Interaction: New Media & Book Arts
Books05: Noosa Regional Gallery Forum
September 2004

I am very pleased to be able to talk to you about what I see are some similarities and crossovers between book arts and new media arts. I hope to speak in a fairly personal and observational way here.

My own artistic practice is based on writing and includes hypertexts, artist books and various text-based works including public artworks. I am also an arts writer and presently writing a series of essays which, in a nutshell, explore the confluence and contiguity of image and text in contemporary artistic practice. It’s a fairly broad inquiry which I have just started thanks to some funding from the Visual Art and Crafts Board of the Australia Council.

In this session, my brief is to take you on a bit of a tour of new media practices and also to highlight some of the linkages across new media and book arts. It’s not as big a leap as it might seem despite the seeming gulf between analogue and digital environments. I am working from the premise that digital media and its impact on the textual and visual environment gives us an opportunity to re-examine the printed word. The sort of examination that this heralds hasn’t been possible for several hundred years. I have been at several artist book and arts publishing forums where questions about new technology have been completely dismissed and ignored. So, even though we’re here to talk about interaction, we have to be aware that there are some contexts in which interaction (at least, at the level of discourse) does not occur. This makes for some interesting silences and spaces.

In order to undertake the sort of inquiry I want to undertake, I have to shift my focus from artist books to something else – perhaps artist publishing or perhaps artist writing. My overarching interest is writing and text. I predominantly work with text and explore the things I can do with words and the places I can put words. Of late this has taken an interesting and unexpected turn because I’ve been invited to participate in a couple of public art projects. Much depends on how we define some key words – words like technology, textuality and publishing – bearing in mind that my overarching interest is text and this of course relates to practices of reading and writing. I am also someone who agrees with the contention that the book and the text are technologies in and of themselves. Funny things happen to technology, though not exclusively technology – we fetishise it, we habituate it, we fear it, we loathe it, we love it. Even though I see those things as technologies, one thing I need to say upfront is that I do not believe that new media works are the same as artist books. I know they are different and that’s why I need to talk about artist publishing or writing and some tendencies inherent in that. I also come at this from the perspective of someone interested in experimental publishing and literature. There’s much potential to explore this in quite an intersected way.

We’re probably all well aware of how, historically, there’s been a bifurcation in the description of book works where artist books are described as falling into the following categories:

:: the book as object
:: the book as idea

To admit my own prejudices, I am more interested in examining works where the ‘book as idea’ is at play. These works tend to be more conceptual and more experimental. It’s with these works that I see more apparent connections between book, text and new media practices. There’s something going on that’s about undoing the book form and interrogating its cultural significance in terms of literacy and knowledge. However, there are lots of different kinds of artist books just like there are lots of different kinds of new media works.

What also interests me, from the perspective of someone who works across media and who has done a fair bit of writing about new media art, is the fact that this new technology is redefining – and that doesn’t have to be a deterministic exercise – the technologies it co-exists with and it’s changing our relationships with those technologies. We live with a plurality of technologies and media and, yet, this plurality is often ignored or is disparaged in particular contexts. Those sorts of reactions range from declamations that ‘the book is dead’ to ‘the internet is a passing fad’. To my mind both claims are preposterous especially when you consider the impact of various technologies on the production of books and the way the internet and other technologies have impacted on the way we think, read, write and the like. To my mind, the book is technology for both writing and reading. The theorist N Katherine Hayles says the book is an artifact whose physical properties and historical usages structure our interactions with it in ways obvious and subtle. It defines the page as a unit of reading, and binding pages sequentially to indicate an order of reading. To change the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring the relation of word to world.

The internet has also impacted on our approaches to design and aesthetics. Obviously practices are always going to be media specific. I am a member of a few artist book discussion lists and to one of those I posted an announcement about a MIT project where researchers were developing digital paper. One person replied to that with the question, ‘yes, but can you marble it?’. Obviously there’s an issue in there about the specificity of media and N. Katherine Hayles is one theorist who explores this in detail. Fundamentally, she is concerned with the literary work because she says that literary criticism, unlike art criticism, does not account for materiality or the objectness of things. I like the exchange across literary and arts criticism that happens in Hayles’ criticism.

She argues that works produced for one media (such as print or book) cannot operate the same in any other medium. For example, if I am reading one of Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine books, it’s not really possible for me to remove a printed letter from a physical envelop (albeit adhered to a page of a book) on the internet in a fairly naturalistic or familiar manner. Nor would I have the same squeamishness or apprehension about reading other people’s mail. On the internet, that’s actually a completely different experience and Hayles argues that’s because of the materiality of those words or works. Particular bodily and spatial relationships are drawn between the book or the screen and thus the word and the work. So to get back to this question of ‘interaction’, obviously interaction in analog and digital media is experienced differently and is contingent on the materiality of the works we are interacting with. As the Nick Bantock example demonstrates, I interact with a book and a website differently and I respond to the materiality of those works or words differently. So really, all I have said is that books and websites are different and that works produced for and presented in those media in turn produced different relationships with us.

