Speciation

This is part of Border Town Online, a digital complement to the Border Town Design Studio which will be on display in Detroit starting on September 21st. You can find the rest of the posts at dividedcities.com

Speciation: A Diagram Book is a one-of-a-kind, handmade book, utilizing a unique, 4-part overlapping pagination scheme to “animate” the processes of speciation theory, from a topological perspective.

The book measures 21 inches by 8.5 inches closed, is printed on 110 lbs index stock, and because it is printed in full color, the costs made wider publication prohibitive. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t see it. I’ve uploaded a “collated” version of the diagrams, which should show the animated motion in the same way as the flipping pages, but on full-size 21″ x 17″ pages, as if the book was open in front of you.

Making this project was not only a work about speciation, and the geographic and non-geographic borders that affect the evolution of species, but a work of publishing and art that involved borders. I’ve long thought that the art of editing for book publishing and fitting text into paginated work is a unique geometry in itself. Layout and design principles have universals across mediums, but working in print means that one is constrained to the topology of the printed page. One of my mentors in print told me that a piece of paper has six sides: not only the front and back, but the header, the footer, and both margins. I would say that a printed text also has that many borders, multiplied by the number of pages. Between the bottom of one page and the top of the next is an un-reconcilable border, and between each page and the one that came before it is an inverted worldview, flipped over to extend and continue, but also to end that which came before. Turning a page is an act of ending, an act of beginning, and a reversal, a dialectic motion of inverting negative into positive, and vice versa. It is little known outside of print design that the right-hand page of a work is called the “recto”, and the left-hand page is called the “verso” (at least in left-to-right reading cultures). In this book I’ve made, the recto and the verso interact, even as they flip vertically. They overlap, to create a border space in between. And in this border, the text and the diagrams live, mutating as the borders are flipped and reversed, and thereby transmitting their meaning, not unlike the lives of the species they are meant to represent.

The information I’ve used in this project is sourced from Wikipedia, and therefore, I’ve given it a Creative Commons license (attribution, non-commercial, share-alike). I’m including, in addition to the online-view PDF of the book, the original source-PDF, with the pagination laid out as it ought to be printed. If you like, you are welcome to print and bind your own copy, so you can see the animated action occur, and interact with the pages as it was designed to be done.

Speciation: a Diagram Book – Online PDF

Speciation: a Diagram Book – Original Pagination, Print PDF

Speciation: a Diagram Book – Cover Image PDF