On the unbound (nature of this) book (version 3.0)
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 8:27PM (The following series of posts has been written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project.
Version 1.0 of this material was first presented at The Unbound Book conference, held at Amsterdam Central Library and the Royal Library in Den Haag, May 19-21, 2011.
Version 2.0 of this material is due to appear as ‘Force of Binding: On Liquid, Living Books (Mark Amerika Mix)’ on remixthebook.com, the companion website to Amerika's remixthebook volume. remixthebook by Mark Amerika will be published by University of Minnesota Press in September, 2011.)
What is the unbound book? Can the book be unbound?
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Is remixthebook, with its literary, philosophical, theoretical, artistic and poetic mash-ups and accompanying website where visual artists, theorists, new media scholars, philosophers and musicians sample source material, ‘postproducing it into their own remix/theory performances’, a book unbound?
The Oxford Online Dictionary defines the term ‘bound’ as follows:
‘bound in bind …tie or fasten (something) tightly together…;
… walk or run with leaping strides…; …a territorial limit; a boundary…; … going or ready to go towards a specified place…; …past and past participle of bind…’
In which case the unbound book would be one that:
had been gathered together and firmly secured, as a pile of pages can be to form a print-on-paper codex volume;
had a certain destiny or destination or had been prepared, going, or ready to go toward a specific place (as in ‘homeward bound’), such as perhaps an intended addressee, known reader or identifiable and controllable audience;
and had been springing forward or progressing toward that place or destiny in leaps and bounds.
Had because the use of the past participle suggests such binding is history as far as the book is concerned. Today, in the era of online authorship, comment sections, discussion forums, social tags, RSS feeds, YouTube clips, streaming video, augmented reality, 3D graphics, interactive information visualisations, geolocation search capabilities, crowd sourcing, remixes, mash-ups, and texts being generally connected to a network of other information, data and mobile media environments, the book is being disrupted, dislocated, dispersed. So much so that if the book is to have any future at all in the context of these other supports and modes of reading and writing, it will be in unbound form; a form which, while radically transforming the book, may yet serve to save it and keep it alive.
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