Cohere

__________

Disperse

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge that the main title of this dissertation ‘Cohere & Disperse’ is a reference to Painting Theory (1970), Mel Brochner. Brochner’s use of language and his systematic approach to analysing painting and photography has been a particular inspirational throughout my research. I would also like to acknowledge Dr Josaphine Machon’s Scale of Immersion, which I learned of at her motivating presentation made at the ‘Performance and Immersion Symposium’ held at the Alec Clegg Studio, University of Leeds on Friday 30 November 2012.

I would like to express deep gratitude to my Practice in Context supervisor, Nick Thurston, for his guidance, enthusiasm and constructive critique of this research project. I would like to thank my tutors, Chris A. Taylor, Richard D. Bell, Simon Lewandowski and John McDowell for their support and guidance. My grateful thanks are also extended to Sarah Bodman for her enthusiastic and inspirational correspondences. The ‘Disperse’ part of this section could not have taken place if it weren’t for the expertise of Michael Murphy. I would also like to thank the helpful staff in the Special Collections located at the V&A Library, London for their assistance. Finally, my grateful thanks are also extended to Akeelah Bertam, Matthew Crowther, Sarah Harrison, Jinny Hayman, David Hill, David Jones, Janis Jones, Sarah Jones, Jane Massey and Dr. Brynnen Massey and the members of 5/7 Lifton Studios, University of Leeds for their ongoing support and generosity of time.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: La Monte Young, An Anthology of Chance Operations (U.S.A: La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963) V&A Library Special Collections, Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 2: The I Ching, key for identifying the hexagrams for the edition used by John Cage from The I Ching Book of Changes, The Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, foreword by C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XIX (New York: Pantheon books, 1950) cited in Sounds Like Silence: John Cage – 4’33” – Silence Today eds. Dieter Daniels and Inke Arns (Leipzig: Hartware MedienKunstVerein & Spector Books, 2012) Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 3: George Brecht, Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) in An Anthology of Chance Operations by La Monte Young (U.S.A: La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963), Colour Photograph: Scribd.com <http://www.scribd.com/doc/6512071/LaMonte-Young-An-Anthology-of-Chance-Operations> [accessed 9 February 2013]

Figure 4: George Brecht, Chance Imagery A Great Bear Pamphlet (Something Else Press, New York, 1966) V&A Library Special Collections, Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 5: Jackson Mac Low, Asymmetries in An Anthology of Chance Operations by La Monte Young (U.S.A: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1963), V&A Library Special Collections, Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 6: John Cage, 4’33” Sounds Like Silence: John Cage – 4’33” – Silence Today ed. Dieter Daniels and Inke Arns (Leipzig: Hartware MedienKunstVerein & Spector Books, 2012) p. 113

Figure 7: La Monte Young, Composition 1960 #9 in An Anthology of Chance Operations by La Monte Young (U.S.A: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1963) V&A Library Special Collections, Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 8: Earle Brown, Dec. 1952 from Folio in An Anthology of Chance Operations by La Monte Young (U.S.A: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1963), V&A Library Special Collections, Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 9: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within La Monte Young, An Anthology of Chance Operations (U.S.A: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1968) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 10: Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1964) V&A Library Special Collections, Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 11: Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1964) V&A Library Special Collections, Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 12: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1964) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 13: Simon Morris, The Royal Road to the Unconscious (Information as Material, York, England, 2003) Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (15 February 2013)

Figure 14: Simon Morris, The Royal Road to the Unconscious (Information as Material, York, England, 2003) Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (15 February 2013)

Figure 15: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Simon Morris, The Royal Road to the Unconscious (Information as Material, York, England, 2003), Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 16: Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud (Information As Material, 2005) Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (15 February 2013)

Figure 17: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud (Information As Material, York, England, 2005) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 18: Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler Henry, apostrophe (ECW Press, Canada, 2006) Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (15 February 2013)

Figure 19: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler Henry, apostrophe (ECW Press, Canada, 2006) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 20: Rachter, The Police Man’s Beard Is Half-Constructed (New York: Warner Books Inc., 1984)

Figure 21: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Rachter, The Police Man’s Beard Is Half-Constructed (New York: Warner Books Inc., 1984) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 22: Klaus Scherübel, Mallarmé, The Book (New York: Printed Matter Inc., 2004) Printed Matter.org (12 June 2004) <http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/mallarme-the-book/> [accessed 16 January 2012]

Figure 23: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Klaus Scherübel, Mallarmé, The Book (New York: Printed Matter Inc., 2004) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 24: John Barth, ‘Frame Tale’ in Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Anchor, 1988) cited in ‘The Longest Shortest Story Ever Told’ <http://spherecow.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/the-longest-shortest-story-ever-told/> [accessed 2 February 2013]

Figure 25: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within John Barth, ‘Frame-Tale’,Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Anchor, 1988) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 26: Raymond Quenaue, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) ‘Portugal Confidential’ <http://portugalconfidential.com/2012/08/tarefas-infinitas-books-as-art-museu-museum-calouste-gu lbenkian/> [accessed 4 December 2012]

Figure 27: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Raymond Quenaue, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 28: Chris Fritton, Why We Lose Our Hands (2011) Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 29: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Chris Fritton, Why We Lose Our Hands (2011) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 30: Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen, 1st Edition (Siglio Press, 2012) Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 31: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen, 1st Edition (Siglio Press, 2012) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 32: Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud App (2011) Colour Photograph: Rebecca Jones (19 December 2012)

Figure 33: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud App (2011) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 34: Small Design Firm (founded by David Small), Illuminated Manuscript (2002) ‘Judirontenberg’,

<http://www.judirotenberg.com/images.asp?id=52&type=0> [accessed 26 January 2013]

Figure 35: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Small Design Firm (founded by David Small) Illuminated Manuscript (2002) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 36: Susan Hiller, Witness (2000) ‘Markmeynell’ <http://markmeynell.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/fully-immersed-into-babel-and-ghost-towns-susan-hil lers-witness-j-street/> [accessed 17 January 2013]

Figure 37: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Susan Hiller, Witness (2000) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 38: Janet Cardiff and Bures Miller, The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012) ‘Spike Art’ <http://www.spikeart.at/en/l/extra/Themen_Park/No__3> [accessed 5 February 2013]

Figure 39: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Janet Cardiff and Bures Miller, The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012) Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Figure 40: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1964), with examples of high and low immersion based upon and adapted version of Josaphine Machon’s Scale of Immersivity. Graph Illustration: Rebecca Jones (2 December 2012)

Abstract

This paper uses language as a tool to measure and evaluate infinity within book works. Inspired by Mel Bochner’s systematic approach to analysing painting¹ and photography, this paper utilizes a systematic process in order to evaluate fifteen book works made from 1958 to 2012. Drawn to the paradox of using such a rigid and systematic method upon the evaluation of book works that are measureless, fluid and changing, it is delivered in two parts: ‘Cohere’ (Practice in Context) and ‘Disperse’ (Context in Practice).

Cohere uses language, images and continuums to deconstruct and examine each book work’s constituent elements: starting with material composites, to a basic description, through to imagery, followed by an exploration of the book works’ wider context and finally evaluating the book works according to an adapted version of Josephine Machone’s Scale of Immersivity. Due to the nature of infinity, a non-conclusion is formulated which discusses the inescapable subjectivity of language and the disposition of infinite and changing book works.

A more appropriate conclusion illustrating the fragility and dynamic nature of language is demonstrated in ‘Disperse’, which will reconstruct ‘Cohere’ by subjecting it to a randomizing algorithm written in collaboration with Michael Murphy. In doing so, it illustrates one of the infinite variations of this paper, which can be found at www.rebeccajanejones.com/coheredisperse.

Glossary of Terms

Animated concrete poem	A piece of text that contains both movement and visual poetry.
Desacrilization	The removal of the artist from an elevated status.
Immersive	A deep physical and mental involvement causing a visceral experience based upon Josephine Machon’s ‘Scale of Immersivity’, which considers six main elements in relation to immersive performance. These elements are: space, sound, duration, interdisciplinary and hybridization, bodies and the pivotal role of the audience.
Mobius strip	A surface with one side, which can be made by giving a strip of paper a half twist and joining the ends together.

Introduction

During the twentieth century, books demonstrated their capacity to be one of the most adaptable and flexible modes of aesthetic communication. No other medium can contain and support so many other art forms² – which include simple text, drawing, print, painting, poetry, performance, musical scores, photography, sculpture and animation. Books as a medium can form a space or site wherein other mediums can be presented and combined.

Books serve as an important platform for artistic expression, and have played a vital role through many art movements: from the ephemeral books made during Russian futurism to the photographic book works of Bauhaus. Man once preserved and disseminated his ideas through the book, which served as a fundamental tool in order for us to build upon society: simultaneously connecting us to our ancestors and to future generations. However, man now places his knowledge and legacy into the virtual depths of the World Wide Web. Where does this position the book now? Yvette Hawkins suggests the book is situated between living and dying:

In the face of this tug of war between the march of technology and legacy of history, the book seems to float in a limbo state; existing somewhere between life and death, it still performs its function yet lives constantly under threat of redundancy.³

However, Joanna Drucker would argue that ‘there are no limits to what […] books can be and no rules for their construction – and fortunately there is no end to their production in sight’.⁴

‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’⁵

(Samuel Beckett, Proust and the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, 1965)

Infinity and the Limitations of Language

Where do we begin when attempting to describe the infinite book?

