bibliostructures

 

Painting by Peter O’Doherty

In the last couple of weeks, as banks have failed around the world and the stock-market has sunk, I’ve been setting up the foundations of my business. I opened a business bank account but the banker who filled out the form made a spelling error that means  the card has to be re-made. I picked up an armload of brochures from the taxation office so that I could set up my record keeping files (which I’m doing in Google docs spreadsheets). And I’ve been researching the capital investments I need to make. When I returned to Australia from America I bought a computer and the first 3G phone I saw without thinking the purchases through. I had a Sony VAIO in Los Angeles and bought the nearest thing to it (in appearance) that I found, a Compaq Presario. And I took an instant dislike to the Nokia phone for entirely superficial, but lasting, reasons. Both devices are on the wrong side of an evolutionary divide. Small of memory, slow of operation, limited of function, and there’s no way to lift them to a higher order of machine. I grew to loathe Windows: my music library is marooned within an old version of itunes. I read many horror stories about upgrading to itunes 7 with Windows XP, and now even that’s gone, given way to itunes 8. No wi-fi modem was bundled with the machine, so I can’t easily work with Google docs and am reliant on the woeful word processing program provided by Windows that isn’t even comfortably compatible with Microsoft word, and the virus protection program became a voracious memory hog and made the machine function in slow motion. Now the disc drive in the computer is malfunctioning so I can’t watch the handful of NTSC DVD’s I own (some of them small dance films made by my friend Dana Gingras’s new dance company Animals of Distinction.)

I had appointments at the Genius Bar and with a Personal Shopper at the Apple Store in Sydney to look toward buying an Apple computer system. There are parts of Sydney that remind me of New York, or perhaps, since I lived in Sydney first, Sydney anticipated New York for me. The new Apple store on George Street, which is a three storey rectangular glass box, reminds me of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as much in the experience of going there as the appearance. Two flights of glass stairs give the appearance of floating in space and unadorned metal walls and surfaces are the kind I envisaged for my bibliostructures. The Genius Bar feels like a real bar: I keep expecting to be offered a martini made from an exquisite Japanese rice vodka. The serious elegance reminds me of the aesthetics of the NeXT computers, which was exactly the kind of computer that Mies van der Rohe would have created. Just about everything I admire these days is seriously elegant and complex, but subtle: Nick Cave’s songs, William Gibson’s novels of the twenty first century, Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron’s retooling of Interview magazine, Peter O’Doherty and Alexis Rockman’s paintings, Al Gore’s reinvention of the stewardship provided by a public figure.

There’s something Leonard Cohen said in the New York Times in 1996 that keeps coming to mind:

“How do we produce work that touches the heart? We don’t want to live a frivolous life, we don’t want to live a superficial life. We want to be serious with each other, with our friends, with our work. That doesn’t necessarily mean gloomy or grim, but seriousness has a kind of voluptuous aspect to it. It is something that we are deeply hungry for, to take ourselves seriously and to be able to enjoy the nourishment of seriousness, that gravity, that weight.”

Trying to decide what computer to buy made my head spin. By default the iphone I bought yesterday has become my primary computer. I didn’t intend to get an iphone. I didn’t think I made so many voice calls, but the preparatory work for my business had seen me make what is usually a month’s worth of calls in a day. And I need to be able to search for information on the fly: the Nokia just didn’t present websites well, and I couldn’t open PDF documents in my emails. The best upgrade solution from my phone service was their iphone pagackage: So I now have a 3G 16gigabyte black iphone. The network at my service provider’s store was down so I went to the Apple store (one block away) and they activated my phone for me and showed me how to use it. A salesman (although I think they have some more benign title like customer care operative, or team member) imported my contacts for me, set up the synchronising of my e-mail with my phone, and showed me how to set the alarms and all of the simple functions. Everything felt right, and inevitable. I suddenly understood why the Windows system and the Nokia’s functioning bothered me: it was all tricksy, trying obvious things with the technology to spin out sales, and larding up the systems with every feature imaginable, hoping that a few shiny trinkets would capture our attention , without linking them to how human activities were changing through technological developments. There’s still a purity about the Apple vision, their machines fulfil one of the functions of mythology, that the information that we take in ties what’s eternal about the stages of human life, to our times.

image from Sony Qualia video

The Sony Walkman was the first piece of technology that captivated me: it was unprecedented and perfectly prescient. The end of the great age of Sony fascinates me, the development of a robot dog to be “man’s next friend”, the linking of computing and gaming, and the flawed Qualia concept are fascinating. Qualia seemed to come out of nowhere at the time. I think the line was launched in 1999. Like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel imagining that Charles Babbage succeeded in creating his computer, The Difference Engine, the products anticipated steampunk. They were phenomenally expensive and housed in finely tooled boxes made of wood and metal, and sold in rarefied stores that had their own perfume pumped through the air. (Although that’s not as unusual as I once thought it was, many companies “brand” the air their customers breathe.) At the time I found it bizarre and eccentric that Sony was creating tools for contemporary Charles Darwin’s and Captain Cook’s, enlightened scholarly generalists and explorers with a spiritual streak.

