Between Page and Screen is a limited edition hand-bound and letterpress-printed book of poems that in form and content engages both the digital poetry and artist’s book traditions toconsider the place of books in an era of screen-based reading. Produced in collaboration with Brad Bouse, an interactive developer, this twenty-poem chapbook contains no text, only geometric markers that, when displayed before the reader’s webcam, activate a series of animations mapped to the surface of the page. Because the animations move with the book, they appear to inhabit “real” three-dimensional space — so the project is described as a kind of digital pop-up book.
Between Page and Screen say – “The resulting poems exist in an augmented reality where the user sees herself holding, and interacting with, the text. The poems include a series of cryptic letters between two lovers, P and S, as well as animations that play with the central images in those letters. P and S explore their fraught relationship through metaphor and innuendo, but have difficultydefining it. Their epistles and coded icon messages suggest a network of connectionsthey may never untangle. P asks, “Be my apport?” S wonders, “Why this mania to name what’s between us?””
We hope to have more from the makers of Between Page and Screen very soon but for now check out the video.