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In the 1890s and beyond, the American Sunday paper transformed the weekday edition into something new. Its inserts and supplements of all shapes and sizes asked people to do more than read, but to interact with the materiality of the paper itself. Subscriptions, which produced expert reading subjects, enhanced its economic success and shifted the paper’s temporality, linking week to week. The Sunday paper became so large and voluminous that it needed to be organized: managed and collected over time, and shared across an entire family. Collecting a variety of supplements and clipping coupons encouraged readers not to treat Sunday papers as disposable, but to see them instead as parts of cultural and consumer life that could gain value if saved. Lithographed art, photographs, sheet music, novels, fiction magazines, games, puzzles, sewing patterns, coloring books and a bewildering variety of paper toys all appealed to the leisure space of the home. Women readers found aesthetic appreciation; juvenile readers delighted in aesthetic play. Indeed, the material form of the Sunday Paper transformed the weekday edition so significantly that it begged the question of whether it even remained a newspaper at all.
Karine Bellerive
Ma présentation s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une recherche-création postdoctorale par laquelle j’explore ce que je conçois comme un enchevêtrement de vieillissements hétérogènes : les vieillissements de femmes aînées dont les parcours de vie sont liés à la production industrielle du papier ; les vieillissements d’une région géopolitique du Québec, la Mauricie ; les vieillissements de l’industrie papetière qui l’a façonnée depuis plus d’un siècle ; les vieillissements d’une ressource et d’un matériau/médium, le papier ; les vieillissements de techniques et de pratiques (techniques et pratiques de fabrication industrielle et artisanale du papier ; techniques et pratiques d’écriture). Je souhaite ainsi montrer comment la prise en compte de matérialités et immatérialités vieillissantes permet de porter un regard différent sur le vieillissement (Andrews & Duff 2019). En considérant le « vieillir-ensemble » (Katz 2009) d’humains et autres qu’humains, je participe à déconstruire les conceptions strictement biologiques et chronologiques propres au discours biomédical hégémonique (Cruikshank 2003).
Charmaine Cadeau
“Bookish” considers John Cage’s edible hand-laid papers, made in Western North Carolina from 1989 to 1991 with ingredients harvested from the local environment and foods common in his diet. The project, developed with Rugg Road cofounders Bernie Toale and Joe Zina, and North Carolina papermaker Beverly Plummer, sought to make macrobiotic paper so that poems could be edible and nutritionally sustaining. Cage’s project arises from his observations and concerns about waste: “Imagine a world in which there is equality between natural resources and human needs. Why not make nutritious papers printed with delicious inks? Then, instead of throwing things away, we could eat them. Imagine inviting your friends over to dinner to eat your junk mail! Aren’t these papers beautiful?” This paper explores how Cage’s work can foreground embodiment and interoception as central concepts about how we read, consume, and feel about poetry.
Christina Corfield
Working with Lisa Parks’ concept of “infrastructural disposition” in which Parks’ argues that artworks focused on infrastructural objects help viewers “imagin[e] and [infer] other infrastructural parts or resources,” I ask what cardboard, as an increasingly visible and particularly mobile and malleable form of infrastructure can help us imagine or infer? Looking at how artists, including myself, have used cardboard, I propose that we consider cardboard as a form of infrastructure, not simply for the circulation of goods by companies of all sizes, but also for imaginative and cultural activities that are fundamental for making sense of ourselves online and ourselves in the world. I also propose that interrogating this infrastructure through craft practices can be helpful, in that crafting with cardboard and transforming packaging into other forms need not simply redirect us from digital screens toward material environments but can help us to express and articulate our relationships to much more complex systems, architectures and ideologies of exchange.
Vinicius de Aguiar Sanchez
The history of animation, paper, and film have been intertwined. From the beginning to the end of production, paper continues to be a contemporary and attainable medium for artists’ visions. In this presentation will present my art practice in film and print-media, highlighting the importance of paper in the moving image. Throughout the talk, I will review print-works, collage, paper cut-outs and short films, and the significance of constructing visions through paper in contemporary art practices.
Tim Elfenbein
How does knowledge infrastructure come to the fore, especially after the initial blush of novelty and open sense of potential wears off? In this presentation, I describe one case: the changing protocols (technical specification, genre expectations, and institutional maintenance) of scholarly documentation as hyperlinks have come to embed themselves within research practices and documents. The forms and infrastructure of referencing—textual annotations listing and commenting on previous scholarship relevant to the current work—is undergoing a significant set of changes as digital research infrastructures become more established. Based on my observant participation as a production editor at a university press in the mid-2000s, I use the hyperlink as a way to rethink what it means to point from one document to another, what can or cannot be remediated between paper- and computer-based textual media, and the dilemmas of those of us who necessarily work in between.
