![]() ![]() In The Book, the future is not far from the physical past. Rather than bemoaning the death of books or creating a dichotomy between print and digital media, this guide points to continuities, positioning the book as a changing technology and highlighting the way artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have pushed us to rethink and redefine the term. To see where books might be going, we must think of them as objects that have experienced a long history of experimentation and play. Performance artist and academic as well, Borsuk brings that later generational and creative perspective to the existential question - What is the book? - and, with an artist’s perception of her medium of choice, displaces the old companion existential question - Is the end of the book nigh? - with an altogether more interesting one - Where next for the book? Produced, and premiered, at HUMlab, Umeå University Even before these latest threats, book artists have long lived and worked with their own existential questions, a kind of higher existential calculus, or derivative of, the book’s crises: What is an artist’s book? What is book art? Stephen Bury, Riva Castleman, Johanna Drucker, Joan Lyons, Stefan Klima, Clive Philpott and many others in the last quarter of the 20th century dwelt on defining and categorizing book art.īorsuk belongs to a later generation of book artists that has embraced these existential crises and recognized that the book’s existential crises are what make the book a rich medium in which and with which to create art - from bio-art miniature to the biblioclastic human-scale to large-scale installations and performances. The most recent recurrence stems from the ebook’s threat to dematerialize the book and the online world’s threat to take us into a post-text future. What is a book? Is the end of the book nigh? For more than a century, those questions have returned again and again. The book has a long history of existential crises. What distinguishes Borsuk’s book are her perspective as an artist and the book’s breadth and depth despite its brevity. The proliferation of degree programs in book studies covering the history of the book, the book arts and even book art ensures The Book will not be the last. With the choir of its forebearers, Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book (MIT Press, 2018) sounds an “amen” to that truth. With apologies to the preacher: Of making many books there is no end. “ Writing, Evolution of”, in James Wright, ed., International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2d. ![]() ![]() Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. The Letter and the Cosmos: How the Alphabet Has Shaped the Western View of the World. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present New Haven: Yale University Press. “ The Miners that Invented the Alphabet - a Response to Christopher Rollston.” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 4-3: 9–22. “ My Typographies – Graphic Design Reading“, Eye, Spring 1998, 58-63. “ Abecedaries I (in progress)“, Books On Books Collection, 31 March 2020.Įlliman, Paul. ![]() As in the app, the book proceeds in gray until the letter Z, when “THINGZ” begin to happen - “Pizza! Jelly beans! Color! Books!”. They can be viewed at work here in this clip from the award-winning app, no longer available but perilously stored on an early iPad in the Books On Books Collection. Likewise in The Numberlys, our inventor-heroes (numbers 1-5 or, in their vocalizations, possibly the five vowel sounds?) lead a similarly manual existence, albeit in a more modern industrial setting. Orly Goldwasser (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) has hypothesized that illiterate Canaanite miners may have been the inventors of the alphabet around 1840 B.C.E. Around 3000 BC, someone merged pictographic signs and phonetic sounds to begin the invention of the alphabet. Clay tokens as signs (8000–3500 BC) and then pictographic marks on clay tablets (3500–3000 BC) were used for counting units of things. Accessed 28 April 2021.Īrchaeologists and paleontologists hypothesize that the alphabet evolved from counting. Exactly what our heroes didn’t even know they were missing.Īnd when the letters entered the world, something truly wondrous began to happen…īased on the award-winning app, this is William Joyce and Moonbot’s Metropolis-inspired homage to everyone who knows there is more to life than shades of black and gray. Twenty-six letters-and they were beautiful. But the five kept at it, and soon it was…artful! One letter after another emerged, until there were twenty-six. So they broke out hard hats and welders, hammers and glue guns, and they started knocking some numbers together. But our five jaunty heroes weren’t willing to accept that this was all there could be. Although bound in landscape, the book reads in portrait … to start and end. ![]()
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