After thinking more about my somewhat vague definition “A book is a stream of consciousness translated to a page” I went on to develop my responding publication’s sub-definition. Consciousness can be anything. I thought back to all the books I had read and the consciousness they contained and emitted.
These books contain a multitude of different themes, ideas and feelings. Despite this fact, it was really interesting to me that they shared certain strings of consciousness. Within both descriptions of setting and a more metaphorical appearance the image of mountains (despite how minor the mention and importance was) was included in every one of these books. If a book is a stream of consciousness as I had previously described, then, A book is a mountain.
A book is it’s narrative and its contents. I took extracts from all these books, focusing on passages that directly contained or alluded to mountains or more widely rocky landscapes, hills that could fit within the metaphor and used them in my response publication. For example “Supposing I’d start to slip back for good, these screes might start sliding anytime” taken from Dharma Bums. I then randomised the order of the passages to take away my own interference from this narrative I was creating. Interestingly enough the passage created from all these extracts (despite the differences in tenses etc) had a somewhat tangible narrative. Perhaps this shows we often create meaning where there is none to try and makes sense of something. However, the passage seemed to fluently describe what I perceive as a journey and physical and metaphysical descent and ascent of a character with a beginning (the character falls both physically and figuratively to “the bottom of the lake”), middle he emerges in a new setting perhaps in a dream “fell asleep. And there befell them both marvelous adventures. Now whenas sacred light began to dawn” and an end in which the character concludes about their journey “I was a wreck but naught had changed in those savage enduring scenes.” This exercise really intrigued me and I wanted a way to be able to portray this narrative in a physical visual form. It reminded me of the theory that “there are only seven basic plots in the whole world — plots that are recycled again and again in novels, movies, plays and operas.”
Consciousnesses unfolds, its not instantaneous it makes itself clear when you have a view of the bigger picture, it’s contextual. A book is an unfolding of consciousness. A sentence, a page, a chapter becomes something bigger . The reader is relied upon to store and maintain previous threads that tie the book together. You form a long lasting relationship with a book, it strengthens as you continue to read the book and I think is also why some books stay with you for so long.
Using folded paper I made a book like format where the pages initially would be read chronologically like a normal book.
Each individual page was type set to encourage a slightly more immersive experience of reading the information. I tried to portray ascents and descents based on the text in the passage, areas which talk about a division or conflict have an effect on the text and certain phrases and words have drawn out spacing in between letters or are really condensed depending on their figurative weight in the passage. I then randomly selected one word on each page and gave it a black outline to see if I could create another subnarrative just from a string of words. This book then unfolded into a big A1 poster I made using scans from old books I found in charity shops and second hand book shops.
A mixture of passages, illustrations diagrams and pictures of paintings and works of art collide into one merging collage. Elements become merged and intermingled and threads overlap and disappear only to reappear amongst another clusters of narrative information. I thought it encapsulated this more frantic colliding narrative that I had explored in a more subtle way in my typography work. Finally when you fold it back up which is somewhat a natural thing we do to an object like this. On the reverse side is the string of books which make up the passage. It’s like a revelation somewhat, seeing what the passage is made up of.
I will explore printing my response publication. I wanted to use black and white to celebrate the traditional print medium used in novels etc where only black ink is needed to communicate the message.
Cameron Aitken Graphic Design 