Chapter 1 - Bibliographics

Summary

Under the coinage “bibliographics,” this chapter follows the planar space of represented word shapes from the Renaissance painting of open bibles through Conceptual art objects printed in time-sensitive disappearing ink. The displacement from page etching to the ambient space of reading, a feature of representational painting in its figurative mental landscapes, also makes its appearance in contemporary installation work in which page shapes are reflected by reading lamps onto the walls of a self-performed “reading room.” The long arc of the chapter runs from saintly reading of the bible “in an extensive landscape” (where the divinely sanctioned world extends and refigures the divine Word) through an “augmented reality” e-text operated from digitally encrypted markers “read” by webcam from the pages of a typical bound volume.