The infinite book would require an infinite book to explain it.

Yet, we do not need to write the infinite book describing the infinite book because it already exists inside the infinite book.

But let us say for a moment we have lost the section of the infinite book that describes it. Perhaps the section had four parts:

A, B, C, and D.

How would we begin to describe each part of the infinite book when each chapter simultaneously impedes and contaminates the part before and the part after? We will never do the description of the infinite book justice; nor will the description suffice in describing the infinite book. Perhaps the true description (of the infinite book, or that of any book, or that of art, or that of indeed anything) would be the total sum of all of its descriptions.

Yet, with every written word its essence dilutes

– but what an immensely useful task for us to try.

‘Somewhere between the book as the world (the complete universe of human experience metaphorized into a representation) and the world as a book (a bound object so replete one is lost in its complex field forever) are real books.’⁶

(Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, 2004)

Cohere

__________

Fluxus

1. PAPER + GLUE

Sixty-one sheets of multi-coloured paper and two envelopes,

containing printed text and images, bound together with glue.

Figure 1

During the early 20th century, Duchamp utilized chance procedures within his construction of art works as a way of escaping traditional processes:

3 Standard Stoppages, which Duchamp later referred to, as ‘canned chance’, is a box containing three variations on the metre: ‘A straight horizontal thread one metre long falls from a height of one metre onto a horizontal plane distorting itself as it pleases and creates a new shape of the measure of length.’⁷

Inspired by Duchamp, the systematic use of chance was a method Cage adopted to ‘let the sounds be themselves, rather than vehicles for manmade theories, or expressions of human sentiments.’⁸

Initially, Cage applied a complex system to composition, using the I Ching, but later developed compositions that were indeterminate in relation to its performance. On 29 August 1952, 4’33” (four minutes and thirty-three seconds) premiered, performed by David Tudor. This three-movement composition without intentional sound is considered to be Cage’s most prominent piece. Cage describes 4’33” as ‘an art without work’.⁹ Cage took away the subjectivity of the composer and allowed the performer to unlock the creative potential of the composition.

Figure 2

The piece has the capability to go in a multitude of directions, perhaps beyond what the composer originally envisioned. Cage once said, ‘My favourite music is the music I haven’t yet heard. I don’t hear the music when I write. I write in order to hear the music I haven’t yet heard.’¹⁰ Cage’s experimental approach to composition was influential across the arts, and played a vital role in the emergent of Fluxus.

A prime example of the type of work following 4’33”, and an epitome of Fluxus notions, is a book called An Anthology of Chance Operations, assembled by La Monte Young in 1963. The document includes work by artists, composers, poets and dancers – blurring the lines between disciplines and between life and art. The publication contains chance compositions, graphic notation, stories, dance constructions, concept art, concrete poetry, anti-art, indeterminacy, meaningless work, natural disasters, plans of action, diagrams, music, essays and compositions.

Twenty-five Fluxus artists contributed, such as Walter De Maria, Earle Brown, John Cage, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Jason Mac Low, Dieter Roth (previously known as Diter Rot), Emmet Williams, Claus Bremer and many more. Prior to each work the book reveals the title, author and disposition – for example Mac Low’s section includes music, poetry, story, essays, indeterminacy and chance operations, whereas Higgins hosts dance, mathematics and compositions.

Throughout the book, musical qualities are apparent within its diverse content. For Higgins, ‘any event occurring in time could be perceived as music…dance, poetry and drama could be considered as so many specific types of “musical activity”’,¹¹ the only difference being that poetry stresses words and dance accentuates physical movement. This emphasis on duration instead of harmony caused new modes of musical composition to be developed. ‘Cage shifted from the metronome to the stopwatch as a means to measure duration as the framing element for the “events” occurring within it.’¹² Thus, creative practice for Cage and many others was no longer about being ‘in time with the music’, but about what it meant to ‘be in time’.

At the beginning of An Anthology, George Brecht published Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event), which is a score for any number of cars arranged outdoors. The score is made up of 44 card sets, and there are as many sets of instructions as there are vehicles. All instruction sets are shuffled collectively, and each performer per vehicle receives 22 cards. The instructions cover a wide range of actions from ‘Pauses’ to ‘Parking lights on (1-11), off’. The audience is invited to use ordinary tools or objects to create a performance that is not only musical, but explores the potential of chance – embracing the unstable qualities and unpredictable outcomes chance and audience intervention have to offer.

Figure 3

Brecht also explored methods of evoking chance in his publication Chance Imagery, which discusses and explains the use of bowl drawing, dice, coins, cards and many other means of creating chance. Objects that are easily accessible and commonplace to most households became the subject of exploration, which distorted the line between life and art, consequently causing the desacrilization of artists.

Figure 4

Mac Low published Asymmetries in An Anthology, which explains methods for reading asymmetries and chance procedures in order to provide words outside of one’s ego or institutional motives. In conjunction with this, Mac Low gave the space between words (silence) equal importance to words. For Mac Low, this white space was ‘equal in duration to the time it would take to read aloud the words printed anywhere above or below them’.¹³ Paradoxically, the white space or silence only comes to life when the poem is read. One cannot exist or be experienced without the other. Such typographic experimentation and alternate word arrangement was famously explored by Stéphen Mallarmé in his poem Un Coup de des jamais n’abolira le hazard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance)¹⁴ and influenced concrete poets like Rot and Williams.

Figure 5

This interest in ‘silence’ and the importance of white space can be considered when looking again at Cage’s 4’33”. Through the absence of sound within 4’33”, one is made acutely aware of the presence of sounds. With this in mind, traditional notation did not carry the means in which to score the new sounds and ideas that were being used. It could indicate pitch, duration and dynamics but could not notate silence, which is pitchless. The traditional notation of music did not allow the performer any options and for these reasons dynamic scoring methods, such as graphic scores or word notation, became favourable among composers and artists.

Figure 6

In La Monte Young’s section he lists various numbered compositions, for example, Composition 1960 #9 is a single-lined stave on a piece of card inside an envelope, but in other scores he utilized words:

Figure 7

Composition 1960 #3

Announce to the audience when the piece will begin and end if there is a limit on duration. It may be of any duration.

Then announce that everyone may do whatever he wishes for the duration of the composition.

5 – 14 – 60¹⁵

Experimental notation developed, and ‘word scores’ or ‘word events’ were constructed. Through language artists were able to further explore indeterminacy. Words also proved to be economical and the most efficient way to describe an unspecified quantity of actions, directions, events or happenings. For example, one might describe an unidentified amount of time as ‘long’ – but how ‘a long amount of time’ is perceived will vary between individuals. Through these precise instructions, order is the catalyst to chaos and intensifies the subjectivity of temporal experience. Free interpretation is encouraged within the space and time of the performance.

As an alternative to using systematic methods to evoke chance, which often gave the performer limited choices but a variety of (prescribed) outcomes, artists moved towards indeterminacy, presenting the performer with unlimited choices, and thus unlimited outcomes. In An Anthology, Brown reproduces a score entitled Dec. 1952 from Folio, which consists of lines orienting in vertical and horizontal positions, varying in width and length, scattered across the page. This score expresses two characteristics that allow choices for performers. Firstly, it can be physically read from any four sides of the page. Secondly, due to the ambiguous nature of the notation a performer must conceptually determine every element of the sound they wish to create, including the cause, pitch, duration and tone. The very essence of Brown’s score is built upon the choices made by the performer, and the infinite ways it could be interpreted.

Figure 8

Figure 9: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within La Monte Young, An Anthology of Chance Operations (La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963) (See Appendix A).¹⁶

2. PAPER + BOARD + GLUE

An unknown quantity of white paper with a black hard cover, containing printed text and drawings, bound together with glue.

Figure 10

Open-ended scores were of the interest of many artists, composers and writers around the time An Anthology was created; Yoko Ono published a book full of worded scores called Grapefruit. Inside are seven sections: music, painting, event, poetry, object, film and dance, each of which contain written instructions from which the performer can choose how to disseminate. Ono reduces graphic notation to words, yet within the work her direct statements carry ambiguity and options for the reader. For instance:

LINE PIECE:

Draw a line.

Erase a line.

LINE PIECE:

Draw a line with yourself.

Go on drawing until you disappear.

1964, Spring.¹⁷

Often her instructions embody a morbid sense of ‘long time’ – a request to do something until death or for obscenely lengthy or uncomfortable periods. Again, through written direction the performer is able to assess for themselves what it might be to ‘draw until you disappear’.

COUGH PIECE

Keep coughing for a year.

1961, Winter¹⁸

LAUGH PIECE

Keep laughing for a week.

1961, Winter¹⁹

Ono’s Cough Piece and Laugh Piece combine mental and material elements within their directions. Ono treats coughing and laughing (both instinctive physical/psychological reactions) as material processes, and implies deliberate repetition of the action within her wording. Rather than being interpreted as pure instructions, her score invites the performer to apply it to any premeditated process and requests the performer to execute with purpose. The score requests for a (not necessarily artistic) action to be intentionally made by reducing it to a human function. In Grapefruit, Ono utilizes linguistic systems to engage the audience’s imagination; a metaphor showing ‘that people can change the world through thought and action’.²⁰

Figure 11

A twofold tension is often felt in Grapefruit – firstly when Ono writes down the instructions, and secondly when the performer interprets them. Correspondingly, 4’33” displays a similar tension between the idea of the sound and expressing that sound through a means of notation or writing.

