Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? is a collection of 99 fragments, aphorisms, and typographic poems. By turns gnomic, rhetorically playful, lyric, and apocalyptic, these distilled and minimalist texts were painstakingly typeset and printed by hand with a Trodat 5253 Self-Inking Custom Stamp, a mechanism that accommodates three and four millimeter rubber type. The goal of Leong’s ascetic practice of “stenography” (literally meaning “narrow writing”) was to impress a surface, to put it “under an impression” (in the way one is “put under” hypnosis). The poems were then transmediated and transformed to create a visually striking blend of digital and analog textures. The color-coded pages of the book feature special buttons that allow for multiple pathways of reading: Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? is a hypertextual, hypermaterial experience.
Michael Leong is the author of e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY.
Preview
In a recent artist statement on Hyperrhiz, Michael Leong describes the process behind creating the print version and the virtual adaptation of his new Fence Digital book, Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? Check it out here!
This essay details the process of composing the electronic collection of poetry Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?, which was published by Fence Digital, a new imprint of Fence Books. By contextualizing my e-book with Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s ideas of immediacy and hypermediacy, I challenge the facile but enduring opposition between the sensuous materiality of print culture and the supposed dematerialization of digital culture.
—Michael Leong
