DisAttachment Anxiety: an exercise in unwitting book design and compelled collaboration
In this exercise, students followed a series of disrupted steps for making an art book with artistic designs using ink and a variety of common and found tools. The purpose of the exercise was to introduce students to the convoluted folds inherent to folio production, while breaking down proprietary inhibitions to collaborative creativity. In a sequence of distinct stages, participants created designs, folded paper from a broadsheet down to a folio, and printed a single word emblematic of the effort. Their activities, however, were punctuated by unanticipated constraints, such as working with non-dominant hand, or from under the table, and the occasional instruction to abandon their own page and pass it along to a neighbor to continue work.