artist's book

A Humument, an oracle of love and life: a diversion of chance and change.Combining the 367 full-colour pages of Tom Phillips’ artist’s book, the treated Victorian novel A Humument, with an interactive oracle function, this App displays the luminous artwork in a fun and highly accessible way. The App version includes 39 newly created, previously unpublished pages. Using a chosen date and a randomly generated number the oracle will cast two pages to be read in tandem. You may receive direction, encouragement or warning. The Find wheel spins through the book to quickly navigate the pages visually and find your favourites. Email your personal choices or oracle reading to friends. Sharekit supports image posts to Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook direct from the App.I found this book (or rather, it found me) when I was not quite thirty and have worked on it constantly ever since. It beckoned me on as it yielded strange words and provoked new images and told the fragmentary tale of Irma and Bill Toge. Now I am well over seventy and still revisiting and revising its pages, I find further layers of hidden texts and buried messages. Like the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, chance pairs of pages, taken together and interpreted, act as a guide and cryptic commentary on life in word and picture; a not-too-serious oracle which I now share with you.

(Source: Author's description in the App store)

Ethereal Landscapes is an interactive computer artwork that employs language in the form of barcodes as the interface between a physical object and a virtual space. The user is immersed in a generative video and audio database synchronized in real-time through scanning the barcodes on each page of the photographic artists’ book. This collaborative piece challenges traditional notions of the book-object (as static and non-aural), and of video/audio (as passive and linear) by integrating the interactivity of turning a book’s pages with projected moving images and sound.

Mirroring the interconnectedness of the formal level, Ethereal Landscapes investigates the relations between life as seen on a biological level and our quotidian human experience. The images from the book are referenced throughout the video; their combination with found and created sounds entwine together in a poetic arc around the processes of life, the passage of time and our un-deniable mortality.

(Source: Artists' description for ELO_AI)

Coupling the physicality of the printed page with the electric liquidity of the computer screen, Between Page and Screen chronicles a love affair between the characters P and S while taking the reader into a wondrous, augmented reality. The book has no words, only inscrutable black and white geometric patterns that—when seen by a computer webcam—conjure the written word. Reflected on screen, the reader sees himself 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 turbulent relationship. Rich with innuendo, anagrams, etymological and sonic affinities between words, Between Page and Screen takes an almost ecstatic pleasure in language and the act of reading. Merging concrete poetry with conceptual art, “technotext” with epistolary romance, and the tradition of the artist’s book with the digital future, Between Page and Screen expands the possibilities of what a book can be. Writer and book artist Amaranth Borsuk and (her husband) developer Brad Bouse, have created a magical space for the reader to discover what lives in the “in-between.”

(Source: Publisher's description)