{"id":16,"date":"2013-01-23T20:44:05","date_gmt":"2013-01-23T20:44:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/?p=16"},"modified":"2013-02-11T15:05:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-11T15:05:00","slug":"read-pulp-to-pixels-artists-books-in-the-digital-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/2013\/01\/23\/read-pulp-to-pixels-artists-books-in-the-digital-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Pulp to Pixels: Artists Books in the Digital Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

From November 7th<\/sup>\u00a0through the 16th<\/sup>, the Harold F. Johnson Library at Hampshire College hosted an exhibition called Pulp to Pixels: Artists Books in the Digital Age.\u00a0 This exhibition of artists books, curated by Andrea Dezs\u00f6, Steven Daiber and Meredith Broberg, is a celebration of both traditional, physical book construction and innovative digital books. Many of the artists featured in the show have created works that bridge the chasm between the analog and digital realms.<\/p>\n

\"pulp
\nThe opening of Pulp to Pixels: Artists Books in the Digital Age was a well-attended affair!<\/em><\/p>\n

I took on the position of Archivist for Hampshire College on November 15th<\/sup>. This gave me one day to tour the exhibition before it closed. As I moved through the exhibition space I was struck by the blurring of the lines between the analog and the digital. Time-honored bookbinding techniques blend with soldering, QR codes, LEDs and computer monitors. Pop-up books share the floor with iPads. iMacs peaceably coexist with a Commodore 64. As an archivist I\u2019m more than familiar with collections that are hybrids of analog and digital materials. The artists in this exhibition are also working in a hybrid milieu and their work shows how well the tangible and the digital can enhance and complement each other.<\/p>\n

\"magicImages of the Pulp to Pixels works on the Hampshire Library Magic Board digital gallery<\/em><\/p>\n

One work that directly and physically integrate the digital with the analog was the \u201ctelescrapbooks\u201d by Natalie Freed and Jie Qi. These books use microcontrollers to communicate with each other. The\u00a0Electrolibrary<\/em>\u00a0by Waldemar Wegrzyn is a book that is full of electric contacts that allow the user to access additional online content when the book is plugged into a computer via a USB cable. These pieces utilize physical, hard connections to make the book interactive. Other pieces, like Manja Lekic\u2019s\u00a0Aunt Pepper<\/em>have no apparent \u201cdigital interactivity\u201d until the user holds the book\u2019s images up to a webcam. When the webcam \u201csees\u201d certain portions of the book\u2019s pages the computer plays music.\u00a0 Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse\u2019s aptly-named\u00a0Between Page and Screen\u00a0<\/em>also uses webcam. This work is a book with human-indecipherable geometric shapes that, when exposed to a webcam, conjures words on the computer screen which allows the reader to follow the epistolary novel encoded in the book.<\/p>\n

\"pulpTelescrapbooks by Natalie Freed and Jie Qi<\/em><\/p>\n

Not all of the artists books featured in the exhibition have a direct analog component, though. There were many pieces for which no trees gave their lives. One that immediately caught my eye was Petra Cortright\u2019s\u00a0HELL_TREE<\/em>, which is an e-book that consists of screen captures of a computer desktop with various text and images files that come together to create a cascade of content. Moving through Cortright\u2019s e-book is especially fun for an archivist \u2013 the content is all there, and the order starts to emerge as you move through the material.<\/p>\n

At the Pulp to Pixels exhibition traditionally-bound paper books coexisted with innovative sculptural books as well as QR codes<\/em><\/p>\n

