The Book by Amaranth Borsuk

Author:Amaranth Borsuk [Borsuk, Amaranth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: books; reading; history of the book; technology of the book; bookbinding; electronic book; e-book; e-reader; digital books; new media; electronic literature; book arts; artists’ books; bookworks; book object; interactive books; materiality; material text; media archaeology; book forms; google books; kindle; digital books; codex; pop-up book; flip-book; harlequinade; concertina book; augmented reality; audiobook; project gutenberg; internet archive; Gutenberg; Aldus Manutius; Jan Tschichold; William Blake; Stéphane Mallarmé; Ed Ruscha; Ulises Carrión; Alison Knowles; Emmett Wiliams; Dieter Roth; Bob Brown; Vannevar Bush; Raymond Queneau
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Much of Knowles’s work explores the intersection between the book and performance. She revisited the life-size book in her 1982 Book of Bean, another walk-through installation meditating on the bean’s cross-cultural and personal significance. Built with artist Yoshi Wada and installed at avant-garde art space Franklin Furnace, the multisensory installation invites viewers traversing the sequence of spaces to read translations of the word bean across languages from Arabic to Swahili. They hear a soundscape that includes a poem composed of the names of every Bean in the phone book read alongside those of actual legumes, listen to a bean orchestra created by rattling beans inside different objects, exit through a window encircled by text about dreams and beans, and in the end are offered a dish of beans to eat.

Knowles’s books, like her artistic practice, offer readers nourishment, reminding us that the book is an exchange, and one that is only completed when we arrive. In her own words: “You have to get right into it, as you do with any good book, and you must become involved and experience it yourself. Then you will know something and feel something. Let us say that it provides a milieu for your experience but what you bring to it is the biggest ingredient, far more important than what is there.”47 Crawling through The Big Book, Book of Bean, or a new incarnation, Boat Book (2014), the visitor’s body stands in for the reader’s eye. As we traverse the pages, our experience is itself the text, which will be different for each viewer because of what we have seen before, between, and after these pages.

You have to get right into it, as you do with any good book, and you must become involved and experience it yourself. Then you will know something and feel something. Let us say that it provides a milieu for your experience but what you bring to it is the biggest ingredient, far more important than what is there.

—Alison Knowles, The Big Book

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