Hello and welcome to Bookmarks, a podcast produced by Central Studies Book here at the library.
My name's Alex and this is Joe. Hi. And today we are joined by multimedia artist Yota Dimitri.
Hello, doctor. Hi there. Thanks for having me on this amazing podcast.
We're in Oxford the moment. Whereabouts are you? I'm sitting in my living room in Liverpool.
So to begin, we'd like to ask you if you could physically describe the work we're going to be discussing in today's podcast,
which is your What to You? Our copy is currently in Sensational Books exhibition here at the Western Library in Oxford,
and Joe and I actually have a handling copy here with us today,
which is borrowed from the space for reading area in the Western Library, where readers and visitors can actually interact with this copy themselves.
So for the listeners of the podcast. Can you please describe what we have in front of us?
Of course. So what you have in front of you is a small box with a little ribbon at the side, almost like a gift box,
and it's got an engraved title on it on the top in Silver Colour rather than actual silver.
And that says to you and you can untie the ribbon and open it up and you've got an a five size concertina book,
which is when you open it up, it's coated in black ink and that's thermal comic ink.
And so you won't be able to see the actual content until you start interacting with the book, or at least librarian glossary check.
Thank you, Richard. We just wanted to do a quick glossary.
Check some a chromate or thin achromatic inks temperature sensitive compounds that temporarily change colour with exposure to heat.
Back to business. How should I interact with it? How are you expecting people to react to that?
Well, it's a book as much as it is an art object.
Right. So as a book, read it, interact with it, touch its pages, infuse its pages with your warmth as you would do a book anyway.
But obviously this is a bit different.
So from the art experience, I guess it's more about the of the audience's way of how they want to interact with it is pretty fluid and I thin.
But the general idea is that you imbue your own warmth from your hands and sometimes if your hands need a bit of warming up,
then that heat needs to be transferred to the book's pages because as I said,
it's coated in thermal comic ink and you'll only be able to see the the very
vulnerable content on it's on the on the pages when you actually touch the book.
I do encourage people saying that.
I do encourage people to read it collaboratively together because it's a book about love, it's content, it's about loss.
And so in the way where the content informs the actual shape of the book, the form, what it looks like, that's kind of vise vice versa in that sense.
So when you're reading it with someone because it's so vulnerable, the content, it's emotional.
I encourage two people to read it together and to help each other read it.
Where they hold the pages together is what we are doing now is next to each other.
And we've, we've got the pages of the books press between our hands and in actually you've done a bit
better than I have in the in the parts where we've had our hands together with the book.
In between them, the pages warmed up and the black pages have turned to white, and it reveals the text, which then usually disappears.
So you kind of have that moment and then if you miss it, then you have to reward me, I guess.
Mm mm. But, um, as with heat transfer, if you transfer a lot of heat very, very quickly into something, heat will leave very quickly too.
So if you're reading it together and your and your, you know, you're sharing your love with the book in that sense,
with if you hold on to that metaphor, then the pages will stay more.
Well, the word isn't translucent, but the paint will stay translucent for a longer period of time.
And it could be a bit closer to the ink now. And could you say a bit about the science behind it and how you came to use it in this work?
Yes, sure. Um, as you said in the beginning, I'm a multi-media artist.
And what that means, as you know, from working with other multimedia artists like others,
I always experiment with different materials and my main, I guess, modes of artwork is more of a performative one.
So I've always been interested in how stories are depicted, how you create stories,
how you create stories, and then obviously with that curation, the experience of those stories.
So I first wrote the content and the content, as you might have read,
was basically just letters, love letters, and they don't address addressed to anyone.
And my research at that time when I was writing those letters was around letter writing and the art form of letter writing.
I also have a performance called Love Letters that was going on for like eight years,
where from that I collected about, well, more than 150 audience love letters to the loved ones.
And I guess what I'm trying to say is that the influence from this is also from all
of that and the process and thinking about what technologies to use came afterwards.
So when I had the contents and you see that some of the pages in the book without one
wanting to spoil anything for future readers or people that come to the exhibition,
is that some of the text sometimes is missing, sometimes some words are bigger than others.
Um, so the actual styling within the copy of the book is an integral to the interaction of, of it's form, right?
So first came that and then having all that in mind, how can I perform this or how can it perform rather?
And I came across thermal comic ink from other projects I had done in the past in terms of, you know, thinking about what stories get told on stage.
The hierarchy of those whose voices get told, whose voices get chosen, you know,
not to you know, how how does that curatorial process happen and what's the intent from that?
But I had always known about thermal coal making also because of the very commercial.
