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Show Me a Story: Children's Books & the Technology of Enchantment
In the Gallery Aug 20 - Nov 5, 2004
 Books from the exhibition
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Encoding Enchantment: Engineering the Materials of Story
We live inside Story. It is how we understand our world, how we create the structures we live inside: personal, social, cultural. Memory is a Story we tell ourselves; and our collective memories, pooled into categories we call law, medicine, science, art, or music, are what we call civilization. The stories called Law set boundaries, establish protections; the stories called Art remind us where we've been and open our eyes to new possibilities. And, of course, the morals of Story guide and teach us Humans have always created, expanded, stored and shared Story in as many ways as we could manage. Lately, in the past few millennia, we've been capturing and passing along Story via physical vehicles using written language. We have been calling these vehicles Books Book design is all about encoding Story into material form. How to organize content so it fits the anatomy of the book. How to convey emotion, evoke atmosphere, create an appropriate state of mind in the reader. How, in short, to create an effective vehicle for the enchantment of Story Childrens' literature, a particularly fertile field for the embodiment of Story, has a rich history of enchanting forms and materials. Pop-ups, foldouts, unusual sizes and shapes, rich color and fanciful content all help to integrate Show with Tell in as compelling a fashion as possible. The technologies of enchantment have taken a huge leap in the past few decades as electrons join the ritual dances of Story. Screens, sound, and interactive objects both enrich and compete with the traditiona story-stage of the book. New kinds of reading machines proliferate: novels are transmitted on cell phones, a news ticker scrolls across the bottom of television screens. Reading becomes ever more important in the uses of technology: the use of email and the Web, both reading technologies, is growing exponentially But the beloved form of the book remains intact, even as new technologies for enchantment burble (and sometimes burst). People are buying — and reading — more books now than ever before. The essence of the experience of reading stories — what we care about — is the quality of the engagement: are we enchanted yet We are learning new ways to tell ourselves stories. Looking for the methods to create enchantment, we experiment with authoring with new, dynamic materials and metaphors, hoping to provoke an evocative reading experience: playing books like instruments, driving through forests of text, wrapping ourselves into worlds built of moving, morphing word and image...and sound...and touch.. "Show Me A Story" includes a glimpse into some of these possibilities. Three prototypes from The Reading Lab play with the possibilities of readers' engagement via new materials and forms imbued with unusual technologies. Rich soundscapes create a world into which readers immerse themselves; dancing text responds to the twitch of a wrist or the swipe of a finger. Physical and sensual involvement in Story recalls the ancient rituals of theater: the stage of the book is ripe for play...for enchantment And not only enchantment. Reading technologies enable people who have found printed text difficult or inaccessible, or who have dyslexia, ADD/ADHD, or who have difficulties holding physical books. These new means of access to the stories of our culture, via multi-sensory channels unavailable a decade ago, open the way to our common heritage: the rich experience of reading Maribeth Back is founder of The Reading Lab, a Berkeley-based developer of new technologies for reading. |
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