Hayles is also more interested in what could be described as a literary work. However I would think that the boundaries are not so easily defined and that there are many ‘literary objects’ in the artworld. These might generally be identified as various kinds of ‘art writing’. By extension, there’s also rather a nice kind of interweaving – or perhaps, interleaving - between the object-ness and idea-ness of various kinds of works. However, for the moment, it suits me to keep those two defining categories of book arts apart. Darren Tofts is a Melbourne based theorist who investigates avant-garde practice. I n writing about cyberculture, he doesn't think it all just happened. He is skeptical about the hype surrounding cyberculture and the incipient promises of virtual futures, all too often couched in descriptive and well-intentioned neologisms.

Tofts argues that despite the apparent novelty of cyberculture, there is something to be gained by including history in our perceptions of cyberculture's nascent artforms. He doesn't argue for this in the 'ho-hum-all-been-done-before' way that proponents of generation wars or 'endist' discourses might argue it. Instead, he claims that all is not as it might seem:

rather than being new of necessity, hypermedia's contribution to and advancement of the cultural apparatus of representation lies in its re-constitution of the historical practices it re-combines.

The challenge is to talk and construct cyberculture in ways that do not subscribe to a normative notion of a post-historical age. Through a shift of perspective which includes history, he points not only to change but also to continuity. Persistence is a word that seems necessary in understanding what Tofts is doing by including history in his account of cyberculture. In referring to the 'recombinant logic' of hypermedia and cyberculture, he alludes to the persistence of seemingly unnamed and experimental artistic practices, which to some might actually be called the avant-garde. Recalling artists who don't or haven't quite 'fit in' - James Joyce, Stephen Mallarme, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, John Cage, Gregory Ulmer, Jon McCormack and Troy Innocent - Tofts asserts that certain "inflections, attitudes and energies" persist into the present and persist into the virtual realm. They persist, not through feats of endurance, but in random moments of resonance.

There's some discomfort in discussing 'new media' because of its more elusive and emergent qualities, because there always seems to be more questions than answers. Tofts investigates and creates ways in which old and new media interrelate. He asks, "in what ways do hypermedia practices have to be reconciled with those media, such as the book, cinema, television, animation etc, which have contributed to its recombinant logic?"(6)

Since the 1960s, commentaries about artist books in the ‘book as idea’ camp have variously made reference to: democratisation of culture which impinges on art system; technological speed and changing information environment with particular reference to television; particular agendas of artists in terms of erasing boundaries between subject and object, art and life; the flexibility of many aspects of the book from design to materials to edition to form; the relationship of the book to time, privacy and permanence; reader reflexivity; cheap and accessible printing and distribution methods (such as photocopying, postal system); artist books as portable, personal and disposable; they were means of creating artwork other than painting and sculpture; galleries without walls; artist books as occupying a place between image and text; and so on. The focus has not solely been on books and artists were making, just as they continue to make, postcards, pamphlets and posters as well. There was a different idea about the dispersed object.

Generally speaking, I have heard the same said of various new media artworks, particularly hypertexts, so clearly there is a shared ethos of the ‘book as idea’ and certain new media practices. In the digital age, we might think in terms of the ‘networked object’. So to spring back to Darren Tofts’ assertions, there have consistently been artworks that do not subscribe to normative perceptions of cultural works, that don't seem to 'fit in'. The threads and ideas that have come to inform cyberculture as we know it are deeply rooted in western society – one cannot simply look at cyberculture and ignore all that has come before it. Tofts suggests that various ideas and practices have existed fleetingly and persistently across multiple times, technologies and spaces. And this is what I suggest is the case with some book arts and new media art. Even when considering the media specificity of those works, we can see the ways in which hypermedia have recombined our cultural forms. Adelaide based artist and theorist Teri Hoskin calls these kinds of works ‘the other writing’ and I think that’s quite compelling because she’s pointing to an idea that these works kind of disappear from view and are doing something with text and image in quite a fugitive way.

I thought it might be worth looking at a few works that somehow do something with the idea of the book or could be read as having that look and feel. There’s a heap of works I could show but for convenience sake I just decided to focus on my own work and a few things I had at home. By no means am I holding up my own work as the best examples. The technology we work with still uses a print-based language even though there are some overtures to shifted levels of interactivity – we develop web pages, PDFs are a kind of electronic book designed to be downloaded and printed, we publish web pages. Likewise, a lot of that software is designed for the development of print-based work. Now I wouldn’t necessarily call these works artist books nor would I be inclined to call them electronic artist books or artist ebooks. It’s just that I can see there’s something going on across these works that’s reminiscent of book art.

