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You or I: The Experience of Reading Julie Chen

You should have an experience from the moment you make contact with the object. The moment you touch it, something should happen. You’re going to be drawn into it bit by bit. You just have to keep going into it to see what is going to happen. I’m drawing you into my world. – Julie Chen, 2000

What is book arts? For that matter, what is a book? Answers to these

questions are as varied as the readers, artists, and critics who attempt to answer them. Most, when they think book, think of the hardbacks issued in bookstores, sold in quantity, meant to be read in an armchair, in bed, or on the bus. However, artists have been pushing against that definition for the last 200 years. Now, the answer can be as simple as a few sheets of printed paper held in a container of some sort, or as complicated as a board game meant to get at the heart of a person’s life experience. Books can be small or large, can come in many shapes, and some are even made of found objects or sewn from cloth. Artists are always pushing the envelope, re-‐inventing and re-‐imagining the book.

One such artist is Julie Chen. Her work over the last 25 years has pushed boundaries and set a level of craftsmanship for others in the field to strive for. Since the establishment of her press, Flying Fish Press, in 1987 Chen has published 28 books, each unique and fascinating in its own way. Chen’s work is typified by a desire to draw the reader into the piece. The work is almost always enclosed in a box of some kind, requiring engagement with the piece from the beginning. The reader must work his or her way through the piece as Chen “draws [them] in bit by bit.” Often sculptural and always beautiful, Chen’s work really must be seen to be understood, however, this paper will make an attempt at bringing one of her pieces to life by looking at her background, the piece itself, and the experience of reading. Julie Chen When Julie Chen first started college she was a philosophy major. She says that the influence of her parents at first made her feel like art was a hobby and not a lifelong career.1 She took some classes for fun, including a basic design class. It was an experience in that class that convinced her that her path should be in the pursuit of studio art. She focused on printmaking and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in studio art.

In the basic design class that set Chen down her path, the professor required all the students to visit a retrospective of the artist Joseph Cornell at the Museum of Modern Art. Although Chen cites a number of influences on her work, the largest, perhaps, is that of Cornell. His work changed her whole perspective on art. Speaking of the visit to the Joseph Cornell retrospective her freshman year, Chen says: 1 Seigel, Caroline L. “A Conversation with Book Artist Julie Chen at Her Studio, Berkeley, California, January 11, 2000,” Art Documentation, vol. 21 no. 1 (2002): 33.


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I went to the city to see the show because I had to. I had never heard of Joseph Cornell. When I walked into the museum is was like my whole life was transformed. I never realized art could be like that, so personal and so intimate. I went back to school and changed majors and never looked back.2 Joseph Cornell (1903-‐1972) was loosely associated with the Surrealist

movement, although did not share all of their philosophies. He is particularly known for his sculptural collages of found objects and engravings. He used visual and conceptual themes to tie together seemingly disparate objects, at first in found containers, and later, after learning woodworking from a neighbor, in custom made “shadowboxes”.3 His work has been called “evocative of childhood, fantasy, and nostalgia,” 4 and although relatively unknown at the time of his death, his influence has lived on through artists like Chen.

After graduating college, Chen knew she wanted eventually to return for a graduate degree, but beyond one book of etchings she produced as an undergraduate, book arts had not yet entered her life. “I actually discovered book arts by accident,” says Chen5. On a visit to her sister, then a student at Mills College in Oakland, CA, Chen decided to visit the graduate school office. After reading the catalog, she was intrigued by the book arts curriculum and scheduled a visit. She “went to Mills and as soon as [she] walked in the room, [she] knew that this was what [she] wanted to do.”6

Chen feels as though her work during school was mainly practice for her7, but since receiving her Masters of Art in book arts, Chen has gone on to be both an active practitioner and a teacher of the art. From 1996-‐2007 she held the title Instructor of Book Arts at Mills College and in 2007 was promoted to Assistant Professor. She teaches workshops around the country and has given talks at a number of conferences over the last seven years. She has been included in exhibits at the Getty Center, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian, along with

2 Siegel, 33 3 Philip Cooper. "Cornell, Joseph." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T019548 (accessed May 24, 2010). 4 Ayers, Andrew. "Cornell, Joseph." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com /subscriber/article/opr/t118/e626 (accessed May 24, 2010). 5 Public Broadcasting Corporation, “Craft in America / Chen July,” Craft in America, http://www.craftinamerica.org/artists_paper/story_456.php? (accessed May 24, 2010). 6 Siegel, 33 7 Courtney, Cathy. Speaking of Book Arts: Interviews with British and American Book Artists (Los Altos Hills, CA: Anderson-‐Lovelace Publishers, 1999).