Even the most skillful zither player, if he strikes the shang (note) he destroys the chio (note), if he vibrates the kung (note) he neglects the chih (note). It is better not to strike them at all; then the five notes are complete in themselves.²¹

This description of a performer attempting to play a perceived note illustrates this point: the moment an effort is made to represent a sound, that sound is instantly destroyed. This lead Cage to consider the potential of ‘nothingness’; in response to these ideas, he composed 0’00”.

You see, if music is conceived as an object, then it has a beginning, middle and end, and one can feel rather confident when he makes measurements of the time. But when it is process, those measurements become less meaningful, and the process itself, involving if it happened to be, the idea of Zero Time (that is to say no time at all), becomes mysterious and therefore eminently useful.²²

Rather than working within a set framework, Cage took his work to a new level and deleted its temporal element; he created zero time. The score 0’00” reads: ‘In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.’²³ Related to Ono’s regimented coughing or laughing, 0’00” is not interested in the creation of sound (and, in Ono’s case, the creation of thoughtful actions) but the gesticulation – a gesture performed deliberately (and one that is not intentionally musical).

An underlying theme for fluxus artists throughout the pieces discussed so far is the playful manner in which they were able to conduct creative experiments, and Duchamp’s question, ‘Can one make works which are not works of “art?”’.²⁴ More often than not, the audience or performer was invited to be part of, and/or activate, the creative potential of the work, consequently causing the desacrilization of artists, broadening what art could be and who could make it. Chance, choice, indeterminacy, duration, performance and word scores transpired across art forms and artists began to value the unpredictable nature and infinite variations that these types of works allowed. Artists acknowledged ‘the replacement of the desire to do something with the desire to see what would happen’.²⁵

Figure 12: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1964) (See Appendix A)

Post Fluxus

3. PAPER + PLASTIC RING BINDER

Forty-one sheets of white paper containing printed text with

black and white photographs, bound with a plastic ring binder.

Figure 13

On a perfect day, at Redbridge Road in Dorset, approximately 122 miles south west of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical couch, on Sunday 1st June 2003 at precisely 7.05am, a Renault Clio driving at 90 miles per hour threw out of the window exactly 333,960 individually cut up words from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.26

Using Ed Rushca’s book, Royal Road Test as a blueprint for the project, Simon Morris made a book called The Royal Road to the Unconscious. In collaboration with Howard Britton, Maurizio Cogliandro, Daniel Jackson and Dallas Seitz, Morris released the words from Freud’s structured confinement – Freud’s application of rational language and words written in order to define and apply meaning to the unconscious and irrational nature of dreams was returned to its original state. The Royal Road to the Unconscious captures the action of throwing and the chance dispersing of the words as ‘The Aleatory Moment,’²⁷

Every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state.²⁸

Seventy-eight students from York College assisted in cutting up every word in preparation for the test. The meaning of Morris’s actions were twice felt, first within the manner in which the words were extracted from the book, ‘as each word was cut from its respective sentence, it was spoken. When cutting from right to left, Sigmund Freud’s words were read backwards’,²⁹ and secondly through a random act of madness conducted from the car window.

The project takes a full circle when, ironically, these fleeting and aleatory moments are recorded in a way that is similar to evidence compiled in a police report. Firstly, it sets the scene and means of transport, and then it introduces the roles of the people involved. Images documenting the ‘wreckage’ are paired with simple titles such as ‘Flora Words 1’ or ‘Road Words 3’. Morris’s record of the day presents, in a sane and methodical manner, the madness that occurred – replicating the way in which Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. In doing so, Morris touches on the inseparable relationship between order and chaos, reality and dreams.

Figure 14

The Royal Road to the Unconscious documents a performance within the realms of a standard book; it touches on dynamic language, showing the new mixture of words through photographic documentation, and contains a certain amount of cross-discipline – exhibiting typography, applications of language, photography and even a degree of performance. The project reveals the creative potential of cutting and dispersing content in order to generate new meaning and unusual collocations.

Figure 15: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Simon Morris, The Royal Road to the Unconscious (Information as Material, York, England, 2003) (See Appendix A)

4. PAPER + GLUE

Three hundred and seventy-six white pages with a yellow and black paper cover, containing printed text, bound together with glue.

Figure 16
Following The Royal Road to the Unconscious, Morris produced Re-Writing Freud. The book was written using a computer program created by Christine Morris. The program randomly selected one word at a time in order to reconstruct the book:

I the the way, After meant of was: their a only the learned which children dating glimmers similar synthesis, responsible sinful.” you obscure who in carriage; representing our a of dream-stimulus the correspondence at internat.³⁰

Similar to Mac Low’s Asymmetries, Morris destroys our conventional notions around grammar, and each word is ‘placed equally beside the next: discrete, unsubordinated, insubordinate’.³¹

Freud took the irrational topic of dreams and presented them in a rational and coherent format that aided the understanding of them. Morris then took Freud’s cogent model and irrationalized it again, returning it to ‘its primal state.’³²

In Re-Writing Freud, the text is nonsensical and makes for difficult reading, but only because we are applying the wrong rules to the content. The book doesn’t obey the conventional laws of language; therefore, we are forced to reconsider our language system and invent new means in order to gain an understanding. Freud’s words are liberated from their grammatical constraints – new bonds and relationships between words are able to thrive. The reader is invited to explore ‘new poetic juxtapositions’³³ and produce new perceptions for reading.

Syntax is relied upon to express and to communicate, and the rules of comprehension are taught from an early age. Speaking, thinking and talking in this mode is habitual for most, and, for this reason, language is often a constant within our lives. However, what Morris shows us is that language can be so much more than its everyday use; it proves here to be fluid and dynamic – such is the nature of dreams.

Re-Writing Freud also pays reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel³⁴, presenting the endless possibilities one book has to offer: ‘this book is an instance or example, a point of singularity in a nearly infinite series of possible books, all essentially the same, and each absolutely unique.’³⁵

Figure 17: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud (Information As Material, 2005) (See Appendix A)

5. PAPER + GLUE

Ninety-seven white pages containing text, with a dark green paper cover.

Figure 18
Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler created The Apostrophe Engine, which sourced the content of their book apostrophe. The website was inspired by Bill Kennedy’s poem apostrophe (ninety-four) written in 1993 and first published in the poetics issue of SinOverTan. Kennedy’s 1993 version of apostrophe can still be found today on The Apostrophe Engine home page, where each line is a hyperlink.³⁶ When the link is clicked, the line is submitted to a search engine, which finds (what it perceives to be) relative web pages. Five virtual robots go through the list of web pages retrieved, gathering phrases that begin with ‘you are’ and ending in a full stop. After a certain number of phrases are returned, or when there are no more pages to search through, the robots stop. Finally, The Apostrophe Engine records and edits all the phrases found (usually taking away any glitches or HTML tags) to produce a new poem. The title of each poem is the line that was initially used as the search term, and the following new lines make up the poem. All the new lines are made into hyperlinks and the process can then continue.

you are like most people • you are perfectly rational • you are puzzled by what you see • you are welcome to print out this book for distribution to anyone that you think would be helped by reading it³⁷

Kennedy and Wershler’s search engine will always be as large as the web. As web content increases and alters, when searching using any line in the poem the pages returned inevitably change. Every poem is unique and unpredictable; the process could go on indefinitely. Yet each poem has in common its original root (Kennedy’s apostrophe written in 1993), and its infinite nature.

Similar to that of Fluxus notions, by allowing a search engine to locate the prose, the work is autonomous from the artist. Yet this potentially brings together the words and ideas of many people. Anyone with Internet access and the potential to upload content could be included in the prose created; yet, fittingly, they will never know they are the authors of their own collaborative work.

Figure 19: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler Henry, apostrophe (ECW Press, Canada, 2006) (See Appendix A)

6. PAPER + GLUE

Sixty-four white pages with a red cover, bound in an unknown manner, containing text and illustrations.

Figure 20

In 1984, The Police Man’s Beard is Half Constructed claimed to be the first ever book written by a computer. It was made by a program called Racter (short for Raconteur) and was created by William Chamberlain with assistance from Thomas Etter. The text makes for interesting, amusing reading:

Reflections are images of tarnished aspirations.³⁸

More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams.³⁹

Due to the way Racter was made, the programmer was distanced from Racter’s outcomes; it required no human intervention once built, and was able to conjure apparently thoughtful sentences:

What the computer “forms” is dependent upon what it finds in its files, and what it can find is an extremely wide range of words that are categorized in a specific fashion and what might be called “syntax directive,” which tell the computer how to string the words together. An important faculty of the program is its ability to direct the computer to maintain certain randomly chosen variables (words or phrases), which will then appear and reappear as a given block of prose is generated. This seems to spin a thread of what might initially pass for coherent thinking throughout the computer-generated copy so that once the program is run, its output is not only new and unknowable, it is apparently thoughtful. It is crazy “thinking,” I grant you, but “thinking” that is expressed in perfect English.⁴⁰

Chamberlain noted that writing was always based on the author’s real or imagined experience and wanted to produce prose that did not rely upon human experience. He acknowledged the humorous and sonic potential a text with no human agenda would have:

Slide and tumble and fall among

The dead. Here and there

Will be found a utensil.⁴¹

Despite the book’s use of plain English with accurate grammar, there is something rather endearing about it, which evokes new perspectives on the ways we can read and write. Countless books could be written in this manner; machines do a large percentage of jobs for humans, and writing for man’s pleasure could be just another task.

