created 2025-05-31, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Survey of Text Etymology, Connections to Fiber, Body Spliced Book - Alternative Reading Methods
The Big Book by Alison Knowles was an eight-foot tall walk-in construction. It comprised a title page and eight moveable pages anchored to a metal spine. It was possible to leaf through the individual pages that were equipped with casters. Each page had an access point to the next page, opening up different spaces between the pages in which the readers could spend some time. The book contained a stove, a telephone, a bed, a chemical toilet, a library, a guest book, a gallery with art works by artist friends, a lush meadow, a ventilator and other utensils in the spaces between the pages. The book was constructed in such a way that it could be packed into two crates for shipping purposes.
The cover of TBB presents a circular hole surrounded by lights, and this hole is the illuminated entrance. Entering requires some unbending. The cover is likely to move as one enters, the book cannot be used without being modified and without modifying the user.
The back of the front cover is an assemblage of wrappings and trash accumulated in the making of the book.
The reader can make a telephone call, eat, sleep or use the toilet, but with a compression that makes the acts, however genuine, something of an imitation of life. While life in the apartment is unpretentious, the compressed scale delineates every domestic activity with so much care and awareness that it achieves the radiance of ritual. This matter-of-fact world is tinged with artifice, and the apparent descent into the domestic is progress along a continuum, for the apartment is on a level with everything else.
