Thank you all so much for coming. I think I've got like five mikes on, so I think you should be able to hear me.
The. I'm going to start a very brief history of of movements I find with my students.
They usually think that movable were invented about three years before they were born because those are the first ones that they encounter.
So I'm going to start with this is a self-portrait of Matthew Paris, who was a Benedictine monk during the 13th century.
Its dates are 1200 to 1229, they think.
And he is the first inventor of not just one movable, but two.
He invented both bow veils, which are wheels and lift flaps.
And so. This, I'm sorry, is a very enlarged, pixilated image of his first Volvo veil, which was used to calculate religious holidays.
And originally, people were having to move the books.
And he's the one who figured out that if he made a movable wheel within the book, they could just turn that instead of the entire thing.
The the next thing that he invented was the lift flap, which is a very, very simple but incredibly versatile device.
And he was devising books that were related to religious pilgrimages for his fellow monks who were not able to travel.
And the addition of the lift flaps allowed the monks to personalise the pilgrimages and to go through the pilgrimage in a way in which they wanted to.
And so these early movable bowls were always intended to further engage the
viewer so that there was an added thing to not just reading the information,
but actually interacting physically with the book that they were looking at.
Peter Petrus, AP Honours is a German astronomer who in his book The Cosmograph Year really expanded the possibilities of what those vessels could do,
and they moved on into the use in scientific instruments and early printing.
And so we are really jumping through time with this is more like 15th century.
So. And then the the list flap book sort of had its incredible heyday as an anatomical flap book.
And this is this alias from 1514.
And he lived 15, 14, 1564.
And in in the 16th and 17th centuries, the list flap used for anatomical purposes was it was possible to dissect on paper human anatomy.
And so they're they're pretty extraordinary in the amount of information that could be communicated with these interactive devices.
And they were often printed as cut out sheets and people would assemble them themselves.
This is Euclid's Elements of geometry, which was printed in 1570.
And in this,
this is an English book in which the printer John Day came up with the idea of of making these geometric forms that were both printed on the surface,
but able to be assembled so that people could interact with them both in their two dimensional and three dimensional form.
So this is another view of a different model within that book.
So this is a metamorphosis book, which is another lift flat book.
And in it, if at some point we can figure out how to make the videos work,
you lift up the top and bottom flaps in various orders to change the figures.
And moving on from that. Those were called either Metamorphosis or Harlequin eight books, and they were an 18th century development.
The Thalmann Trope, excuse me. In the 19th century we started getting into optical toys, which were also called philosophical toys.
And this was a way of teaching sort of various things related to our optics, mostly related to the persistence of vision.
And so a thermometer trope was a spinning device that relied on the the persistence of you seeing both sides and merging them into one.
And so this was invented by another man named Paris, John Arendt, in Paris.
He's credited either with inventing them or popularising them in 1820.
This is a peep show, which is also sometimes called a tunnel book, and many of them were used as souvenirs during the building of the Thames Tunnel.
They were originally started more in Austria, but they definitely popularised in London with the Thames Tunnel.
This is a view of one of the Thames Tunnel souvenir pop ups and you can see the sequence of the panels.
This is from the Bodleian was one of the treasures I got to see here.
You can see how the different panels give you this wonderful three dimensional depth.
This also I saw up in conservation. This is by a publisher named Dean and Son.
And this is what's called a pull up book.
And again, these are all what would fall into the category of movable and movable are books that are operated by the viewer,
whereas a true pop up is operated by the page.
So this is something conservation because all the connective ribbon has disappeared,
and so they're doing a treatment on that to restore it to its movable qualities.
In the late 1800s into the early 1900s, the sort of the golden age of publishing of children's pop ups in Germany.
This is a book called The Circus by Lothar Mega Indoor Fur,
and he and a number of other German paper engineers sort of merge that paper engineering artist
publisher phenomenon and end the art of pop ups for children continues even to this age.
This is from the end gift shop.
This is The Wizard of Oz by Robert Saluda.
And from there, we're going to go to me.
So this is my normal view from my press when I'm printing in my own studio my stairs.
