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This spring saw the publication of two new books from the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. A third will appear this fall with a limited edition print publication appearing of the course of the summer: Micah Bloom’s Codex. For more on that project, go here.
Below is my first draft of the preface for the book and a sneak preview of the contents:
Archaeologists study formation processes. These are the various natural and cultural processes that transform human activity into archaeological sites. To make meaning from the physical traces of the past, archaeologists disentangle the various events that create what we see in the present. The result of this work is both an appreciation for the complexity of time and experiences as well as an emphasis on objects and contexts that co-produce meaning.
Micah Bloom’s Codex, here expanded with a series of new essays, is about formation processes.The surging waters of the 2011 Souris River flood left the city of Minot coated in mud and strewn with debris and Bethany Andreasen’s contribution to this book provides a sweeping overview of those events. Micah Bloom’s camera, however, focused on the books that the river deposited across the landscape. Robert Kibler the work of the flood and Bloom’s work has produced hybrid that embodies both natural and human transformations. As Ryan Stander shows, each photograph echoes both the book-littered landscape of the post-flood Souris and the myriad photographic images that have gone before.
I became familiar with Blooks’s project during its installation at the North Dakota Museum of Art in May of 2015. Laurel Reuter’s essay provides a perspective on that event from her position as director of the museum. The exhibit combined his photographs with various approaches to dealing with the damaged and waterlogged books. Some approaches were archaeological and featured careful indexing, systematic photograph, and scientific precisions. Others approaches embraced a religious cast manifest in a neatly-arranged book cemetery commemorating each volume lost. As Brian Prugh’s essay notes, books are special objects.
In many ways, formation processes also produce books. Thora Brylowe reminds us that books themselves emerge from natural processes mediated by human intentions. Sheila Liming’s essay reveals that books are always in the process of decomposition as both the physical objects and the ephemeral containers of ideas. Bloom’s lens presents the blurred words and water soaked pages and encourages us to recognize that the intent of the book is, as Justin Sorensen notes, part of what gives it meaning. Books are to be read, but even when they’re not readable, they still speak to us as artifacts. The meaning of the books in Bloom’s photographs compels us to take their materiality seriously and to recognize, using David Haeselin’s term, that they are constructed.
This book too was constructed in a very particular way. The contributors hail from around the U.S. and, as this brief introduction has shown, bring a range of perspectives from the fields of history, literature, art history, and criticism to Bloom’s work. These essays were copy edited by the students in David Haeselin’s writing, editing, and publishing course at the University of North Dakota. Micah Bloom supervised the design of the book with the help of Marissa Dyke at Minot State University. The book is published by Bill Caraher’s project, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota with funding from both UND and Minot State University.
