Dance with Prints: Your Body & A Poster & A Book
Performance
2022
2022
The process grew from individual performance to a collective action. I used ambiguous instructions like “kiss your poster”, “hug your book”, “disrespect your book”, “lift your poster together”, “clap for the publisher/author”, “each person read a word from the books out aloud, etc. I also brought some spreads in variable sizes and cut out handle shapes and thumb shapes along outer margins. Participants who picked the books had to hold the handles and read the spreads and books together. The process unpacks the invisible default of hand interacting with books, it groups people to read together and share the reproductive labor of one person holding one page. The distance between the two readers is shifted by the size of the spreads. This workshop recontextualizes how graphic design creates a community. The experimentation challenges canonical interaction and critiques historical procedures of how the body, proportion, space, and movement have been interpreted, articulated, and elucidated with 2D graphic design prints.