Looping Time
The design concept centres on repetition and cyclical renewal – time understood through return rather than progression. The logic draws from the narrative reset of Groundhog Day (1993), where the protagonist relives the same day endlessly, and from the ouroboros, the ancient snake consuming its own tail, a figure of continual rebirth in its Egyptian and Greek origins. Together, they anchor this volume’s ‘ecology of time’.
ALWFAV 9 invites the reader to (re-)enter the publication from different points. Multiple covers become multiple beginnings, while a continuous page structure blurs beginnings and endings into a single flow. Repeating content at the top and bottom of pages allows each spread to gesture simultaneously toward what has passed and what is about to come. The act of reading becomes a form of scrolling, where each page offers a partial view into both the past and the future. Beginnings and endings dissolve into a loop.
Contents as Temporal Strands
Each contribution in the volume is treated as a time object, occupying a specific duration and rhythm. Contributors become protagonists within a shared time-space, and each text offers the reader a distinct temporal experience rather than a discrete unit of information.
Titles draw from the conventions of film credits and title cards, while interviews are structured as scripts that retain ‘stage directions’ and ‘sound cues’, reinforcing the volume’s engagement with time-based media. The overall layout follows a single-column structure, suggesting a continuous timeline that moves forward while remaining entangled with what precedes and follows it.
At certain moments, this single thread splits. Collaborative articles introduce parallel strands of text that coexist on the page. Drawing on Johanna Drucker’s Diagrammatic Writing, these strands may run alongside one another, intersect or compete for attention. Meaning emerges not from linear hierarchy but from proximity and entanglement – where neighbouring texts reshape how each is read.
ALWFAV 9 Glyph: The bookworm-snake
The creature inhabiting this publication begins as a bookworm, a burrower whose tunnels mark movement and time as tiny apertures. A bookworm’s movements create pathways between pages, collapsing linear order and opening unexpected routes through the text.
This meets the figure of the snake. The ouroboros introduces cyclicality; the digital snake from the mobile game Snake (1998) introduces accumulation, a line that grows by consuming its own path. The bookworm-snake completes the loop of time, folding its own movement back into itself, just as the publication grows by weaving and overwriting through knowledge that has already been produced.
The visual form of the snake is developed through observation of the typographic structures of Edition Asymmetrical. Its irregular curves and directional tension inform the movement of the glyph, tying the creature directly back into the project’s typographic language.
ALWFAV 9 replaces conventional page numbers with timestamps, positioning each page as a moment rather than a fixed location. These holes act as temporal markers and as points where the bookworm-snake enters and exits the page. As it travels through the volume, the snake links each contribution to its references at the end, returning ‘home’ like a snake returning to its nest.
- Groundhog Day is a 1993 American fantasy romantic comedy film directed by Harold Ramis, in which a television weatherman becomes trapped in a time loop and is forced to relive February 2 repeatedly.
- Drucker, J. (2013) Diagrammatic Writing. Eindhoven: Set Margins.
- Snake is a 1998 mobile video game developed by Taneli Armanto for the Nokia 6110. In the game, the player controls a snake that grows longer by collecting orbs.