Sharing an interest in the operation of weaving with regard to textual materialism and material text, the authors follow the operation of folding, cutting and biding, the operations that constitute the making of a book. The work contains two main sections, one on folding and the other on cutting, with a concluding section on binding. The sections on folding and cutting dramatize two approaches to the entanglements of thought, reflection and aesthetic practice. In the first, precedence is given to a conceptual elaboration of the fold in parallel with the reservations of an art of the fold that resists formalisation. The philosophical concentration on a logic of form in relation to practice and questions of process is deconstructed. Whilst the first section traces a philosophical and scientific investment in pre-established design, the second ruins this through attending to the possibilities that arise through cutting, generic interplay and bricolage. The book unbinds as it works from the tightly woven to a loosening of its threads, where finally the book cannot contain the book.
Contributors: Vera Dieterich, Caroline Rooney