The event was exciting, overwhelming, and exhausting. I'm just beginning to form coherent thoughts around the things I saw, but I want to get some thoughts down before I get too overwhelmed with my day to day stuff again.
I didn't notice BYOB (Bring Your Own Books) by Celia Alvarado & Alberto G Saenz until my second or third pass inside the Great Hall. In short, users throw books at a wall. When the book hits the wall, projections of letters spill out of the spot the book hit and fall to the ground, along with the physical book.
It reminded me a bit of Golan Levin's work, particularly the Interstitial Fragment Processor (2007) and Ursonography (2005).
The statements in the video documentation are telling. "Down with books," one user says with a big grin. It's pretty hard not to read a comment about the demise of the physical book into it. You are throwing the book against the wall, letting it fall among the other bibliocarcasses while digital letters fall out or possibly escape.
To be honest, I don't really care whether it's a statement about questions surrounding the future of the physical book. I'm interested in the activity of letters and the decision to free them from the pages of the book. Over the past month or so I've been trying to wrangle an insatiable desire to release words or letters from the page. BYOB does just that. The letters are not merely splatter. They spread out, hang in the air for a moment, and then fall to the ground. That moment in the air gives them their autonomy, more than if they just fell out or remained splattered on the wall (although there's a thought about how to build up a surface).
I'm looking forward to checking out the other projects on her website. It looks like she has a playful tendency that I find very seductive.
No comments:
Post a Comment