This conceit determined the book’s cover, with fields of red and blue overprinting to reveal a third color (though any two colors could have been used, Ryan uses red and blue extensively throughout his work).

Moreover, we took the intervals of Scriabin’s chord, translated them to numerical proportions, and then used those proportions to build the book’s structure. They’re all there, on the cover and throughout the text. (We wonder, on occasion, how effective this kind of deep conceptual work is. If you hadn’t read this, you likely would never know about this aspect of the book. The design process is analytical, and it is intuitive, and sometimes it is both at the same time. But in the end, perhaps it’s more about intent than outcome: setting up rules like this means we approach the text in a different way, hopefully better attuned to the content. Our friend Paul Mort makes the comparison to a painted manifold in a street rod: “You may never see it, but it’s cool.”)

The broad fields of red and blue form the cover resolve to Ryan’s triple image of his colleague Isami Ching on a ladder, holding a stethoscope. The inside front-cover flap carries basic exhibition information and contributor bios, leaving more room inside for images.

Reprise of cover type, overprinting Ryan’s wall piece The Lost Chord/Ear Fluorescent (2017).

The Art Gym was configured as one large room for this exhibition. The catalog is constructed around a series of installation photographs by Evan La Londe that begin by facing east from the entrance and panning clockwise. After each installation image, we moved in to show the work framed within it in detail. Caption information runs along the top edge of the page, in approximately the same position as the labeled works.

The book’s proportion and page program were structured around an image block that would partially bleed onto its facing page. To make room for this, the classically proportioned text area (constructed by Van de Graaf’s canon) is weighted away from the gutter. All objects—centerpoints for captions, page numbers, indents, etc.—are placed along the intervals of the mystic chord.

Ryan’s Mystic Chord Wind Chime, by itself, and being performed by the artist; with an excerpt from Scriabin’s Piano Sonata no. 5, op. 53, showing an example of a complete voicing of the chord.

Illustrations of individual works are threaded throughout the narrative, as close as possible to their reference in the text.

At left is a detail of Ryan’s Bio Music Flow Loop (2017). We set the artist’s conversation with critic Jan Tumlir in red and blue, both as a nod to Ryan’s work and to establish a distinct visual voice for each speaker.

Installation view of Ryan’s Ayn Rand Loop (2012–15), an illustration of the author’s furtive eye movements during a 1960s interview with Dan Rather.

Detail of Ayn Rand Loop. The uneven, staggered distribution of the image frames results from their distribution along the intervals of the mystic chord.

End of Tumlir’s interview, showing the intrusion of the text block into an image. This is the only place in the book where that happens, and it shouldn’t work, but it does.