Qualia is a term from neuroscience — I’ll need to look it up again to properly describe it — that relates to how we experience experiences. The dictionary in this woeful word processor gives this definition: “essential quality. a property of something, for example, its feel or appearance, rather than the thing itself.” I thought that Sony was trying to suggest that their products allowed people to create and store experiences that turned the home entertainment environment into an equivalent of natural history museums and private cabinets of curiosity. The product literature mentioned leaves in rainforests and fine wine. Now it’s evident that Sony was just early, that Nobuyki Idei was a seer: the steampunk aesthetic has now taken complete hold. I went to pick up my mail at the post office in Potts Point yesterday and stopped for coffee at Toby’s estate, organic coffee, organic soy milk, in a French style bowl. And I saw a sign for what I thought was a real estate agent and followed it to a store tucked behind a parking lot that mixed minimally ornate Edwardian-seeming estate jewellery and diminutive antiques, with pure fibre sensual clothing: plain cashmere and silk jersey, and haute-simple baby toys and archly plain ceramic mugs and bowls and plates. There were also artworks: butterflies laid out on paper, in glass boxes. The customers of this store would have naturally gravitated, now, I think, to Sony’s Qualia range of electronics.

Left: Apple iphone wallpaper

There’s a Qualia-quality, sweeter, more democratic and warmer, in the Apple products. I’m almost more taken with the quality of the packaging than the phone itself. A black box that feels like cashmere and matte black dividers in the box: if it weren’t opaque it could be a display case at a natural history museum. The wallpapers loaded into the phone are classic pre-modern paintings — the Mona Lisa, a Cezanne still life, a Degas, Van Gogh’s Starry Night — alongside images that could have come from National Geographic (a lotus flower, peacock‘s fan of feathers, section of a rainforest plant, autumn trees, a frog, a monarch butterfly,), and earthrise, the photograph taken looking back at earth from the moon’s orbit, by the Apollo 8 astronauts, that Joseph Campbell believed infinitely expanded the horizon for mythology. The ringtones are all drawn from life, snatches of oral history: machines (motorcycle, an alarm, pinball, robots), animals (dogs, ducks, crickets) and pure, generic music (blues, harp, xylophone, piano riff). These aren’t abstractions and metaphors but field recordings by made by the computer out in the world.

Yesterday I visited a metalworking shop in the inner city Sydney suburb of St Peters. My new bibliostructures are vastly different from those I made during the L.A. period. I want them to be snapped together from pre-fabricated parts and I don’t want to use any glue at all. I had a vision of a book with a metal spine and covers that’s inspired by a “floating” steel table by Junya Ishigami. I want one of these tables for the warehouse space I’m looking for. It’s extravegantly long — perhaps as long as three regular tables — and thin, merely millimetres. It looks like a sheet of steel paper levitating at table height. It’s exhilarating, like a magic trick.

I’ve been reading a lot about magic lately. Nick Cave’s albums are bibliographies as well as musical works for me and the latest Bad Seeds album has led me to the Robert Fagles 1996 translation of the Odyssey as well as the biography of Harry Houdini by Larry Sloman that the song DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! was inspired by. At the Kings Cross library I found a book called The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects by Norman Klein.

“In 1993 I visited the Luxor in Vegas soon after it opened. Luxor was billed as “the first pyramid in 2,600 years.” While I leaned at the entry, a chunk of the front wall broke off in my hand. It was weightless, made of stucco, chicken wire and Styrofoam. For years, I kept my chunk of the Luxor on a shelf near my computer, beside a piece of the Berlin Wall; next to broken pottery shards from Armageddon (I had found them in a parking lot in Israel, at Megiddo, the spot where Revelations promises the world will end); and finally, near some tattered editions of pulp novels from the fifties (urban ruin as special effects). 

The metalworking shop could have belonged to one of William Gibson’s gomi non sensei. The firm specialises in making metal furniture for architects. There were curlicued gates and panels being sanded and polished by the front door. Everything in the shop has an intense patina: drill bits are stored in ancient powder-coated tins. Sheets of various metals are propped up against the walls, hinges are sitting haphazardly on shelves. Arcane tools are fanned out on the tables. At one point a fine down of dust sank through the air until the worker opened the back door to let the air circulate.

From Steampunk magazine.com

The metalworker looked at my sketches and gave me specifications: the side of the spine will need to be about 4mm to allow the hinges to hold when they are drilled in. I’ll need a plate with three holes if I’m to pin the pin the signatures inside the spine, and I’ll have to have some way of reinforcing the edge of the covers that the hinges screw into. The thinnest metals and aluminium that’s standard won’t hold up to the kind of wear and tear I want to put a book through, and the surface will look ruined and beat up rather than charmingly weathered. So we discussed softer metals that are easier to work with and show the marks of aging and use more attractively. I came out of the meeting with a list of brass and copper crescent mouldings and butt-hinges to acquire to make test models with. It struck me that I no longer have something coolly futuristic with a reverent nod to modernism but something Victorian, utterly steampunk. A couple of months ago I read an article about steampunks in the New York Times. The protagonist dresses in Victorian suits with tall top hats and has had an articulated brass casing made for his ipod. In a roundabout way I’ve re-invented that brass encased ipod.

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.