I own both the printed book of his most recent novel ‘Freedom’, which I’m currently absorbed in, and the ebook, which I had first but didn’t start, despite my anticipation to start reading. The steady stream of text on the flat, grey Kindle screen failed to engage. I remembered the amazing experience of reading his previous book, and how affectionately dog-eared it now was. It was several months before I came across a copy and lunged for it.

This and other seminal novels deserve a commitment, often countered by lengthy, trying reads (thankfully not in Franzen’s case), and having to lug heavy books around. The argument that e-readers are able to contain thousands of books is valid, but carefree, limitless access to anything is not entirely positive – I find making the effort to single out one book heightens the enjoyment.

But books that are liable to be read once (murder mysteries, review copies etc), reference texts, or collections of short stories are perfect for e-readers. They also allow access to out of print texts and numerous edited versions, and of course don’t require masses of trees to be felled. People with sight problems or disabilities can read with greater ease.

Franzen chooses to block access to the internet and uses noise-cancelling headphones whilst he is writing. Other writers choose to work accompanied by music, or in busy places. Readers can choose to remain devout to printed books, or they can leap into the world of the digital. They can straddle both, using hybrid platforms.

Freedom of choice.

It’s boggling – they suit the format perfectly as portable, pocket sized A6 books, or the grander A5 size, and can be made very quickly without any design knowledge, in any word processing application. Use them as cheap and plentiful portfolios of work, or travel booklets for personal reading – anyone with a computer and printer has access to their own print on demand service. If you need to make changes, or they get damaged, make some more.

Or, use the online bookreader to share digital versions, and embed into websites. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve edited eBooks embedded in my portfolio site, but as the link remains the same, there’s no need to re-upload.

Despite the tone of this post, this is not a sale pitch. bookleteer is free, you skeptics. I just want see fellow writers embracing it, and possibly to add to our existing library of eBooks, Diffusion. Get busy!

We were able to quickly transform the draft books into the final printed format to get a feel of what they would look like on the page, and then to cross out, change and empathise parts, scribbling notes without feeling they were too precious to make marks on. Having a hard copy of previous changes, with progressive layers all on the same page, lets you revert back if you change your mind – something I’ve also come to appreciate in my own notebooks, when early choices are all too often lost with a newly edited digital file. Working with multiple versions and backing up regularly are safeguards easily neglected, as we all  know.

As an alternative, use the online bookreader to preview eBooks without messy edges or any dodgy printer issues, and to show collaborators work instantly.

Paper or digital? Both.

As much as what you’re reading can influence any subsequent writing, I find staying largely within the realm of text helps me to dedicate more time to these distinctly lo-fi pursuits, avoiding being too saturated with moving image mediums to concentrate, or becoming too fixated with games or other highly involving activities. Reading and writing generate imagery from within the individual (although they can be tinged by external events happening at that moment – noise, the weather, people, etc), rather than receiving it from a projecting device.

Of course, I’m influenced by all things, but it’s the more static forms like art, objects, or powerful images from films, seemingly captured with a mental camera, that allow me to visualise them later, tinkering and contrasting with other images for effect. This leads to the composition of a few sentences, and thus a starting point. There’s also direct personal experiences and sensations, particularly specific moments and microscopic details. Sometimes I wonder about the authenticity of material inspired by these sources, compared to the real world counterpart, or what actually happened, but what is creative writing if not rendering what you see and feel into words, which is then liable to be interpreted differently by each reader? Hounding out the truth can sometimes seem pointless – this isn’t journalism, though that includes a fair bit of fiction these days.

Being able to impose your own prism on the world is vital to create original and humane art. It can allow you to feel competent enough to make a mark, and to be compelled to write. Which, as the universal frustration over blank pages shows, is everything.

Projects like this that intersect the realms of poetry and digital mediums and distribution channels, will hook new audiences that are used to more than just the written word, and despite me believing that should be enough for interested readers, when done in this harmonious manner it works brilliantly. Kudos!

Yesterday, Proboscis launched the first series of Material Conditions, a set of eight eBooks created with bookleteer, asking professional creative practitioners to reflect on what the material conditions for their own practice are, especially now in relation to the climate of change and uncertainty brought about by the recession and public sector cuts – part of Proboscis’ wider programme of activities, Public Goods.

For this series, we commissioned 8 artists and artist groups (Active Ingredient; Karla Brunet; Sarah Butler; Desperate Optimists; London Fieldworks; Ruth Maclennan; Jules Rochielle & Janet Owen Driggs and Jane Prophet) to produce a book each. Half of the contributors took the opportunity to design their own layouts and use bookleteer to create their books themselves, whilst the other half (often busy working on various projects and unable to make the books from scratch) took advantage of our in-house design and production team (for the most, myself, with assistance from Giles Lane) to create their books. My practice, as a writer, is usually contributing text but for this venture I took on a role as co-commissioning editor and designer – coordinating responses, reviewing early drafts and producing front covers, guided by my co-editor, Giles. In this way, the process behind this project also echoed one of its main themes – how do we continue to be creative and productive everyday in the face of limited resources?

Collaboration and co-creation are at the heart of our practice and ethos, for the riches they bring as much as resources dictate their necessity. This stance has led to a very different, and I believe perhaps more exciting, output for this series, than if all the books had simply been commissioned by us and created entirely by the artists involved remotely. I relished the chance to guide and inform, alongside Giles, the direction of several of the books, to be the first set of eyes to witness a first draft outside of its author, to design covers – sealing a visual stamp upon a beautifully written piece.

