REBECCA TARG:

FOLD:THE READER is a book of written and visual work that I design and edit. I invite people whose work I know from across disciplines to participate and then I file, arrange, design, distribute. I’m not the first or last person to engage in this type of effort. Many magazines and journals bring diverse work together under an umbrella topic as I have (the first issue is called lying, the newest is called sacrifice). This American Life is a wonderful aural model of this grouping of information with the inherent request of the viewer/listener to develop their own engagements with the topic and to build their own (phenomenological) experience of it. I love this project because it brings me closer to people I miss and who are fascinating to me, but also because a large part of what happens is beyond my control.

In a collaboration, there must be a release of the authorial grip, but, dialectically, there must be the push of ego, the rise of purpose and intent. Multiple parties proffer their ideas before any of them are fully formed, the ideas meet and interact, changes occur symbiotically and a final product is formed wherein the individual contributions are dissolved into the whole.

Of primary (and cross-disciplinary) concern is how to engage people in a way that allows their own authorship in the engagement, how to engage people from across social, economic and educational (constructed) bounding lines, and certainly the concern of some kind of ending note: a goal or product or thing, such that the engagement is allowed to continue.

I believe that we need to know that experimentation is allowed, is progressive, is the essence of engagement. Where does that get us? We have now multiple parties who collaborate toward a goal. We have the context of art-making, or meaning-making. We have the discrete and arguably immutable form of the book (a binding, pages that turn, some printed or affixed image and/or text).

I answer this question–where does that get us–by interleaving a few statements I wrote for my graphic design history students into this essay. I wanted to give them some thought of my own, some impassioned declaration that would activate them and bring sense to the study of design.

I wrote:
As a result of studying design history, out of any book or in any course or by reading whatever magazine, we also activate the world our work falls into. We are no longer passive or working inside a bubble. It is inherent in the interaction with history that we place ourselves into it and because of that we catalyze change.

Energy begets energy.

My reason for starting this journal of written and visual work was initially to bring together the work of people from diverse backgrounds and educations. People living all over the world who I know and want to draw closer to me. I knew I could rely on the quality of their work, and I also knew that the wide variety of work would force any reader into an active role. The title of the book acts as an umbrella and the disjunct between different works inside makes the difference from work to work visible; an armature rises out of it instead of the directed content but muffled structure of a traditional book.

Disjunct meeting formal structure forces ACTIVITY.

THE WORLD IS ACTIVATED