Caseroom Press and Visual Language

Barrie Tullet from Caseroom Press came to DMU on Friday and gave a talk to our undergrads on the history of visual language. In the main, Barrie's talk provided an luscious visual overview of the history of concrete writing, typography, and graphic design in literature and in magazine culture; a history that extended from Gutenberg in the 15th century through Tristram Shandy through Futurism and Modernism and into the contemporary graphic design of magazines.

As a scholar who examines multimiodal literature, it was fascinating for me to see this history from a different perspective. For a start, it mentioned a few books that I was unaware of (watch this space - reviews will follow once I have the pennies to buy them).

My own research focuses on multimodality in late 20th and early 21st century literature; This was an area largely untouched in Barrie's talk. Instead, as mentioned, his attention to works in our age turned to the magazine. I was really struck by his view that the most interesting work in graphic design today is going on in magazine culture - he mentioned the brilliant Emigre magazine and Raygun (which I hadn't heard of), and his top tip: Carson Magazine, one to watch!

Part of my research involves hunting out visually dynamic literary works: They do exist! But they're certainly deviations from the norm. Experimental, and not mainstream. I spend hours performing internet searches, chasing 'customers who bought X, also bought Y' links... Barrie is right in that in general, the full capacities of the book as a material and artistic artefact are not being explored. In terms of the future, I'll end this blog post with his words, "The next step is to design books like a magazine".

The Latest Cindy Sherman

Just before it closed at Sprüth Magers - London, I went to see the latest Cindy Sherman exhibition. I really like Cindy Sherman's work, particularly the untitled film stills and the centrefolds. While her work has varied (the clown portraits, for example), there seems to remain a lingering interest in the relationship to the past, questions of authenticity, and disparity, and these themes continue to resonate.

Giant murals, such as the image shown above, dominate the gallery walls, juxtaposing black-and-white landscapes with colour portraits (the artist as subject) which seem garish in comparison. The odd tension that arises from such a clash manipulates our sympathies; there is a strange nostalgic allure to the black-and-white backgrounds which show rural time-honoured scenes (despite their obvious digital design) while the figures appear crass, played up by the artificial excess of each costume. This artificiality is made even more uncanny by the deliberate inconsistencies - the ski boot on the sitting woman's left foot, the socks worn by the standing warrior.


The colour clash is quite fundamental to the aesthetic experience of these murals. I was struck by the difference in my reactions to the majority of the images, and the one shown below right in which the female figure is, unusually, also in black-and-white, complementing her surroundings. 

The harmony of figure and landscape in this photo contrast the uneasy tension of the others. And yet, having seen the others, the coloured figures showing up the constructed nature in a way that felt brash and confrontational for the viewer, I couldn't look at the solely black-and-white section in the same way. Sitting alongside these others, it too seemed to be shown up as somehow unnatural in this enigmatic play of meaning and signification.


I don't think the polemic of this new work is as clear as in other collections in Cindy Sherman's oeuvre, but there is a definite continuation of the play of performance, reality, and identity.

The Book as Art: Reading the Sculpture

A fleeting Blog post: I just thought I'd share with you the book-art objects of Isaac Salazar.

Salazar transforms books into these beautiful sculptural forms. These works are less about the experience of reading books, but about books as a material form in themselves. Salazar's work shows us that the book, or the pages of books at least, are much more malleable than we might think. In other words, these sculptural forms make us see the book in a new light: Not as a work of literature, but an exciting art object in itself.

See more of Isaac Salazer's Books of Art collection here.

Multimodal Printed Literature

What is Multimodality?

Multimodality, in its most fundamental sense, is the coexistence of more than one semiotic mode within a given context. More generally, multimodality is an everyday reality. It is the experience of living; we experience everyday life in multimodal terms through sight, sound, movement. Even the simplest conversation entails languae, intonation, gesture and so forth.


What is Multimodal Printed Literature?

Multimodal novels are typified by their inclusion of graphic elements. Thus, they feature a synthesis of word and image, with word and image arranged on the page not is a distinct or separate fashion, but in such a way that they constantly interact in the production of narrative meaning. Additionally, such novels often exploit the tactile and material dimensions of the book itself.

Some of the formal features that consistently appear in multimodal novels are:

• The Inclusion of Images.
• Unusual textual layouts and page design.
• Varied typography.
• Use of colour in both type and imagistic content.
• Concrete realisation of text to create images, as in concrete poetry.
• Devices that draw attention to the text’s materiality, including metafictive writing.
• Footnotes and self-interrogative critical voices.
• Flip book sections.
• Mixing of genres, both in literary terms, such as horror, and in terms of visual effect, such as newspaper clippings and play dialogue.

An early, canonical example of what can be considered a multimodal novel is, of course, Laurence Sterne’s (1967 [1759-67]) much celebrated and sometimes berated The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

In my own writing, I've explored works by Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves):

Steve Tomasula (VAS: An Opera In Flatland):

Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close):

and Graham Rawle (Woman's World):

The images above show the varied nature of multimodal printed novels. Indeed, one of the things that make mulitmodal literature as a genre so exciting is its diversity.

I'm always on the look-out for new books, so suggestions welcome!

The selected (online) writings of A. G. Gibbons

Alison Gibbons first entered the blogosphere in early 2011, and when she did she felt very self-conscious about what it was she should say. After all, this would be her first blog post (the first of many?) - surely it should be momentous, fascinating, enthralling. Typing, now, in this moment, would bring Iconnote into existence...

Certainly, Alison would need to choose her words carefully. Afterall she had decided to call her blog 'Iconnote', a title she had mulled over and finally arrived at for a variety of carefully considered reasons. Not least, because the URL was available. But more than this, 'Iconnote' was a neologism, an invented word, and one which Alison had dreamed up as a compound. That is to say, it places two independent words together to make a new one. With a linguistically playful title like ‘Iconnote’, surely Alison’s first blog post needed to be written in a manner that was witty and engaging.

As a compound, ‘Iconnote’ can be read as a unification of ‘I’ and ‘connote’: ‘I connote’ (no, this blog is not sponsored by apple and yes, other electronic brands are available). What you should therefore expect from this blog, dear reader, is a series of suggestions, thoughts, ideas from its writer, Alison - or at this point the seemingly allusive ‘I’.

And Alison’s ideas will be focused in a particular area. You see, ‘Iconnote’ is polysemous. It has multiple meanings, for it is also a compound of ‘Icon’ and ‘note’: ‘Icon’, the image, the visual – art; and ‘note’, a reference to the blog itself. Yet by compounding ‘note’ with ‘Icon’, the title also suggests the symbiosis of word and image, the creative combination of verbal and visual which so fascinates Alison.

‘Iconnote’ is a blogospheric outlet for Alison’s thoughts on the creative arts: Multimodal books, art exhibitions, multiplatform storytelling, and perhaps even some cognitive poetics thrown in for good measure.

Now, what to tell the reader about first, thought Alison.

I know, I’ll start at the beginning.