Figure 21: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Rachter, The Police Man’s Beard Is Half-Constructed (New York: Warner Books Inc., 1984) (See Appendix A)

7. PAPER

A blue dust jacket with white printed text.

Figure 22
In 2004, Klaus Scherübel produced Mallarmé, The Book. The piece is simply a dust jacket with the title and ISBN – a format with the potential to hold everything and nothing. The book is a gesture towards Mallarmé’s Le Livre, which was an unrealized project devoted to the concept of ‘the Book as a cosmic text-architecture: an extremely flexible structure that would reveal nothing short of all existing relations between everything’.⁴²

Scherübel conceptually portrays Mallarmé’s vision by creating a dust jacket that could not only hold the sum of all books, but also enclose the sum of everything. The book is conceptually similar to Maurizio Nannucci’s Universum.

In 1969, Nannucci made a classic codex book protected by a traditional marbleized slipcase. It has two spines – the second spine is located on the fore edge of the book. The book cannot be opened; consequently, its content cannot be read. Like Mallarmé, The Book, it possesses dual paradox roles.

The first role portrays that it could contain anything; everything; thus, the Universe. Titled Universum, the book is a visual metaphor for the total or complete book. On the other hand, the book could contain nothing, yet even in this scenario it has the potential to hold everything. Exempt from the changing nature of time, it will always contain everything.

The second role represents the impossibility of the total or complete book – this is reiterated in its form; enclosed in a never-ending cover, the book needn’t look out and is forever looking in on itself. Universum will always believe it has to answer to everything, yet its trapped position, which forces it forever to look inwardly, leaves the book blinkered – a paradigm for the common phrase (describing human nature) ‘ignorance is bliss’.

Figure 23: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Klaus Scherübel, Mallarmé, The Book (2004) (See Appendix A)

8. PAPER

A strip of white paper with printed black text.

Figure 24
In Lost in the Funhouse, a collection of short stories, Barth simultaneously writes one of the shortest stories in the English language, and one of the longest; a story that could go on infinitely. The title of the piece is ‘Frame-Tale’, and can be cut out of the book and made into a mobius strip. One side of the strip reads ‘ONCE UPON A TIME THERE’⁴³ and the other says, ‘WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN.⁴⁴ ‘Frame-Tale’ can be read in seconds, yet go on forever – it also reminds us of the ‘infinite imbeddedness of the narrative impulse in human consciousness’.⁴⁵

Barth’s Frame Tale also pays reference to those artists using cutting and loop methods. For example, in the 1882 rehearsals of Parisfal in Bayreuth, Richard Wagner was asked to compose an extra piece of music due to the curtains closing too slowly during the performance. Wagner refused, however his assistant, Engelbert Humperdinck, agreed to help and composed an additional section of music, approved by Wagner. Unfortunately, the composition was eventually dropped when the curtains and apparatus were fixed. Years later, Rodney Graham examined Humperdinck’s work and spotted that rather than composing something new, he had manipulated Wagner’s original score so that the piece could loop back on itself.⁴⁶

Graham took inspiration from Humperdinck, and used his rejected bars of music to construct Parsifal (1882--39,969,364,735 AD), also known as ‘Transformation Music’.

By returning the extra bars of music to the score of Parsifal as a progression of repetitions, their durations determined by the prime numbers between 3 and 47, Graham was able to create a series of asynchronous loops that would not resynchronize for 39 billion years.⁴⁷

Graham used a looping method to create a piece of music that perpetually loops for longer than a lifetime; indeed, given the means to continue, it would probably last longer than our planet’s lifetime. It is very easy to get lost and absorbed in Graham’s music – immersed in its sheer length, we are reminded of the shortness of human life. Equally, one could spend a lifetime agonizing over the pure simplicity and eternal nature of Barth’s ‘Frame-Tale’.

Figure 25: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within John Barth, ‘Frame-Tale,’ Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Anchor, 1988) (See Appendix A)
9. PAPER + BOARD + THREAD + GLUE

An unknown amount of paper containing printed text, with a hardback cover, bound with thread and glue.

Figure 26

In 1961, Raymond Quenaue produced Cent mille milliards de poèmes (one hundred thousand billion sonnets). Inside the book there are ten pages of poetry, each of which has been cut into fourteen sections perpendicular to the spine, so that each section holds a line from a sonnet. Each section can be turned individually, revealing various combinations of the ten pages and fourteen sections. The book is capable of creating one hundred thousand billion combinations.

No person could ever read all combinations in their lifetime. The book poetically displays the complex and infinite nature of existence; every choice leads to another set of decisions, and there is no end in sight. The reader holds in their hand something that gives them one hundred thousand billion choices, yet strangely they are left feeling limited by the vast amount of options presented to them.

Figure 27: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Raymond Quenaue, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) (See Appendix A)

10. PAPER + THREAD + MOBILE PHONE

Sixteen sheets of paper containing hand-printed black geometric shapes, with text on the back page, bound together with thread.

Figure 28

In 2011, Chris Fritton hand-letterpressed an edition of one hundred black and white books; no words are immediately present, as the entire book contains only quick response codes (QR Codes). In order to read the book, one must be in possession of a mobile phone capable of deciphering the codes.

Why We Lose Our Hands is a complex reading experience; whilst handling a phone to scan the codes in order to ‘translate them’ into English, the reader must also navigate the pages of the book. The reader is very aware of their hands being full, and it takes some time to get used to operating the phone in conjunction with the book.

The mobile phone and the book have an unevenly weighted relationship; the mobile phone could live without the book – it just carries on being a phone. Yet the book could not exist without the mobile phone – it would be redundant and unreadable without it. Such is the subversive disposition of media – forever reinventing itself and in so doing erasing what existed before. It is a metaphor for what moving to digital did to analogue technologies, and shows that analogue printing methods will now always be dependant in some way on digital processes. For example, even an independent printing studio is likely to advertise their services on the web, or learn about their competition through Internet search engines. The past (letterpress) survives on the present technology of the time (QR codes and mobile phones).

The book is also a paradigm for the world we live in; around us, technology and computers constantly code and decode, yet the languages that technologies communicate in are unreadable to the majority of humans.

Fritton’s book depicts the disparity and issues surrounding QR code technologies, and considers the reliability of artificial data as a source of knowledge, the divide created in society due to the cost and access to these technologies, and the actual efficiency and speed of the codes:

There’s something very curious about a cipher named ‘Quick Response’ that requires me to take the phone out of my pocket, open an app, point the camera at the code, and wait for the translation. Most literate adults could read 5-10 sentences in that time.⁴⁸

The book is a conversation between analogue and digital. The reader must navigate between the old and the new to come to a conclusion; a conclusion that may not be possible to conjure in the future – through the remediation of digital technologies.

Figure 29: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Chris Fritton, Why We Lose Our Hands (2011) (See Appendix A)

11. PAPER + GLUE + WEB CAMERA + INTERNET

Twenty-two white pages with a red and black paper cover, containing black and white geometric shapes and text, bound together with glue.

Figure 30

Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s book Between Page and Screen requires a webcam and the Internet in order to read it. On each page there are ‘abstract geometric patterns’⁴⁹ similar to those found within QR codes. When pointing the pages within the book at a webcam via the website, the viewer reveals text in the form of poetry on the screen. The poems are letters between lovers, ‘P’ and ‘S’, who are ‘struggling to map the boundaries of their relationship’.⁵⁰ Neither exists on page or on screen, but in an augmented space that is activated by the reader.

The experience is unique, as the reader can observe him- or herself reading through the webcam. The reflection is startling at first – the reader is very aware of reading ‘to themselves’. Through this reflection, the solitary act of reading is both intensified, and doubled. Two versions of one person are reading two versions of one book.

As the reader turns the page, the letters suddenly disperse, ready to welcome the following page’s content. As the story unfolds, the reader learns of P and S’s dynamic relationship – reiterated in the book’s fluid and augmented form.

The text is loaded with plays on words and anagrams:

Dear P,

You give me the space to undulate,

SCHEREN. My best subject was always

division; I like partition. You only

get a portion of the stuff that makes

me up – or anyone. The rest hides. I

own both sword and plowshare, sure.

I lied – not idle, I’d sidle up to either

Side that held me, let slide my I. Oh

Yes.

– S⁵¹

The book explores the origin of words by referencing lexical differences and similarities.

Between Page and Screen exposes man’s complex relationship with technology; the feeling of being uncomfortable with it, yet unable to live without it.

When holding the book, the reader figuratively holds the weight of the world – a world driven by technological progress and a world that is moving too fast to sit down and read thoroughly. The reader is confronted with the modern means of gathering information, a world that now relies on scouring the web and that reads by scrolling down or by pressing control + F to find exactly what they are looking for. However, concurrently, all this power is still in man’s hand – the readers hand; the world does not have to be this fast-paced, the reader can slow down, in order to manipulate and muse over Between Page and Screen in their own time. Depending on the screen, where it is situated in the world, and the viewer’s method of reading, each experience is unique. The book combines concrete poetry with movement and uses the formation of words to produce inquisitive imagery.

