another, one next to another.

For the reader, it is a site to resist or to become complicit with the intention of the artist or writer.

—Stephen Bury

Stephen Bury is the Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian at the Frick Art Reference Library, New York and the author of Artists’ Books (1995, 2015) and Artists’ Multiples (2001).

frick.org/person/bury

A book is a brick in the architecture of knowledge.

—David Clark

David Clark is a Canadian media artist whose whole thing is all about bits and pieces, narrative vertigo, and informal conundrums. After the internet was invented, he began tearing it to pieces and putting it back together bit by bit with glue and tape and with an eye for pathetic fallacy, delusions of reference, and apophenia. He teaches Media Arts at NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada.

chemicalpictures.net

A book is what reading looks like. It bears the same relationship to reading as space does to time.

—Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist and the author of twenty-one books of poetry, fiction and books for children. His latest book is the poetry collection No TV for Woodpeckers (Wolsak & Wynn). His recent national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates (Random House Canada) won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour as well as the Canadian Jewish Literary Award (Fiction) and the Hamilton Literary Award (Fiction). It was also a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His interactive writing installation using old typewriters and guitar processors was featured during 2016-2017 at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. A finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), he is a three-time recipient of Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature and has co-won the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the K.M. Hunter Arts Award.

garybarwin.com

a slow rue. a mess of beans, of categories, of spilt personalities & pretty ribbon.
an equation. a village of fractals. a before feathers there was finger painting.
a mongol court. lebanon. syria. palestine. christianity's ego trip.
what venice bit. the first sheet. the 18th paper cut. the holy letterpress sinking into the ocean.
the first binary ascending from the foam. the ephemeral joy of mildew.
a heat rash on plump thighs. the last ream. mecca. alpha. omega. a resurrection.
an insurrection.

—LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

A writer, vocalist and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at the Brooklyn Museum, the Poesiefestival in Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, the QOW conference in Slovakia, the International Poetry Festival in Bucharest, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the 56th Venice Biennale and currently in Beijing as a Red Gate Artist in Residence. As a curator and director, she has staged events at BAM Café, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, The David Rubenstein Atrium, The Highline, Poets House and El Museo del Barrio. LaTasha is the recipient of numerous awards; of them include New York Foundation for the Arts, Barbara Deming Memorial Grant, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, the Japan-US Friendship Commission, Creative Capital and the Whiting Foundation Literary Award. She lives in Harlem.

The book is a device whose content can only be imagined when it is still unread, consequently creating endless versions, and can be shared and expanded after it has been read. Still, it remains the same.

—Alessandro Ludovico

Alessandro Ludovico is a researcher, artist and chief editor of Neural magazine since 1993. He received his PhD degree in English and Media from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge (UK). He is Associate Professor at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and Lecturer at Parsons Paris – The New School. He has published and edited several books, and has lectured worldwide. He also served as an advisor for the Documenta 12's Magazine Project. He is one of the authors of the award-winning Hacking Monopolism trilogy of artworks (Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon Noir, Face to Facebook).

neural.it

In the book,
it's the eyes that meet the words
first

The book is ready and includes reviews of astronauts

Skywriting is here then it's gone

Handwriting a thing from the past is all thumbs now

For the letters that choose not to return to the word - it is a kind of suffocation

A holy text read silently, seen aloud
A book carried through history

I was reading a page in a book with an adjoining illustration that I wanted to examine closer. Instead of moving the book toward my face or my head thrust forward to see further details - i found myself putting my fingers on the image in the book and using that magnify finger and thumb motion over the picture you'd use on a tablet

—Nico Vassilakis

Nico Vassilakis writes and draws language. Many of his results can be found online and at his website:

staringpoetics.weebly.com

The book is a cultural compact, where culture may be understood as the experience of living in a place over time. A book is an insistence upon the hope to participate in an as-yet-undefined community given material form. A book’s materiality consists of acts of reception and propagation that mark that community; its form is thus iterated, variable, embodied, and entangled. Even the most trivial books memorialize their predecessors and anticipate their successors. Still the book lives among others as an other. The best books are amiable and aspire to ekstasis, they tremble in our hands or before our eyes. The worst mean to manipulate or deform desire.

—Michael Joyce

Michael Joyce is the author of fourteen books and a number of digital works, some predating the web. His most recent novel, Media: a picaresque is forthcoming in October 2018 from Steerage Press.

A book is not always a book, and a reader is not always a reader. Sometimes a book is a film—and a film projector. Sometimes a reader is a moviegoer—and a film projectionist. Our page turning sets images in motion, pulling us back into the tactile relationship to print we had as children. Or into work that has fallen into history, like the labor of film projectionists rendered obsolete by technological change. When the book is a film, then, it embodies more than a relationship between mediums, more than a mix-up of technologies variously textual and visual. It also materializes a relationship to time. It materializes historical experience in the tempos where mediums meet as we turn the book’s pages: sometimes slower, sometimes faster, sometimes bookishly, sometimes cinematically—but always historically. The book is the place where we are always in history, paging our way through time.