I don't know if you have ever bought your parents from Mother's Day.
I bought my mom one of those monks where you can print an image on a mug, but you can only see the image when the mug is warmed up.
And then there's well, the ink that's used on batteries, for instance, that's also a chemical mic or in different thermostats.
So the inking itself isn't an innovation.
It's out there. And so I bought some of that and I started playing with it.
I played with it with spraying on, you know, my different work.
But then obviously the there there were problems if I wanted this book to be readable.
So how, how would I make it work? Because the temperature of the of this one is commercial.
So it's, I guess, between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius.
So it would work hopefully when someone's touching it, unless you're me with very, very cold cuts and I have to rub them together a bit.
Yeah. And I started experimenting with the ink, but I'm because I'm interested in electronics,
so I thought, okay, maybe there could be something combined here with if I create,
if I create a heat pad and electronic heat pad and put some technology in it where if someone is touching the book,
then it's almost like a bit of more assistance to the heat.
So if I make a heat pad and then the reader touches the book and automatically because there's a sensor in a proximity sensor or something,
tactile sensor, then the book understands that it's been touched.
And so it would just slowly, slowly put some more heat in it to help the reader, you know,
and I designed a prototype of that, and that was the first one that I made to go and show other people.
But then I thought, you know, that takes away.
That's great. But it also takes away from the content of the book and what the book has a form and an artwork is trying to say.
Not that electronics are bad. I love using technology, but yeah,
I just thought that this the minimal t of it just being as it is black pages and just having
someone to come and touch it in order to read it is more meaningful than having some support.
This input can come from you to reading it together.
That's really lovely because you describe the act of reading this as an really intimate reading experience.
Can you talk a bit more about that and what that means to you?
Yeah, so it comes from the actual content where it's about love, loss, it's about grieving.
And you know, from speaking to people, they've asked me, is it our relationship?
Is it about, you know, is it about Break-Up? Is it about a death?
Is about is it about what is it about? Um, it's about all those different things.
Um, so, so I guess that's one of it.
And, and there is a type of intimacy that goes in when you're writing any kind of love letter, right?
The act of writing a love letter in itself is can be for some people, an art form, but it's also a type of healing, right?
This there's a certain type of focus and performativity a ritual that goes into writing one,
I guess any type of letter, even if I'm writing a postcard.
Um. And you want the way you're articulating the words to be.
You know, there's a type of, you know, set up that goes into it, I guess.
And so intimacy comes also out of that, because if it's a love letter and you're sending it to someone,
then the receiver getting it, acquiring it is going to have their own set up to receive it and the space and the mind frame.
So the intimacy comes out of that to.
But if we put the content with the book form together, how it how the content is styled, how it's, you know,
all put together and parcel in this in this little box with ribbons and taking it out and opening out and laying out the concertina.
It's all in itself an intimate ritual.
And so I wanted. The book as it is experienced.
To almost take on a human manifestation in a way is like an object of the love that you needs, because the content is so from the heart, right?
It's so and I describe it in the book, I use a word called about, you know, men,
which is a Greek word for something that's almost a it goes beyond being naked and raw.
So I'm covering it, I'm dressing it, and it's up to the reader to undress it.
So there's all those poetic acts of intimacy that go into the performance of this book.
Yeah, that's something I was thinking about actually when we were preparing for this.
There's a limited number of copies of this book that you created,
and even when you're reading it, when you have a copy in front of, you can't see the whole text.
At the same time.
The pages are a slightly larger than your hand, so you need to need to reveal different parts of the text, even on one page at different times.
And yet we have copies of this book on display for people to come into the Western Library at the moment to read.
Possibly that's more people than you were expecting to have access to the text.
How do you feel about that? I feel so privileged to be part of your exhibition.
I come from a very a very small place.
And in Cyprus, I'm a British Cypriot. And I come from a family whose, you know, the granddaughters,
the first generation of people, also women to have been able to gain access to education.
And if you think of the class perspective that that goes in, you know, and and sometimes for, you know,
in terms of education isn't the first thing that, you know, a parent for the first generation is going to, you know, is going to not be happy.
But like, you know, that isn't something that you're supposed to do because indication is a kind of investment in you know
not that on isn't and that's you know those are the types of thinking that we need to be shifting.
Do you see this as a work of art that looks like a book or do you see it as a book?
Okay. Well, I mean, that's a bigger, more philosophical question.
I'm not going to put my academic head on now because we'll be here for out, I think for this book.
I can't answer to other books. Right. So I obviously I can't define that for anyone else's book.
