Content Warning: The following post describes and shows a book being physically altered.

In one of my earlier contributions to the Butterflies & Aliens Library, I shared the process of creating my first altered book project, Spark Unnecessary, using Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as the source work. Since completing that project back in 2017, I’d been pondering other altered book projects based around themes of dystopia and censorship, slowly gathering up materials and ideas.

In particular, I had picked up a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 with that possibility in mind, but had been slow to be inspired. Instead, the book became the source of raw materials for workshops on altered books that I presented at Calgary’s When Words Collide festival and at Edmonton’s MacEwan University, out of which attendees could tear pages to try creating blackout poetry. It seemed fitting.

Then with the pandemic shutting things down, that now invisibly damaged copy of 1984 just ended up in a pile of random papers on my office floor.

But last October, an idea finally began coalescing and as a result I sent out a request looking for a miniature spy camera or some such thing. Wouldn’t you know it, like the firestarter for Spark Unnecessary, the exact right thing appeared. My friend Mark Turta – hey Mark! – replied that he had an old camera from a radio-controlled helicopter he’d flown a few years before, and popped the camera and receiver into the mail to me.

It was perfect.

And then also sat on my floor for another couple months.

Finally, in a spontaneous late-night fit of inspired destructiveness last January, I picked up my utility knife, that copy of George Orwell’s 1984, and Mark’s camera, and I started sculpting the second in what is probably now destined to be a series of altered dystopian books.

It’s rough, it doesn’t have a name, and it happened so spontaneously that I didn’t even think to take progress photos. I just started cutting. And now, with it still arguably unfinished, I figured I’d share it here in the Butterflies & Aliens Library with you.

So did you take a close look at the photo above? Because it was taking a close look at you…

As it happens, the lens on the RC helicopter camera turned out to be the exact same size as the lens on the image of the surveillance camera on the cover of the book. Once cut out, the hole fit perfectly. I then cut a tunnel straight through the book to accommodate the rest of the camera, letting its excess length and strangely disturbing antenna protrude out the back, like some cancerous plastic growth.

I still need to find the right cable to recharge the camera itself, so haven’t tested out it or the receiver. That said, it doesn’t even need to work. The mere physical presence of it provides discomfort enough.

That said, I do have a vision of one day getting the camera working while displaying this work in a more public venue, having people walk up and look at it, only to realize their face was suddenly being broadcast on a large screen elsewhere in the room. Or maybe in the next room, where visitors can spy on the next person to look at the book, and suddenly realize someone might have first been watching them.

There’s a thought, eh? That not only are you being watched on your digital devices, but maybe through your analog ones as well…

Happy reading?

– Winston