"McHale at this time abandoned the neural forms of his earlier work in order to emphasize the role of communications media. He wished to visualize how raw data (represented by torn bits of colored paper, newspapers, and magazines) might be organized by a human or mechanical brain into discrete messages. The collage books that he produced in 1954 (cat. no. 37) synthesized the themes of mass culture, information processing, and viewer participation. Each page of these books (one of which was shown in the ICA's Collages and Objects exhibition in 1954) is composed of a collage cut into strips, so that the volume becomes a bound series of variable collages to be 'read' however the viewer wishes."--Baas, Jacquelynn. "John McHale" In The Independent Group: postwar Britain and the aesthetics of plenty. Edited by David Robbins. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c1990.
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