HYPERBOOK.
Considerations and Concerns about the Digital Artist Book.
Both reading and writing have been traditionally seen as sequential acts, even though human thought does not respond to this very same
pattern of growth and organization. Artist books can be structured following different sequences – frequently polysemiotic – resulting in non-linear narratives and connections. In a similar fashion,
hypertext transcends the limits of the printed page, building invisible links and resulting into a vast network that organizes discourse not-only through sequential connections, but rather in
multiple directions and depths.
Over the last decade, the rise of the digital book as an entertainment and the arrival of the first devices meant for this new medium, boosted a debate around the concept of "digital artist's book”:
its definition, form, materiality and – which perhaps is the most important feature – its hypermedia nature. Thus, in this paper we will briefly address the notion of artist’s hyperbook (as opposed
to digitised books) and what we think should be acknowledged as its main defining features, the implications it entails in regards to other mediums, how it overlaps with other tangential artistic
manifestations (net.art, game-art, etc.), and its current and future possibilities, including distribution and sale strategies as part of a much larger art system.
Furthermore, if a book is rendered as a sequence of spaces, the sequence of spaces in the artist's book ultimately defines its temporality – shaped by the dynamic relationships between formal and
content structures and their reading over time.
Consequently, in this paper we will also address the space of the digital artist book – as well as its
connection with the printed artist's book – and the meaning of ‘sequence’ in such a profoundly hypertext scenario as defined by the hyperbook.