I know what you\u2019re thinking. You\u2019re thinking \u201cwhat about apps?\u201d One of the apps (displayed, appropriately enough, on an iPad) on exhibit was Jason Edward Lewis\u2019Speak<\/em>, which is an application that allows the user to drag her finger through a field of letters to create instant poetry. The user can also import text from a Twitter feed to play with.\u00a0 One of the things that occurred to me as I played with Lewis\u2019 piece was the performative nature of the Pulp to Pixels show. I\u2019ve attended a lot of book art exhibitions, most of which feature books in cases and on pedestals, and I\u2019ve never seen a more interactive\/hands-on experientialcelebration of the book. Oh and if you\u2019re thinking apps are a new thing in the book world, I\u2019d direct you to Paul Zelevansky\u2019s\u00a0The Case for the Burial of Ancestors Book Two.\u00a0<\/em>This book \u2013 which is a physical, printed-on-paper book \u2013 included a floppy disc (oh the preservation issues there!) with a computer game on it. This book dates back to 1986 \u2013 likely before many current Hampshire students were born!<\/p>\n

There was also Nick Montfort\u2019s\u00a010 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));\u00a0: GOTO 10<\/em>, which features both a print book but also a Commodore 64 (which some whippersnappers may claim is an \u201cobsolete\u201d computer) in order to\u00a0\u201c<\/strong>consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interactivity and performance were the hallmarks of this show.\u00a0 While both of these concepts did not begin with e-books (pop-up books, puppet books, choose-your-own adventures, anyone?) they definitely find impressive and often instantaneous expression in the digital world. Gretchen Henderson, who gave the keynote speech at the exhibit\u2019s reception (a podcast of that speech can be found here), created the impressive\u00a0Galerie de Difformite<\/em>.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>This crowdsourced book and website invites \u201csubscribers\u201d to take images from the different exhibits on the website and manipulate (deform) them in some way. Subscribers are invited to then send the images in for inclusion on the site. The book and site thereby become a gallery \u2013 a wunderkammer \u2013 displaying these deformed, reformed, manipulated and repurposed objects. With Henderson\u2019s work the Internet becomes a conduit, allowing subscribers to take part in a growing, changing, ongoing performative work.<\/p>\n

\"tree_hell_petra_cortright\"Petra Cortright\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>HELL_TREE, displayed on an iPad<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As I moved through the exhibition that word \u201cperformative\u201d kept coming back to me. As an archivist my chief mandates are the preservation and access of information. How do we preserve the kinds of artworks found in the Pulp to Pixels exhibit? Is it reasonable to believe that in fifty years a user will be able to not just view one of these interactive pieces but also interact with it in the way(s) intended? While we can preserve these kinds of works as-is and we can also preserve records of them, it remains to be seen how \u2013 or if \u2013 we will be able to preserve the infrastructure (displays, software, Internet communication protocols) needed to make them interactive. In many ways the questions we face in trying to preserve these kinds of dynamic artworks are also faced (and being treated by) the Preserving Virtual Worlds project as well as many members of the National Digital Stewardship Project. Archivists, librarians and curators will continue to look at this kind of scholarship and research to guide our preservation decisions. In the meantime, artists will keep creating works like those showcased in Pulp to Pixels \u2013 works that integrate analog processes and digital technologies and expand our notions of what books are and what they can be.<\/p>\n

Pulp to Pixels, a Five College Digital Humanities project, was made possible by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation. For more documentation about the Pulp to Pixels exhibition go<\/em>\u00a0here<\/a><\/em>.
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The photographs on this blog were taken by Rachel Beckwith,<\/em>\u00a0Sara Krohn or Steven Daiber<\/em>\u00a0and are used with permission.
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Find out more about<\/strong>\u00a0Hampshire\u2019s new digital art gallery and listen to talk<\/a>\u00a0given during a Pulp to Pixels related event<\/strong>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

-Jimi\u00a0Jones, Archivist of Hampshire College<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From November 7th\u00a0through the 16th, the Harold F. Johnson Library at Hampshire College hosted an exhibition called Pulp to Pixels: Artists Books in the Digital Age.\u00a0 This exhibition of artists books, curated by Andrea Dezs\u00f6, Steven Daiber and Meredith Broberg, is a celebration of both traditional, physical book construction and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12827,12826],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-humanities","category-exhibits","column","threecol","has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.hampshire.edu\/theharold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}