Unbound: Beyond the Codex, The Book as Process/Experience/Event

The book as ‘process’ and ‘event’ requires a different understanding of ‘book’: one that acknowledges the impossibility of meaning residing in the final object alone. The finitude of the codex is ‘undone’ by the infinite dimensions of language, interpretation and time. This article extends that notion by exploring the process of making artists books as experience(s) that engage spatial/temporal/sensory attributes of making in constructing knowledge and meaning: posing knowledge as an ‘event’, by foregrounding making and process, not the outcome. Skinful (Calvert, 2003), questions the role of materiality in the codex as object, and examines how time and process operate in the book as a metaphor for emotional encounters. The Cruelty of the Classical Canon (Calvert, 2014), expands the paradox of the material book as container of knowledge, exploring ‘brute’ encounters with making and experiencing such an object. Both books explore the relationship between the body/embodied thought in the book-as-process.