Artists' books as a physical site of practice

If a post-literate society might also encompass new ways of thinking about reading, we could think of contemporary artists' books as a site of practice beyond that of McLuhan's signposting of the invention of moveable type as fundamentally responsible for how the Western world physically reads: "along straight lines of the printed page".We seem to have already moved from linear to non-linear reading; we are used to flitting through digital screen based texts, and losing our attention through a multitude of online multi-tasking. Physical engagement with artists' books provides us with space to breathe, a slower rhythm of ingesting information and time to reflect, so what about the artists who are making them? How are artists engaging with the physical book now?These examples focus on celebrating the book as a physical container used by artists to: re-present language, offer performative reading , view how reading is perceived, appropriate text from novels and instructional manuals into new works, or to transform information from the virtual into the physical.