Material Matters in Digital Representation: Tree of Codes as a Literature of Disembodiment

In a digital era of representation, where screen content is abstracted from material objects/apparatuses, how do we still associate “text” and “book” with materiality? This essay analyzes Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes as a “literature of disembodiment”—experimental print texts that represent objects from which materiality is erased.