Between Page and Screen
Between Page and Screen is a hand-bound and letterpress-printed book of poems that engages both the digital poetry and artist's book traditions to consider the place of books in an era of screen-based reading.
This sixteen-poem chapbook contains no text, only stark black-and-white geometric shapes and a web address leading to this site, where the reader follows instructions to display the book on his or her webcam. Our software detects the square markers in the book and displays corresponding word animations mapped to the surface of the page. Because the animations move with the book, they appear to inhabit "real" three-dimensional space—a kind of digital pop-up book.
The poems—a series of cryptic letters between two lovers, P and S—do not exist on either page or screen, but in an augmented reality only accessible to the reader who has both the physical object and the device necessary to read it.
Book
Between Page and Screen was printed in an edition of 12 on a Vandercook proof press at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California. The book was digitally set in URW Grotesk and hand-printed from photopolymer plates on Rives BFK paper. The three-dimensional poems were set in Helvetica Bold, using the VectorVision library. The binding is Keith Smith's Butterfly, which is also known as Yamato Toji and Double Span-Span Span-Span.
Many thanks to Linda Dare for facilitating the project and to Genevieve Kaplan for assistance with printing. Barbara Maloutas and Rebecca Chamlee provided valuable insight into the book structure and materials. Gratitude to the lab techs who provided a keen eye when needed: Leslie Ross-Robertson, Sudeshna Pantham, and Roxy Morataya. Thank you to Maggie Lomeli for help screenprinting our postcards.
Authors
