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The Book after
the Book thrusts us into a new visual aesthetics, using technological devices.
The Book after the Book is perhaps closer to the visual arts than to the field
of literature. But, these two categories are nothing else than processes of
experimentation, or what Italo Moriconi defines as “prácticas de experimentación
que afectan o se moldean en diferentes circuitos de recepción.” The Book after
the Book develops other zones of perception, in contrast to regular readings,
through which content/form is channeled and networked via the virtual space. We
can argue that in the Book after the Book era, we should refer to the reader as
a user who performs not only a “reading” but also other actions in the process
of approaching an online hypertext. As André Lemos affirms, “Today we have to take into account a
new form of territory in contemporary societies: the digital, informational
one” (4). This informational territory is defined by electronic flows (Lemos
4). The Book after the Book works in this informational territory generating
active and interactive responses from the users.
In The Book after the Book, inspired by
Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Sand,
Giselle Beiguelman presents an installative collection of digital screens where
mobile messages, letters, numbers, and options appear. She seems to be
extending the notion of book in connection with the browsing tools and
automatic text generators. The viewer/user is in charge of constructing a story
throughout the process of navigating the site which offers a great number of
possibilities (shelves, other books, poetry pages, codes, etc.), reminding us
of what Borges calls the “infinite” book or monstrous object, without beginning
or end. Borges suggests that the Book of Sand, in which no illustration was
repeated, kept the main character of the story condemned to stay at home,
fearing that it would be robbed. Borges also says that the book tainted reality
itself. Something similar happens when people are connected to the internet.
They inhabit those “informational” territories which have become “real life,”
an engaging domain where virtually anything is possible: from the setting up of
creative virtual relationships, to simultaneous readings of images and visual
forms, layers of information, and other materials. As Moriconi argues, “la realidad de la producción
literaria y de la dinámica cultural colocan hoy como problema la propia
realidad: lo real en tanto tal, las relaciones entre creación y realidad, entre
ficción y realidad” (179).
Beiguelman’s
book brings to mind the optical effects of the interactive sculptures of
Venezuelan artist Jesus Rafael Soto. Beiguelman, however, constructs her virtual
installations without using three-dimensional objects, but an electronic “writing”
that organizes formats, icons, illustrations, web sites, and ideas. Her project
is based upon an aesthetic of transmission, dealing with “traffic speed,
monitor quality, hardware makers,” and it imposes a reflection on “programming
and publication strategies that make the work readable, decodable, and sensible”
(Knight 1). She questions the notion of library, arguing that a library does
not effectively contain content anymore, in a traditional sense (Knight 2). Kimberly
Knight highlights that those bookshelves in Beiguelman’s project link to
material held in other locations (2). And yes, indeed: in the process of moving
from one location to another, the user experiences other animated resources and
forms of reading that give a virtual volume to each section of the book.
Authors/Artists Consulted:
Giselle Beiguelman, Jorge Luis
Borges, Kimberly Knight, André Lemos, Italo Moriconi
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