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Book Art Attention Span

BOOK ARTS 2000 & BEYOND

Fifth Council of Book Arts Programs Conference February 25-28, 1999 The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa "Toward Theory, What Concepts are Evolving as the Book Arts Mature" Panel contribution by Gary Frost:

* The Image

Revivals are always overlaid with the paraphernalia of the next wave. They all end up tourist attractions. Instead of any nostalgic agenda we need to use historical perspective as a predictive mechanism. We don't want to be known for our excellent reactions to each new communication agenda. We want to be perceived as directing a new communication agenda. Too much cast iron can ruin your image particularly with information technologists and development officers.

* The Product

Artists books are a subset of books about books. Layers of stereotype of the book at work in society are in need of review. It is frequently mentioned that no reader would want to take a computer to bed or to the beach. It is less remarked that no reader would want to use a paperback in a computer game arcade or in the cockpit of a fighter airplane. Where does the book start and stop in daily lives? Whose attention span is it, anyway?

* The Customer

Book artists must project the reader's voice. The advent of the codex, in the first few centuries in north and eastern Africa was coincident with the beginning of the readers' voice. Explaining a coincidence, the codex was invented to house the reader's voice.

Using this customer orientation book artists will be in accord with a trend toward greater reader interactivity. Authors remain authors and artists remain artists, but readers are unpredictable. New reading modes are emerging along with their own specialized literacies. Young people experiment with reading. One them described the newspaper as "dirty and smelly, and there are all those words." Enough interactivity and a reader can be an author and enough experiment and a reader can be an artist. Book arts can intercept new reader navigation paths, divert them into the interior of the book and work to answer readers' unposed questions. The book begins where information leaves off.

A reader first agenda is at odds with the classical role of the inspired artistic personality. It positions the aesthetic achievement at the point of purchase rather than at the point of production. But this artistic outcome fits the medium of the book. The influence of books on society is as defining as their contents. Book artists can demonstrate this.

* The Economy

Being analog and digital at the same time is natural. Digital communications are still young variants of print; keyboards, writing, graphic design. Departing from its origins digital communication will eventually achieve its own expression through spoken interface and, more significantly, with layers of machine consciousness. At every phase book artists can intermingle analog and digital technique and help to define the influence of digital communication. Books transcend dichotomies of all kinds.

Educational, entertainment and communication media, unlike their underlying technologies, do not succeed each other as much as they accumulate over time. During this accumulation the media modify each other simultaneously so that any subsequent comparisons of different media can never be conducted using their previous identities. The traditional paper book has transformed on-line publication ...and vice versa. So now the comparisons themselves are skewed. The expression, "hard (copy)", is not native to print and "(hyper)text" is not native to cyberspace.

* The Business Plan

Information technologies are now so complex and diverse that they are in constant revision and replacement. They cannot be maintained, let alone preserved over time. As a result, the content of these systems is subject to dissolution and chaos. This is a significant and risky departure from a humanistic approach to transmission of knowledge. Tangible days are over and tacit knowledge, remote learning, multiple media and disintermediation are in.

As a result the short term agenda for the book artist is the long term. Since digital technology blurs traditional distinctions, what were once peripheral functions can move to the center. Librarians are discovering that you can lose your title but move your functionality to the center. Book artists are in the same position. Book arts programs can show their centrality to parent institutions by spreading their influence to the larger, undergraduate market and popular digital reading modes. We also provide a liberal arts education as we teach the interface of the book.