Figure 31: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen, 1st Edition (Siglio Press, 2012) (See Appendix A)

12. MOBILE PHONE

A mobile phone with an app, containing black text on a red or white background.

Figure 32

Morris’s ongoing interest surrounding Freud lead the project’s third incarnation: an app for smartphones and iPhones called Re-Writing Freud. When the reader touches the screen, it summons one word at a time randomly from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The reader is invited to ‘make sense of new poetic juxtapositions’⁵² and to re-write the book according to his or her own pace and timing.

With Re-Writing Freud, judgments about sense no longer themselves make any sense. The reader who responds to this book by complaining that it is nonsensical is neither right nor wrong, but asking the wrong question, posing an impossible problem in response [to] this book’s insistent imaginary solution.⁵³

There is no perceivable horizon on the screen – just a block colour background providing a vacuum for the words to operate within; yet strangely, due to the varying sizes of the words, a false perspective causes some words to feel nearer than others, yet all are flattened within the same experience. The form in which the words are displayed make for a new mode of reading; one word is added to the screen at a time, producing a layered typographic effect. Previous words linger and layer (sometimes the text is unreadable), but after an unpredictable amount of time they fade away.

Morris’s one-word delivery is comparable to Michael Snow’s silent film SO IS THIS.⁵⁴ The film is made up entirely of written words, and each word is delivered one at a time. Snow combines the sensation of reading with that of watching a film, thereby creating a completely different form of reading and in so doing simultaneously valuing silence and the written word. Comparable to the works of Mallarmé and Mac Low, the viewer is made very aware of the entwined relationships between silence and words. Snow produces an extra dimension in order for the words to function –Mallarmé could not have achieved this using paper alone. SO IS THIS incorporates qualities that are like both a book and a film. Comparable to Re-Writing Freud, SO IS THIS could be described as an animated concrete poem.

Images often take precedence in films; however, Snow presents words as images and in so doing elevates the position of the written word above that of the position of images. During the film, the viewer is reading silently alongside other members of the audience. Snow takes the solitary act of reading and instigates a communal reading. Many jokes are made within his film, but underneath the wit and humor is a seriousness; the statements are often direct and are enhanced through their one-word-at-a-time delivery:

YOU - COULD - SEE - WHAT - A - POWERFUL - TOOL - THIS - COULD - BE - IN - THE - WRONG - HANDS⁵⁵

Snow utilizes more than one language within the work, switching from French to English. Without knowing some French, one is left unaware that he is repeating statements made previously in another language.

IF - YOU - DON’T - SPEAK - FRENCH - YOU - SHOULD - LEARN⁵⁶

In both Morris’s Re-Writing Freud app and Snow’s SO IS THIS, the solitary act of reading is altered in its dissemination. Words are placed on a pedestal and presented dynamically; the difference being that Snow sets the tempo of coherent sentences and Morris allows the reader, at their chosen pace and in their own time, to make sense of the words presented.

Figure 33: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud App (2011) (See Appendix A).

13. PLASTIC + SENSORS + PROJECTOR + ROOM

An unknown amount of white plastic pages bound in an unknown manner,

inside a white room containing an unknown number of sensors and projectors.

Figure 34

In 2002, Documenta 11 commissioned Small Design Firm (founded by David Small) to create the Illuminated Manuscript. The piece consisted of a handmade book set in a room devoid of any decoration. The content of the book is focused on freedom; it begins with the four freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Located in the papers of the book and within the room are various sensors. The words were virtually printed onto the page by a video projector, and sensors within the pages communicated to a computer when the pages were turned. The viewer could interact with the piece in the usual way one handles a book (running a finger along the lines or turning the pages, for example) or in a more disruptive manner (manipulating the text on the page or interfering with the projection).

The words were stripped away from their physical constraints and freed from the page in order to be reincarnated virtually. By combining conventional book qualities and electronic media, the Illuminated Manuscript invited the audience to physically explore a virtual environment in order to investigate new types of reading.

Figure 35: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Small Design Firm (founded by David Small), Illuminated Manuscript (2002) (See Appendix A)

14. SPEAKERS + WIRES + ROOM

An unknown number of speakers connected to wires,

suspended from a ceiling in a room.

Figure 36

Susan Hiller’s Witness does not look particularly like a book; suspended from the ceiling are hundreds of small speakers, each playing a personal account of an encounter with UFOs. Yet aspects of the piece are very much like a book – it contains narratives and languages, and instead of reading, one is listening, similar to that of an audio book or being in the presence of a storyteller.

The accounts of UFO encounters are reflected in the formation of the speakers, which are organized with the cross and the UFO in mind:

The religious symbolism of the cross in the circle is crucial because the stories are examples of contemporary visionary experience. Only today people see UFOs where once they saw angels.⁵⁷

Comparable to the feelings arising when experiencing something supernatural, the audience lose their sense of time and space within the soundscape. Each account impedes on the next as the voices speak at the same time in various languages. Within the layers of discourse, a single voice may be lifted and briefly catch the listeners attention. Each encounter is fleeting and unique, depending on the choices made by the audience members – how they physically navigate the space and their proximity to any number of speakers.

Consider the range of positions available to the listener with which to categorize this late 20th century phenomenon… They may be fictional, illusory or hallucinatory (a somewhat different category); or physically real. If the latter they may be interpreted as man-made, natural, extra-terrestrial or supernatural.’⁵⁸

When listening, the spectator is presented with the accounts as though they are facts. They have no reason to disbelieve anything the voices are telling them. In amidst the hundreds of accounts, the viewer is both lost in time and made very aware of it too; throughout the ages, the same stories have been told from generation to generation, except instead of associating these supernatural experiences with God, today they are more often associated with UFOs.

Hiller utilizes sound and the full body to intensify the content of the accounts and immerse the audience within the stories. The work can be viewed in a multitude of ways; depending on the timings of the recordings, the path chosen by the viewer, and what they choose to listen to. Each account in close proximity creates a layer of lexis, thereby contributing to the fluctuating entirety.

Figure 37: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Susan Hiller, Witness (2000) (See Appendix A)

15. MOBILE PHONE + HEADPHONES + TRAIN STATION

An iPhone with headphones, in a train station in Kassel, Germany.

Figure 38
Janet Cardiff and Bures Miller created a ‘physical cinema’ in an old train station in Kassel, Germany for dOCUMENTA (13) with The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk. A checkout booth loaned iPhones and headphones out to the public. Virtual and real worlds met as viewers watched the events unfold on screen. As participants were guided through the train station, the happenings were felt intensely by the audience because they were able to stand where the footage was shot.

A strange sense of sadness is felt in the work – whilst the viewer is engrossed with fleeting moments from the past, they are missing out on what is happening presently. The phone has the power to transport the viewer to times gone by, and in so doing assigns the audience a ghostly role. As they live through the events on screen their future is snatched away.

As they follow the moving images (and try to frame them as if they were the camera operator) a strange confusion of realities occurs. In this confusion, the past and present conflate and Cardiff and Miller guide us through a meditation on memory and reveal the poignant moments of being alive and present.⁵⁹

Figure 39: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Janet Cardiff and Bures Miller, The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012) (See Appendix A)

Non-Conclusion

Due to the nature of infinity, a formal conclusion would be incongruous. A more appropriate conclusion would be an infinite one.⁶⁰

However, it can be said that infinite book works aren’t necessarily about their ‘infiniteness’, but rather are more about what ‘being infinite’ allows the reader to discover. Sarah Bodman states that it is not ‘whether a work can be read in its entirety in one lifetime […] it’s about the possibilities of experience that the reader/viewer takes from it, and that could be from a single sentence or paragraph.’⁶¹ Infinite, total or complete books easily captivate the imagination because knowledge is considered a key to power. ‘We are drawn to them because we want to devour their contents.’⁶²

The popularity of the Internet as a platform of dissemination or as a material in the making of book works has increased. The Internet could be the closest we have come so far to the ‘total’ book; it is always expanding and its content changes every day according to what is of interest to man. Bodman considers ‘the Internet as a total container of information’,⁶³ but can it be considered as a whole book, when ‘so much of it is irrelevant, it would be like a total book interspersed with adverts’.⁶⁴ Bodman also states that she ‘could imagine Wikipedia being the total book as it has a coherence as such, entries of information to complete an ongoing, growing total’.⁶⁵

Söke Dinkla stated that interactive computer art (from the 1980s onwards) further develops the ideas already contained in the new art of the 1960s (happenings, performances, installation): active participation of the audience, an artwork as a temporal process rather than a fixed object, an artwork as an open system.⁶⁶ Furthermore, the role of the artist has changed over time; artists following in the footsteps of Fluxus, or those that put emphasis on the audience, often remove themselves from the foreground of the piece, thereby allowing the work to grow and expand from the constraints of the artist’s vision.

