Mark Taylor: Bringing the Academy into the Electronic Era 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 The e-mail correspondence between Taylor and Saarinen as they taught the course became the basis for the text of a jointly-authored book titled Imagologies ("like mythology, only in images," he explains), so striking and unconventional in its design that the Finnish fabric designer Marimekko produced an entire product line-including T-shirts, backpacks, and notebooks-based on its pages. A banner from the series hangs on the wall of his study, a visual reminder of the intensely interdisciplinary nature of his work. Taylor lives at the end of a dirt road just outside of Williams, where he and Dinny moved when his son Aaron and daughter Kirsten left for college and graduate school. His study is the converted barn next door. In a spacious room whose wide picture windows look onto the Berkshires and into Vermont, he works alongside a vast bookshelf where several years of Wired magazine share space with Kierkegaard and Hegel, whom he describes as the "two thinkers who've framed most of the questions that define my work." A beautiful 19th-century Bible that once belonged to his grandfather rests next to a pot of ivy from Hegel's grave. The Marimekko banner hangs over a pair of large, desert-whitened shoulder-blades of a cow from the desert near Las Vegas-a city he considers to be "a trope for the contemporary cultural tradition." Las Vegas is the subject of The Réal, a multimedia CD Taylor produced concurrently with his most recent book, Hiding. The book tackles the issue of the increasingly visual culture we inhabit and its emphasis on surfaces, images, and advertising. It is both an academic work of post-modernist media criticism and an experiment in the limits of the book form. "It's a design problem," he explains. How do you illustrate the concept of elusive and multiple truths in a traditional analytical fashion - instead of trying, he holed the book would embody in its very form the deconstructionist ideas that propelled it. Unlike Imagologies, in which he and Saarinen delivered finished text to the designer, for Hiding he worked with designers Michael Rock and Susan Sellars from the beginning.