Oak Mot

Art?

Or books?

When reading the section of Writing Machines that detailed Kaye’s interest in artists’ books and her treatment of Tom Phillip’s book A Humument, I was reminded of my recent discovery of Oak Mot which is an artist book by the actor Crispin Glover (the dad from Back to the Future).  One of the presentations at the conference I recently attended analyzed Oak Mot (Crispin’s version) in the ways it diverged from the original similar to the way that Hayle’s did with Phillip’s book. After encountering these two different artist’s books and the respective criticism that accompanied them, I was struck by the difference between the two analyses and the ways in which the attention to the original novel affected a reading of the artist’s book. In Hayles discussion of A Humument, there seems to be a strong connection between the characters in Mallock’s original book and Hayles analysis of Phillips work. She even uses specific quotes from A Human Document to reveal certain ways that Phillips is interacting with Mallock’s novel in his erasure (84, 85). Hayles reading was surprising to me because mainly because of the degree to which it diverged from the reading of Glover’s work, Oak Mot, that I saw at my conference which dealt very little with the original novel. I believe one of the reasons for this difference may come from the language that the two critics used to refer to their objects of study. Hayles refers to these reconfigured texts as artists “books” but the presenter at my conference, who actually had an argument with Glover over this very issue, insisted that Oak Mot was a piece of art and not a book or novel. This is interesting to me because it shows the amount of influence that something as simple as naming can have on our perceptions.

This idea of the “influence of naming” becomes even more interesting, and complicated, when thinking about Hayle’s larger ideas about materiality and specifically the influence of computer software on writing and culture. If something as simple as the difference between a piece of “art” and a “book” could affect the reading of these reconfigured texts, then how much more does something like a complex computer program configured in a certain way affect the way that we write and even think? For example, why does Microsoft Word, by far the most popular writing program, function in no way like a piece of paper? Although there are certain things considered very important that Word can accomplish such as spell check and word count that a piece of paper cannot, in what ways has this computer program affected our writing? Does it matter that we cannot turn the paper a certain way when we write? Or that we do not read our work in our own handwriting anymore? Does it even matter? I’m not sure, but I believe that Hayles is correct in her position that attention to materiality is nothing new and we should not stop considering it now even if it something strange and complicated to people more familiar with words than with code.