Book Arts Conference - March 20th 2013 Event

An upcoming Book Arts Conference at Winchester School of Art will consider how digital technologies have transformed and expanded the book. Entitled New Art of Making Books, the one-day event will bring specialists in this exciting area together to discuss the way in which the book has been freed of its traditional role as a container of bound printed pages leading to dialogue between digital and print-based media. The event’s title makes reference to Ulises Carrión’s provocative definition of a book through a series of aphorisms written in the 1970’s. But how have new technologies shaped a very different perspective on the book since that time? How have these changes crafted an alternative reading experience?

Internationally renowned book artists and theorists including Helen Douglas, Sarah Bodman, David Gauntlett, Bruno Ceschel and Andrew Haslam will explore the current transformation of the artist book and examine the connections that exist between the physical and the digital. The complexity of this issue will be teased out, since the digitization of the book is not a straightforward linear change, but an intertwining of technological, aesthetic and cultural habits and tendencies. The book does not just become digital, but the digital becomes book-like with the growth of platforms that remediate the book such as Kindle and yet, it could be argued, the book is on some levels disappearing as a physical object.

Book tickets online at http://www.book-lab.org/naomb.html