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many other institutions. And her work is included in the permanent collections of many libraries and museums.8

Although Cornell is a major influence, in an interview with Cathy Courtney, Chen discusses the influence on her work of a small Japanese Kabuki Lion Dancer figure from her childhood home.9 She describes the figure as “mysterious, so foreign, yet so sure of himself.”10 It was kept alone in a glass case, which has inspired Chen’s use of enclosures in her book art. In discussing her enclosures she says, “The force of the mystery comes not from the inability to see what is inside the box, but from being separated from it physically, and that sense of ‘otherness’ is very important.”11

Chen cites book artists Clare Van Vliet and Susan King as role models for her art. Although she feels her work is very different from theirs, their beautiful craftsmanship is an ideal she strives to meet.12 King’s work, although different from her own in many ways, shares a certain artistic perspective with Chen’s in that it “connects different aspects of her experience into a larger pattern.”13

Although their influence on her work is not visually apparent, the Russian Constructivists also inspire Chen in some ways. She appreciates their use of typography and their iconographic appeal to the less literate. She does not “actually use it but there’s something about it [she’s] always trying to capture.” 14

An important element of Chen’s work is the personal voice she uses. “It is the relationship between the work and the personal experience of the reader that interests me. I always hope that the use of the intimate voice will resonate with the reader and help to create a direct emotional connection for him or her.”15 This is particularly apparent when she addresses the reader directly in the second person. Although the “’you’ that appears changes with each book…[it] does not necessarily represent anyone in [her] life.”16 However, this use of the second person also changes the way in which a piece is read, and represents a break with traditional forms of reading, an idea discussed in more detail below.

Chen ends her interview with Courtney with a sentence that sums up her relationship to book arts: “I cannot imagine living a life in which books were not a central part of my activity.”17

A Guide to Higher Learning 8 Chen, Julie. “Mills College – Julie Chen CV,” Mills College, http://www.mills.edu/academics/faculty/book/jchen/jchen_cv.php (accessed May 24, 2010). 9 Courtney, 204. 10 Courtney, 204. 11 Courtney, 204-‐205. 12 Courtney, 208. 13 Courtney, 208. 14 Siegel, 32 15 Julie Chen quoted in Goodman, Richard, “Fine Presses: Flying Fish Press.” Fine Books & Collections, July/August 2005: 17 16 Courtney 213. 17 Courtney, 219.


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A Guide to Higher Learning is housed in what is known as a drop spine box.

A drop spine box is a common container for books, especially rare ones. Stiff walls surround the book protecting it from damage. In this case the box is held shut by magnets. Upon opening the box one first sees the blanket intended to be laid out on the table prior to opening the book. Removing the blanket, one gets a first view of the book. The book is a perfect square. Printed in the center is a grid with red circles placed in apparently random order throughout. In the center there is a depression, which holds a small pamphlet labeled simply “The Answer Book”. The grid and dots, it turns out, are not random, but instead follow the pattern of the Ulam Spiral, a representation of prime numbers created by Stanislaw Ulam and first published in 1964 in The American Mathematical Monthly.18 First, real numbers are plotted on a grid in a spiral pattern. The number one appears in the center, two is south, then three east of that, four north of three, and so on.

Fig. 1: Basic spiral

The next step in generating the spiral is to begin marking the primes in some manner. This is generally done by circling them:

Fig. 2: Spiral with circled primes

18 Stein, M. L.; Ulam, S.M.; Wells, M.B.. “A Visual Display of Some Properties of the Distribution of Primes.” The American Mathematical Monthly Vol. 71, No. 5 (May, 1964): 516-‐520.


