Paper / card
2023, 20pp, paperback

Overview

A short story printed on a mask which must be read in a mirror.

Background

Butterfly Mask started as an expansion on some of the ideas presented in Oubliette, namely that of mirrored text and an uncomfortable physical process to read the story. Rather than using an implement like a dental mirror, I thought it would be interesting to have the story on the reader’s face. Obviously, you can’t see through the pages so cutting holes out would be necessary.

A rough prototype was made out of scrap paper and something about the blank face that I saw put me in mind of classical horror film bogeymen like Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees. I didn’t really want to write a horror story, though - at least, not one like that. Further experiments pulled me towards the ideas of camouflage and I found myself thinking about the deceptive wings of butterflies, which represent themselves as the faces of big, scary creatures to scare away predators. I thought the process of looking at oneself in order to read this story could have an interesting side-effect on the text. Rather than the text being out there, on a separate plane, it would be one’s own reflection, the face that you’re wearing to the outside world. Furthermore, there was the opportunity to do some playful stuff with the narrator - the ‘you’ of second person perspective giving way to the ‘I’ of first person as the story progresses.

Although the prototype was a plain book, I got it in my head to form it in a form more like that of a butterfly. This proved to be a pretty stupid idea. At first I wanted the text to flow on non-straight lines and spent a loooooong time setting text on various different arcs which were supposed to look like butterfly wings. They didn’t, and just looked crap. I then allowed myself the benefit of straight typesetting, albeit in a butterfly-shaped text frame, with the words flowing around the eye holes. The first versions had these towards the top of the page, but moving them to the bottom allowed for the curve of the wing to form a more natural shape for the reader’s nose. 

Although the basic principles had been set out in the early prototype, finding the right sort of binding was a time-consuming process. I really wanted an elasticated strap that would keep the book secured on the reader’s face, but this proved too difficult to work out. I just couldn’t get the right combination of materials that would stay in position, but also allow the pages to fall open and allow the reader to see them properly. The strap had to be abandoned, much to my annoyance. It is for the best. Masks can be hand-held and so are books. I tell myself this in order to keep the loathing at bay.

There was no way I was going to be able to cut this consistently by hand, so I used the Cameo 3 cutter for both the pages and the cover. I’m getting a little tired of this process, particularly as Affinity Publisher doesn’t allow for addressing the cutter directly, meaning lots of exported PDFs, which are then placed into another application, then sent to the cutter. It’s a bit of a convoluted method and I miss the Illustrator plugin I used to use. There’s also the broader issue of everything being quite computer-based. My attempts at hand-making things tend to be quite shoddy, though, so I think that’s going to continue for a while.

The end product is a lot simpler than I had in mind, although it does maintain the fundamental principle of the idea from first conception – that of reading through the book and relying on external perception for an understanding of self. The whole process took a lot longer than I would have liked, although this was partly due to personal factors in the second half of 2022. Had I known it would end up as a stapled pamphlet, I could have knocked it out a lot earlier. Possibly. It’s more likely that I had to go through all those iterations in order to get to the simple version. I’ve really got to learn how to start simple and stay there.