But for my book, I think it's both. And the reason for that is because I've always been interested in interactivity and engagement,
not just for the sake of something being interactive or engaging, but meaningfully engaging.
So the question, again, how does it influence your reading of it?
How does it influence your experience of it?
Where does that experience start? Where does it end? Where does it heighten?
So all these different, you know, different influences that we can gather and understand,
you know, how some someone perceives something and receives it.
I've always been interested in interactive books since I was little.
I'm neurodiverse myself, so it's easier for me, and it was easier for me as a child.
Also, if I think back to it, to engage with books that had much of a more I wouldn't say, well, multimedia, but not multimedia.
And the digital element more of a multimedia like using different senses because they would capture my entire focus and I wouldn't be, you know.
Like I wouldn't be reading a phrase and then I forget it and have to read it again because they're capturing everything.
Obviously, that's not it's not my expertise in terms of sciences to think about some kind of neuro diverse and thinking about what's appropriate.
But I know I can speak from my own experience. And so when I do design something, having I guess that experience, that person experience in mind,
but also coming from a theatre and a performance background and having my research interests
embedded within thinking about different forms of encountering stories and engaging with them.
So that all combined is what kind of influences my thinking around.
This is both an artwork and a book. And so this kind of leads me on to something I wanted to ask you particularly.
Have you thought about the physical human interactions that have to happen with this book, the inevitable changes and marks, the copy we have here.
This is one that's out in the Western Library for people to look at every day, and there are signs of kind of use now.
How do you feel about that? Is that something you thought of? Definitely.
If we take it to another kind of metaphor place, I wanted to also kind of intervene within the boundaries of what is an artwork, right?
And what is the book form and what are all these different things.
So, you know, ease of use it.
You can interact with it. It's an artwork that is supposed to be touched and it's supposed to wear and tear.
And the reason for that is because it's as you start to expose and touch and and get
to know the actual book itself and the book's feelings as you're reading the content.
It, you know, becomes more familiar with you. So it's almost like on one hand, yes, there's the restrictions of the technologies that are used.
But on the other hand, they are also the restrictions are also facilitating the the the ideas of the outlook, the conceptual ideas of it.
So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question.
No, it really, really does. And something that kind of just interests me as a concept is that we have this copy now,
which does look quite different from the one behind glass, which obviously is also part of the collection.
And readers will be able to look at it in the future. But right now it's had so much less handling than this one,
and they are both within the library at the moment, but both have had quite different journeys already.
Yeah, it's it's really like a kind of a physical manifestation of all of the things that we were hoping
that the Sensational Books exhibition would be it coming as we're coming out of lockdown.
And so it's just been a bit of a celebration of the sense since things and interact
with things that we haven't that have we haven't had the opportunity so long.
Well, the country was in lockdown.
So, yeah, this is quite different from a more traditional exhibition where all of our objects are behind glass here.
They can see this as well and they can see it in groups as well.
Yeah, I was just kind of chatting about like we talk now, but once the book is off exhibition,
it will go into permanent collection and people will order up into the reading room if they want to see it, which anybody can do.
But that's a very solitary experience. You order up as an individual, you go to a desk and you're not really supposed to consult things in in pairs.
So it will be just one person and not with a hot drink to be able to warm their hands on because it's there's no no drinks at all in the reading room.
So it'll just be and if you're somebody like you, it's quite cold hands, then you're stuck, really.
So I think this exhibition has really allowed this piece in particular to be explored
in the ways that it sounds like you really want it to be able to be explored.
Thank you. Know, that sounds wonderful. And I'd love to take part in the kind of solitary experience, too.
So what are you working on now and what's coming out?
So at the moment I am working on a creative non-fiction book.
Um, I'm writing. It's taking me ages to write because again, the contents is very personal.
I never learn. And it's about the two, the stories of two of my grandmothers that are not intellectually interlinked in the text,
but it's about their stories and thinking about identity, women's histories and how they navigate diaspora, you know, being refugees fleeing.
And I haven't thought of the form. Yeah, I think I need to focus and finish the content.
Yeah, that's. That's fine. Looking forward to it. Thank you.
So nothing remains apart from me to say thank you very much to you have to do each year.
Artist and creator of two. You are currently on show in the Association of Books Exhibition at the Public Library.
Thank you very much. Theatre. Thank you. Thanks very much for listening to this episode of Brightness.
You can find photos of Yachties work and links to some of the things we talked about over on the Centre
for the Study of the Books blog the conveyer and you can find a link to that in the podcast description.
Join us. Next time, we'll be talking to poet and book artist Steven Emerson about his work in translation.
See you then.