Essential Knowledge: The Book

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 2×6 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.

A book is flight. Pages and spine, feathers and skeleton. Take off.

—Aurelea Mahood

Aurelea Mahood is a Professor of English and Liberal Studies at Capilano University.

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

Through my investigation of the nonverbal narrative in artists books, I was led to explore the essence of storytelling in the absence of words. It was not simply the linear arrangement and progression of images with storytelling qualities that I was pursuing, but rather the resonance and communicative quality that are embodied in its physicality.

Books in sculptural form are a medium for me to explore the narratives of the landscape. The book has been the vehicle of language across the ages. I consider it an intrinsically visual experience, a spatial and tactile object whose form is fundamental to conveying its message. The physicality and visual suggestions allow me to create a book conveying a language in the absence of text that speaks of the complex interaction of nature and humanity.

—Pamela Paulsrud

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

Le livre est un support matériel qui, tout au long de son histoire, a offert toujours plus de manipulabilité à son lecteur. Avec le numérique, ce n’est plus seulement le support, mais le contenu lui-même qui est manipulable.

Le support numérique s’inscrit ainsi dans une continuité. Néanmoins, on peut parler de passage à la limite dans la mesure où toute la médiation est calculée ; avec le support numérique, tout devient manipulable.

***

The book is a physical medium that, all along its history, has always offered an ever-increasing manipulability to its reader. With the Digital, it is not only the medium, but the content itself which becomes manipulable.

Thus the digital medium is a continuum. However the phrase passage to the limit is relevant in so far as the whole mediation is based on computation. With the digital medium, everything becomes manipulable.

—Serge Bouchardon

Serge Bouchardon is currently Professor at Sorbonne University, Université de technologie de Compiègne (France), where he teaches interactive writing. His research focuses on digital creation, in particular digital literature.

As an author, he is interested in the way the gestures specific to the Digital contribute to the construction of meaning. His creations have been exhibited in many venues in Europe, America, Africa and the Middle East. The creation Loss of Grasp won the New Media Writing Prize 2011.

Research: www.utc.fr/~bouchard/
Creation: www.sergebouchardon.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

When I think of what a book is, I think of Gilles Deleuze saying that instead of asking what a body is, he wants to ask what a body does. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa describing how writing makes the reader into a shape shifter. I think of Neal Stephenson’s book Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, in which a young girl in the future receives a nanotechnological book that contains an AI with the ability to talk to her and respond to her requests by transporting her to virtual worlds. I think of Ursula K Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of science fiction which says that we have had too many stories about long stiff weapons, sticks, swords and obelisks, which she calls killer culture, and she says that what we need more of are stories that can be carrier bags, containers, to carry our people, stars, memories and new worlds.

—micha cárdenas

micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor in Art & Design: Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz. cárdenas is writing a new algorithm for gender, race and technology. Her book in progress, Poetic Operations, proposes algorithmic analysis to extend intersectional analysis and develop a trans of color poetics to reduce violence against trans women of color. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. Her artwork has been described as “a seminal milestone for artistic engagement in VR” by the Spike art journal in Vienna. She is a first generation Colombian American.

michacardenas.org

… 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

In the best sense of the word connection, paper and puddles reflect the entire sky.

—CA Conrad

CAConrad is the author of 9 books of poetry and essays, the latest is titled While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017). A recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Literature, they also received The Believer Magazine Book Award and The Gil Ott Book Award. CA is currently working on a (Soma)tic poetry ritual titled, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration,” which investigates effects the vibrational absence of recently extinct species has on the body of the poet and the poems.

Their poetry is online at bit.ly/88CAConrad