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abstract
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 a performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Further expanding this practice beyond the book's margins, yet at the same time, embedding it in the material and technical affordance of the book's medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology: one that unfolds with the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, human and non-human authors weave 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: on the one hand in transgressing traditional scientific methodologies and models from thinking-of-the-other into thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand with and through the agency of our eponymous characters. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, Fauna and Flora operate on 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.
- Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen - New Ecology of the Book - 2024
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