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It appears, from Ulam’s mapping of the primes in this manner, that certain visual patterns begin to emerge. There are horizontal lines containing no primes and diagonals rich with them. The spiral was mapped out to 65,000 points using a computer at Los Alamos, where Ulam was a researcher, and these patterns held.

Fig 3: Ulam Spiral19

Another important visual element within A Guide to Higher Learning is formed by the origami folding patterns of Robert Lang. Lang is well known in both origami and art circles in the United States and Japan. His work is incredibly lifelike and complex, modeled after nature. Lang says of his art, “while complex figures must be designed according to fixed, fundamental principles (design), there is always some spark of sponteneity [sic] and serendipity (creation) in the realization.”20 He views origami in a similar light to music in that there is a composer of the design and many practitioners “performing” (making manifest) the piece. A Guide to Higher Learning is a book that must be engaged with. There is no simple page turning in this book. Instead, one must slowly unfold individual sections. Each section is a small and rectangular and there are three to a side. The eight corner sections open outward to form part of a loop with the remaining four being small cases with plexi-‐glass revealing a single word. Even beyond the unfolding of the sections the book immediately draws the reader in. “This is a test”, it reads on the first fold. It continues as follows, each line break representing a fold of the section:

You will not be given any assistance Or instructions on how to proceed You will not be told when to begin or when to stop

19 Stein, Ulam, Wells, 517 20 Lang, Robert J. “What’s New.” Robert J. Lang Origami. http://www.langorigami.com/art/compositions/compositions.php4 (accessed May 30, 2010).


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You will be given a single question.21 As each successive loop is unfolded one is taken through a journey of answering a potentially unanswerable question. The use of the second person means that the reader helps create the book as he or she reads. Each person’s experience of the book will be unique as their reaction to the text is based upon their own life experience and personality. On the reverse side of the text lies a series of complex mathematical problems drawn from abstract algebra, analysis, geometry, and number theory. Each equation has a solution of some form of the number one, tying the loops together through this unifying concept. Says Chen in “The Answer Book”:

The abstract algebra and analysis loops demonstrate the central concept of unity in mathematics. Each of the four equations has a version of '1' as its solution. The geometry loop evokes the surprise of newer geometries incompatible with Euclid's mathematics: once thought to be true absolutely is now true only conditionally. The vastness of mathematics yet unknown is hinted at by the conjectures in the number theory loop. Mathematics have been trying to prove or disprove these conjectures for centuries, but still do not know if either is true.22

Complementing the mathematical loops are verbal loops. Text at the edges of each equation forms a sentence that can be read both forwards and backwards: the evidence within the pattern (the pattern within the evidence); reason evolves into chaos (chaos evolves into reason); the familiar subsumes the unknown (the unknown subsumes the familiar); profound truth sustains heartbreaking beauty (heartbreaking beauty sustains profound truth). One moves through the piece not knowing when to stop, taking everything in, but not necessarily understanding, ultimately coming back to where one began, realizing that each loop represents every other. The Experience of Reading Julie Chen’s work provides a rich landscape in which to explore the very act of reading. A Guide to Higher Learning, along with her works Panorama and Personal Paradigms all engage their readers in unique and interesting ways. We are pushed to think and interpret, making the reading of these texts a more complex process than that of reading a standard book. Think, if you will, about the process of reading. Linear, controlled, perhaps even dictated by the author. One enters a story at the beginning, and emerges changed, to greater or lesser extent, at the end. We 21 Chen, Julie. A Guide to Higher Learning (Berkeley, CA: Flying Fish Press, 2009). (A full transcription is in appendix A.) 22 Chen, A Guide to Higher Learning


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see this linear consumption every day from the smallest pieces, such as road signs or cooking instructions, to more complex texts such as television, movies, and novels. We are taught from a young age how to interpret signs and symbols to see new worlds.