Maureen Flint
Paper’s materiality extends beyond its physicality – twisting and spiralling in its use as a noun and verb. This remains particularly true in academic life, where paper both produces and is a product of the academic subject. We write papers, count their reads, attend to texts, cite articles, curate dossiers – all produced by and composed of paper and its logics. Paper, for the academic body, can be stifling, a strait jacket of pulp and page orienting one to consume and produce or perish. And yet. Paper also offers a means for resistance, its malleability and multivocality an avenue for possibility and connection outside the boundaries of systems of surveillance. This presentation will explore the potentiality of paper as an impasse, what Berlant (2013) defines as “a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic” (p. 4) and as a slowing down that “helps to clarify the relation of living on to ongoing crisis and loss” (p. 5). Compiling and curating the debris of academic life, the author will explore the logics of paper as both a governing device and a mode of resistance, connection, and possibility.
Céline Gendron
Since paper was not manufactured in Canada before 1803-1805, it had to be imported. My presentation covers the provenance, trade and use of paper in New France in the 17th century, including an explanation of commercial routes for the exportation / importation of paper from Europe to North America during that period. The paper used in New France came mainly from the two major paper-producing regions of 17th century France, namely the Angoumois and the Auvergne. We will see how paper from Angoumois and Auvergne followed different routes, both geographical (river and/or land) and commercial, to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
Pierre-Olivier Gaumond
Le conseil à la dramaturgie est une pratique artistique généralement passée sous silence lorsqu’on s’éloigne du monde des arts de la scène : fréquemment employé en danse et au théâtre, le rôle de dramaturg est particulièrement polymorphe : « Stéphane Lépine définit le dramaturge comme un “intellectuel au sein d’une production” [… ,] là pour répondre aux questions socio-historico-esthétiques, aider à situer une œuvre dans son contexte. Pour aider à l’établissement du texte, dans certains cas. » (Labrecque, 2019) Ce métier, largement inconnu, est naissant dans le contexte québécois : « alors qu’en Allemagne les Dramaturg détiennent une place indéniable dans l’écosystème théâtral, le métier en est encore à s’inventer au Québec : traditionnellement absent du processus de création d’une œuvre théâtrale, il s’exerce essentiellement sans référent. » (Devirieux et Craft, 2020)
Hugo P. Gladu
Once an important player in the development of American cities (Guarneri, 2017), newsprint isn’t as ubiquitous as it once was. Today, more and more daily and weekly newspapers are shutting off their presses for good. However, media companies, old and new, are returning to newsprint as a wide canvas on which to print exquisitely designed and unique pieces. Whereas newsprint was (and still could be) described as dirty, cheap, messy or impractical, a reinvigoration of the newspaper form is emerging. Established newspapers are printing special editions meant to be collected and are doubling down on paper quality, while some magazines are using newsprint as their main printed form, showing a renewed interest in the unique feeling this kind of paper can provide. With this talk, I aim to briefly look at why newsprint is making a comeback and how this reflects a yearning for a print media proclaimed dead many times over. Through the lens of “tactile aesthetics” (Gallace & Spence, 2011), I aim to understand how the unique materiality of newsprint provides something that both higher-end paper and digital media can’t provide. Using recent newsprint publications from The Globe and Mail, Monocle, and Direction of Travel, I want to show how media companies are getting back into the fold of newsprint and transforming it from a something disposable and temporary to something people intend to keep, something permanent.
Sheryl Hamilton
Wash your hands. Wear a mask. Get the shot. In our high-tech mediascape, a sheet of paper, with words and/or images, affixed to a flat surface in a high-flow location seems an unlikely vehicle for important health messaging. Yet, the poster persists as a favoured medium of public health communication. Scholars rarely reflect on posters, and when they do, their attention is on message. My work focuses, instead, on medium. We encounter COVID-19 posters in situ while moving through the circuits of everyday life and as paper artifacts, posters are simultaneously durable and fragile, cheap, not easy to break, yet vulnerable to the elements. Combining longitudinal photo-journalling and walking methods, I will: 1) map our quotidian, emplaced, and cyclical encounters with COVID-19 posters; and 2) track the artifactual lifecycles of select posters. This data will allow a more profound theorization of the relationship between paper, communication, and public health.
Ilinca Iurascu
The cardboard box as a medium of storage, transmission and processing at the intersection of 19th c histories of labor, global supply chains and data flows.
