Book Art Museum to Open in SL
by Petronilla Paperdoll

It is difficult to imagine an object more distant from SL than a RL book: I mean a book as artifact, made by a skilful hand. Let’s think about its weight, the color and smell of the paper, the refined details of a binding... Are we going to lose track of all of this in the virtual world?

The Center for Book Arts has chosen to face a real challenge: to connect RL and SL books.

The Chairman, ArtWorld Market, explains how this move to SL will advance the CBA’s mission, while a giant book, with raised bands on the spine as balconies, is growing in NMC Island Teaching 2 (72, 204, 25): it is going to become The Book Art Museum in Second Life.

Above: On the CBA Campus: a life-size prototype of the Book Art Museum

“There are two strategies at least," he says, "One for educating people in-world about the book as artifact, and the other for marketing real-world courses and exhibitions”.

The in-world programs will include the building of a museum that shows examples of book forms from Assyrian and Sumerian tablets through today, and will have exhibitions of contemporary book art. It will have early codex forms like Coptic bindings, Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, Livres d'Art such as Delacroix and the Vollard editions, Constructivist, Futurist, Dada and Fluxus books and so on. There will be exhibitions of the structures of books from these periods, information about where to see the real books all over the world, and exhibitions from different libraries. Moreover, we are planning have distance learning classes in-world, that will teach people how to make these book forms in the real world.

We plan to teach all the SL bookmaking systems that now exist, and we will encourage the exploration and development of other book forms as well. We already have a THiNC Press and NeoBook, and have been talking with Falk Bergman about teaching his book production device. A KDC GNU book and Free book just arrived. They all have different features. We expect to see more artists using the book form to create visual literature in-world.

The CBA also has several thousand images of RL book art works that it is now organizing for its online archive, and this will be available from the SL unit. This represents over 140 exhibitions we have organized during the last 33 years. Additionally, we plan to construct working models of traditional and contemporary book art objects that will function as SL objects.

The SL Book Art Museum will encourage the creation of new artistic content, and give a strong impulse to in-world book technology. The codex shape the object has from late antiquity survives in the Second World, and still suits the avatar’s need to leaf through pixel pages: but the history of the RL object is longer, and it will not be left behind. In this way, the SL Museum will keep tangible the memory of the book’s source as artifact—that particular mix of creativity, taste, knowledge, practical skills and patient effort called by the Greeks τέχνη (techne), “art/craft”. This human attitude is, in my opinion, the true link between the book you can touch and the one you can click.

—Petronilla Paperdoll

Above: CBA Chairman ArtWorld Market in the Book Production Studio, reading the
Bergman Books edition of Alice in Wonderland. Four other SL book production methods
are in the photo: a THiNC book (left), NeoBook, KDC and Free book.
Chairman ArtWorld is wearing an avatar created by Nebulosus Severine for her recent
AHO Museum exhibition The Cult[ure] of Television.

 
Another view of the Book Art Museum

The Center for Book Arts Campus in Second Life. Landscaping is in progress.
Above scene includes the book production studios in a renovated papermill.