But the question is, who creates those worlds? Are they prescribed by the author, existent from the moment he puts pen to paper, unchangeable? Or are they created anew each time a reader engages with the text? Michel de Certeau, in his essay “Reading as Poaching” argues for the latter. “What has to be put in question is…” he writes, “the assimilation of reading to passivity.” 23

Although Certeau’s full argument is very political – he sees the act of reading as subverting the inherent power structure of our cultural system (“poaching”), a system in which the “correct” interpretation of a text is handed down from a cultural elite – the crux of the argument is still useful in exploring Chen’s work. “Reading as Poaching” continues:

…to read is to wander through an imposed system (that of the text, analogous to the constructed order of a city or of a supermarket). Recent analyses show that ‘every reading modifies its object,’ that (as Borges already pointed out) ‘one literature differs from another less by its text than by the way in which it is read,’ and that a system of verbal or iconic signs is a reservoir of forms to which the reader must give a meaning…. The reader takes neither the position of the author nor an author’s position. He invents in texts something different from what they ‘intended.’”24

Certeau is not alone in viewing reading as an act of creation. Wolfgang Iser writes, “the message is transmitted in two ways, in that the reader ‘receives’ it by composing it. There is no common code – at best one could say that a common code may arise in the course of the process.”25 In Iser’s view, as much is said by the text’s omissions as by its words, by the “blanks” created and left by the text. The text serves as a guide to the reader both through what it says and what it does not say, controlling in some way the reader’s activity. However, “this control cannot be understood as a tangible entity occurring independently of the process of communication.” In other words, both text and reader are essential to creating the work. Now pick up a book, any book, and begin reading. Who’s voice do you hear as you read? Yours? The authors? In fact, until relatively recent times (the last few hundred years), the answer would have been unmistakably your own. Reading 23 Certeau, Michel de. “Reading as Poaching.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, 165-‐176. Berkeley: University of California Press 1984. 24 Certeau, 169 25 Iser, Wolfgang, “Interaction Between Text and Reader” in The Book History Reader ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. (London: Routledge 2006), 391


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aloud (or at least mumbling) was the norm for most of the history of reading. We often forget (or even do not know) this, and take the silence of modern reading for granted. However, Julie Chen’s books make us ask this question anew.

Chen’s “imposed system” (to use Certeau’s words) is different from our standard experience of reading. By using the second person in her text, Chen has forced us to reconsider the voice of the author. By writing in loops, she subverts our linear experience. We cannot emerge at the end, because there is no end. As she says in her text, “[turn] your back on all your fruitless efforts, and start again, or you can simply walk away.”26 Three lines later, however, she brings us back to a hopeful reading. “You will realize that at some point in the process, finding the answer stopped being your main objective,”27 another loop, this one emotional. Where, though, does the math fit in? Most readers of this text will not be able to parse the complex math Chen uses in this piece. How, then, is it read? As the pages unfold, mathematical text obscures the verbal text. Language we all read is replaced with the language of a specific subset of the population. Here Chen forces us to step out of our comfort zone and into a world we do not understand. She freely admits, in The Answer Book, that she does not understand it either; so why is it there? The math, it seems, serves to illustrate more poignantly the journey the text is taking us through. As we struggle to understand the text, it is gradually subsumed (or consumed) by the revealed math. We are forced to enter a discourse we are unprepared to understand. Further, by omitting explanation, Chen creates Iser’s blanks to help guide us through our creation of the text. Further, we are left without context for both verbal and mathematical texts, and as we read, we must construct a story to fill those in, a story that will inevitably change from reader to reader.

The math is, in fact, a key element in the piece. “The obscuring of the text by a highly technical language is the whole point of the piece,” says Chen in an email message to the author. Although she admits she could have used any number of other things, she chose math “because math is very hard thing for [her] to understand personally, as [she] believes it probably is for many other non-‐math people.”28 The piece’s direct engagement with the reader, this subversion of the author’s voice, is present in other of Chen’s works. As in A Guide to Higher Learning, Panorama, Chen’s second most recent work, also addresses the reader directly. It takes a distinct political stance and forces the reader to struggle with certain realities that he may or may not wish to confront. Vamp and Tramp Booksellers, Julie Chen’s primary book dealer, describe Panorama beautifully. They write:

Panorama is a warning, a challenge, a clarion call to action… Its five spreads present in a visual, tactile, and focused way the situation: You are here and now, and