What can also be deducted from this essay is that permanence is an illusion.⁶⁷ We live in a society where today’s technology lives under constant threat from tomorrow’s. ‘There is also a new electric technology that threatens this ancient technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet’;⁶⁸ how artists choose to embrace or battle this quality surrounding how we archive, experience, and consider these artworks, and protect them against the future, makes for rich debate. Changes in language and mediums are emerging as developments in new media continue to transpire. Between Page and Screen and the Re-Writing Freud app are key examples of such adjustments in language; both dynamically engage with movement, fluidity and the forming of new colligations. In the more successful examples of immersion, the experience is encouraged by the appropriate choice of medium – ‘‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.’⁶⁹

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with all the artists in all ages.⁷⁰

It is possible to detect a certain amount of correlation between immersive book works and the advancements made in digital technology. The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk illustrates just some of the immersive potential these digital technologies have, and the new modes of reading brought about by these changes. However, ‘a lot of the technology so far tends more towards distraction than immersion. Links to related facts, other texts, images, anecdotes, etc. in e-books encourage the kind of shallow reading we do when we skim the Internet’.⁷¹ With this in mind, the solitary act of reading is becoming less familiar compared to our compulsive ‘sharing, scanning and skim reading’ – ‘no longer mere viewers, they are now users’.⁷² Book works are no longer confined to paper, and nor must the reader read them from left to right; in the spirit of Fluxus, they can be read in a multitude of directions through unusual platforms that allow audiences to activate the creative potential, sometimes in a bodily manner, releasing varying, unpredictable and perpetually altering outcomes.

Finally, by using language as a tool to explore infinity within book works, the essence of this paper illustrates the plight of art itself. As each description simultaneously influences and changes the last, the limitations of language are exposed and the ways in which we express our thoughts about art are reconsidered. Throughout, the reader is manipulated through the author’s subjectivity – the very subjectivity that some of these book works strive to evade; subjectivity is inevitable and true objectivity is impossible to achieve. The most neutral space (the white page) and the simplest of words (for example, Mallarmé, The Book’s description ‘PAPER’) still contaminates the visceral feelings one has when encountering and attempting to evaluate artwork. It was considered at the beginning of this paper that the truest description would be the sum of all of its descriptions, yet, as time moves on, descriptions are constructed according to the social, political and economic conditions of the time. Thus, a full understanding of the works is unattainable, since the sum of all of its descriptions can never be generated.

Every idea is destroyed instantly through human limitation. Every idea will be destroyed indefinitely.

Nevertheless, man will continue to express his ideas.

A more appropriate conclusion would be an infinite one.

How would we begin to describe the infinite conclusion when each chapter simultaneously impedes and contaminates the part before and the part after? We will never do the description of the infinite conclusion justice; nor will the description suffice in describing the infinite conclusion. Perhaps the true description (of the infinite conclusion, or that of any book, or that of art, or that of indeed anything) would be the total sum of all of its descriptions.

Yet, with every written word its essence dilutes

– but what an immensely useful task for us to try.

Appendices

A: Josephine Machon’s Scale of Immersivity in Performance and Theatre.

Immersion can be defined as the action of submerging someone or something in a liquid. An object or person that is placed in an environment completely surrounded by water would be a physical example of ‘immersion’. Another way of describing immersion would be to compare it to that of a ‘deep mental involvement’, a profound mental connection that allows man to enter into another world.

Both definitions deal with the physical and the mental separately. However, by combining both the physical and the mental, immersion could achieve a greater feeling of ‘being in another world’. Josephine Machon states that theatre combines all these definitions; immersive performance allows all the senses to be manipulated, causing inward and in-expressionless feelings that evoke physical upheaval, and thus an indescribable visceral quality. This visceral quality paradoxically possesses ‘lasting ephemerality’ – where the moment is fleeting and never to be repeated, yet the experience lives on, embodied as a memory.

Machon devised a ‘Scale of Immersivity’ that considers six main elements in relation to immersive performance. These elements are: space, sound, duration, interdisciplinary and hybridization, bodies and the pivotal role of the audience.

Space for Machon describes a world that exists on its own term;, a place that has its own rhythm. The space brings about specific transcendental audience experiences, and operates outside the timeframe of our conventional world.

Sound is a vital part of immersion as it defines the atmosphere and describes the space beyond its physical attributes. Machon suggests that both composed and naturally occurring sounds are used in equal measures for deeper immersion.

Duration is not simply how long something lasts, but an experiential part of the event. Duration has its own character, and the length of time impacts the experience of the work. It could be prescribed or it could invite the audience to move into the world as it wishes. Durational elements of immersive performance can offer kaleidoscopic happenings where the world turns in on itself – being aware of time through visceral feelings.

Immersion allows for interdisciplinary and hybridisation between practices, it can take the form of a combination of mediums, thus blurring the boundaries between art forms.

Bodies play a key role in immersive performance; the senses are stimulated through human communication and invite bodily interaction. Immersive experiences will only happen within the roles encouraged and aided by other performers and members of the audience.

According to Machon, the audience is vital to the immersive performance; without the audience – there is no immersion. The audience play a pivotal role, as there are varying levels of participation within a performance. As a consequence, audience participation always involves some experience of immediacy and/or intimacy.

Thus, only through the presence of all of these elements is a performance considered to be immersive and to produce a truly visceral experience. Machon’s criteria hold similarities to Fluxus notions and help form a developed framework in order to review and understand post-Fluxus book works. True immersion indulges many senses and promotes artwork as an open temporal process, instead of a static, passive or fixed encounter. It also allows the audience to experience new worlds and permits them to make their own journey.

Can the book works in this paper be understood and evaluated with the adaptation of these characteristics in mind?

The following chapter will evaluate and measure book works according to a modified version of Machon’s Scale of Immersivity. All elements will be approximated on seven continuum scales, which will explore the composite sum of the works previously discussed, and suggest where they ought to be positioned on an immersive scale. The conditions observed will be: space, sound, duration, interdisciplinary, audience/performer participation, language and bodily involvement.

For space, on one end of the scale will sit ‘closed space’ and on the other, ‘open space’. Closed suggests limited and predetermined boundaries. ‘Open’ describes a space that is unlimited or boundless – operating in a frame of its own. The Internet, for example, could be defined as a more open and boundless space, as it operates through its own unique virtual system, which goes beyond that of reality.

Humans are naturally rhythmical, and respond to sounds; even when one cannot hear, they will feel the vibrations of sound, and when used appropriately it can engross the audience. The sound continuum will not measure frequency or volume, but will look at the presence of sound in the role within the piece. ‘No intentional sound’ will illustrate that sound is not part of the intended piece; ‘intentional sound’ will indicate the extent to which sound is used towards an immersive experience.

Duration will operate on a similar continuum to space. ‘Closed’ duration involves a predetermined and fixed amount of time within the piece. ‘Open’ will suggest undetermined duration and include those works that operate in ‘longtime’, or more than the average person’s lifetime.

Interdisciplinary will use the term ‘mono disciplined’ to illustrate just one discipline being used. ‘Multi-disciplined’ will suggest the extent to which diverse practices have hybridized and cross-fertilized.

A ‘determined performer/audience participation’ eludes those works that have static and set outcomes related to the audience participation. A finished painting in a traditional gallery, for example, involves the audience observing or studying the painting – that is, the artist’s and galleries’ intention – and that is what the audience are invited to do; there are limited choices for the audience, and therefore fixed outcomes. Whereas ‘undetermined performer/audience participation’ reflects the degree of indeterminacy present in a piece, the more choices the audience has, often the more varied and mixed the outcomes will be. The piece operates dynamically, beyond the artist’s vision.

Be it the language of music, written or spoken language, experimenting with language was a key part of Fluxus notions and will therefore be evaluated on a scale concerning static and dynamic language. ‘Static language’ denotes conventional use of traditional English or music notation, similar to how language is used in a newspaper or in customary music notation. ‘Dynamic language’ represents language used outside of or beyond conventional means.

Finally, bodily involvement will sit on a scale between high and low. On one end of the spectrum, ‘low bodily movement’ describes a traditional book read in a solitary manner. ‘High bodily involvement’ signifies physical engagement of the body outside the conventional reading techniques, and can also indicate the presence of other bodies that are physically involved.

Figure 40 illustrates Machon’s modified Scale of Immersivity as ‘The Seven Continuums of Immersion’. As an indication, Ono’s Grapefruit has been placed on the scale in comparison to examples that obtain high and low extremes of immersivity.

Figure 40: Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity within Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (Peter Owen Limited, 1964), with examples of high and low immersion based upon an adapted version of Josephine Machon’s Scale of Immersivity

B: Original Transcript of an Interview with Sarah Bodman (University West England, Bristol) conducted via emails sent between 26 November 2012 and 11 February 2013

How would you describe ‘sequence’ in relation to book works?

Hmm, I guess I would describe sequence as narrative, text or image, as any turning pages is a sequential device, Ed Ruscha's pauses with blank spaces are still part of the sequence when experiencing his books.

Or, a journey from A to B, but that could be via C!

What books have you experienced that have really questioned your notions of sequence and narrative?

Sally Alatalo's books – Sara Ranchouse publications, so her books: Love Takes Two/The Other Side, or A Rearranged Affair (magnificent book idea! Where she took apart and rearranged 100 romance novels, the pagination still worked but stories could jump all over the place as locations and characters were all mixed up. Her argument is that with the formula provided to any writer of a romance novel, the basic narrative always stays the same) and Karen Reimer's, where books have been rearranged alphabetically (Legendary, Lexical, Loquacious Love).

