Handiwork

“[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 

(Granary Books, 2004) 2.

"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 

(MIT Press, 2002) 107.

“Focusing on materiality allows us to see the dynamic interactivity through which a literary work mobilizes its physical embodiment in conjunction with its verbal signifiers to construct meanings in ways that implicitly construct the user/reader as well.” 

—N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines

 (MIT Press, 2002) 131.

"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

(MIT Press, 2013) 32.

Between Page and Screen