26 Chen, A Guide to Higher Learning 27 Chen, A Guide to Higher Learning 28 Julie Chen, email message to the author, June 4, 2010


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you are in denial; the earth’s environment is delicate and endangered… As always with Julie Chen’s work, it begins with an elegant box, suggesting that what is inside can be contained. But once the pages begin opening, Panorama expands in two and then three dimensions. The problem is bigger, more complex, and more entwined than we might think. And as always the craft and formal invention are lusciously overwhelming and yet on point. Three sections of the book demand physical interaction with a lift tab structure; two sections turn into grand — in both senses — sculptures (to call them pop-‐ups would be an injustice).29

As with A Guide to Higher Learning, Panorama engages the reader physically, mentally, and emotionally. It combines standard, linear page turning with a more complicated structure that requires some thought to engage with. Again, the text is revealed gradually, disallowing a quick reading and encouraging thoughtful consideration. Certain pieces are obscured as others are revealed. For example, some of the first lines read:

You are here At this moment in time You are here You are in denial30

With the text “you are in denial” superseding and covering the second “you are here”. Thus, the meaning of the text changes as the reader engages with it. At first innocuous, “at this moment in time, you are here”, the reader (or perhaps the author) changes that to a darker sentiment, “at this moment in time you are in denial.”31 As the book unfolds (literally in this case), the story becomes darker, the voice in our head more accusatory. Here we cannot help but see (and hear) the passion with which Chen is approaching the issue of environmental degradation. Presumably her voice is present in the piece, but the question still remains, where does her voice end and ours begin? 29 Vamp & Tramp Booksellers, LLC. “Flying Fish Press,” Vamp & Tramp Booksellers, LLC, http://www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/f/flyingfish.html (Accessed May 31, 2010) 30 Chen, Julie. Panorama (Berkeley: Flying Fish Press 2008). (A full transcription is in appendix B) 31 Chen, Panorama


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Chen herself gives two explanations for the voice. She says “the voice in [A Guide to Higher Learning and Panorama] stems from me speaking to me. This would translate (hopefully) to either the reader speaking to themselves or me (as the narrator) speaking to the reader.”32 Or is there a third option? As Barthes said in “The Death of the Author,” “no one, no ‘person’, says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading.”33 In other words, the author, in writing, has given up some of her voice, and the reader, in reading, has created that voice anew. In speaking of another piece, River of Stars, Chen acknowledges that there are many readings (and therefore many voices) possible in her work. She says,

There should be different readings possible, partially because there is a potential there and partially because if it’s open-‐ended, different people are going to read it different ways, and it should either make sense in several different ways or it should be really obvious if you’re doing it wrong.34

However, Chen’s use of the second person makes Certeau’s view that “the reader takes neither the position of the author, nor an author’s position” and Barthes’ view that the author’s voice is, in some sense, dead, slightly problematic. Her voice, as the creator, is always present to a greater or lesser extent, because of the direct address to the reader, but our reading reappropriates that voice as our own. Our own experiences, thoughts, and feelings combine with Chen’s to create a new voice, thus creating the multiple readings she mentions in the Siegel interview. This would support Certeau’s view that “…one cannot maintain the division separating the readable text (a book, image, etc.) from the act of reading… the text has meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them,” and Iser’s contention that the reader creates the text anew each time it is read.

One must also consider the act of reading aloud. When Panorama is read aloud, it gains a certain extra force. The listener is hearing both the author’s voice and the reader’s voice creating a landscape of sounds to interpret. It takes the step from ideas to actual warning. The author and reader’s voices combine, and the words literally come off the page and into our reality.

Julie Chen exemplifies the ideas illustrated by Panorama and A Guide to Higher Learning most strongly in a piece from 2004. Personal Paradigms: A Game of Human Experience is a book in the form of a game. As Chen’s website describes it, “the object of the game focuses on the player's own life experience and perceptions at the moment that the game is being played.”35 The reader plays the game, and then records the results in a ledger book, each reader adding to the book as they 32 Julie Chen, email message to author, June 4, 2010 33 Barthes, Roland, “The Death of the Author,” in The Book History Reader ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. (London: Routledge 2006): 279 34 Siegel, 31 35 Chen, Julie, “Flying Fish Press: Personal Paradigms,” Flying Fish Press, http://www.flyingfishpress.com/gallery_paradigms.html (accessed June 2, 2010).


