Wot is a book?

Sarah Wong, Control, 2018
My post digital bookwork is a response to the change in behaviour in our daily lives
as a result of technology’s rapid advancement. I usually work with traditional,
illustrative mediums and this bookwork was an exciting opportunity to challenge
what I’m comfortable with in creating illustrations through digital collage (and a lot of
prototyping). Although our ability to communicate and access information in an
instantaneous manner is an incredible aspect of our lives, it is also the cause of an
impatient, restlessness due to our reliance and habit of the easy control which we
digitally possess. Our quick agitation towards situations that cannot be solved
instantaneously is a characteristic which is uniquely common to people of this post
digital era and my book presents different, real life scenarios which keyboard
shortcuts may be applied to, to illustrate this.
We treat small inconveniences with frustration similar to that of a child’s and almost
crave the ability to use a digital function to fix a problem. I wanted my book to echo
this experience of a child’s impatience through its format of a pop-up book, drawing
attention to its exclusiveness to the people of this era by using images, visuals and
colours which are clearly from the past. The title of my book “Control” refers not only
to the immediate command we are restlessly quick-tempered for, but also to the
CTRL key on our keyboards. This cycle of quick agitation in troublesome but minor
situations is what I wanted to portray through the wheel pop-out at the top corner of
my book, with its constant presence on every page mirroring how the effects of the
post digital era are also a constant presence in our daily lives.