Book contents
- Book, Text, Medium
- Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture
- Book, Text, Medium
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Prospectus
- Intro\Retro
- Part I The Hold of the Codex
- Chapter 1 Bibliographics
- Chapter 2 Platformatics
- Part II The Grip of Inscription
- Part III The Give of Medium
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 2 - Platformatics
from Part I - The Hold of the Codex
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2020
- Book, Text, Medium
- Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture
- Book, Text, Medium
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Prospectus
- Intro\Retro
- Part I The Hold of the Codex
- Chapter 1 Bibliographics
- Chapter 2 Platformatics
- Part II The Grip of Inscription
- Part III The Give of Medium
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This chapter revolves around a retrospective tour of recent book arts expositions where the material vehicle – the physical platform – of codex objects gets appropriated, reworked, simulated, or digitally remade in various combinations of analytic and figurative rigor in the bibliobjet: first the “Odd Volumes” curation at Yale in 2014–15, then “The Internal Machine” show at the Center for Books Arts in Manhattan in 2017. Exhibits range from a pre-Kindle irony of electronically activated video “reading,” through books as sounding boards for acoustic synthesizers, to a sonnet anthology accessed only by an embedded microphone. In such exaggerated “platformatics,” repeatedly the interplay between sound and text is displaced from the normal subvocal enunciation of written script – as is more recently the case in a “volume” of spectrogram rather than script lines, transferred from digital audio, that goes out of its way to correlate the prehistory of binary computing with its vestigial codex form.
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- Book, Text, MediumCross-Sectional Reading for a Digital Age, pp. 57 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021