Interface is an important word. So in working with the book as a model, this question of interface becomes more dynamic – we see the printed page as a kind of interface. However, in providing a critique of the user-friendly interface, Paul Brown argues that “by adopting metaphors which reflect existing media usage these interface tools reinforce traditional points of view and make it difficult, if not impossible, to investigate and develop a new multimedia context and language”. Brown expresses a concern about the user-friendly interface which has resulted in the ‘publication’ of artworks on ‘pages’. For Brown, these kinds of practices and metaphors merely reinforce an old paradigm of print. In turn this means that new methodologies and critical dialogues are not being pursued. Complex technologies merely pretend to be simple in the guise of user-friendliness. It’s when we look at this field with these kinds of sensibilities that we see things like ‘ebooks’ pose a bit of a problem. The publishing industry hasn’t warmed to, actually they haven’t caught on to, ideas about hypermedia: it has almost exclusively picked up on the web and new technologies as a means of distributing, marketing and selling books. It’s really about selling the same kind of product using these capacities rather than doing anything new with it. So obviously there’s a place for artists to be doing the hard slog and the unfunded research to put interactive work out there.

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Like all nine-year-olds, my niece loves to make things. She is just as comfortable collaging and painting on paper as she is writing and making images using the computer. This is one of her works where she writes stories and assembles clip art in Power Point to make slide shows. So to her that’s a kind of story or scrapbook. I wanted to show you this work first because there are generations of people who will be living in this world of technology in very different ways to our generations. They will traverse a technosphere with apparent ease and be nonplussed about using whatever media suit their creative or other ends.

Generally speaking, my work is very simple and low tech. It doesn’t make for the most cutting edge new media art or writing but it does give me mental space to explore one or two ideas and develop a handful of skills along the way. There are people who are better equipped and better funded than me who will make the grand statements about electronic textualities and electronic literacies. Having spent the misspent part of my youth in the 80s – post-punk era - I come from a background of independent media like cut and paste zines and have worked in both web and print publishing in various capacities. I now realise that in those cut and paste misdemeanours - using stills from Bunuel, Kurasowa and Fassbinder films, cartoonish drawings, manipulated photocopies of anything and everything, appropriated storylines and newspaper headlines - I was making hypertexts. I don’t think my creative writing lecturer at the time saw it like that.

Because I have a niece, I was quite interested in doing some work for kids and did a series of pamphlets called The Adventures of Green Bear. These are downloadable PDFs and the reader can cut them out and fold them. This is just cute work that’s been assembled using digital photos and software like Photoshop and Freehand. People’s favourites tend to be Green Bear Goes to Venice and Green Bear Stops to Smell the Roses. I’ve had people tell me they’ve downloaded them and made them up into pamphlets or panorama as well as printed them off and pinned them on the wall. Just to make a distinction these are artist books not new media works – they’re just distributed via the internet but the availability of the graphics and web tools means they function in different production environment.

My own works heavily reference a book or print aesthetic. I find it kind of contrary when book scholars say things like digital artists have much to learn from print aesthetics. It’s odd because print aesthetics have actually informed and shaped our textual environments for the past half millennium or so. I suppose there are many histories of technological change in human history and changing or fragmenting textual environments make people very anxious and nervous. Again there’s a devaluing of the digital knowledge where knowledge of coding or software, for example, isn’t considered to be equal to knowledge of archival glue or board grain. I just think it’s always important to be aware of these kinds of biases because if we don’t, we can and do actually miss out on some interesting stuff in this world.

speak: a hypertext essay . In this work and being a critical writer, I was interested in exploring how I can bring different aspects of my work together. I sought to somehow build into the essay form a graphic and non-lineal reading path. And that was fundamentally constructed by a linking structure and pop-up windows as well as an open navigation system. It is intentionally a very simple work that doesn’t have lots of bells and whistles. In a review of this work, one critic did describe it as having a ‘bookish’ quality and that’s intended. It’s like a book but not and the point of the work is to equally foreground and displace some print tropes. At present there’s the web version and then I produced a downloadable PDF book which people can print off and bind themselves. John used a bulldog clip to bind his copy and I’ve got a copy using an Ibco binding comb. So there’s an idea there of kicking back to the reader, letting them complete the work or not, rearrange the pages if they like or whatever. I am planning to revisit this work at some point to produce it in Flash. That should change the look and navigation of the work in a way that makes it more at home on the web.

