"The artist is to show all this through the art of colors as in a book that had a tongue to speak with. For the silent image can speak from the walls where it is seen by all, and there it renders the greatest service." - St. Gregory of Nyssa
In the middle of a large room at a Boston Convention center, the site of last year's splendid ACM Conference on Multimedia, I witnessed several dozen demonstrations of the latest high-tech multimedia creations, but only one was astonishing. I caught a glimpse of a new kind of "book" which seemed certain to change my thinking. A fantastic claim, and one made all the more fantastic by the fact that the "book" contained no printed text. As you begin to comprehend just what Jacquelyn A. Martino's "Without A Special Object of Worship" is about, you might find your understanding of the place of the "book" in education dramatically altered also.
Martino's "book" - be patient with the oddity of seeing book bookended by quotation marks - is described by its creator as "an interactive Book Arts Computer Installation." This means that one sits in front of a bound book (five pages, and the dimensions of a small prayer book), wired to a computer. As one turns the book's pages, the computer monitor displays a variety of 2D and 3D digital imagery, art activated by the act of page turning. What is created is an interactive opportunity, an invitation to explore two parallel texts, the analog book (which is an input device) and the digital book the computer displays as a consequence of paging the analog book.
Why are both texts wordless? Martino's title clarifies her purpose, while circling a paradox. The experience of this installation feels akin to religious worship, and this installation is very much "a special object." Yet there is no single, clearly defined object of one's worshipful attention. While not designed to induce an object-centered religious experience, it is intended to be installed in a candlelit space, and the installation includes a recording of an original musical sound track in the style of Gregorian chants played while one explores the pages. So the atmosphere surrounding the computer site is a crucial part of the experience of this book. Add to this the nature of the book pages. The paper, which has the tooth, the roughened texture and color irregularities found usually only in handmade papers, is a sensuous invitation for the eyes and fingertips to explore. The textures of the papers - without any printed words - are faithful to Martino's inspiration: the salt washed, Veneto-Byzantine architecture of Venice, Italy. The digital imagery flickering across the computer monitor is an uncannily faithful complement to this kind of Byzantine patterning, full of rough-hewn surface textures flecked with bits of glistening gold or silver pools of light, the animations creating the illusion of moving book pages. It is as if the spiritual resonance one might feel meditating upon Venetian architecture is transformed into a spiritual illumination which transcends the building forms themselves.
This might sound exotic, charming, arcane, precious - but one would be wrong to simply see this aesthetic and spiritual fusion of analog and digital art books as a rare artistic experiment. The educational implications of Martino's experimental book installation are considerable.
Think of all the palaver heard in the mass media about "the death of the book," with computer technology painted as the assassin. Suddenly Martino raises the specter of the "wired" book. Yet this digitized hybrid book doesn't offer any of the "lost in an endless labyrinth" vertigo that hypertext creations like "Storyspace" software might. Rather than a book becoming a seemingly limitless set of possible links students can explore until ennui sets in, the book Martino creates is an inviting and centering meditational object. While Martino's concern with meditation is linked to inducing a relaxing, non-denominational spiritual/artistic experience, isn't it possible that meditating on her creation could lead to unique intellectual explorations in humanities classrooms?
What I would give to take Martino's book into a college humanities class! Think of the possibilities. Among the questions provoked by her art would be the following: how does this book, and the digital technology making it possible, cause us to redefine what a book is? How does a wordless book convey meanings in ways both similar and dissimilar to conventional texts? How might a Venetian architect, or bookmaker, transplanted from the sixteenth century into our moment, greet such an invention? How could such books be created to honor artistic styles from the non-Western world (i.e., Could an electronic kente cloth pattern book be created as an inspiring part of a study of Yoruba culture?). Must books be packaged exclusively in analog or digital format, or are a multitude of analog/digital hybrids possible and desirable?
