If connected to other information, is the book still a book? Do we herald the death of the individual author with the rise of collaborative writing? What role will editorial and technical standards play? While the printed book seems finite, is there room in our Order of the Book for works that never achieve closure, that remain in an unfolding state?

Pousser has observed that the poetics of the ''open'' work tends to encourage ''acts of conscious freedom'' on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point
of a network of limitless interrelations, among which he chooses to set up his own form without being influenced by an external necessity which definitely prescribes the organization of the work in hand.

The book has pages that are wonderfully, even improbably, varied. This in itself marks a move from the representation of a literal to that of a phenomenal object. A certain measure of visual unity is achieved by the fact that all the pages show the same script. We are certainly meant to imagine that this is a single object. But then the book’s pages offer very varied kinds of information and graphical formats: double-columned text with a gold initial letter on black ground, musical notation on a page with a black majuscule on a gold ground, a page with interlinear rubrication that seems to stretch across the full page facing another double-columned text page in which red and black paragraphs alternate. Another page repeats elements of this format, reinforcing our expectations about the uniformity of design within a single work.

Her theatrical staging within the layered text takes advantage of the dramatic potential of the page as a play of action.
Where are we to locate the work in this instance?
The surface of the page serves as a scrim, in an indeterminate place between projected shadow from behind, activity precipitated from above (scraps of paper laid, illusionistically, onto the page as if cut from another sheet), as a surface on which are scribbled, palimpsestic, traces of another reading. The sheets are also used to support a conventional text block, thus playing with the invisible or neutral status to which they are so often relegated. The effect of these various layers is to destabilize the sheet. No single identity can be assigned to it. The paper floats, is receptive, functions according to several codes of presentation simultaneously. And the space created is very much a virtual espace constituted by relations among these modes and their capacity to produce effect. The reading of such a page necessarily results in a contingent work, one that uses the codex to advantage while undercutting its fixed identity.

When everything is reduced to the display screen, some kind of ‘simulation’ of space becomes necessary, since everything now must fit within these few inches. Also, in order to make the simulation understandable and/or realistic, any system for finding one’s way (‘navigating’) within this virtual space should include a consistent interface, allowing for multiple perspectives and levels of viewing. Unfortunately, there has never been a clear standard for implementing this. The different strategies, symbols (icons, pictograms) and navigational structures of various competing systems have not yet succeeded in presenting readers of virtual printed content with a set of standards that they can easily become accustomed to. The result is that a so-called ‘clean’ virtual reading space remains more unfamiliar than the ‘messy’ physical one.

⤡ 02.16

Scrolling text on a computer terminal is so commonplace that it may be alarming to question it. But really it is rather dreadful. Most of the time it cannot be read when moving. Almost all of the time it gives the user absolutely no sense of where he or she is vis-a-vis some whole.