Katherine Hayles dedicates a chapter of Writing Machines to Tom Phillips’ original treated art book A Humument.
Humument began as A Human Document a forgotten novel that itself purports to be an edited version of the journals and scapbook of lovers. Phillips paints over the pages letting rivers of text flow through to produce a new material work of art and literature. Hayles uses Humument to bring forth the materiality of textuality – a materiality that helps us understand problems for electronic literature. There is always a technology of inscription, even when we forget it.
“The implication for studies of technology and literature is tha tthe materiality of inscription thoroughly interpenetrates the represented world. Even when technology does not appear as a theme, it is woven into the fictional world throught the processes that produce the literary work as a material artifact.” (Hayles p. 130)
Hayles’ book is similarly heavily designed. It is a collaboration with the designer Anne Burdick that is not always successful. I suspect the designer was constrained by the publisher into something too busy and too cute.
See the associated web site at: Mediawork Pamphlet Series. In particular see the Web Take by Eric Loyer. Some cool flash animation.
N. Katherine Hayles Writing Machines Cambridge, MA: Mediawork, MIT Press, 2002. http://mitpress.mit.edu/mediawork