The Self-Conscious Codex: Artists' Books and Electronic Media

Abstract

THE CODEX FORM, CHARACTERIZED BY BOUND SHEETS fixed in a regular sequence of individual pages, has proved durable on account of its efficiency and flexibility through hundreds of years of use. Capable of containing vast amounts of information readily accessed and systematically ordered, it is deceptively simple in form. This apparent simplicity results in part from its familiarity, its pervasive presence in many aspects of historical and contemporary life. With the advent of electronic media, the codex book has become a favorite object in apocalyptic predictions of extinction. Rising printing and paper costs, shortage of storage facilities, and mouthings of ecological concerns over wood-pulp paper consumption have combined with a vision of a book-less library stocked with electronic databases, onscreen search machines, and dazzling innovations superseding the modest capabilities of the tried and true codex book. Warnings against the foolhardiness-and improbability-of the imminent demise of the book as a source of reference and pleasure meet with the same enthusiasm granted the wet-blanket comments of a chaperon at an old fashioned school dance. Sanely speaking, however, it seems sage to consider that in the immediate future the codex book, whatever it may be in the long run, is likely to have a profound effect on the conceptualization of new electronic innovationsand vice-versa. The process by which new forms of information storage, writing practice, and readerly interface will evolve will no doubt transform many of the conventions that have been standard aspects of book production. The excitement which such an interchange generates should not produce an either/or attitude towards electronic and traditional media; rather, emphasis should be put on the service of the conceptual insights that each, by its limitations and possibilities, provides to the other. The question this essay addresses, therefore, is precisely this: how will formal aspects of the traditional codex book be affected by and affect the conceptualization of electronic books, and vice-versa. To answer such a question requires an initial reflection on the nature of the codex form-both an examination of the structural elements that