I have seen recently a demo of the British Library ‘Turning Pages’ system for displaying books. Go to their web site and take a look here. There seems to be this trend for making the sense of turning the page of an electronic book as realistic as possible and I thought I would take a look round and review the scene.
My art school teacher and friend, Robert Janz, once complained of a museum where he had seen a Chinese scroll painting mounted in a glass cabinet. Only one small section of the landscape narrative was ever visible to the viewers and the kinetic experience was lost. I was reminded of this when I started to think about the way we scroll our web browsers to see the content ‘below the fold’ of our computer screens and digital handhelds. It seems that we are happy to have the choice to scroll a lot but we don’t want to be forced scroll a little bit! Has the Ancient Chinese way of presenting narrative through the scrolling painting resurfaced in a new digital paradigm?
Between 1975 and 1989 I formed a collection of photographs of megalithic sites around the British Isles. For several summers I travelled the British Isles taking black and white and colour photographs. The original idea was to follow the list from ‘Megalithic Sites’, Alexander Thom, OUP, 1967. Many of the photographs have been published over the years, but how I wish the Internet existed in those days. Well, in fact, I wish desktop / laptop computers were available then. I spent hours in the darkroom (I can smell the chemicals now) crafting beautiful black and white photographic prints, many were exhibited.