Week 6: Editions at Play

Google and Visual Editions’ project Editions at Play sells books “powered by the magic of the internet”. Publishing what have been deemed “unprintable” books, I immediately thought of Editions at Play when I read this week’s blog question. In particular, I want to take a look at Reif Larsen’s Entrances & Exits.

So how has the magic of the internet worked its way into Entrances & Exits? By telling the story using Google Street View. Editions at Play offers the following introduction:

“Entrances & Exits by Reif Larsen is a Borgesian love story told through Google Street View, in which the narrator discovers a mysterious key in an abandoned bookshop and gradually learns of its power to open and close doors around the world. The story is a beautiful dance between fictional narrative real locations that seamlessly spans the globe.”

Because I am a student I only read the free trial (which you can access here: https://editionsatplay.withgoogle.com/#/detail/p_taCwAAQBAJ) , however, this was enough to get me thinking about how Entrances & Exits plays with the idea of the page.

One of the first things to jump out at me was that in the description of the book, the publisher offers a “read time”, to let you know Entrances & Exits will take you approximately one hour to read. One thing we might not think about when we think about the page is that, not only is the page a finite container for text, but it also acts as a marker of time. Andrew Piper touches on this change in Turning the Page when he highlights that “If one of the crucial features of the page is its finitude ---that it stops---then one of the first ways to think beyond the page is to transgress its horizontal limits” (55) and focus instead on the “roamable text” (55).

Entrances & Exits is a perfect embodiment of the roamable text. The book encourages readers to navigate the physical space of the page, which is no longer static, but a 360 degree view of a selected environment. When the space of the page becomes roamable, the temporal structure of the reading experience changes. There is no longer a finite number of words to take in, but a whole visual environment that the reader must navigate to move forward in the text. By manipulating both the temporal and spatial elements of the page, Entrances & Exits is forced to adopt a new measure of expressing the time necessary to engage with the text.

Entrances & Exits is also unique in that it combines the archetypal understanding of the page, with this new exploratory environment powered by Google Street View. The story isn’t told simply through Google Street View imagery with minimal overlaid text, but through an oscillation between this and highly structured print like pages of text.

What I find really intriguing about this structure is that on the one hand, it is working extremely hard to reinvent the experience of the page, while on the other, it requires the standardized conception of the page to support this new innovation.  Stoicheff and Taylor echo this sentiment in their introduction to Future of the Page, writing that “Today digitization has opened up endless possibilities for visual and acoustic innovation, but our understanding of that constitutes a text remains rooted in the traditions of the medieval page” (8). Below I've included two screenshots of different iterations of the page in Entrances & Exits:

       

If you look at the "standard" page, you will notice that it even employs grid lines to emphasize the structure of the page and delineate its strict borders. 

There is a lot going on here, and I think that it really takes going through the book trial to fully understand the dichotomy of pages that Entrances & Exits presents. Indeed, there's so much going even beyond thinking solely about how Larsen's text uses the page.The book is currently  on sale, so I'm considering purchasing it and maybe using it as the subject for my final essay. Let me know what you guys think!

References

Larsen, Rief. Entrances & Exits. Editions at Play, 2016. Access at https://editionsatplay.withgoogle.com/#/detail/p_taCwAAQBAJ

Stoicheff, Peter, and Andrew Taylor. Introduction to The Future of the Page. University of Toronto Press, 2004. 3-25.

Piper, Andrew. "Turning the Page (Roaming, Zooming, Streaming)." In Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. University of Chicago Press, 2012.