But let’s digress for a second.

Books have always excelled at capturing process. But perhaps not the process we’re talking about here. And this is an important distinction.

As the sun rose on October 9, 1991, Christo and Jeanne-Claude unveiled one of their temporary "gentle disturbances” [5] — The Umbrellas. Across portions of the eastern coast of Japan and the western coast of the US, they opened 3,100 massive umbrellas. In their words:

"This Japan- USA temporary work of art reflected the similarities and differences in the ways of life and the use of the land in two inland valleys, one 12 miles (19 kilometers) long in Japan, and the other 18 miles (29 kilometers) long in the USA .” [6]

This was the result:

The Umbrellas — California Side

Wonderful stuff.

Years ago, standing in a small bookshop in London, I happened upon a large table far off in the back corner. Atop it were two hulking volumes. Together they comprised the Taschen collectors edition for The Umbrellas; I was mesmerized.

For hours I stood there plying through those two objects which so well captured Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s creative process. Documented within was the residue of engineering a dreamscape and overcoming endless bureaucratic snafus. That book — the physicality of it — codified the great effort behind their beautiful mountainside and rice paddy installations. It memorialized their efforts and journey. But for whom was this book created? I suppose it was for me — someone on the outside.

The Umbrellas, the book(s)

I would argue, however, that for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the book simply formalized much of what they already knew. Their work benches were covered in schematics, file cabinets filled with correspondence between farmers and governments and architects and textile manufacturers and engineers. In other words — to them the magnitude and grandiose nature of their work was present all around their home, their work space. It manifest physically in those files and papers and cabinets. For them, a monster book like this didn’t illuminate the enormity of their undertaking — they were aware of The Umbrellas’ bombasity every time they opened their studio door.

It’s also important to note that Christo and Jeanne-Claude didn’t directly take money from outsiders. In fact, they funded much of their projects by selling the detritus of their process:

[The] 26 million dollar temporary work of art was entirely financed … through the sale of the studies, preparatory drawings, collages, scale models, early works, and original lithographs. [7]

Twenty-six million dollars of sketches! You can imagine just how viscerally aware they were of process by raising that kind of cash through selling off the very goop of their creativity.

Prepatory Sketches

— The California Side Prepatory Sketches

— The Japan Side

Their monograph gave form to their creative process for those of us not privy to studio access; to those of us who had never seen their chaotic lair of physical detritus.

So this book about The Umbrellas is for us. It captures their process and — if not entirely making sense of it — at least gives us a frame by which to view it. Edges. But for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the book was simply a formality. If anything, it shrank their sense of the project from something full of physicality to just a couple of books.

Which brings us back to the previous point: Something curious happens to our ability to understand scope when we move all that goop of process and narrative into a computer. Even for those of us doing the making: the insiders. The Christos, if you will.

When all the correspondence, designing, thinking, sketching — the entirety of the creative process — happens in bits, we lose a connection. It's as if all that process is conceptually reduced to a single point — something weightless and unbounded. Compounded over time, the understanding of where one is as a creative in a digital landscape collapses to the just-a-little-while-ago, the now, and maybe the tomorrow. [8]

At the end of the Flipboard for iPhone project I wondered if we could find value by exploding that singular point into a form we could grasp. That form could have taken many shapes but it's easier than ever to make a book. Although, this would be a book to serve the precise opposite role of The Umbrellas monograph. It wouldn't shrink our creation. Instead, it would hopefully give shape and weight to the amorphous nature of our digital production processes.