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play the game. In this way, the piece is literally written by each reader. The author’s role, then, in Personal Paradigms is not of creator, but that of a guide. Rather than providing a text for the reader to interpret, the author creates rules for the text and leaves the creation up to the reader. These are Iser’s “blanks” made explicitly manifest.

Looking at these three pieces it is apparent that reading Chen’s work is not passive consumption, but something more. The reader engages with the text, and by extension the author, and a new reading, a new voice, emerges each time. Every reading does indeed modify these objects. We “devise many elaborate strategies” to interpret the texts, and despite our slow progress, we “remain unwavering in [our] determination” to understand. Ultimately, though, we may “understand enough to know that [we] will never really understand anything at all.”36

36 Chen, A Guide to Higher Learning


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Works Cited

Ayers, Andrew. "Cornell, Joseph." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com /subscriber/article/opr/t118/e626 (accessed May 24, 2010). Barthes, Roland, “The Death of the Author,” in The Book History Reader ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. (London: Routledge 2006): 277-‐280 Certeau, Michel de. “Reading as Poaching.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, 165-‐176. Berkeley: University of California Press 1984. Chen, Julie, “Flying Fish Press: Personal Paradigms,” Flying Fish Press, http://www.flyingfishpress.com/gallery_paradigms.html (accessed June 2, 2010). Chen, Julie. A Guide to Higher Learning (Berkeley, CA: Flying Fish Press, 2009). Chen, Julie. Panorama (Berkeley: Flying Fish Press 2008).

Courtney, Cathy. Speaking of Book Arts: Interviews with British and American Book Artists (Los Altos Hills, CA: Anderson-‐Lovelace Publishers, 1999). Foucault, Michel, “What is an Author?” in The Book History Reader ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. (London: Routledge 2006), 282-‐291. Goodman, Richard, “Fine Presses: Flying Fish Press.” Fine Books & Collections, July/August 2005: 16-‐17 Iser, Wolfgang, “Interaction Between Text and Reader” in The Book History Reader ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. (London: Routledge 2006), 391-‐396. Lang, Robert J. “What’s New.” Robert J. Lang Origami. http://www.langorigami.com/art/compositions/compositions.php4 (accessed May 30, 2010). Philip Cooper. "Cornell, Joseph." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T019548 (accessed May 24, 2010). Public Broadcasting Corporation, “Craft in America / Chen July,” Craft in America, http://www.craftinamerica.org/artists_paper/story_456.php? (accessed May 24, 2010). Seigel, Caroline L. “A Conversation with Book Artist Julie Chen at Her Studio, Berkeley, California, January 11, 2000,” Art Documentation, vol. 21 no. 1 (2002): 30-‐35.


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Stein, M. L.; Ulam, S.M.; Wells, M.B.. “A Visual Display of Some Properties of the Distribution of Primes.” The American Mathematical Monthly Vol. 71, No. 5 (May, 1964): 516-‐520.


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Appendix A A Guide to Higher Learning transcription