Alysse Kushinski
This short “excursion” takes the Paperology Symposium participants nearly 3000 miles from Montréal to Soledad Canyon, California. Join Alysse as she takes “paper” as a starting point for thinking about place. While wandering the path of the Santa Clara river and the Antelope Valley rail line, Alysse recounts the promise of paper made from yucca brevifolia (Joshua tree) and how the question of “can it be made into paper?” was common to colonial placemaking. In looking for the site of a short-lived paper mill near the no-longer standing Ravena Rail Station, Alysse reflects on the differences of place from her time exploring paper mill sites in the Berkshires to now being “stuck” in Southern California (a paper-desert of sorts).
Deidre Lynch
A significant though now forgotten group of eighteenth-century English narrative fictions take non-human agents as their protagonists and narrators. My paper is in part about a subset of these, fictions that imagine situations in which paper is no longer simply the platform on which reading matter is recorded but in which it is instead the subject about which one reads. In these novels, it-narratives, as scholars of the novel call them, paper is no longer content to serve as the medium for human discourse. Become a memoirist, paper instead sets to discoursing on its own behalf and discoursing in particular about its past as cloth and clothing. While they reveal the material underpinnings of the metaphoric connection between text and textile, those memoirs of the lives and metamorphoses of cloth and paper also complicate the divisions between mental and manual labour–and between a singular mind and plural hands–that the very idea of literary art can often seem to assume.
Catriona Macleod
Romanticism as a movement has a long history of opposition to materialism, a history to which my talk will serve as something of a corrective. Putting deceptively small paper things back into Romanticism studies also extends our critical reach into visual artifacts not traditionally considered either by literary critics or by art historians – ephemeral miniatures that counter Romanticism’s preoccupation with the vast, sublime, and monumental. The early Romantic fragment, as practiced by the Schlegel brothers or Novalis does not usually fall under the category of material object — though of course fragments do take material form in the pages of the Athenäum , the programmatic journal of the movement, and elsewhere. Friedrich Schlegel had commented on its creation as a material process of cutting and excerpting, particularly pointing to the letters of Caroline Schlegel, which he sourced for the journal. In the longest fragment (#336) to appear in the Athenäum , we find what amounts to a portrait of Friedrich Schlegel as paper-cutter, genially dispensing self-portraits in diverse attitudes: “A man who can be the life of a party with his way of offhandedly cutting out little silhouettes of himself in various poses and handing them around . . . that is an open person.” Two key points will emerge from this charming portrait of the scissoring Schlegel: papercutting as a virtuoso, improvisational, and sociable performance; and the analogy between the paper fragment itself and a non-linear alternative to writing.
Will Mari
Building on work for my books for Routledge’s “Disruptions” series (and other projects) on the computerization and internetization of the newsroom space, this project looks at the survival of paper as part of the long analog-to-digital transition occurring in this era, from the 1960s through the 2010s. A primary focus will be in on the use of manuals, textbooks and paper notes. The author will also discuss why paper remains seemingly essential in “digital-first” newsrooms, and what might be next for the role of paper in journalism.
Jenifer Monger
This presentation focuses on my journey in extra-illustrating a journal I created two decades ago. Extra-illustration, now seemingly long forgotten, derives from 18th and 19th century England and consisted of cutting up books to make a new book! The journal I held onto for two decades was based on a trip to Italy in 2001, and recently revealed more than I bargained for! Flipping through the pages, it triggered memories and revealed secrets I never shared with anyone: words meant to poke and jab other people, postcards that reminded me of unsettling moments, and artworks that revealed forgotten traumas. I ripped the binding off this journal, freeing the pages from their bondage! The mania, guilt, joy and relief of both cutting up my journal and then hunting for, analyzing and incessantly wrangling countless paper objects to make a new hefty tome is a process and a feat of engineering I seek to share in a way that is enlightening.
Sabina Rak
Cardboard, is there anything it can’t do? It is strong and light, textured or flat, fun yet stern, but never self-aware. It serves, but it also deserves better. There is a lot to unpack here: the packing, the package, the packer, the fillers, the meaning beyond the box. The world has been pre-packaged for your convenience, and its products are on their way. It is full of both value-in-transit and of post-consumer value, like matter and anti-matter filling up our world. I feel the urge to pick it all up: small and big boxes, insulated panels, Styrofoam shapes, zip ties, industrial staples, bottle divisions, tape. And pull that discarded chaos back together, make it cover me, protect me from being consumed, and re-shape it. But what shape matters? Part of my practice has been to inquire what I could possibly do with a cardboard container; and is my time invested in the work worth it? My hypothesis is that the universal state of all matter is absurd (with no intrinsic value system): the goods shipped in those cardboard boxes that I have accumulated as much as the cardboard itself. To prove my hypothesis, and also as an exercise in rehabilitating the value of absurd in art making, I attempt to play with the conventions of these values. And play I shall, for the only greater value than playing with words, for a visual artist, is playing with matter.
