‘Tangled Threads’ was an eBook designed to act as a film storyboard, as part of Proboscis’ Sensory Threads project. Scripted by Karen Martin and Alice Angus, and illustrated by Mandy Tang, the book is a series of intricately rendered scenes and captions, but the real draw is how Mandy has incorporated pop-up inserts at the back which the reader can cut out and assemble, adding new layers of depth to the pages.

You can have a peek at the digital version below – minus pop-ups, of course – and read posts from Karen and Mandy explaining how it was made.

Download, make and read ‘Tangled Threads’ for yourself.

Click on the picture below to view the Flickr gallery.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Du9XaMN5hM&w=640&h=390]

They’ve also animated scenes from Maurice Gee’s novel, Going West, using the actual pages from the book. This one beggars belief.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBec95Mv8G8&w=640&h=390]

These remind me of Karen Martin’s previous posts that featured similar concepts, particularly pieces by Yuken Terya and Brian Dettmer. Oh, what humble paper is capable of.

Xavier Antin has constructed an extraordinary printing chain made from a stencil duplicator (1880), a spirit duplicator (1923), a laser printer (1969), and an inkjet printer (1976) – spanning almost one hundred years of technology. Each uses a single ink from the CMYK colour model, which explains why the book printed through it resembles a series of hazy retro 3D images ; a disorientating, yet impressive effect.

Abigail Reynolds collages different images of the same building or scene, then cuts and fold’s portions of the overlaying paper to produce new representations with depth and occasionally dizzying perspectives. A similar effect could be created with eBooks, by printing on both sides of the paper, and manipulating the top layer. Getting the orientation right would be tricky, but the end result could be intriguing. Anyone up to the task?

Carmen Vela Maldonado created these lovely eBooks by experimenting with different coloured paper and card, as well as cutting out parts and using scanned scraps of paper as backgrounds. So much more impressive then using standard paper, they add a whole new dimension of texture and depth, engaging the reader on a higher level. “A Manifesto for Black Urbanism” by Paul Goodwin, which uses black ink on black card and faint images of urban environments printed onto tracing paper, looks stunning. The map overlays used in “Dusk”, by Saki, also work really well – visual place-marks to a tale defined by its location and references to surrounding areas.

Another gem which has been featured on www.fastcodesign.com, and something my brain is still trying to recover from. Created by Michael Hansmeyer, and constructed from 2700 laser cut sheets of cardboard with wooden cores, these columns were spawned by an algorithm fed into a computer, forming “computational architecture”, with up to 16 MILLION facets. It’s absolutely staggering. After being cut out, the sheets left behind form a negative, empty-space column. The image of this is unreal; it looks like the hallucinatory imaginings of an alien spacecraft, mechanical yet almost organic, something that wouldn’t be out of place from the trippy sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Blow your mind here.

Recently I’ve written about a few artists who combine cut-outs with books (Yukon Terya, Nicholas Jones and Chisato Tamabayashi to name three..) and Brian Dettmer fits right into that category. For The Book Autopsies Brian takes old books which have ceased to be valued for their content and gives them new life as art objects. The books are cut by hand and no text or image is repositioned to create the final ‘autopsy’. Beautiful, pain-staking work.

A blog post from 2007 on centripedalnotion.com contains a statement from the Toomey-Tourell Fine Art website (one of the galleries who represent Brian Dettmer) about the process of making this work. I couldn’t find the statement on the website but included it anyway because I think it gives an insight into the motivation and the method.

Explanation of Book Dissections-

In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the cover of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and other surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose a book’s hidden, fragmented memory. The completed pieces expose new relationships of a book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.

Brian Dettmer is represented by Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, Toomey-Tourell Fine Art, San Francisco and Haydee Rovirosa. There are more images on these websites and on Brian’s Flickr stream.

Cut-outs, book artists and bookleteer

Reading a boing boing post about Brian’s work I was interested in a commenter who said they would prefer Brian to make their own books to treat in this way and not use discarded books. While I think (as was pointed out by someone else in the comments) that this kind of goes against the concept of Brian’s work I think it’s an interesting idea in relation to bookleteer.

As with the pop-up eBook I’m working on, it would be possible to design a bookleteer cutout book where the designer does not cut the book but produces an eBook template showing where it should be cut in order to complete the book. How does this alter the idea of book-as-object and the role of book artist when the work of making the book is completed by the person who downloads it?

Augmented Everyday Objects by Yuken Terya: A McDonald’s Happy Meal Bag and a Toilet Roll

Ok, I have to confess that I came across these two images (above) of Yuken Terya’s work first and then I hunted around in the hope of finding that he had also worked with books and written material. And luckily for me, I came across the two projects below on Yuken’s website.

Lost and Found (above) features cut-up copies of The New York Times in which the image on the front page has been cut to form what look to me like dozens of pieces of clover (I could be wrong about that – there’s no information on the website about what they represent).

The Giving Tree Project (below) is a cut-out of a tree made from a book which stands out from the page in such incredible detail.

I’ve shown these projects because they fit with the augmented reading theme but I really recommend you visit Yuken’s website. to see his other projects.

(Image from http://www.hemmy.net/2008/04/20/nicholas-jones-book-sculptures/)

Nicholas Jones is a Melbourne based artist who has been described as a book artist, book dissector and book carver. He takes discarded books and cuts and sews them to form beautiful book objects. It might be called augmented non-reading as I don’t believe it would be possible to read the books once Nicholas has finished with them.

