Friday, November 19, 2010

A Humument app

Yes, Tom Phillips' A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel is now available as an iPad application. I bought it last night ($7.99 in iTunes) and have already spent hours reading and looking and exploring its "oracle feature." Using a chosen date and a randomly generated number the oracle will cast two pages to be read in tandem. You may receive direction, encouragement or warning. The Find wheel spins through the book to quickly navigate the pages visually and find your favourites. Email your personal choices or oracle reading to friends. Sharekit supports image posts to Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook direct from the App. Maybe best of all: the app version includes 39 newly created, previously unpublished pages.

Phillips writes: "I found this book (or rather, it found me) when I was not quite thirty and have worked on it constantly ever since. It beckoned me on as it yielded strange words and provoked new images and told the fragmentary tale of Irma and Bill Toge. Now I am well over seventy and still revisiting and revising its pages, I find further layers of hidden texts and buried messages. Like the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, chance pairs of pages, taken together and interpreted, act as a guide and cryptic commentary on life in word and picture; a not-too-serious oracle which I now share with you."

ARTIST: tomphillips.co.uk
A HUMUMENT: humument.com
TUMBLR: tomphillipshumument.tumblr.com

Below are two screen shots from my iPad. The first shows page 2. The second shows the oracle function at work, about the merge pages 11 and 367 at a randomly chosen point in time.