My most current work is called racconto ]telling[ and for this work I have tried to lift my game to develop higher level web authoring skills and to work with the different capacities of the web like programming, Flash animation and other kinds of software. This work kind of drifts a little in the sense that it’s very much grounded in print and I have appropriated a lot of imagery from illuminated manuscripts and books of hours to use the screen for a different kind of illumination. It’s still not quite ready for publication because not all the elements are in place but the sorts of histories I am exploring are about the transition from script or hand rendered object to print to digital, ideas about games, fate and chance through a random generation capability within the work. There are so many digitisation projects around the world in museums and libraries we can experience some of these medieval and renaissance works virtually. As you can see, the pages of this work very much resonate with the printed or hand drawn page with quite small interactive or animated interventions throughout the work. With so many pop-up windows in this work, I really wanted readers to get a sense of being able to arrange and rearrange pages on the screen and to experience the spatiality of the screen. My longer term objective with this work is to produce a printed book and cdrom set from this work – mostly that’s because that means I will have an object to sell but also it’s an exercise in negotiating textual environments across media.

The cdrom is, or perhaps I should be saying ‘was’ these days, a different kind of technology. Artist cdroms attracted quite a bit of attention about 10 years ago but their importance doesn’t stop there. Given miniscule web bandwidth and access 10 years ago and until recently, the cdrom provided a very important and cost effective means of producing, distributing and exhibiting highly interactive multimedia works. Burning the Interface, curated by Mike Leggett, was one of the first exhibitions of artist cdroms having been presented in 1996. I didn’t see the show but I do have the catalogue and have seen some of the works which it included. In re-reading some of the writing which accompanied that exhibition, I became aware of the lack of reference to technological innovation in print or analogue work. I won’t go into great detail about the aesthetics and technicalities of this artform but the key words that crop up are: interface, interaction and immersion. I would like to say that some of these practices aren’t unique to digital technologies but rather that, on the one hand, digital technologies have been able to do something for or with these words and, on the other hand, these words have been able to do something for or with digital technologies. There’s a nice little circuit or feedback loop of meaning and interpretation going on there.

Mike Leggett makes the point that the “printed book is one interactive model used frequently in popular cd-rom titles”. He says, “The interacting subject, by definition, is the same kind of close proximity to a work as the reader of a book … Some artists have experimented with this model.” He cites John Collette’s 30 Words for the City works as using the book as a starting or reference point. So while some artist cdroms might look like books or experiment with the book, there are other works in this exhibition that remind me of what artist books can do – Eric Lanz’s Manuskript which uses photographs of tools placed against a white background, meticulously lined up and grouped together, like so many letters making so many words, they seem to simulate the hieroglyphs of some strange script. By clicking on the tool, it appears in a pop up window. Linda Dement’s Cyberflesh Girlmonster was also in this show – it’s assemblage specifically designed for the multimedia environment with a concealed navigation pathways. It is reminiscent of the kind of collaborative collaging experiments like Vivienne Binns’ Tower of Babel. Here women have donated images or scans of their body parts and supplied some spoken word to describe the body part. Dement has pieced it all together to create this monstrous and uncanny images. As you click and roll over, you don’t know what will happen next: “when a viewer clicks on one of these “monsters”, the words attached to that body part could be heard or seen, another monster may appear, a digital video could play, or a story or medical information about the physical state described by the story may be displayed”.

I’m kind of interested in this idea of producing books from websites and multimedia works, reinterpreting or adapting work and exploring different media. So not everyone is assuming the death of the book but rather a different kind of life in a different kind of world. I mentioned Teri Hoskin before. Teri is the co-ordinator and curator of the electronic Writing Research ensemble and she devised a project called ensemble logic. In the first instance, she invited a bunch of electronic writers to engage in online conversations about their work and we all talked and produced work. Then she pulled the work together for a beautifully designed publication which included a cdrom and book. She described this publication as a “trajectory from the website. It is a chance to consider how writing for online environments translates in-to, back-to, the book.” So obviously, there are people who continue to draw lines across media because they share something as well as do something different – that shared something might be as simple as being technologies for storing information in various formats. However, in the context of ensemble logic, that something is writing. Nick Bantock is also one of those people having developed a multimedia version of Griffin and Sabine for cdrom.

Another one of those people is Suzanne Treister whose work No Other Symptoms: Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky resulted in a cdrom and book publication. I really enjoy Suzanne’s work: it’s autobiography and pure fantasy at the same time. One of the issues with cdroms of course is that many of those earlier ones no longer work in new systems – so there’s an archiving issue which libraries, galleries and museums are grappling with. Treister’s character Rosalind Brodsky is a time traveller and researcher at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality. She travels back in time seeking psychoanalysis with Freud, Jung, Klein, Kristeva and Lacan. The cdrom and book document Brodsky’s life and times with diary entries, recipes from Brodsky’s Time Travelling Cookery Show, the psychiatrist case notes and some other stuff.

Thanks for your time and interest …