—Joel Burges

Joel Burges is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Rochester. He has written extensively on time, obsolescence, and labor in contemporary culture and critical theory, turning to mediums as varied as the mimeograph, animation, film, television, video games, and the book. He has published Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture (Rutgers UP, 2018) and co-edited, with Amy J. Elias, Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2018). He is at work on Literature after TV, a history of how the rise of television transformed the practice of literary writing in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

A book is a magic portal.

—Sarah Bodman

Sarah Bodman is Senior Research Fellow for Artists' Books at the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) at the University of the West of England, where she runs projects investigating and promoting contemporary book arts. She is also Programme Leader for MA Multi-disciplinary Printmaking at the Bower Ashton Campus. A book artist and researcher, she is the author of Creating Artists’ Books and the editor of the Artist's Book Yearbook, a biennial reference publication on contemporary book arts. She is also the editor of the Book Arts Newsletter and The Blue Notebook journal for artists’ books. Sarah writes a regular news column on artists’ books for the ARLIS UK and Ireland News-Sheet, and an artists’ books column for the journal Printmaking Today.

bookarts.uwe.ac.uk

Alchemy in a word, in the way a sign is scratched into the wet dirt and the dirt starts to dry and the sign is fixed. When the dirt begins to crumble before the wind, intangible, into dust, someone presses a leaf into the impression to hold it and a page is born. Then another pressing to make sure the first will not disappear. Placed one over the other, the silence between the leaves becomes a portal among the pages, leading the eyes to burrow through the opening. A dazzling. Where one listens and eventually closes one’s eyes, forgetting the frame. Such fragile fasteners hold it together, always in decay like the dry and precarious dirt. But the sounds remain. And the glow of singing between the coherence, spoken into the mind, sometimes through the fingertips, sometimes through the breath.

—Samuel Ace

Samuel Ace (formerly Linda Smukler) is a trans and genderqueer author of three collections of poetry: Normal Sex, Home in three days. Don’t wash., and most recently Stealth, with poet Maureen Seaton. A new book of poems, Our Weather Our Sea, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in early 2019. Ace is also a visual artist and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Fund Prize in Poetry, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in or is forthcoming from Poetry, Aufgabe, Fence, The Atlas Review, Black Clock, Mandorla, Versal, The Collagist, Posit, Vinyl, Troubling the Line: Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, Best American Experimental Poetry 2016, and many other publications. Ace is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Mount Holyoke College.

samuelace.com

Thinking about what the book is, for me, is also thinking about what a publication is, what it means to publish, that is, to deem a work as finished and complete and whole, to then prepare the work to be seen by others, to then share that work with others in some bound or unbound form. The book, then, has something to do with access and accessibility, with readers and readership, with the relationship and traversed distance between a writer’s hand and reader’s eye. The book, then, is the physical manifestation of a relationship between a writer and a reader.

—Janice Lee

Over Time

• the stories humans told around campfires and the ensuing conversation

then humans found a way to move those stories across time and space
• the stories and ideas humans carved into rocks
• the stories and ideas humans wrote on papyrus scrolls
• the stories and ideas humans hand-wrote and then printed on sheaths of bound paper

then when interactive media was developed
• the notion of the page expanded to include audio/video and limited interaction

and then when interactive media combined with the internet a book became
• a PLACE where humans shared stories and ideas and discussed them, returning us back to the beginning

—Bob Stein

Bob Stein is founder and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book and founder of The Voyager Company. For 13 years he led the development of over 300 titles in The Criterion Collection, a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Who Built America, and the Voyager edition of Macbeth. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. 11 years ago, Stein started 'Night Kitchen' to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing. A 2017 TED Resident, Stein's recent projects include SocialBook and Lectory.

futureofthebook.org

In the language in which I write and work, two constraints were invented. The first one concerns a flowering technique. From the core of a word, phrase, or sentence emerges the next layer of text, which develops the previous layer. One grows out from the other continuously. The second is the emanation technique, based on folding sentences, words, entire books, which allows the writer to hide huge areas of invisible text under the visible text. With a sheet of paper, the reader brings out these layers.

When I think about the definition of a book today, I am thinking of these two writing techniques, which in my opinion describe the transformation of the book as a medium. On the one hand, all its extensions, enrichment, or uses of other platforms often lead to flat and distracted reading (a characteristic of digital media); on the other, the book serves as a civilizational medium, exercising concentration, deep reading, stability. These movements (blooms and folds) also cause the medium to be constantly revived and refreshed.

