Giant Underwater Books

I literally drew this on the table cloth tonight as I was trying to come up with some kind of experimental book that was, for a change, not related to computer technology or free, open source software.

It is a giant underwater ribbon of recycled garbage arranged to be read by divers over many years using flashlights that project three dimensionally on the surrounding particles suspended in the water (BS&W is the technical term from petroleum engineering, not sure what the oceanographic term is even though I had an oceanography course in college). You can read what is woven and otherwise inscribed onto the fabric of the huge text itself, or view the image shimmering around you.

• This book is like a Moebius strip or a continuous sheet like the old cloth towels wound like typewriter ribbon you used to find in restrooms to dry your hands. Floating, suspended in the water both sides are legible.Out of habit I divided it into a sequence of pages, like large computer display screens or an infinite Escher-like Turing Machine tape. Consider the clustering concept that Michael Heim describes in Electric Language: a four foot by five foot paper sheet that is beyond the scale of any imaginable computer display in the 1980s - the 'pages' of this book are larger still. That is why one of the divers exclaims, It's going to take me 10 years to read this!

• Reading tied to swimming underwater instead of playing dead on dry land. At first it seems very unnatural, but once staying still to read seemed odd. DL quote, noting that in BofB no non-sedentary reading methods are described. Doesn't Ulmer play on this idea with his Dreadmill?
  

• Blocks out sound and other visual distractions. The aural effect of submersion reflects on Ong's distinction between the all aboutness of sound for speaking versus the singular locus of vision for reading.

• Just as the Kindle is being promoted as a 'green' environmentally sound reading device, this huge underwater ribbon will be woven from garbage floating in the oceans today, by robots or specially trained sea creatures. Over many decades as the books are slowly 'written', trash will turn into treasure. It is the reversal of the destruction of nature by the side effects of literacy, if you are like Ong and credit the rise of modern science and industry to literacy and print. Crap, technology creeps in..