Creating a Meaning-Machine: The Deck of Stories Called Life in the Garden
Eric Zimmerman describes his interactive paper book as "an inverted exquisite corpse," and although a digital version of the book would be easy to produce, he argues that an electronic edition would not produce as meaningful an experience as the printed volume.
The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Eric Zimmerman
Life in the Garden (1999) is an interactive paper book I created with graphic designer Nancy Nowacek. The fifty or so pages of the story are cardlike sheets to be shuffled, picked, and placed between the covers of a tiny book, temporarily creating a story. The first page ("Adam, Eve, and the serpent lived in the garden") and the final page ("The End") are always the same, but the rest of the text and images are selected and ordered randomly.
The quote was directly rewritten from the essay.
