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Amaranth Borsuk - An unlikely marriage of print and digital, Between Page and Screen chronicles a love affair between two characters, P and S. The book has no words, only inscrutable black and white geometric patterns that, when coupled with a webcam, conjure the written word

 


Amaranth Borsuk, Between Page and Screen, Siglio, 2012.

http://www.amaranthborsuk.com/


Created in collaboration with programmer Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen is a book of poems that contains no text, only stark black-and-white geometric shapes and a web address leading to betweenpageandscreen.com, where the reader follows instructions to display the book on his or her webcam. Our software detects the square markers in the book and projects poems mapped to the surface of the page. Because the animations move with the book, they appear to inhabit “real” three-dimensional space—a kind of digital pop-up book.

The poems—a series of cryptic letters between P and S, two lovers struggling to define the bounds of their relationship, do not exist on either page or screen, but in the augmented space between them opened up by the reader.

Originally created as a limited-edition hand-made artist’s book, Between Page and Screen was published in 2012 by Siglio Press and went through two printings. A second edition is now available from SpringGun Press. Readers interested in book arts and book history can print and bind their own copy and create their own augmented reality poems using our DIY tools. For more information, visit www.betweenpageandscreen.com.



An unlikely marriage of print and digital, Between Page and Screen chronicles a love affair between two characters, P and S. The book has no words, only inscrutable black and white geometric patterns that, when coupled with a webcam, conjure the written word. Reflected on screen, the reader sees him or herself with open book in hand, language springing alive and shape-shifting with each turn of the page.

The story unfolds through a playful and cryptic exchange of letters between P and S as they struggle to define their relationship. Rich with innuendo, anagrams, etymological and sonic affinities between words, Between Page and Screen revels in language and the act of reading.


 Between Page and Screen has reinvented visual poetry, doing so by displaying hieroglyphs that humans can read only through the eyes of robots. Each coded sigil resembles one of the cellular automata that a mathematician might find in the game of life—except that each glyph has become a cipher for an epistle that explores the sound of words, then explodes these messages into shrapnel. Such a book heralds the virtual reality of our own poetic future, when everyone can read a book while watching it play on television, each hologram standing in its cone of light, hovering above the open page. —Christian Bök


 You suddenly see yourself projected on the screen, holding in your hands the paper pages from which the living language of digital text unfolds into the story. And what a story it is -- full of wordplay and innuendo, the narrative flows with equal parts humor and poetic sophistication as words morph into one another with your every movement, a visceral metaphor for the longing of the two alphabetical lovers.-Maria Popova, Brainpickings


Innovators like Borsuk and Bouse prove that the future of the book should be something we all consider with optimism provided we think beyond current expectations and strive to build new ones. - Buzz Poole, Salon.com


Between Page and Screen invokes--indeed necessitates--a love affair between the reader of books and the reader of screens, a love affair that is inevitable, timely, lovely.-Timothy David Orme





Reviews:

  • Max Parnell. “Between Page and Screen.” SPAM Zine, December 2018.
  • Elizabeth Cooperman. “Notable Books.” Poetry Northwest (February 2014).
  • Jessica Pressman. “Reading (Between) Machine.” American Book Review (January 2014).
  • Abraham Avnisan. “Between Page and Screen.” Rain Taxi Review of Books (October 2012).
  • Ander Monson. “Mirror Work.” American Letters and Commentary 23, Special Issue: The Future of the Book (August 2012).
  • Peter Szatmary.”Between Page and Screen” Phi Kappa Phi Forum (Fall 2012).
  • “A Useful Pageant,” Anna Lena Phillips, American Scientist 100:3 (May-June 2012).
  • “Seen/Scene, Sheet, and Screen: Reading Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen,” Timothy David Orme, Diagram 12.2 (May 2012).
  • “May Book List: Between Page and Screen,” Hey, Small Press!, May 8, 2012.
  • Maria Popova.”Between Page and Screen: A Digital Pop-up Book About Love.” Brain Pickings, April 30, 2012.
  • Cassia / Muse of What. “Coolest Book Ever.” April 19, 2012.
  • Daniel Donahoo.”Why I Love Augmented Reality Right Now,” Geek Dad, Wired, March 27, 2012.





The Book, MIT Press, 2018)

Project Website: t-h-e-b-o-o-k.com


The book as object, content, idea, and interface.

What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book’s development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.

Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive. Despite nostalgic paeans to the codex and its printed pages, Borsuk reminds us, the term “book” commonly refers to both medium and content. And the medium has proved to be malleable. Rather than pinning our notion of the book to a single form, Borsuk argues, we should remember its long history of transformation. Considering the book as object, content, idea, and interface, she shows that the physical form of the book has always been the site of experimentation and play. Rather than creating a false dichotomy between print and digital media, we should appreciate their continuities.

Translation:

El Libro Expandido: Variaciones, materialidad y experimentos. Trans. Lucila Cordone. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Ampersand, 2020.

Interviews:

Reviews:

Excerpts:

“El libro expandido.” Página 12, August 2020. An excerpt from the Spanish translation of The Book that focuses on defining the artist’s book.

“The Book as Recombinant Structure.” The Writing Platform, October 2018.

Supplement:

What exactly is a book? In The Book, I have tried to define it with respect to its status as object, content, idea, and interface. By nature slippery, the book has taken numerous forms over time and been the subject of extensive experimentation by artists, filmmakers, tinkerers, and bookbinders.

In April, 2018, I began contacting writers, artists, and scholars I admired to ask them What is the/a book? You’ll find their answers at t-h-e-b-o-o-k.com in an attempt to draw attention to the many other formulations of what the book is and can be.

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