The Book that Exploded

The Book that Exploded investigates the relationship between communication and code, between message and contamination.

William Burroughs, with the concept elaborated in the book The Ticket That Exploded, lays the groundwork for a critical and lateral thinking towards reading and in general in the way of sharing information. The theory of language as a virus—the starting point of the project— turns into methodology itself, becoming the approach which accompany all work phases, from the planning and structuring of the book in question, to the management of alterations carried out through specific physical processes. The performative act rooted in the project calls into question the principles of sequencing, of organization and of serialization of contents — and therefore of information itself—that is contaminated, dismembered and rearranged in a new random order. Just like in Burroughs Cut-ups, where informations are reassembled through a random principle, in the poisoning action of the book, fortuity becomes the keystone of the research. A randomness that allows a recodification of the elements which constitute an idiom. The editorial product, designed through a precise and vertical code as a timeless and unfiltered dissemination object, is, therefore, distorted and looted of its main function, that of communicating in a clarifying and objective manner. The physical process itself, flowing into the various actions of contamination, leads the code of language to transform and weaken, or to veil and strengthen, and so on. Without specific positions or conceptual rhetoric, The book that exploded presents itself as an subject of reflection, emphasizing the fragility of the written form and its rules, examining the possibilities of deconstruction and recontextualization of the messages that each written text carries, highlighting the consequences generated by external processes in relation with the original and linear communication.

Made at ISIA Urbino, MA Communication and Design for Publishing, Academic Year 2017/2018. Concept and design: Fabio Bacchini, Gianluca Ciancaglini, Giacomo Dal Prà, Alessandro Latela, Luca Longobardi.