Chapter 2 - Platformatics

Summary

This chapter revolves around a retrospective tour of recent book arts expositions where the material vehicle – the physical platform – of codex objects gets appropriated, reworked, simulated, or digitally remade in various combinations of analytic and figurative rigor in the bibliobjet: first the “Odd Volumes” curation at Yale in 2014–15, then “The Internal Machine” show at the Center for Books Arts in Manhattan in 2017. Exhibits range from a pre-Kindle irony of electronically activated video “reading,” through books as sounding boards for acoustic synthesizers, to a sonnet anthology accessed only by an embedded microphone. In such exaggerated “platformatics,” repeatedly the interplay between sound and text is displaced from the normal subvocal enunciation of written script – as is more recently the case in a “volume” of spectrogram rather than script lines, transferred from digital audio, that goes out of its way to correlate the prehistory of binary computing with its vestigial codex form.