This is the view in the bibliographic press, which is a very interesting change for me.
So this is the press in the bibliographic press. This is a 90 I'm sorry, 20th century press.
It's the western. Western, which is a van der Cook license version of an American press.
And so it's also known as a cylinder press. And and that's how I print most of my books.
This is a book of mine, one of my earliest artist books, and it's called My 12 Steps.
And the pages are folded to Form Steps.
And so it's my version of a self-help book. This is from nine in 1996.
And then we'll sort of do a survey of various formats.
This is a book called Mutually Exclusive, and it's a series of what are called Magic Wallets,
which are books that open one way and then the other way. So you get to connecting phrases.
And so this was made in response to the events of September 11th.
And I had started to work on a book about nightmares, but was kind of quickly derailed by the events of that fall.
And so this book was done in a residency in New York City.
That was I was staying in an apartment that was about six blocks from the World Trade Centre site.
And so that's another video. Oh, hang on.
All right. Okay.
Well, now we know this.
The book is from 2006 2007.
It's actually a series that was a subscription series.
And sometimes I change the ways in which I do things just to make it interesting.
And I wasn't really sure that anyone would get on board with a subscription series because
my initial subscribers basically just took it on faith that I would actually do something.
And so over the course of two years, about every five months, they got a new lexicon.
And I had chosen the format, but I had no idea what the content would be.
And it ended up being sort of a little autobiographical series through the various events of of that time period.
My dog died, I moved various other things.
And so with any luck, this one will also play this is one of them called denial is a wonderful thing.
And each of these formats have very specific actions.
And so the content of the book,
the fact that this is a circular book and it will bring you around to the beginning was very important in how I chose to use the text.
And this is something I'm always emphasising with my students, which is that these formats are very interesting,
but if there's no relationship between the content that you're working with and the format that they're using,
then it's just a sort of an irrational gimmick. And you need to figure out the nature of the structure and what it is bringing to the content.
And a lot of times the content can be partially told by this or more than that, by that structure itself.
So this is what finally came about. This was the book that I started to work on that got stopped by the September 11th events.
And it originally was a completely different book. It didn't have a text.
And and because of that time period, it very much influenced how the book ended up.
So it's called Sleepers, Dreamers and Screamers. And it's a pop up book and it's it's an accordion.
So it can be stretched out and viewed all in one piece, but it also can be seen page by page.
So we'll just go through the sequence. This is not a video, but this is the text.
And in the opening of this page, that character pulls the covers over their head.
I don't always use movable structures. This is a book called It Didn't Just Happen.
Which is from 2008, Sleepers, Dreamers and Screamers was from 2006.
And this has kind of a sequence of characters.
And I put it together almost as if I was casting a play I various characters, and there's this ambiguous dialogue.
And so there are people that are happy, there are people that are sad, there's possibly a crime going on.
And the text has this rhythmic quality where it was, there was no one to blame, there was no reason.
And then the final one is there was no cause.
But it didn't just happen.
This book is a double tunnel book that I made in response to my mother's frontal lobe dementia as she was sort of shifting away from us.
And and it was a very curious phenomenon in that as she became more demented, she was actually more happy and but it was more sad for us.
And so this is a double tunnel book.
So there's sort of the the bright side where it's kind of where she thought she was and then the other side where she really was.
But there was no point in trying to convince her of where she really was because for one thing, she didn't ever remember that.
And for another, it was just needless. So this is a close up of.
That side and then the other side. This is the book that really kind of caused a pretty major shift in the way that I work.
And it was also brought about somewhat by the board.
And even before they knew it, when I was, I often go to the Codex book fair to sell books.
And so Richard Ovenden was one of the speakers there at the 2011 Codex,
and they were just beginning to publicise the design of book binding competition, which was going to be displayed here.
And he was commenting in his talk about how they were really hoping they would have more artists books enter entered into the competition.
And I think what sounds kind of interesting and then I also ran into the the call for it and it had a pop up in it.
And somehow between the two things, it seemed like this was really speaking to me and I thought it would be a really interesting challenge.
The one requirement of the competition was the major one was it had to have something to do with Shakespeare.