Joseph Rosenberg
Building on the argument of my first book, Wastepaper Modernism: Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print, my contribution to the “Paperology” symposium will trace the image of the weaponized blank page in modern literature. In a range of works from Samuel Beckett to Elizabeth Bowen to the poet W.S. Graham, the blank page is imagined not just as a site of potential written violence, but as an object of material violence that has the potential, in Graham’s words, to become a “suicide torpedo” that destroys the writer’s fantasy of linguistic mastery.
Rebecca Rouse
In this talk, I will share my interdisciplinary perspective on theatre, game design, and education with paper-based movable books and toys as creative platform. Movable books and paper toys are discussed as important historical precedents to contemporary digital interactive forms, such as digital games, and as a performative companion to theatrical practices. To illustrate these intersections, I will share recent examples from my own research in practice, including a movable book made in collaboration with a classroom of twenty 3-5 year old children, an augmented reality movable book that presents a feminist re-imagining of the classic John Cheever short story The Swimmer, and a set of paper toys that help design students in higher education critically materialise feminist philosophy and theory as it relates to design praxis. Throughout each example the affordances of paper are discussed and examined for the ways in which materiality contributes to meaning making.
Michael Stamm
This presentation is about how chemists, farmers, and policymakers developed a way of making paper out of corn stalks in the US Midwest in the 1920s. This was meant to both alleviate US dependence on Canadian wood-based paper and give Midwestern farmers a new outlet for their crops. By the mid-1920s, the technology was in place and successful demonstration printings done of books and newspapers. Though the concept was proven, the project failed for reasons of economy: the Canadian paper was cheaper.
Sophie Valiergue
À travers cette présentation, je vais m’intéresser au papier cadeau. Celui-ci est très peu présent dans la littérature scientifique comme objet central d’étude. Son usage est aujourd’hui quasi incontournable dans le rite du don occidental (Hendry, 1993). En effet, il participe à l’expérience du don de présents à la fois pour celui qui offre et pour celui qui reçoit (Clarke, 2007). Je vais ici plus particulièrement interroger la façon dont le papier cadeau intervient sensoriellement et émotionnellement auprès des personnes qui interagissent avec lui. Pour cela, mon approche mobilisera l’ethnographie sensorielle, une méthodologie critique. Cette approche réflexive et expérientielle permet de faire émerger la compréhension, la connaissance académique et appliquée d’un phénomène (Pink, 2015). Je commencerai ma présentation par une brève histoire du papier cadeau. Puis, mon propos sera divisé en trois parties que je performerai : l’emballage d’un paquet, son don et sa réception par un membre de l’auditoire.
Celina Van Dembroucke
This piece looks at how the materiality of the paper, and particularly print paper, provides an aesthetic opportunity that accounts for memory practices that seek to convey dynamic movement rather than static fixity. Memory practices, particularly those at the social level and carried out by the government, have always been associated with the notion of monument, which in turn has been related to the stone or marble. This hard element located in various public places is—in Germany, Chile, France, Algeria or right here in Canada—designed to combat oblivion. More than a decade ago, artists and social actors saw the contradiction of conveying memories through immutable surfaces and questioned the stone as the go-to material for the creation of markers of memory that, once installed, become invisible and devoid of content regardless of their size. In contrast, print paper, fragile but tactile at the same time, defies that stagnancy incapable of changing so characteristic of the stone. As an example, I will show how paper was (and still is) central in Argentina’s singular mnemonic practice to remember the ‘disappeared’, those who were kidnapped and killed clandestinely by the military in the 1970s.
Georgina Wilson
Where does writing matter come from, and where does it go? ‘The Adventures of a Quire of Paper’, published in 1779, follows the tale of a thistle that is transformed into flax and woven into linen before being transformed into sheets of paper. I’ll explore what this anonymous satirical story can tell us about the life of paper – both in reality, and in the literary imagination. ‘The Adventures of a Quire of Paper’ makes clear that texts are objects, which both remember their past and are always on the cusp of becoming new things. Plant matter is reused as writing surfaces which are later recycled as new, non-textual forms. ‘The Adventures of a Quire of Paper’ simultaneously lifts tropes and ideas from other authors, giving fragments of textual matter a longer lease of life. Paper makes possible the reuse of both literary and physical forms, whose longer life explodes the bounds of books, and of texts, in surprising and curious ways.
