DECODEX: artistsbooks and postliteracy

Abstract

In this research project I explore the notion that the contemporary artistsbook is a vibrant, open arena for an experiment in the evolution of literacy. I investigate the structures and language forms of this new phase of literacy that I term postliteracy. The project comprises a series of eight artistsbooks made in the studio and an exegetical record. The overall method of this research involves a creative loop that begins with studio making. The reading and viewing of the experiment in literacy underway in these works, which is expanded with the written analysis of works by other artists of the book, writers and theorists, feeds back into further making in the studio. In this way, while being a record of the development of the issues of the project, this document also builds a historical and critical context for the studio works. Encompassed in this project is an exploration of the nature of the background mental ecology of centuries of standard literacy and its main mechanisms in the context of which postliteracy emerges. Western literacy's dominant feature of linear sequentiality and its conventions of pictorial space and narrative time crucially influence the look of language and how it operates across the pages of books. With the arising of experiments that challenge these conventions in the book, I examine the reawakening of the sensory dimension of language and its role in the process of signification. I also explore the mosaic principle of the book as an open field of language systems, and the significance of the resonant spaces between language elements without standard literacy's hierarchical structures or prescriptive grammars. I explore too how the temporal dimension in the artistsbook is reconfigured into cycles and loops, or is collapsed entirely, resulting in a different type of narrative with a different way of telling. The core of this research is presented in a final chapter comprising the reading, analysis and commentary of the artistsbooks made in the studio, thus completing the final round of the generative process that underpins the creative methodology of this project. In each of the studio artworks there is a question for the book form itself and the expressive possibilities for the language forms and structures that operate in its spaces. The title of this research contains the word an enfolding, portmanteau word. Code is the essence of the operating mode of language and literacy, while codex is our term for the millennia-old form of the book. The sense of going beyond both code (conventional literacy) and the standard book, implied in the word Decodex, is precisely the spirit of this project, an unfolding of a new literacy invoked on the pages of the experimental, contemporary artistsbook.