So somewhat randomly, I chose Romeo and Juliet.
And I have read a lot of Shakespeare's plays, but not mostly when I was in school and so when I was required to.
And so it was very interesting to revisit this play and and just see how it struck me as a much older person.
And so part of what I had not really remembered from the play was the chorus,
which opens the play and it talks about, you know, the, the two households, both alike in dignity.
And so I, I synopses the plays into single lines for each act, but I kept repeating the chorus.
And so this is Juliet's balcony, which I actually have visited in Verona.
Even though she is a fictional character, she has a physical location.
And so this is Romeo being banished to the various acts.
And then this is both the original chorus and then my repeat of the chorus.
But I kept changing the scenes of strife to more modern one.
So it was Bosnia, the United States, Israel, Rwanda.
And then in that tiny little smudged sense there of type is my little bit of commentary
because it was a very curious thing to start working with Shakespeare's texts.
It's really like I'm going to edit Shakespeare. And so I took to excerpting him and.
So that and it opens in the round.
So it references the Globe Theatre. There was sort of as many references that I could work in there as possible.
I studied the architecture of Verona and various other things, and so happily it was very well received.
It not only was accepted, but it won a prize and travelled all around.
And so I decided to continue on with this sort of visiting of Shakespeare,
but without sighs and other requirements that that I had with the first book.
So the next book that I chose was Othello because I was going to be going to Venice.
And I again, upon reading it, which sort of struck very differently from how I remembered it.
And part of it was that I was incredibly irritated with Desdemona because she's an
incredibly passive character in the play and and how I took to characterising her.
She basically stood around until somebody killed her. And so I.
Isolated all of her words and and physically sorted them.
And many people have told me that they're device computer programs that will do all of that.
And but I really needed that time with the text where I was physically cutting up and sorting and finding words.
And there were certain words that really jumped out at me, like beguiling and and various other ones.
And there were certain ones I wanted to use that didn't make the cut,
but I made them into little magnets because they kept blowing around and I was losing them.
And so for the longest time, I was using that just as a way of sorting out the texts.
But eventually I came to realise that I really needed them to be a part of the book
and I eventually wrote seven lines that became the individual prints and it starts.
There's a coda, then there's five or sorry, a prelude five X and a coda.
And so these lines are all there words that she has in her lines, but they are not in any sort of order that exists in the play.
So I had to that was the rule that I made for myself was that I could not make up words for her.
So I had certain things I wanted her to say, and I had to figure out what kind of language was there that would get me there.
And then I made a series of prints. So these are loose leaf prints.
So I still think of it as a book, but they're in folders so that they're, they are in a set order.
And the prints for this book are all just of Desdemona and her lines.
But when I was figuring out the drawing for these, I made a series of puppets, sort of on the order of shadow.
The Indonesian shadow puppets. They're very flat. But I could move them around to kind of test out various gestures.
And so as a result of that. Oh, sure, this one is good.
Now that one's not going to work. There isn't a stop motion animation.
And at the end of my talk, we're going to figure out how to play you that.
Because I want you to see that and.
Okay. Not there. This book is here.
It's the only book aside from the project that I have here.
This was done during residency at the University of Florida and.
It's called all sorts because the the sort of brief of the residency was to spend time with the citrus
label collection that had been donated by a man and and do an artist's book in response to that.
So the citrus labels are incredibly bright and they were on the ends of crates and
shipped from Florida to snowy places like Ohio in the middle of winter for the buyers.
And they never looked at the fruit, they only looked at the labels and certain colours signified certain things.
So blue was first quality. So we had to have a blue tunnel book because.
First quality. So I was thinking about all the sorts of words that we use to sort people to label people.
And so this is a double alphabet that.
So it starts with apathetic, blunt, cheery deviants,
etc. It goes through the alphabet twice and it forms rings to symbolise the various citrus fruits.
It's a tunnel book so that when it spreads out, it looks somewhat like an orange crate.
There is many references to the various labels that I was looking at as possible.
There's lots of patterning. It's very densely printed.
So when we used a lot of the type of face kind of approximation of some of the images from the various labels.