(Image from http://www.hemmy.net/2008/04/20/nicholas-jones-book-sculptures/)

On Nicholas’s website, the book objects are named by the title of the book from which they were made. It’s strange but I do find that knowing the title of the book adds to the experience of looking at the object as I’m able to imagine some of the words and the style of language folded up into those complex shapes. Somehow I have a different relationship to these objects than I would to other folded paper sculptures. I wonder why this should be…

(Image from http://www.hemmy.net/2008/04/20/nicholas-jones-book-sculptures/)

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

I expect you have seen The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle before. It is the children’s book where a tiny caterpillar spends one week eating his way through a variety of foods before making a cocoon and finally emerging as a beautiful butterfly. As a kid I loved the holes in the pages which showed where the caterpillar had been. But it was only recently that I found out how Eric Carle makes the fabulous coloured illustrations for this book and the many others he has written.

The technique uses a combination of paint, tissue paper and cut out. First he paints onto sheets of tissue paper building up layers of colour and patterns. There is a slideshow on the Eric Carle website showing how this is done. The outline of the caterpillar (or whatever the collage is to show) is then drawn onto tracing paper and this is used as a guide for cutting out the tissue paper shapes and arranging these onto the final page. Another slideshow on the Eric Carle website shows this process.

What I love about this technique is the depth of colour that it’s possible to get. For me, the subtle variations in tone on a simple shape of a pear, for example, give the cut-out shape the quality of a drawn illustration. And as a person who is not good at drawing, I’m delighted that it’s an eye for colour rather than the ability to control a line that is needed when trying to imitate this approach. I’m planning on using this technique to create the illustrations for my pop-up eBook. Of course, I’ll show you the results (good or bad!) here…

Book of Space was made by architecture student Johan Hybschmann while at the Bartlett, UCL. Johan was inspired by Sokurev’s film Russian Ark in which viewers travel through time as they move through the rooms of the Winter Palace. This all takes place in a single shot sequence. Johan writes:

“The distortion of time is, of course, interesting in terms of the timelessness of the spaces – but the interest of the project lies in the way that the camera never looks back. Even though the viewer never sees the full dimensions of these spaces, we are still left with a sense of coherence and wholeness. It’s as if we constantly use the previous space to create an understanding of what should be behind us.”

Book of Space draws directly on the film and transforms two scenes into constructed perspectives cut into the leaves of the book. The elements collide and the nature of the space changes as the user turns the pages.

For me, Book of Space is a fascinating and inspiring match of concept and construction as it explores spatiality and temporality through its content as well as through the book format. And I feel that the fragility of the cut-out pages brings a further reminder of the temporal nature of books as they are used.

See more images on Johan’s website..

9 – 5 is a book of hand-cut images showing the shape and colour of a tree transforming through the seasons. Alongside this three miniature books nest inside the book cover illustrating smaller transformations of the tree at different speeds and times. The image below is not actually from the book because I couldn’t find any accessible photos of it. Instead these two pictures are from Chisato’s Season series and similar enough to give you some idea of the beautiful colours and delicate nature of the work.

Two untitled images from Season series

queue is designed as a pop-up book and as a fold-out pop-up scene. As a book each page shows a single car that, once unfolded, line up to form a traffic jam.

queue as a fold-out pop-up scene

The last project I’ll write about is branches which combines elements of both of the above (and do check out Chisato’s website because there are many more fabulous works to see!) branches is a pop-up book that explores the transformation of a family of trees in different seasons and of different generations. Like queue, branches can also be viewed as a fold-out scene showing all of the trees simultaneously.

I find these books completely inspiring and after looking at these I’m impatient for my next session of bookleteer experiments (last week I played with pop-ups and I’ll write about the results of that soon). I would love to see what Chisato would make out of the bookleteer eBooks and StoryCubes..

All of the projects I describe here (and more) are on Chisato’s website..

Another bookleteer experiment I thought I’d show you is another  version of Dusk by Saki. This short story is set in the West End of London around Piccadilly and this time I illustrated the eBook with a cut-out of a map of this area.

bookleteer eBooks are made by folding  and cutting sheets of A4 paper and slotting these together to make the final A6 size eBook (see here for a detailed video of how this is done). One sheet of A4 paper makes 4 eBook pages. Thanks to the folding technique pages from one sheet are not included in sequence but are interspersed throughout the eBook.

For the cut-out eBook I marked up one A4 sheet with 4 A6 size boxes and put a section of the map into each leaving a reasonable sized border so that the final eBook pages wouldn’t be too flimsy. Once I had cut out the map I cut the A4 sheet vertically down the centre (you would cut the sheet differently for different designs of eBook) and inserted it amongst the A4 translucent sheets onto which I’d printed the text.

Dusk cut-out eBook deconstructed

Because the map was only printed on one side of the A4 sheet the flip side of the cut-out pages is blank. I really like the effect of seeing the text through the cut-outs and the fragile quality that the cut-outs give to the book.

(See some other bookleteer experiments here)

A few pages from Your House, Olafur Eliasson

Looking deceptively simple, Your House by Olafur Eliasson (the artist behind the Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2005) is beautiful and detailed. The book shows a laser-cut negative impression of Eliasson’s house in Copenhagen. As you move from the front to the back of the book you make your way through the rooms of the house constructing a mental and physical narrative as you go. Every sheet is individually cut and every time you turn the page your perspective on the building changes. Each page is to scale and corresponds to 2.2 cm of the actual house.

The book is a limited edition of 225, published by the Library Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006. Concept by Olafur Eliasson, design is by Michael Heimann, Claudia Baulesch / groenland.berlin.

See more pictures of it on Olafur Eliasson’s website here..