—Piotr Marecki

Piotr Marecki is assistant professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and lecturer at the Polish National Film, Television and Theater School in Łódź. Since 1999 he has been editor-in-chief of Ha!art Publishing House, which he co-founded. He is also the head of UBU lab. In 2013-14 he did a postdoc at Massachussets Institute of Technology at the Trope Tank lab. His recent collaborations include the conceptual book 2x6 with Nick Montfort, Serge Bouchardon, Andrew Campana, Natalia Fedorova, Carlos León and Aleksandra Małecka published by Les Figues Press and Robbo. Solucja the book designed and generated on pure Atari (with demosceners Wojciech Bocianu Bociański, Lisu, Piotr Kroll Mietniowski and Krzysztof Kaz Ziembik). Currently Piotr works on a ZX Spectrum monograph (together with Yerzmyey and Hellboj) and is based in Kraków, Poland.

As and when language is practiced as graphic gesture, the book is whatever volume has been created by the conceptually third-dimensionless material support of leaves, inscribed and bound. The persistence of such volumes engenders the predominant imaginary of our historical enculturation and belies the circumstance that the practices these volumes seem to contain are mere dialect with respect to so much more. For, the book itself—the book that has always been to come—is simply an architectonic dwelling for language, in any form and supported by any perceptible material, a dwelling that is capacious enough to welcome and care for human life, by allowing its language to be read at length, read, that is, as located communal singularity, style, and outer-inner voice, the substance of language, the articulable substance of, all-at-once, our significance and our affect.

—John Cayley

I think of a book as a structure for reading or encountering language. That structure can be an outdoor garden with verse cast or stamped into concrete, lines printed on the structure of a bridge, wayfinding texts on a bicycle path. Of course, books also have pages, but the most interesting books lie in unconventional forms that bring alive the experience of reading through a physical engagement with all of the senses.

—Shin Yu Pai

Shin Yu Pai is the author of several books including AUX ARCS (La Alameda, 2013), Adamantine (White Pine, 2010), Sightings (1913 Press, 2007), and Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003). Her book arts projects include Hybrid Land (Filter Press, 2011) and Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks, 2007). A mid-career retrospective, ENSO, is forthcoming from Entre Rios Books. From 2015 to 2017, she served as the fourth poet laureate of the City of Redmond. Her visual work has been exhibited at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas Museum of Art, The Paterson Museum, American Jazz Museum, Three Arts Club of Chicago, The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, and The International Print Center. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pai lives in Seattle, where she works as Deputy Head of the Obscura Society and designs events for Atlas Obscura.

For more information, visit www.shinyupai.com

It’s a space that makes a space—the book opens to vastness.

—Jen Bervin

Jen Bervin is an interdisciplinary artist and poet. Her projects are research-driven and often weave together art, writing, textiles, science, and life. She has published ten books, including Silk Poems—presented as a long-form poem and as an implantable, silk biosensor developed in collaboration with Tufts University’s Silk Lab. She is a 2018 Artist in Residence at Northwestern University and is currently participating in the SETI Institute’s Artist in Residence program, which facilitates a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas between artists and scientists. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center; Granoff Center for the Arts at Brown University; and featured in exhibitions at MASS MoCA, The Power Plant in Toronto, Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Artisterium in Tbilisi, Georgia. She’s the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including The Rauschenberg Residency and a Creative Capital Grant.

jenbervin.com

… adept and affecting in a touch, a sound,

a glance in ways that transcend borders of culture, place,

religion, being, thinking, time, and hate.

—Tia Blassingame

“* The Asterisk, or Maybe” from the artist's book A Love Story, Primrose Press, 2018

Tia Blassingame is a book artist and printmaker exploring the intersection of race, history, and perception. Utilizing printmaking and book arts techniques, she renders racially-charged images and histories for a nuanced discussion on issues of race and racism. Blassingame holds a B.A. from Princeton University, M.A. from Corcoran College of Art + Design, and M.F.A. in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design. She has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo and MacDowell Colony. Her artists' books and prints can be found in library and museum collections around the world including the Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, University of Virginia, the State Library of Queensland, and Tate Britain. Her writing is featured in Freedom of the Presses: Artists' Books in the 21st Century, an upcoming Booklyn publication. Blassingame teaches Book Arts at Scripps College, and serves as the director of Scripps College Press, an experimental letterpress and bookbinding studio.

Primrose Press

Book Arts and Social Justice

The book is an author-making, reader-making, random-access text machine, usually but not always of paper that is attached, fitting in some ways both the hand and eye. Powerful and projecting, it must be bound and contained.

—Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort's computer-generated books of poetry include #!, the collaboration 2×6, Autopia, and The Truelist, the first in the new Using Electricity series from Counterpath. Among his more than fifty digital projects are the collaborations The Deletionist (with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul) and Sea and Spar Between (with Stephanie Strickland). His digital artwork has been shown internationally. He has six books out from the MIT Press, most recently The Future (in the Essential Knowledge series). He is professor of digital media at MIT and lives in New York and Boston.

nickm.com