This was a return to Shakespeare. I had thought that The Merchant of Venice was a tragedy.
But in in the general sorting of things, it's considered a comedy.
And I've learned that if a Shakespeare play ends in a death or murder, it's a tragedy.
And if it ends in a wedding, it's comedy.
And so it kind of doesn't matter what happened in between, because there are some pretty terrifying things that happen in some of the comedies.
And so they're they're known as the problem comedies.
And so I was trying to do one book on all of the comedies, which was kind of beyond me.
So it ended up being a dose audiobook and it's called Funny, Peculiar, Funny, ha ha.
And the titles I actually swapped, half of them say funny, ha ha, funny, peculiar.
Because I never it you can start on either side, it's not one over the other.
So this is from the problematic sorry, this is from the funny side.
And, and there are certain things that I kept noticing in a lot of comedies that there's a lot of gender confusion and mistaken identity.
And plus, originally, all of the characters were played by men pretending to be women,
but sometimes within the play, the woman would be pretending to be a man.
And so I decided to have sort of swapping genitalia.
And this is from the problematic side.
And I quoted a series of lines from various of the plays that are considered problematic, ending with All's Well that ends well.
So the har har side is what's known as a slice book.
So you can page through it in different orders and and kind of combine and recombine the figures.
And these are the same figures that I'm using in the project here. It's a slightly different figure.
But while I was doing that, just for general amusement, I think I decided to make a set of paper dolls as well.
And so you can see it also comes with additional optional genitalia.
And so you can you can cut them out or you can keep them as sheets.
So this is what I'm working on when I'm not here, which is King Lear and the actual play.
But the 2006 election in the United States caused a lot of kind of.
It caused me to think about King Lear. And it also but there was also a lot of just general distraction with the current president and.
And I started thinking of two King Lear's There's King Lear, spelled L r, but there's also King Lear spelled with two eyes.
And and I have a little video on that. We're also going to make sure we show you that.
But this is from the actual play. And these are various test pages.
This is still in the working stage, but the characters have been kind of reduced to more abstract forms.
And there's this sort of pulling of Lear between his daughters and various other things.
So as I say, this is very much a work in progress.
I hope to have it at the Kotex Book Fair next February, but I have quite a bit to do.
This is a madness scene. King Lear spiralling out.
I think. Okay. So this is the Desdemona stop motion animation.
And there's no sound, so it's really just a voiceover. So I'm going to read it.
So the lines as they go through are I am not some token to be moved between men with motives of their own.
When did your heart lose faith? So your ears here. But guilt in your eyes see me not.
Where is this beguiling monster that he never speaks slender to my face?
Why did no one speak on my behalf before all was lost to violence?
Who is this miserable man that he taints my truth and makes such fatal sorrow?
What wretched husband believes fault speech and feels just in killing his loyal wife.
How can love die this easily? Was it ever even truly love?
And then this is the other King Lear. That's his King Lear.
A tragedy and five puppets. Thank you.
Okay. All right. So the project that I've been working on is in the Frontier.
And as I said, it's called Order of Appearance and Order of a Disorder of disappearance.
And it has it. This also arose from Shakespeare.
It started very little germ from Winter's Tale.
In Act three, there is a stage direction of exit pursued by a bear.
And and there's very little other stage direction in a lot of the plays.
And so from that, I jumped off to a series of other stage directions.
It's it's got a gatefold. So that. The the pages are such that you can open each side independently so that you can
have two characters on stage or not or exiting or entering in various orders.
And so it starts with the leading lady.
Exits to wild applause. And I can't remember exactly the order.
And the order is variable. There is a front and back side of the bear.
They don't align properly. The various lines such as the mime exits to the relief of everyone.
Not quite sure I'm picking on names, but the leading man enters on the wrong cue.
Various things. And so they. They come and go.
And again, it's meant to signify that interactive aspect in that the viewer is controlling the order of the performance.
You can go through the pages in whatever way you wish to, and you also can go through them in different ways, on different viewings.
And so it's here. So you can look at them and I also can take questions if you have any.
We're not.