Spill your Tea

This book was unassuming on the shelf, which was intriguing to us as “Books Arts” are meant to be a different interpretation of “the book.” We selected it off the shelf to take a look, simply because it was the mundane in a sea of peacocks. Wei commented that outfit of the book reminded him of a normal novel. But upon opening the book, the first image he saw was 2 sentences printed on old-style paper. Wei was caught off guard by the design of the outside versus the inside of the book. Ashley felt that it initially caught her attention because the cover was very interesting like one was staring at a picture with light leaks and blurred light, which connected very nicely with the title of the book: Chasers of the Light. Rachel agreed with both points, relating it to the idea of finding a local indie band: they have sound, but niche aesthetics. This was echoed by Kevin who commented that when he first heard the name of the book and saw pictures on google drive, he knew it should be a fancy book.

Chasers of Light focuses on Tyler Knott Gregson’s identity as a photographer, through the use of images, but primarily speaks to human experiences such as nostalgia, courage, and love. Ashley described liking the mix between the “antique” looking the poems from the typewriter on aged yellow paper versus the poems that looked more modern and with words typed from a computer font. She thought that it gave the book a nice juxtaposition as the poems were very simple to read but had a lot of meaning within them. Kevin and Wei felt like they could feel the authors strong emotion in the poems due to the author’s use of photographs to set off the content of the poem. They felt that it was a good way for the audience to understand what the author wanted to express, especially readers whose English is not their first language. Rachel pointed out that since many of the poems were about love and life, having the poems have a beautiful picture such as thunder, old homes, and old paper added to the overall feeling of missing the past, whether it be love or past experiences. Furthermore, the design of the book is soft feeling, meaning there is not a rigid structure which allows all visual aspects of the book to come alive. Gregson deploys the use of the “blackout” method, which creates a new understanding of a piece by blacking out words that do not relate to what wishes to focus on, as well as using a typewriter to physically type new context into found pieces. He specifically uses a typewriter as it allows him to create poetry in a free flow form; there is no way to edit his piece via typewriter after.

In terms of digital components that could be added to enhance the experience of the book, we felt that we need to know more about the author first, as the aesthetic of the book leads us to believe that he was familiar with things such as tumblr and instagram. Ashley found that while Gregson’s first publication was in September 2014, since 2009 he has had a following on social media with Instagram, with over 300,000 followers, as well as Tumblr and Twitter. Pretty impressive for a poet, author, and photographer from Helena, Montana. With this in mind, we knew that we need to push the digital component further. Kevin felt that sometimes when people read poems they cannot easily understand what author want to insinuate. He felt that if we created a website with videos of the author reading the poems, or videos that provide more imagery with voices overs, we could help audiences hear the inflection that the authors uses, assisting in building an emotional connection between the author and audience. Ashley liked the idea of a website as well, saying that it would be interesting to see the poems divided into different freeform sections, allowing the audience choose where they want to go in the book, a different experience compared to flipping through the physical book in order in which it was bound. She felt that giving the reader the option to choose how to read the story would make the story more universal. Rachel took all of these ideas, and thought about a couple different types of web experiences, such as Switching it to a partially analogue experience, where one experiences Gregson’s photography digitally, but the poems are physical copies of each word individually, (think word magnets) that you rearrange, creating new, personal meaning from his words. Overall, we found that thinking about the digital aspect that this book could have was inspiring, and are ready to start our project!