Symbiosis/Introduction

This living book is also a symbiotic book. It is a merging and cohabitation of different media-species, a mash-up of text and video, sound and images, pixels and living, material tissue. The digital medium has in many ways made it possible for the book to become increasingly infected with foreign non-textual elements, as it is evolving into something different, into a becoming in which the book might even mean the disappearance of the book as we know it and the rise of a new symbiotic book-evolved hybrid species.

The symbiotic book in this context also forms a tool for critique, a critique targeted at visions of the book as a static, stable entity, a lifeless thing, a death tree. The symbiotic book as a concept argues for the book as becoming, as infinitely transforming and interacting and crossing over into other books and other discourses. In this vision these networked, liquid books form an ecology of information, growing stronger and more consistent in mutual cooperation. Cooperation as books, as ‘lifeless entities’, or nonorganic matter, also takes places with and via the living, with the human assemblages that create the books, feed into them, and make them part of the networks through which they algorithmically spread over the web, keeping the book alive, keeping it social.

The symbiotic book crosses boundaries. Boundaries between the life sciences and the humanities, boundaries between the scholarly world and society at large, making the book open for infection, for re-use, remixing and change. The symbiotic book has borders though. Evolution is a slow process, heavily influenced by environmental and cultural barriers. But maybe some genetic modification might be beneficial in this respect.