Then there are questions about how Martino's invention provokes introspection about the nature of one's reading habits, the rhythms of page turning, the sensuousness (or often lack thereof) associated with reading. How many students set up intentional pauses after every page to let images, catalyzed by reading, gel in the mind's eye? Is there a "Byzantine" reading style particularly well suited to comprehending the complex structures of Byzantine art?
This last question is underscored by Keith Smith, whom Martino quotes in her recent article explaining her creation in the journal Leonardo (Vol. 30, No. 1, 1997). "Bookbinding at its ultimate realization is not a physical act of sewing or gluing, but a conceptual ordering of time and space. . . . The physical object and turning pages become part of the content." This point was once driven home when I worked with a freshman English class given to complaining about the dullness of their science textbooks. I offered them an assignment encouraging them to create a "mock" college textbook, provoking them not only to consciously imitate dull textbook prose, but also to describe the book's design, layout, and so on. Then they were asked, after successfully creating a sample chapter of this ilk, to create a chapter totally in an opposite vein, full of lively as well as informative writing, and designed beautifully. One student surprised me by asking if this positive textbook could be designed so that chapters could be read in any order. After I processed the unexpected query I affirmed such a possibility.
I began at that moment to dream of a college textbook as a work of art. This wasn't a totally bizarre notion. Certainly I had suffered college texts as an undergraduate that seemed as grotesquely designed and written as any gothic or surrealistic fable. Why not the kind of instructional book a William Morris would have been proud to behold? Of course, there are scores of economic considerations to be considered. What student could ever afford such a text? But suppose just one college textbook could be created in this vein simply to demonstrate how the possibility could be actualized?
Now this particular freshman class did this assignment back in the Dark Ages when computers were mainframes safely hidden in some administration building basement, far removed from the field of vision of these freshmen. The thought of a book wired to a computer would have seemed nonsensical then, both to them and myself. But now?
Think of stripping away the Byzantine and religious trappings of Martino's book for a moment. Think simply of turning the pages of a book to activate computer monitor patterns. Imagine that the book before the computer possesses complete text as well as graphics. Suppose the book page the student opens offers a spectrum of different options. A fingertip running across a line of print can duplicate the same line on a monitor screen. Or translate that line from the language of the book text into a foreign language the student is studying. Or a pause in the forward motion of the reader's fingertip triggers a set of questions to flash on the monitor, reinforcing critical thinking about the meanings of that line. Suppose the act of page turning - the speed of page turning - is a signal to the computer that the student had perhaps reflected longer on the previous page before proceeding. Suppose a finger touching a book illustration signals the start of an in-screen animation enhancing comprehension of a concept no static text or graphic could sufficiently convey.
There is a striking image in poet Ezra Pound's The Cantos: that any intelligently engaged reader of a thoughtfully constructed book will discover, during reading, that the book will turn into a ball of light in the reader's hands. Martino's invention does literally that, the paper text magically turning into a radiant pixel display. What was once the airy stuff of poetic metaphor, digital technology might fashion into a viable and inspiring educational tool.
In discussing this project with Martino at the Boston ACM conference, I sensed how working on this installation changed her own thinking as a digital artist. There is a remarkable balance in "Without A Special Object of Worship" between technological ingenuity and artistic creativity. Technology, in this instance, is a vehicle to bring about a close sense of connection to the natural world (I recalled the salt-washed New Jersey beach houses of my youth while sitting at her installation). Rather than bringing about accelerated nervous fatigue, here was computer technology catalyzing deep relaxation. Rather than feeling "driven" by having to use the latest digital technology in a novel way, she began with her own artistic and spiritual need to re-experience the beauties of Venice.
In dreaming how Martino's invention might someday find a home in university classrooms, I think of how I felt in the noisy room of multimedia demonstrations. I looked across a sea of faces and found someone looking thoughtfully at ease, oddly at peace in the midst of the hubbub. It was Martino, turning the pages of a wordless book. She glanced at me, inviting me to turn a new leaf.
Norman C. Weinstein is a poet/critic, former university faculty, and publisher in WIRED and MIT's Technology Review. [email protected]