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New Ecology of the Book (last edited: 2025)

About this exposition

In our exploration of the spatiality of language and, specifically, the activation of the site where writing "makes" rather than takes place, we propose a multilayered experience of the book as an object, as well as a geometrical, topological, and especially performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Extending this practice beyond the book's margins, yet simultaneously embedding it within the material and technical affordances of the book’s medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology—one unfolding alongside the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, and both human and non-human authors weave together the heterogeneous texture of the book’s "new" ecology. In our monographs, "Fauna. Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals" (2018), "Flora. Language Arts in the Age of Information" (2020), and "Fiction Fiction. Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling" (2023, De Gruyter/Edition Angewandte), we explore and map the territory of language arts. This approach manifests, on the one hand, through the transgression of traditional scientific methodologies and a shift in models—from thinking-of-the-other toward thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand, through the agency of our eponymous characters, Fauna and Flora, who not only title our books but also act as conceptual operators—figures that navigate, perform, and activate the very spaces our texts explore. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, these characters move within and percolate through the margins of text (written, figural) and space (concrete, fictional), reconfiguring the notion of authorship and placing literary texts and digital drawings within the frame(less) collective of more-than-human and more-than-organic actants.

type	research exposition
keywords	language arts, spatial storytelling, interaction-landscape, ecology of the book, material affordances, more-than-human authorship
date	04/03/2023
last modified	08/05/2025
status	in progress
share status	public
copyright	Elena Peytchinska; Thomas Ballhausen
license	CC BY-NC-ND
language	English
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2010919/2336921

Copyrights

name	Fauna_Cover
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, Tobias Egger, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Fauna_2
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Fauna_1
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Origamion_gottrecorder
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Manfred Stocker
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Fauna_3
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Fauna_4
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Fauna_performance_book launch
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, Sabina Holzer, Jack Hauser, Chris Saupper
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Origamion_Extra Raum
copyright	Elena Peytchinska
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Fauna_5
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Fauna_6
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Origamion_II
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Chris Saupper
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Among Animals_performance
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Sabina Holzer, Thomas Ballhausen
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Zinnober
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Flora_Cover
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Flora_Noise_Leseprobe_1
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	slideshow

name	Flora_Noise_Leseprobe_2
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	slideshow

name	Flora_Noise_Leseprobe_3
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	slideshow

name	Flora_Noise_Leseprobe_4
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	slideshow

name	Flora_Noise_Leseprobe_5
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	slideshow

name	Flora_Noise_Leseprobe_6
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	slideshow

name	Flora_Noise_Leseprobe_7
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	slideshow

name	Flora_Noise_Leseprobe_8
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	slideshow

name	AGC_6
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	AGC_1
copyright	Elena Peytchinska
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	AGC_3
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Flora_1
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Flora_3
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	AGC_2
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	Flora_2
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	I see the stars become alien to me
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Elena Peytchinska, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	AGC_4
copyright	Elena Peytchinska
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	AGC_5
copyright	Elena Peytchinska
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FF_Cover
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, Nina Reisinger, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	nonhuman_friendships_I
copyright	Elena Peytchinska
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	nonhuman_friendships_I_landscape
copyright	Elena Peytchinska
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FF_1
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FF_bibliographiclandscape
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FF_exhibitionlandscape
copyright	Elena Peytchinska
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FF_2
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FF_3
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	nonhuman_friendships_II_detail
copyright	Elena Peytchinska
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FF_4
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FictionFiction_NewPosition
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Nina Reisinger, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FictionFiction_CarbonCopy
copyright	Thomas Ballhausen, Nina Reisinger, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	FictionFiction_AfterCallimachus
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen, Nina Reisinger, DeGruyter/Edition Angewandte
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	landscape
copyright	Elena Peytchinska
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

name	book_geometry
copyright	Elena Peytchinska, MAK Wien
license	CC BY-NC-ND
usages	picture

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