I just came across this announcement for a “new experiment in reading and writing,” namely a digital, multimedia Illuminated book. if:book london is launching the project, “Songs of Imagination and Digitisation,” which also has its own blog.
From the announcement:
Songs of Imagination & Digitisation will involve working with a range of those people, commissioning new writing and art, providing incentives for new voices to submit work and for readers to give us their ideas. We will mingle film, text and image, reader response and author interviews – and once we’ve gathered enough ingredients on our blog we hope to transmute them into something that feels like a proper, substantial, networked book.
So many web projects go encyclopaedic and neverending. The book of the future will be linked to a community, open to revision and extension, but also bounded in a meaningful way, a satisfying artistic entity, porous but not pointless.
I’m glad such a bold and ambitious experiment is going on (and it makes sense for it to be Blake!), and I wonder how academia might sustainably integrate some of these collaborative, “porous” methods…
–Rachel Lee
