THE ASSEMBLY

bringing this book to life from its component parts is something of a dance ... we're learning as we go! the pictures below show shaunté battling the desert sea breeze to make the first copies of her book. you can also see FIIK//BOOKS co-conspirators claudia and mary hope assembling the second batch of copies on an 88° early-march day.

THE EVOLUTION

the design for this book has been anything but straightforward. in dreaming up what we wanted to create with shaunté's instagram collages, we prioritized making a book that would provide an analog equivalent to the digital act of scrolling. this, it seemed, encouraged a time-bending collaboration between old-school book technology [scrolls] and our 21st century ways of engaging with text on a screen.

as a first attempt, we tried to create a "phone book" that would scroll vertically like a standard smart phone. below, you can see a picture of some of the rough draft templates for the design using scrap paper, chopsticks, and straws. the video shows one of the prototypes in action.

unfortunately, the "phone books" didn't turn out to work as smoothly as we had hoped. maybe one day ...

anyway, next we decided to shift the orientation to a horizontal scroll to mimic the way that screens change on an instagram story. this ended up leading to the final design which includes two scroll ends made from second-hand paper, and three, five-panel strips that are glued together and reinforced with artist tape on the back. when fully unfurled, the book, extends about three and a half feet. as a final touch, we repurposed an old vhs tape (thanks claudia!) to create scroll bands. this is a nod to one of shaunté's other artistic superpowers, which is film -- another screen-based medium that has a deep-rooted history in scroll mechanisms. here are some photos that show the iterative evolution of the design as well as a cartoonish portrait of our dissected vhs.