This is a test you will not be given any assistance or instructions on how to proceed you will not be told when to begin or when to stop you will be given a single question. At first glance the question will seem straightforward and easily comprehensible. This will give you a deep sense of confidence in your own abilities. Only in hindsight will you realize that you were seriously mistaken. You will remain unwavering in your determination to succeed no matter how long it takes. You will devise many elaborate strategies, although you secretly believe that you will be able to find the solution in record time. But despite your best efforts, your progress will be slow and uncertain. You will occasionally experience moments of great clarity which will be followed by intervals of confusion and doubt. As time passes, these episodes will become more frequent and intense. Until your resolution to continue begins to weaken. Eventually you will be forced to admit defeat. You will struggle to find an adequate explanation for your repeated failures. You will feel a continual need to justify your methods to yourself and others in order to avoid taking full responsibility for your perceived shortcomings. At this point that you will make a startling discovery: in your zeal to complete your task as swiftly as possible, you neglected to collect one vital piece of information without which it will be impossible to reach a solution. You will feel strangely calm at this unexpected turn of events. You will now be faced with a seemingly difficult choice: you can cut your losses, turning your back on all your fruitless efforts, and start again or you can simply walk away. Either way you will be no closer to a solution than you were when you began. You will contemplate your options with a new-‐found equanimity. You will realize that at some point in the process, finding the answer stopped being your main objective. You will now understand enough to know that you will never really understand anything at all. The evidence within the pattern (the pattern within the evidence) Reason evolves into chaos (chaos evolves into reason) The familiar subsumes the unknown (the unknown subsumes the familiar) Profound truth sustains heartbreaking beauty (heartbreaking beauty sustains profound truth)


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investigation formulation interpretation revelation in plexi cases at cardinal points

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probably but perhaps not Given

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Appendix B Panorama transcription:

A definition is printed on the page:

1. A picture representing a continuous scene, often exhibited one part at a time Folds out to: Image of the earth and its magnetic field, the earth has the text “You are here” with a line to a dot next to the text optimism, connected by another line to a dot with the text despair Fold ups reveal: In this room In this city On this planet You are here At this moment in time You are here You are in denial (supersedes “you are here” by covering it) You cannot bring yourself to see the magnitude of the situation You do not want to believe that time is running out Printed on a pop-‐up showing the layers of Earth’s atmosphere labeled with their name on the left and height on the right: The breathable atmosphere that surrounds the earth comes to an end roughly 6 miles above sea level. This may seem like a long distance until you imagine laying it out horizontally instead of vertically. Instead of visualizing the struggle to breathe at the top of Mount Everest, consider what it would be like to run out of air in the midst of your daily commute to work. What familiar landmark would you be passing by at the moment when you took your last obtainable breath? Folded up pages reveal several clocks A definition is printed on the page:

2. An unlimited view in all directions Dual image of the earth showing both polar ice caps with the text “No one imagined what terrible beauty lay beneath the surface” folds up to reveal: You live in a world with secret story Where everything is inextricably linked in ways that you may never fully understand Where all the evidence points to one conclusion That the situation is much worse than you had feared Everything you hold dear is poised to turn against you


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Your repeated failure to change your way of life Is having serious repercussions No action that you take from this day forward will be enough To reverse the process of destruction That has already been set in motion No one imagined what terrible beauty lay beneath the surface Until it was too late Folded up pages reveal the earth in pink and yellow labeled with the major ocean currents Pop-‐up of earth and rocks with holes surrounded by species slated for extinction with the text: If each species that is committed to extinction by the year 2050 corresponded to a single word listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, you would have to read through the entire list of entries nine times in a row in order to represent them all. If each word took one second to read, and you did nothing but read dictionary entries for 24 hours a day, with no breaks, it would take 23 days of non-‐stop reading before you were through. A definition is printed on the page:

3. A continuing series of unfolding events Image of the earth as a map with circles of red, green, and yellow and the text “Make a space for the things that are gone so they will not be forgotten” Pages fold up to reveal: Your habitat is in peril You are standing on the brink of an uncertain future As both willing contributor and unknowing heir To monumental changes that began long before you were born The invisible world is making itself known Through radical transformations that have taken place within your own lifetime Take a serious look at the truth about the world around you You are only one tiny part of a vast living web of interdependence You are only one of many in your emerging recognition That doing nothing has now become as powerful as taking action The planet will endure long after you are gone What matters now is whether you will think beyond your own survival And respond to the challenges that await you. Colophon:


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PANORAMA was written, illustrated, and designed by Julie Chen. It was letterpress printed from wood blocks and photopolymer plates by Julie Chen and Alan Hillesheim, and assembled in the studios of Flying Fish Press by Julie Chen, Erin Latimer, and Kimi Taira. Special thanks to Erin Latimer for her stalwart support in the studio through the year-‐long process of birthing this book. Of the 100 copies in the edition, this is number: 5 Signed by the artist Copyright 2008

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