Barb Tetenbaum's ‘A Powerfully Exciting Short Story’ (http://www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/t/triangular.html) describes the scenes you would see if the images were actually there. Tony Kemplen's Kubla Can't – using a children's plastic printing set to try and print Kubla Khan and watching the text disintegrate as the letters broke down into nothing. Matthew Birchall's Photograph Converted into Base64 Code (http://www.caferoyalbooks.com/index.php/shop/photograph-converted/) total sequence, but nothing you can do with it short of retyping it all in manually.

Fiction books: Jonathan Safran Foer'sTree of Codes, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves (obvious, but still a great book!), Colin Sackett's Black Bob. I received a book in the post about a month ago by a writer in Slovenia, Bojan Meserko. 69: but you have no idea of it, he published it in 2006 but was sending it out to a few people who may be interested. It's a conceptual book of non-linear reading. It looks like a normal hardbound book but when you open it, there is a portfolio of loose sheets hidden inside. Each is printed front and back, but each half of the page is the other way up. As he says: The book can be read in 276 combinations, so 276 different readers would each have a completely different reading of the text. I have attached an image here. There isn't much about him on the Internet, there is a page on this website: http://www.art-anima.com/eng/stories/inversio.html

What qualities would you associate with the term ‘bookish’?

The first thing I think of when I hear the term bookish is the quality of being serious. All of Colin Sackett's books – they are definitely bookish. Bookish to me doesn’t necessarily describe the object, more of a feeling. Does that make sense?

But in terms of artworks, bookish could be anything book-inspired/related I guess, a painting of a favourite book, videoscan be bookish inscreen transitions for narrative, or even a book if you really believe it, or can argue your case successfully, I haven't managed to yet but still think of mine and Tom's video ‘No Dutch Details’ as a book.

When and how is a piece of work finished for you?

If you mean my own work, well that depends. Sometimes a book is finished just like that, I have already decided exactly how it will be in my head, and then get on and make it to fit, so in that respect it could be finished before I started.

Viola for example I knew it would be exactly that shape, size, cover etc. Other books, the Flowers In Hotel Rooms series goes on indefinitely, I am just starting Vol V now, and before that is finished I will already be starting the next one as I can only use 10 images per book, so there will be some to carry over, so even when a book is finished it is still part of the next one.

I am fascinated by the idea of the ‘total’ or ‘complete’ book. Do you think the Internet is the closest we have come so far to this notion?

Yes, I suppose it is but what is that book about I wonder? I could imagine Wikipedia being the total book as it has a coherence as such, entries of information to complete an ongoing, growing total. The Internet is a total container of information but I don’t know if it can be considered as the whole as so much of it is irrelevant, it would be like a total book interspersed with adverts!

In your opinion, how do these fables of 'complete' or 'total' books came about? Why do you think we are drawn to such paradoxes?

I have no idea how these fables came about, it must be an amazing thing to have in your possession, a ‘complete’ book, perhaps it was to do with power, or to do with religion (to have a book more important than the bible) or a thirst for knowledge.

Of course we are drawn to them because we want to devour their contents, imagine having access to everything there is to know! And I assume that in these fables, the complete book holds the correct information on everything, could answer any question, so knowledge truly does become power.

In relation to the above, in terms of [artists’] book works, this reminds me of a few things: TNWK proposed a piece ‘The Book’ for a small project in 2003, when we asked people to send artwork for digital reproduction as ‘The History Book That Never Was’. The Book (Kirsten Lavers/Cris Cheek) cannot exist until every other book in time has existed, as it is the book that consists of one page from every book that ever existed ‘THE BOOK that makes all other books immortal’. But if the future is still to come and more books are yet to be made, then it can never be bound until all the other books have been bound, and if it has not been bound then it cannot become the book that it purports to be. It is impossible for the book to exist unless time stops, but if this happens it will not get the chance to be bound as a book in order to exist. http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/neverwas.htm

The gallery for the image is: http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/nevergal.htm

Emma Kay wrote ‘Worldview’ for Book Works, a history of the world from memory.

http://www.bookworks.org.uk/node/67

Radoslaw Nowakowski, if you haven’t already looked him up is a perfect example of someone who has moved from traditional (typewriter) to working with hypertext, he said it is the stuff he dreamed of working with in the 70s but didn’t know it could ever exist. We interviewed him for our project (http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/canon.htm) as he is completely amazing: http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/nowakowski.htm

He said he loved the fact that working to make a book in hypertext meant that it could never be printed out. Have a look at his Reading Room where he has published some of his essays about books. He writes more eloquently in his second language than I could ever hope to in my first: http://www.liberatorium.com/teksty/teksty.html

Do you think the advancements made in technology and new media are allowing books to move towards a more 'immersive' experience?

Possibly yes, there is potential for this in the near future. I think a lot of the technology so far tends more towards distraction than immersion. Links to related facts, other texts, images, anecdotes etc. in e-books encourage the kind of shallow reading we do when we skim the internet. Immersive experiences I can think of include Guy Begbie’s ‘Back Room Sounding’ (http://www.guybegbie.com/Pages/backroomsounding.aspx) or Charles Sandison’s digital work Carmina Figurata. Did I mention this one before?

There is a great essay by David Paton here about the work: http://www.theartistsbook.org.za/view.asp?pg=research look for the link for: IDEOLOGIES AND IDENTITIES IN DIGITAL ARTISTS’ BOOKS: PARALLELS BETWEEN CHARLES SANDISON’S CARMINA FIGURATA AND WILLEM BOSHOFF’S KYKAFRIKAANS. In fact there are lots of interesting essays there you can download.

Immersion for me involves spending time and concentrating on being receptive. Alessandro Ludovic wrote a great a book recently published by onomatopee, called Post-Digital Print – The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894. Where he talks about printed books as ‘steady’ and internet books as ‘unsteady’ [and] each has its benefits and disadvantages.

http://www.onomatopee.net/project.php?progID=c3149ad5e7c0b4bb6e80e4c770ee528c

My paper also discusses the solitary act of reading and how this has changed through works such as Michael Snow's SO IS THIS, Chris Fritton's Why We Lose Our Hands and Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's Between Page and Screen. Have you encountered works that stray from the more traditional manner of reading by yourself?

I can think of a couple, Zenon Fajfer’s ‘BELOW’ (http://www.biweekly.pl/article/1422-liberature-word-icon-space.html), actually I think he changed the title recently to ‘DOWN’, it is an emanational poem, so you have to read it aloud to realize that you are eventually repeating a phrase. They have updated their Wiki page recently (as their website is in Polish) and it has some nice classifications of the features of Liberature on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberature

Johnathan Safran Foer’s ‘Tree of Codes’, of course is a different reading experience, as is Bojan Mesrko’s. Or Radoslaw Nowakowski's ‘Sienkewice Street in Kielce’, where you get what he calls a street sentence.

How do you think that our transition from 'viewer' to 'user' has altered the way we make books and understand them?

I am not sure we fully understand how we work with books yet! Nicolas Frespech has just started calling his e-books (lirepub.com) BIPS (books in progress) as he still isn’t sure what they actually are. People are exploring possibilities as makers but most of the ‘user’ books I have seen are still way off the amazing things I thought they would be by now.

[Inspired by the likes of Borges, Morris and The Apostrophe Search Engine,] I am going to randomize my dissertation and place it on an online platform (whilst handing in the original transcript!). Since there are about 12,000 words, it will have 12,000 to the power of 12,000 possibilities. What potential do you think changing book works have, when paradoxically one person will never be able to understand or fully comprehend the work as a whole?

There is still so much potential, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could capture time and spend it reading the 12,000 possibilities of one book! But, one person’s experience of a text, whether a random selection or sequence will always be different to another’s whether they read it all [or] partially. Whether a work can be read in its entirety in one lifetime or not, it’s about the possibilities of experience that the reader/viewer takes from it, and that could be from a single sentence or paragraph.

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__________

Disperse

---

¹ Mel Brochner’s Theory of Painting (1970) displayed the four remaining manoeuvres at the time that were left for abstract painters: coherent figure on coherent ground, coherent figure on dispersed ground, dispersed figure on coherent ground, and dispersed figure on dispersed ground. Mel Bochner, Theory of Painting (1970) exhibited at ‘Mel Bochner: If the Colour Changes’ (Whitechapel Gallery, Galleries 1, 8 & 9, 12 October – 30 December 2012) [visited 19 December 2012]

² Dick Higgins observed in his 1965 essay, ‘Intermedia’, that books were the one form that had the capacity to contain drawings, writings, performance and musical scores, photographs, transcriptions, and even material records and documents. Dick Higgins, ‘Intermedia’ in foew&ombwhnw (New York: Something Else Press, 1969) cited in Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (Granary Books Inc. New York, 2004) p. 9

³ Yvette Hawkins, ‘Book Installation at Globe Gallery, Newcastle 2010’, in Book Art Iconic Sculptures and Installations made from Books, ed. By Paul Sloman (Gestalten, Berlin 2011) p. 9.

⁴ Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (Granary Books Inc. New York, 2004) p. 364.

