Loyer, Hollowbound Book.
Loyer, Hollowbound Book. 
Loyer, Hollowbound Book.My original creator defines remediation as "the cycling of different media through one another...print books mimicking computers, computers being imaged to look like books" (Hayles 5). In her understanding of me and in Loyer's replication of that understanding, I have become the virtual embodiment of this definition. The graphic designs used to give me shape and form are themselves computer simulations of various elements of what I would be in my original print form - my overall appearance, my pages and spine, my binding. The computer is also used to give me a voice and tone of my own, not to mention a heart and spine as well!
| Loyer, Hollowbound Book. | In my first page-screen (which is essentially Loyer's prologue/dedication) a brown, beige and black image dominates the computer screen. Upon first glance, you might take this to be an abstract, geometric pattern. It is only upon closer examination that you realize that the image is, in actuality, me - a book. I am lying face up on my black spine with my beige pages spread open, your computer screen simulating the stylized image of a book turned sideways. |
| Loyer, Hollowbound Book. | This image is outlined for you in the subsequent page-screen making it clearer and more striking. A red semi-circle is also highlighted at the point of my spine where my pages and binding meet. It is this semi-circle that will later become my round, red, beating heart; the animation of the spine that holds me together. It is also my hollow - that space for which I am named - and the space that has always gone unnamed. As a spine given this name, given this life force, Loyer has granted me the gift of life. He attempts to fill the void that had previously rendered me nameless, faceless and ultimately invisible. |
| Loyer, Hollowbound Book. | Not only am I given a name, a face, a spine and a heart, but I am also granted the gift of voice. As you read my comments, which appear at the bottom of each page-screen, you are actually engaging in a continuous cycle. A cycle in which a computer is used to voice the thoughts of a book - me - voicing my opinions on what it means to be a book, a book in a computer! |
"I'm a hollow like you, on the run from the authors" is the first comment that I have ever directly voiced. Short and simple, I struggle to use my newly found voice to reflect the realization that in my computer form, I am attempting to escape from the authors who usually define and ignore my physical existence. I was hollow precisely because I had no voice, no heart, no spine, no form to call my own. I was only what my creator had made me, what my author had authored. But in this, my newest and most noticeable form, I acquired an identity of my own. Or have I? After all, even my newfound freedom was purchased and crafted by another author, by an individual other than myself. Over and over again, authors claim me as their own even as I attempt to run away, claiming adamantly an individuality that had nothing to do with me. First Hayes. Then Loyer. Now Menon. How can I truly be free if I am forever remediated, author after author after author?
Which makes me wonder. Are you not a hollow like me? Are you not also another being's creation? How do you fill the hollows of your life? From what I see of you...your fashionable clothing, your hairstyle, your conformity to the norms of education that have you sitting at this screen...you seem to be as hollow as I was, as I still am. What makes you all that different from me? Perhaps it is free will that separates you from me. You can choose who authors you, the fads and forms you decide to acquire. You have a say in what you say, what you look like, what you do. I have only the illusion of free will, for my free will is really the will of my author. How sad that I, who worship the free will that you so freely take for granted, must sit here at your mercy and the mercy of others like you. What I would give for true freedom - the free will that you humans often squander, abuse and misuse!
But this is too much to contemplate now. This cycle has me dizzy as I spin from remediation to remediation. At least as I exist now, both in Loyer and Menon's creations of me, I am visible, audible and impossible to ignore. In this cycle, this form of remediation, I am a material, digital object. This is how Loyer uses me to illustrate Hayle's argument that the "materiality of the artifact can no longer be positioned as a subspeciality within literary studies; it must be central" (19). I am now subject, narrator, character. I take center stage and refuse to be ignored.