This book explores embodiment of ideas, embodiment of text as language and print matter, and theories about embodiment, using the body as the representational surface in pictures for characters in an alphabet book. Recent avant-garde experiments in mixed-media book design reconfigure text and image. Tom Phillip’s Humument (1997), Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968) by William Gass, Bonnie Gordon’s Anatomy of Proteus (1982) Cecelia Vicuna’s Cloud Net (2001) and Aimé Césaire’s The Lost Body (1950), illustrated by Pablo Picasso demonstrate new embodiments of text.

This work has several influences including Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, a brief tour of a poetics and literature. The premise of alphabets as a primitive concept, provides a historical context to understand literature and current literary theory. In the aftermath of modernism and the 1960’s new-wavism, current discourse pursued questions of embodiment. Other influences include Johanna Drucker’s research on typography and alphabets, and George Bornstein’s and Theresa Tinkle’s work on the editorial critique of text rendition as the textual body. Nicole Brossard’s sensual approach to literary essay provides another perspective. New theorist of digital media such as Lev Manovich, posit a new language of digital discourse, and others, such as James O’Donnell propose that new media is derived from prior modes of discourse.

Why an alphabet? Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934) Leo Stein’s The ABC of Aesthetics (1927) serve as loose departure points for this work. Like Pound’s short tour of western culture’s essential literary history, this alphabet is a tour of images from western culture’s tradition of figurative art. Stein’s theory of "pictorial seeing" anticipates the study of cognition in relation to knowledge. Alphabets as the primary element of a language are encoded metaphor systems. The alphabet book format is generally mixed media and offers freedom to experiment. Carl Steadman’s Kid A in Alphabetic Land - Lacan Trading Cards, a comic-book introduction to Lacanian psychology is an example.

Futurist Fillippo Marinetti’s experiments in typography and orthography called for a revolution in visual, literary and graphic expression in his "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature"(1912-1914) and "Words in Liberty" (1919). The Futurists principles of speed, sensation and action would transform syntax using only infinitive verbs and nominative nouns, replacing adjectives with analogies and discarding punctuation for mathematical operators. The futurist’s aesthetics sought to streamline language and print for a more immediate signification of meaning in reading and perception.

Marinetti’s "Manifesto of the Surprise Alphabet" (1916) pursued the ideas of analogy, metaphor and animism in a hand scripted alphabet. Dunes (1914) and Zang Thumb Tuuum (1914) represented syntactical and typographic transformations emphasizing the aural and onomatopoetic component of language on the written page. Futurists aesthetics of speed and immediacy are evident in the postmodern interest in hyper-text and hyper-sensation and A New Alphabet acknowledges Marinetti’s influence on current modes of text rendition.

This work explores ideas of text and body, figuratively and literally. Alphabets are the script of language and an analogy between bones and letters is suggested. Text and alphabets are written as pictorial and figurative objects to explore an interaction with theories of embodiment. Paintings and photographs of the body from the fine-art western tradition were selected as the basic visual layer.

Walter Benjamin in 1935, considered the burgeoning accumulation of artifacts of mass culture in his statement: "The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior towards works of art issues in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality" ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," XV). In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the internet has become a reservoir for digitized images of art, although efforts to restrict usage and to sell viewing rights are underway. Several repositories are now available for limited, shared public use.

Fine Art images were chosen for their meaningful visual value. Many of these images are well known visual icons, as Leo Stein stated in 1927 "The world of art becomes a reinforcement of the easy-chair. It is then essentially as important as the easy-chair." (ABC of Aesthetics, 154). Much as Pound promoted the idea that one must know certain literary works, this book fosters knowledge of art, but not as Pound argues for an essential knowledge of a literary or artistic cannon, rather from Stein’s viewpoint for "fine art as social convention" (260). Fine art images were placed for potential allusive relationships and juxtaposed to create new contexts. For instance Manet’s nineteenth century Olympia alludes to Titian’s Venus Urbino (1583). Each page is a visual verbal poetic vignette of individual alphabet letters. A particular artist’s work may have been chosen for its title, content, history or author name as a signifier for the alphabet character.

Some pages were arranged to replicate the shape of the alphabet character. Some letters have multiple pages, are omitted or are placed in a different sequence. Several abecedarian poems were composed using words of the base letter. Experiments in image assemblage included; writing on the body and tattooing the figures of painting and sculpture.

Computer based graphic design allows images and text to be layered with variable states of transparency, cropping and opacity. Graphic digital design software tools include: text processing, page-composition, webpage html composition, paint tools, photo-editing, animated imaging, slide-show editors, sound production, mixing, sound compression, and video editing and production. These tools/programs often use different protocols to perform the same tasks on objects and layers. Product design assumes an enclosed frame or viewing space in which the product performs. This book was produced with the assumption of a paper bound book viewing frame although it is also translated to HTML for internet publication and browsing.

Printing is in black and white, although color printing would be more effective for display of the paintings. Computer design offers new possibilities with interesting limits. It is a language of its own. Because one does not touch the material objects of assembly, the process can feel like putting one's hands inside of a black box, or like the nineteenth century photographer, working in the dark under the camera cover. Images are retrieved and handled by opening file spaces and moving the mouse or keyboard to perform commands.

There is no paper, pen, paint, ink, brush, knife or glue. Images and text matter are virtual objects viewed through the screen. Tactile queues and physical techniques are diminished with digital design resulting in increased use of mental resources and memory to control image attributes of location, space, state and concept through software manipulation. Images and text as virtual objects may be configured, stored and altered by several software composition tools in order to obtain the appropriate feature set for a particular design task. The manipulation and organization of digital objects becomes embodied in a database or a virtual body of concept constructions. Media scholar Lev Manovich and the authors of "The Digital Manifesto" consider the aesthetics of databases and their logic as the subject of new critique. The mode of digital production is a new kind of literacy that constitutes its own alphabet.

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