⁵ Samuel Beckett, Proust and the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, (Calder and Boyars, 1965) p. 103, cited in ‘Drama, Criticism and Manifesto: Beckett’s Three Dialogues with George Duthuit’, by Paul Stewart, The Modern World.com <http://www.themodernword.com/beckett/paper_stewart.html> [accessed 18 November 2012]

⁶ Drucker, p. 363.

⁷ Marcel Duchamp in ‘Aesthetics of Chance’ by Margret Iveson in Documents of Contemporary Art: Chance ed. Margret Iveson (London, UK and Cambridge, MA: Whitechaple Gallery & The MIT Press, 2010) p.12.

⁸ John Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’ in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Calder and Boyars Ltd, 1968 reprinted by Marion Publishers Ltd, London, 2009) p.10.

⁹ John Cage, ‘Anything I Say Will Be Misunderstood: An Interview with John Cage,’ in John Cage at Seventy-Five, by William Duckworth, eds. Richard Flemming and William Duckworth (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989) p.21, cited in Sounds Like Silence: John Cage – 4’33” – Silence Today ed. Dieter Daniels and Inke Arns (Leipzig: Hartware MedienKunstVerein & Spector Books, 2012) p. 27.

¹⁰ John Cage, ‘An Autobiographical Statement’ was written for the Inamori Foundation and delivered in response to having received the Kyoto Prize in November 1989. It is reprinted at New Albion Records, Newalbion.com <http://www.newalbion.com/artists/cagej/autobiog.html> [accessed 2 January 2013]

¹¹ Dick Higgins, ‘Postface and Jefferson’s Birthday’ (New York, Nice and Cologne: Something Else Press, 1964) p.42 cited in Anna Dezeuze, The Do-It-Yourself Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010) p.51.

¹² Anna Dezeuze, ‘Origins of the Fluxus Score: From Indeterminacy to ‘Do-It-Yourself Artwork’ in Documents of Contemporary Art: Chance ed. Margret Iveson (London, UK and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery London & The MIT Press, 2010) p. 74.

¹³ Jackson Mac Low, ‘Methods for Reading Asymmetries’, in An Anthology of Chance Operations (U.S.A: La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963) no pp.

¹⁴ Stéphane Mallarmé, Un Coup de des jamais n’abolira le hazard, 1914 (first published in Cosmopolis, May 1897 issue) Poetry Foundation (Poetry Foundation 2013) <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/staephane-mallarmae> [accessed 2 January]

¹⁵ La Monte Young, An Anthology of Chance Operations (U.S.A: La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963) no pp.

¹⁶ ‘The Seven Continuums Evaluating the Scale of Immersivity’ is a visual representation of the qualities assessed based on an altered version of Josephine Machon’s Scale of Immersivity in relation to Performance and Immersion in Theatre. See Appendix A for details describing Machon’s Scale of Immersivity at the Performance and Immersion Symposium conference held at Alec Clegg Studios, University of Leeds, Leeds (30 November 2012)

¹⁷ Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1964) no pp.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Yoko Ono, ‘“Grapefruit” at Stendhal Gallery’ George Macinuas Foundation Inc. (George Macinuas, Fluxus Foundation Inc. 2013) <http://georgemaciunas.com/?page_id=1369> [accessed 9 February 2013]

²¹ Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. IV:1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962) p.160, footnote d. cited in Sounds Like Silence: John Cage – 4’33” – Silence Today ed. Dieter Daniels and Inke Arns (Leipzig: Hartware MedienKunstVerein & Spector Books, 2012) p. 58.

²² Cage, ‘Indeterminacy’ in Silence: Lectures and Writings p.38.

²³ John Cage, ‘Solo for voice 8’ in Song Books (August/September 1970) p. 31 cited in Sounds Like Silence: John Cage – 4’33” – Silence Today ed. Dieter Daniels and Inke Arns (Hartware MedienKunstVerein & Spector Books, Leipzig, 2012) p.64.

²⁴ Marcel Duchamp, 1913, from the notes collected in À l’infinitif, quoted in Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) p.74 cited in Sounds Like Silence: John Cage – 4’33” – Silence Today ed. Dieter Daniels and Inke Arns (Leipzig: Hartware MedienKunstVerein & Spector Books, 2012) p.27.

²⁵ This quote was modified from: ‘the replacement of the desire to do something with the desire to see what will happen’ in Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Action and Accident: Photography and Writing’, in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987) p.223 cited in ‘Aesthetics of Chance’ by Margret Iveson in Documents of Contemporary Art: Chance ed. Margret Iveson (London, UK and Cambridge, MA: Whitechaple Gallery & The MIT Press, 2010) p.24.

²⁶ Factual information and description, such as the term ‘perfect’ as written by Simon Morris in The Royal Road to the Unconscious (York, England: Information as Material, 2003) no pp.

²⁷ Simon Morris, The Royal Road to the Unconscious (York, England: Information as Material, 2003) no pp.

²⁸ Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997) p. 5.

²⁹ Morris, The Royal Road to the Unconscious, no pp.

³⁰ Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud (Information As Material, York, England, 2005) p. 355.

³¹ Craig Dworkin, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Grammar Zero’ in Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud (Information As Material, York, England, 2005) p. 12.

³² Morris, Re-Writing Freud (A term taken from the blurb).

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Jorges Luis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel’ in Labryinths eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Penguin Group, London, reprinted Penguin Classics, 2000) pp. 78 – 87.

³⁵ Craig Dworkin, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Grammar Zero’ in Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud (Information As Material, York, England, 2005) p. 11.

³⁶ Interestingly, the search engine has recently become redundant. The links on the site no longer operate due to the remediation of technology and the changing nature of web browsers. This illustrates the unstable nature of online book works and shows how platforms used for dissemination can change and cause book works to alter or disappear. <http://apostropheengine.ca> [accessed July 2012]

³⁷ Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler Henry, apostrophe (ECW Press, Canada, 2006) p. 114.

³⁸ Rachter, The Police Man’s Beard Is Half-Constructed (New York: Warner Books Inc. 1984) no pp.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Stéphen Mallarmé, ‘Mallarme, The Book’ by e-Flux, June 12 2004, e-Flux <http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/mallarme-the-book/> [accessed 16 December 2012].

⁴³ John Barth, ‘Frame-Tale,’Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Anchor, 1988).

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ John Barth, ‘John Barth: Art of the Story’, PBS Newshour interview by Elizebeth Farnsworth Airdate: 18^th November 1998.

PBS Newshour.com <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec98/barth_11-18.html> [accessed 2 Febraury 2013]

⁴⁶ Dave Dyment, ‘Long music and the short now: on Rodney Graham’s Music’, in C: International Contemporary Art, Summer 2004, The Long Now, <http://longnow.org/media/djlongnow_media/press/pdf/020040622-Dyment-LongMusicandtheShortNowOnRo dneyGrahamsMusic> [accessed 11 December 2011].

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Chris Fritton, QR Code Book: Why We Lose Our Hands, Western New York’s Book Arts Collaborative Blog Site, 23 March 2011 <http://bflobookarts.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/qr-code-book-why-we-lose-our-hands.html> [accessed 16 August 2012]

⁴⁹ Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, ‘About’, Between Page and Screen’ 2012 <http://www.betweenpageandscreen.com/about> [accessed 16 August 2012]

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen, 1st Edition (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2012)

⁵² Simon Morris, ‘Re-Writing Freud’ in Information as Material <http://www.informationasmaterial.org/portfolio/rewriting-freud-app/> [accessed 12 October 2012]

⁵³ Craig Dworkin, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Grammar Zero’ in Simon Morris, Re-Writing Freud (Information As Material, York, England, 2005) p.13

⁵⁴ Michael Snow, SO IS THIS, 45 min, 16mm film, silent (1982)

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Susan Hiller, ‘Susan Hiller: Witness – behind the scene’ by Kirstie Beaven, Tate Website (2 March 2011) <http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/susan-hiller-witness-behind-scenes> [accessed 21 December 2012].

⁵⁸ Louise Milne, ‘Witness 2000’, cited in Susan Hiller (London: Tate Publishing, 2011) p. 100.

⁵⁹ Janet Cardiff and Bures Miller, The Alter Bahnhof Video Walk <http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/bahnhof.html> [accessed 10 February 2013]

⁶⁰ A more appropriate conclusion, and one of the infinite variations of this paper, can be viewed in ‘Disperse’. Infinite variations can be found at: www.rebeccajanejones.com/coheredisperse.

⁶¹ Sarah Bodman, interview conducted via email by Rebecca Jones (see Appendix B for full transcript), November–February 2013.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Söke Dinkla, ‘From Participation to Interaction: Towards the Origins of Interactive Art’, in Clicking In: Hot Links to Digital Culture, ed. Lynn Herhman Lesson (Seattle WA: Bay Press, 1996).

⁶⁷ A prime example of the unstable and impermanent nature of these book works is the remediation of technology as illustrated in Apostrophe Engine <http://apostropheengine.ca> [accessed July 2012].

⁶⁸ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001) p. 89.

⁶⁹ Ibid. p. 9.

⁷⁰ Ibid. p. 379.

⁷¹ Sarah Bodman, interview conducted via email by Rebecca Jones (see Appendix B for full transcript), November–February 2013.

⁷² Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20^th-Century Art (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2000) p. 208.