meanderings

Book Art Backgrounders at Deeplinking

Robert The: “I kinda blew a fuse in my senior year—something very strange happened—and I lost my ability to read for a period of a month or two. This sharpened my interest regarding what was actually going on with the symbols that convey meaning on a concrete level.”

William F. Aicher:

March 26–July 7, 2008, MOMA

Featuring works that transform books through a variety of mediums, Book/Shelf stresses an expanded notion of the illustrated book. The exhibition begins with a documentation of Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade (1919)—a work created when the artist, while traveling, asked his sister back home to hang a geometry book on his balcony in order to let the wind flip and tear the pages. It continues with works in which artists appropriate books by others, such as a sculpture by Martin Kippenberger made partly of books, and a copy of Duchamp’s catalogue raisonné rebound by David Hammons under the title Holy Bible. Artists who tackle the idea of books in film (William Wegman), sound works (On Kawara), prints (Edward Ruscha), and drawings (Steve Wolfe) are represented as well. Finally, the exhibition surveys a number of artists who have created installations that display books in public contexts, including Brian Belott, Allen Ruppersberg, Josh Smith, and Lawrence Weiner.

Dissected book in circular acrylic case.

S T E G E R P H O T O

Smallest book in the world with millipede.

Alison Knowles — The Big Book (1967)

“…an eight foot tall construction … a front cover and several pages, and contains a stove, telephone, chemical toilet, art gallery, electric fan, books and other necessities of life.”

“ROEM enables users to download and carry with them electronic books…”

huge-entity

“What is the book?
What is mind?
How can one bridge the two? “

lindA Zacks – I Swallowed a Rainbow…

electronicbookreview.com

“Open the Book, Open the Mind”
July 11-15, 2007
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Book History is devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print.

David Small

“New visual languages have been created for information display which exploit the computer’s unique ability to render dynamic and three-dimensional typography. These languages demonstrate that the use of three dimensional form, expressive movement, visual focus and layering, in harmony with human perceptual abilities, improve navigation and contextual understanding of complex written documents.”

Small, D. Rethinking The Book. MSC Thesis, MIT 1999.

mladen penev

“…the real change we must confront and understand is not a new selection of canonical great books but, as our expressive radical moves from print to screen, a new conception of human reason and how Western culture creates and transmits it.”

The electronic word: Democracy, technology, and the arts, Richard Lanham (1993)

“This paper examines competing visions for the future of the book in the digital environment, with particular attention to questions about the social implications of controls over intellectual property, such as continuity of cultural memory”

Clifford Lynch, First Monday, volume 6, number 6 (June 2001)

Bob Stein, new media pioneer, creater of TK3, interviewed in Halo by “This Spartan Life” about future of the book as a networked, media rich, mutating, 3D navigatable space.

Bob Stein: “The much more significant issue about the book of the future is that they will be networked, and won’t be frozen; they’ll change over time, quite rapidly…[and re: Muriel Cooper's work on navigable 3D space]…To be able to walk around in a book this way will be brilliant.”