User:Lieven Van Speybroeck/Graduation Project Proposal

Graduation Project Proposal — Draft #1

Lieven Van Speybroeck, 25 Oct. 2011

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Overview

1. A glance in the rear-view mirror (a bit of what, why and how from the past)

In order to look forward, let me start by looking back. To pinpoint what exactly has been the common thread in projects I have done in the past is not an easy task. However, to define my 'interests' is crucial to this proposal. It is a process in which I find myself crystallizing fleeting glimpses of overlaps and recurring themes and ultimately highlighting the core elements that are embedded in all of these snapshots:

• text
• print
• modes of reading
• reading as a process of production
• reading through a production process

Quite a fat-point highlight marker, I know. I am fully aware of the fact that this list seems rather broad and more specification is desirable, but I am convinced that these are the components that keep all of my work together. Probably the projects I did last year will help to illustrate this. The first one, a colaboration with a fellow student, was two-fold: firstly a chat program that involved the mediation and alteration of text through a computer script, secondly this script was embodied by a printing device that exposed its inner workings to an audience in real-time [1]. In the second trimester I tried to combine texts and imagery from the Situationist International with material from Flickr's photo-sharing service as an attempt to formulate a contemporary notion of 'spectacle'. While this resulted in several experiments rather than a single finalized work, the interplay between reading text as and through a production process was strongly integrated in this research. The last project I did was an installation consisting of four ink-jet printers that 'performed' a short-story by Ernest Hemingway, thereby transforming the fictional time and space into the real [2].

Next to these projects, I attended a symposium in The Hague last year that dealt with some of the core elements I listed above, or at least, I thought it would. It was called 'The Unbound Book', and presented itself as 'a conference that invites its speakers and audience to take part in defining the transformative landscape of reading, publishing and learning' [3]. A relevant topic to discuss in an age where new media technologies are reshaping every aspect of culture, including the concept of 'the book'. The program looked promising on paper, inviting speakers from diverse disciplines with various backgrounds. In reality, however, practically the whole series of lectures – apart from a few rare exceptions — was a tiring battle between the printed and the e-book, diametrically opposed to one another. Taking part meant as much as picking sides. A potentially interesting discussion was nipped in the bud before it even started.

2. Questions

So far for looking back. I would like to take this fascination and frustration as the foundations for this year's graduation project. More specifically I think it would be valuable to re-address some of the questions that arose in the preparatory communication around The Unbound Book, but remained – at least in my impression – more or less untouched during the symposium itself. Which possibilities and opportunities arise from the rapid infiltration of electronic media into a culture that has been determined by print technology for centuries? What is the impact of this on the act of reading, acquiring knowledge, models of production? To which extent is electronic media a remediation of print media? How does this manifest itself in our contemporary daily lives? There are many more questions to be asked, and perhaps the most important thing is not come up with a clear answer for them, but to create a space in which they can be discussed and contemplated upon in a meaningful manner, rather than just thinking in terms of 'old' and 'new' or 'good' and 'bad'. If at all "the concept of 'bookness' needs reinvention"[4], it has to happen on the level of experience, not technicality. I want to turn my graduation project into a quest for this space where alternative reading experiences can be explored.

3. Trajectory

I imagine this search as a combination of practical experiments driven by theoretical research. Whereas Iast year's projects approached the concept of print in a fairly concrete and practical way, I feel the need to start this quest by immersing myself in a more in-depth theoretical study of the history of print. It is the kind of knowledge I lack, and it is the kind of knowledge I need to gain useful insights and make informed decisions. The next step would be to move into the realm of electronic media, and more specifically its implications on those parts of culture that are/were highly print-dependant. The newspaper industry, publishing practices, journalism, etc. The third stage will be a matter of focusing on contemporary concepts and projects dealing with practices of reading through new media technology and the book in particular: e-books, e-readers, epub, SocialBook (Bob Stein), RoSE (transliteracies project at the University of California), and so on. This research will help me to develop a practice in which I can incorporate and react to past and ongoing developments within this field.

4. Circle

This proposal links back very closely to the application assignment I submitted when I applied at the Piet Zwart Institute. I created tag-cloud versions of three canonical novels and exported them as epub formats, so they could be 'read' on an e-reading device. By doing so, I wanted to raise awareness around the differences between reading from a screen and reading from print, as they both ask for a different approach and cannot be carbon-copied from one to another. Although I am convinced that this conceptual intervention is doing a decent job at communicating the underlying idea, I realize it was also primarily dealing with matters of technicalities. In that respect, I think my graduation project would be a nice opportunity to return to the initial starting point of my studies at Piet Zwart, and use the experience I have gained last year and the research I will do this year in order to shift the focus beyond the level of technicality.

Work plan

• October - mid December

• reading + summarizing + annotating: history of print / electronic media / unbound book symposium

• by mid December

• make a list of and look into projects that deal with the concept of the book in new media technologies (s.a. RoSE, SocialBook).
• start thinking about possible setups to explore alternative reading experiences (small experiments?)

Bibliography

• Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: the making of typographic man
• Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy
• George Berkeley, Towards a New Theory of Vision
• David Bolter, Writing Space: computers, hypertext and the remediation of print
• Manual de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
• Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth
• David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd
• David Diringer, The Alphabet
• Friedrich Kittler, Grammophone, Film, Typewriter

...

Audio, video, ...

• Terence McKenna: Riding Range with Marshall McLuhan - 1995 lecture
• Walter J. Ong: The End of the Age of Literacy - 1960 lecture

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[1]
The Listener is an interactive installation that consists of two main parts. Firstly, it is an online multi-person chatbox that people can join by surfing to a certain web address. The chat is mediated by a computer script that alters the original messages by adding, deleting or replacing words. It operates in such a way that every participant sees his/her own unchanged messages, while the recipients are presented with a transformed variation. Secondly, a large pen plotter instantly prints out a complete transcript of the conversation, showing both the original and altered version of the messages. This way, the workings of the computer script are exposed – which is not the case in the interface of the chatbox itself – and a physical log of the conversation is made. The installation was presented at an internet cafe where people were invited to join the chatbox and could see their conversations being plotted at the same time.

[2]
'Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway' is an installation composed of four inkjet printers that perform the homonymous short story, each representing either one individual character or the narrator. The story is about a trip to a so-called „Indian Camp“ by a medical doctor, his son, and his uncle, in order to help an indigenous woman to give birth to her child. During the process - a Caesarian incision has to be made to save the mother and her child - the husband commits suicide. An important aspect is that apart from the narrator's voice, the whole story consists of dialogue between the father, uncle and son.

The installation uses the fictional time of the story as a timeline for the actual – 'real-time' – print performance. Dialogues and narrator breaks are thus printed out as if they would be performed by actors in a theatre play or movie, synchronized with each other and containing the time gaps of the original narrative. One complete print-out of the story is a five hour sequence of intense, concentrated printing sessions interspersed with long pauses. Nothing was added to or left out of the original text. As they are being printed, the sheets – usually not containing more than one sentence or a few words – fall on the floor, so people can pick them up to read and recompose the part of the story that has already been 'told'.

[3]
The Unbound Book, n.d. [online] Available at: ‹ http://e-boekenstad.nl/unbound › [ Accessed 25 October 2011]

[4]
Ibid.