“Bookmaking for the Future” by Taj Williams
an influence piece more than a tutorial
With this project, I desired to show people that bookmaking can be easy and fun, and to teach the importance of making books by demonstrating the process via audio/video and the world wide web. This day and age, bookmaking has been made all but obsolete due to digital technologies and electronic literature. I’d like to find out how effective a video demonstration, such as my "Bookmaking for the Future," can be for learning skills specific to analog materials. I’m also interested in how my demo will be perceived by different groups based on age, gender, race, class and other demographics. To collect this information, I chose a style of book which I have much experience with, filming the entire construction process from start to finish, cover to cover. I then edited this footage to accompany an instrumental track of my own composition. My hope is to aid the viewer’s learning curve by adding music to the demo. Through this I became aware that digital technologies very well support analog, creative, hands-on learning, a fact which I was a little surprised to learn. With my new knowledge I plan to further seek new methods of creating digital tutorials and demos with the aim of teaching hands-on crafts to a variety of people, gifting future generations of artists with knowledge that is accessible via the internet.
