Third Time’s a Charm (sort of)

The idea of a double-tabbed nonadhesive joint for assembling book pages continued to niggle at me last week, so I made another attempt at a workable version. The image below shows the successful iteration.

Friday Night Flicks: William Blake

Some might consider William Blake to be the original book artist, controlling every aspect of production, and personally selling his work door-to-door. Tonight’s short flick is about the printing process employed by Blake in producing his books and prints.

 

 

If you have a few minutes free this weekend, you might want to watch this second video about Blake’s use of light in his images.

 

How to Make a Tabbed Accordion

The latter part of the week I spent playing with tabbed accordions.

Friday Night Flicks: Dieter Roth

Dieter Roth produced an extensive series of artist’s books in his lifetime: some were new works, some were altered works. (The first altered book I encountered back in the early 1970s was one of Roth’s Literaturwurst series.) Tonight’s flick features Roth’s son Björn talking about his father, with images of Roth’s extensive Diaries on exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery during the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2012.

 

 

If you would like to explore more of Roth’s work this weekend, you might watch a second, longer video from Colorado University Boulder Libraries — The Book’s Undoing: Dieter Roth’s Artist’s Books.

 

In Praise of the Binder Clip

I like stores that sell tools and materials: art supply stores and fabric stores and hardware stores and stationary stores. One of the often overlooked treasures in the last-mentioned is the humble binder clip.

Friday Night Flicks: R. J. Kern

The webpage with this flick has been sitting open on my desktop for almost a week, but I forgot to post it until now. The video is an introduction to a physical book that is also a virtual book.

 

 

I am posting the trailer as a teaser for a series of longer interview videos. You might want to watch one of them —or more— this weekend.

How to Make a Wind Spinner

It has been blustery here for a couple of weeks, but I discovered how to make the wind stop blowing: build a wind spinner and try to make a video of it in action.

Friday Night Flicks: One Step Away

The role of computer technologies in our life is increasingly under discussion these days. It seems appropriate to check out how people are combining new technologies with the traditional idea of the book. Today’s flick features an experiment in combining the book form with virtual reality — an augmented book.

This work is an experimental project within the PhD program with the collaboration of the Athens School of Fine Arts, entitled “Scripture and Image, The Evolution Of The Substrate-. From The Space, To The Object, To The Paper, And The Return To The Contemporary Space Of Virtual Reality.” This research concerns the examination of the form of the elements of a book (words and images) and the substrate on which they are incorporated as a means of memory and storytelling. It develops through a comparative study of their evolution over time: from the manuscript book to typography and recently in digital media such as computer screen, digital tablet, smart phones, virtual and augmented reality.

 

 

If you are intrigued, you can learn more about the project this weekend by looking here, or watch more of Anna K. Meli’s book-related videos here.

Waiting for glue to dry …

The major book arts project this week was finally constructing a wrapper for Recomp, a work that I started in 2015. (You can read about it here and here.)

Recomp is mounted in a box that has hinges and a latch. The wrapper needed something to make room for those, so I began by making spacers out of thin book board built up in layers to match the depth of the hinges or latch. (You will note that I used a highly sophisticated clamping system.)

Friday Night Flicks: Dia al-Azzawi

On March 26, 2023 I mentioned the Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry exhibition on at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. Tonight’s flick features curator Francesca Leoni‘s introduction to the works in the show and the ideas behind the pairings with works from the Ashmolean collection.

 

 

You could spend some time this weekend looking through the exhibition leaflet. If you viewed it back in March, it still might be worth looking again after hearing Leoni’s talk.