The Essay Blinks

AWP 2015

Amaranth Borsuk

@amaranthborsuk

amaranthborsuk.com

Making space

A book is a sequence of spaces.

Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment - a book is also a sequence of moments.

A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words.

—Ulises Carrión,

“The New Art of Making Books” (1975)

the experience of Reading

It might be any art: an artist’s book could be music, photography, graphics, intermedial literature. The experience of reading it, viewing it, framing it—that is what the artist stresses in making it.

—Dick Higgins, A Preface


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A House of Dust reimplementation
copyright (c) 2014 Nick Montfort <nickm@nickm.com>
based on a 1967 program by Alison Knowles and James Tenney

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
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IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

Updated 10 March 2015 to remove a duplicate value in "place".
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challenge

The best of the bookworks are multinotational. Within them, words, images, colors, marks, and silences become plastic organisms that play across the pages in variable linear sequence. Their importance lies in the formulation of a new perceptual literature whose content alters the concept of authorship and challenges the reader to a new discourse with the printed page.

—Joan Lyons, Artists’ Books

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Artists' Books

[An artist's book] integrates the formal means of its realization and production with its thematic or aesthetic issues. […] It has to have some conviction, some soul, some reason to be and to be a book in order to succeed.

—Johanna Drucker,

The Century of Artists’ Books (2004).

Material metaphors

Literature was never only words, never merely immaterial verbal constructions. Literary texts, like us, have bodies, an actuality necessitating that their materialities and meanings are deeply interwoven into each other.

—N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (2002)

Mediated Reading

As much acts of interpretation as material things, as much processes as objects, media are not merely storage mechanisms somehow independent of the acts of reading or recognizing signs they record.

—Craig Dworkin, No Medium (2013)

TEKS- To weave; also to fabricate, especially with an ax; also to make wicker or wattle fabric for (mud-covered) house walls. 1. TEXT, TISSUE; CONTEXT, PRETEXT, from Latin texere, to weave, fabricate. […] 4. craft (of weaving of fabricating). TECHNICAL, POLYTECHNIC, TECHNOLOGY, from Greek tekhne, art craft, skill.

—American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Word Roots. Ed Calvert Watkins (2000)

Handiwork

binding

A book is a community of likeminded things.

—Dieter Roth, qtd. Roth Time (2003)

Whispering Galleries

whisperinggalleries.com

<script type="text/javascript">

var t = 0,
material = ['POEMS', 'RECIPES', 'CUT-OUTS', 'TWEETS', 'STORIES', 'IDEOGRAMS', 'DIAGRAMS', 'DREAMS', 'SONGS', 'LYRICS', 'CONFESSIONS', 'FOUND IMAGES', 'ERASURES', 'REPRESSED DESIRES', 'COLLAGES', 'STRANGE SIGILS', 'MADE UP LANGUAGE', 'MAKE-BELIEVE', 'FORMS'],
place = ['IN PRIMARY COLORS', WITHOUT A COVER', 'IN DOS-A-DOS', 'IN PAPIER-MACHE', 'WITH THE SOUND OF WAVES', 'IN CODEX FORM', 'IN A STAB BINDING', 'IN A FLAG STYLE', 'IN A WIDE ACCORDION', 'IN A GREEN BOX', 'AS A DECK OF CARDS', 'IN YOUR HANDS', 'IN HEAVY INDUSTRIAL FELT', 'IMMERSED IN TALLOW', 'IN AN AIRLESS ROOM', 'IN A LIBRARY', 'IN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS', 'IN THE DISCARD PILE', 'AS A COFFEE SHOP', 'IN AN EXHIBITION', 'NONCHALANTLY INSERTED BETWEEN OTHER BOOKS', 'ENCASED IN LEAD', 'IN THE LIBRARY OF BABEL', 'IN A SACK OF FLOUR'],
light_source = ['PAGES', 'DUST', 'SAND', 'MIRROR NEURONS', 'NOTHING SO FAR', 'DISCARDED NEWSPAPER', 'FAIRY TALES', 'HAND-MADE PAPER', 'OLD PHONE DIRECTORIES'],
inhabitants = ['STARLIGHT', 'FLIGHTLESS BIRDS', 'ROBOTS', 'TOUCH', 'SMELL', 'CHAMBER CHOIR', 'CANDLELIGHT', 'CHILDREN AND OLD PEOPLE', 'UNKNOWN ARTISTS', 'LOVERS', 'BOOKSELLERS', 'PEOPLE WITH TIME', 'PEOPLE WHO SING IN THE SHOWER', 'BIBLIOPHLES', 'FRIENDS AND ENEMIES', 'INSOMNIACS', 'EXISTENTIALISTS', 'YOU', 'GRADUATE STUDENTS', 'PEOPLE FROM MANY WALKS OF LIFE', 'BENETTON MODELS', 'LES REVENENTS', 'POLYGLOT READERS', 'MONGREL POETS', 'PEOPLE WHO LOVE TO READ'];

function rand_range(maximum) {
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    return Math.floor(Math.random() * (maximum + 1));
}
function choose(array) {
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    return array[rand_range(array.length - 1)];
}
function stanza() {
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    return 'A BOOK OF ' + choose(material) + '<br \>      ' + choose(place) + '<br \>            MADE FROM ' + choose(light_source) + '<br \>                  READ BY ' + choose(inhabitants);
}
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ephemerality

Wait, later this will be nothing

—Dieter Roth, Snow (1964/65)

Between Page & Screen

Sunt lacrimae rerum

<title>A Book of Dust</title>
</head>

<body onload="produce_litany();">
<div id="info">
    <h3>homage to Alison Knowles<br />
    and James Tenney's<br />
    A House of Dust</h3>
    1967<br />
    Seimens System 4004<br />
    FORTRAN IV<br />
    <br />
    Reimplemented by<br />
    <a href="http://nickm.com" target="_blank">Nick Montfort</a><br />
    Adapted by <a href="http://amaranthborsuk.com" target="_blank">Amaranth Borsuk</a><br />
</div>
<div id="main"></div>
</body>
</html>

Abra

An Expanded Artist's Book

With Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher

"Expanded Artists' Books utilize the rich capabilities of the tablet platform to imagine new forms that a book might take, such as exploring how interactivity challenges the traditional closure of text or the performance of time."