bibliostructures

How High The Moon

I declared my bibliostructures business officially reopen for business last Tuesday. For the last month I’ve been at the State Library of New South Wales looking at modern architecture and design books for reference points. Sketching the hinges on the Barcelona Chair and Shiro Kuramata’s wire mesh club chair, How High The Moon. I’ve been copying down specifications for advanced alloys: metals that bounce like rubber, light emitting concrete. My clients and collaborators are musicians and dancers and roboticists. Music is a large component of the books and I’m trying to figure out (with the help of the i-phone I acquired this afternoon) how to place an electronic tag on the paper that an i-phone might read in i-tunes. Serendipitously last.fm and myspace are making advances towards music streaming, and the intelligent playlist feature in the new edition of i-tunes is a useful step towards more complex and subtle ways to align and relate music beyond the current simple musical taxonomies.

The first phase of the business ran for nearly ten years in Los Angeles towards the end of the twentieth century. My roboticist friend Ken Goldberg described the books I was making as “bibliostructures”. I felt way out in orbit, shooting off towards the future. My inspirations only went as far back as Mies van der Rohe. My books had slender spines that owed more to the Golden Gate Bridge than the Victorian corsetry of the bookbinding craft. Then I spun off on a tangent, I was chasing what I will now admit was an impossible dream, the paperback electronic book. Just as Penguins had transformed the book publishing world with cheap, smartly designed paperbacks I wanted to create simple, cheap electronic books. Computers were doing increasingly wondrous things: we take Google maps for granted without stopping to be amazed that we have the navigational devices for NASA’s moon missions in our phones. But computers never mastered what I imagined should have been the simplest task of all, still text on many paper-like flexible screens bound together as a regular book would be.

I wandered away from journalism for a time as well. I managed a landscape design business. I taught myself to cook (rearranging the covalent bonds in food molecules) well enough to construct canapés at a few catering firms where the food is taken seriously. And I followed, again, what had been the intense interests of my childhood: natural history and cosmology. Discovering Alexis Rockman’s paintings has been one of my greatest joys so far in the twenty first century. And Carnivorous Nights, the story of his trip through Tasmania with Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson, in thrall to the thylacine, is one of my favourite books. And I’ve been methodically reading all of the books of the paleontologist, explorer and biologist, Tim Flannery. I moved to Sydney last year and came out of hibernation to discover that natural history is everywhere: books are being written in giddy admiration of Charles Darwin. The Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine) is being cloned. Desperate measures are being taken to save the Tasmanian devil. Steampunk is the trend du jour. And the great media dinosaurs are facing extinction.