A haptic, looping book that reconfigures the ephemeral into print.

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Medusa is a book of shifting perceptions – an incantation, a closed-loop system of meaning where text, image, and material interact in an evolving dialogue. Designed in collaboration with Tin Drum, it extends the ideas of the Medusa mixed reality installation at the Victoria & Albert Museum, translating its ephemeral, light-based architecture into print.

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The book resists conventional reading. Its structure follows a cyclical rhythm, unfolding through deliberate shifts in materiality: black paper dissolves into silver, light builds towards a crescendo of iridescent colour, then recedes again into shadow. Each transition acts as a rupture, a recalibration of perception through the haptic shifts of textured surfaces, gloss overlays, and typographic interventions. The sequence is governed by an internal algorithm, a visual logic that dictates the flow of light and meaning across pages, forming an interwoven pattern of recurrence, modulation, and return. A dual structure defines the book. Lyrical image sections weave an abstract, poetic visual narrative, while reflective text sections engage with ideas of knowledge, architecture, and transformation. The layout of the text sections deliberately subverts the rigid authority of scientific and religious formats through contemporary design choices: justified text strains against narrow margins; image sequences fracture traditional composition, breaking the imposed order of the page.

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Typography becomes a structural force. A contemporary blackletter anchors the book’s architectural presence, holding tension between geometric and gestural forms. A stark sans serif counterbalances this with monolithic clarity, while a serif typeface – manipulated into waveforms and organic shapes – gives Medusa her voice: mutable, unstable, and embodied.

Cymatic images – formed from the sound waves of the installation – are woven into the book’s structure, appearing across both lyrical and reflective sections. These sound-forms, generated through vibration and frequency, visualise resonance as a shifting, organic surface. Their presence reinforces the internal logic of the book, linking sonic phenomena to visual structure and embodying the theme of perception beyond the visual. Elsewhere, spectrograms and typographic distortions transform Medusa’s voice into tendrils of language, expanding and contracting across the page.

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Material choices carry thematic resonance. Paper made from algae refers to organic, oceanic matter – echoing the installation’s references to siphonophores and collective bodies. Translucent overlays obscure and reveal, creating architectures within architectures. The exposed spine binding reveals its own construction, like geological strata – marking the traces we leave behind. The book loops back to its origin. Darkness returns, Medusa’s voice lingers, the sequence begins again. Medusa is not a document but a living system – one that shifts, moves, and reconfigures itself with each reading, mirroring the cyclical nature of myth, architecture, and perception.​

Artist & Author: TIn Drum & Yoyo Munk

Design: Billie Temple / Assistant Design: Agatha Smith

Contributors: James Bridle, Seirian Sumner, Veronica Strang, Sou Fujimoto, Todd Eckert, Alysha Naples

Editorial team: Yoyo Munk, Billie Temple, Alysha Naples, Eliza Scott

Published by Hurtwood Books
Papers: G.F. Smith, Favini, Fedragoni / Foils: Foilco

All images courtesy of Hurtwood Press