Being able to instantly generate and preview drafts in the relatively new bookreader format has also been a huge boon during the design process, and it’s accessibility will ensure Material Conditions can be read, shared and used as a resource globally, by anyone, in addition to the printed set and the downloadable PDFs. In fact, all the printed books carry a QR code link to the digital version on the back cover, so they can be instantly shared amongst smart-phones and tablet devices.

Thank you to everyone involved – we’ve got a great, diverse collection on our hands. 

All the books are now available on our archive of publications, Diffusion. Delve in, and enjoy.

The next series of Material Conditions is scheduled for June 2012, for which we’re planning another experimental approach, shifting away from individual commissions to a collaborative process generated through an intensive ‘booksprint’. Stay tuned for more details.

Most writers have one or two trusted readers-of-drafts, critical friends who are relied on to make suggestions and offer that gentle critique that we didn’t know we needed. And the closer we get to conventional publication, the more likely we are to find ourselves working with an editor who scrutinizes our text for errors, ambiguities, sloppiness and – horror of horrors – breaks with convention. With the publication of my essay on picnic and community, published using Bookleteer last month, I had the chance to reflect on the experience of ‘doing without’ an editor. It was stimulating but also a little scary.

In the summer of 2011, I needed to take a decision about finalising and publishing the work. Choosing Bookleteer presented me with a new option: it meant I could go all the way to publication without any editorial oversight.

Picnic was an unfunded project: no client, no defined audience, no expectations, no responsibilities. That may seem liberating but it also means no feedback, no reassurance, no confirmation. I kept the text to myself (apart from sharing it necessarily with my collaborator, the artist Gemma Orton) at the obvious risk of missing out on potentially valuable guidance, having mistakes spotted, and being seen as arrogant.

The key justification for me was that to submit to editorial control would have been a crass betrayal of one of the essay’s themes. The essay contrasts picnic with formal meals, it contrasts organisation with networking, and disorder with order, as a way of exploring our tendency to idealise community in structured, formal terms. I felt that by submitting to the convention of editing – a fundamentally conservative process – I would have contradicted that theme in a rather feeble way.

I was also aware that Picnic challenges people’s expectations, because it doesn’t fit easily into any recognised genre. An editor might have made valiant, corrosive efforts to turn it into this or that.

I don’t wish to imply that the editorial process is either redundant or pointless, but it may be that many writers come to be over-dependent on editors. Perhaps this is to do with perceived differences between non-fiction and fiction. Few musical composers or visual artists would expect to cede so much influence over what they do. On the whole, editing is a process for confirming convention and reinforcing norms, which may not always be what’s needed. By making the publication process realisable, it was Bookleteer that empowered me to remain consistent to the theme without compromise.

Young people working on ‘Project 18’ carried out and recorded 39 interviews in people’s homes, at Norwich Castle museum and in residential care homes. They amalgamated quotes from these interviews with photographs of selected museum objects to produce both a printed booklet and an e-reader version using Bookleteer.

The project is a partnership between Norwich Castle Museum and the Mancroft Advice Project (MAP), a charity that provides help, education and training for young people through advisors, counsellors, youth workers and a drop-in centre. Project 18 helps young people to learn more about themselves, others and their community through the creation of an accessible small archive of oral history testimony about being 18 in the past and today, inspired by the museum’s collections.

Some people might expect paper copies to be of low importance and relevance to young people who are already comfortably immersed and swimming in the cyber ocean. Conversely, paper copies could be seen as important tools to present to those people who have travelled to positions of influence and governance where a more traditional background might place greater value on well-trodden methods of communication.

We found the reality to be that the young participants placed great store in the tangible form of the printed items. They valued something they could actually hold, see, feel and smell. This multiply dimensioned tangibility was something they could experience wherever and whenever they chose, rather than only when in contact with a screen. Just having something physical to keep, share and treasure was hugely important. In addition young people expressed their gratification about something that was a token, a signifier of their achievement and enhanced status. Of course this enhanced status works both in the way in which others see the young person and in the way in which they see and value themselves.

This effect was re-enforced by the good physical standard of the booklets themselves. The cost of short-run printing was impressive. We were not forced to order a huge bulk run to achieve economy (with concomitant waste), nor did we have to be miserly in distributing the booklets to the young people and their friends, museum and MAP staff, stakeholders and supporters.

At the same time, having the e-booklet available has given an easy flavour of the project and its purpose to outsiders such as funders and government agencies, both national and local. We feel this kind of attention-catching and information giving is much more likely to lead to interaction and positive responses and outcomes than just a paper communication in the general wasteful paper blizzard. In this way, perhaps counter-intuitively, the e-booklet has provided us with a more permanent resource than traditional paper copies for those that we wish to inspire and involve in financially supporting future projects.

Maybe, too, by putting the booklet on the internet we will benefit from some degree of good fortune as people anywhere in the world stumble on the project. One person’s happy discovery could be promulgated world-wide with astonishing rapidity.

More about the project on the MAP site here.

Designed with comic book style panels for each story and vivid colours throughout (which look great contrasted with the monochrome photographs and historic objects), Project 18 provides snapshots of lives from what must seem to be another world for most younger people these days, in a format they’ll most likely be familiar with and enjoy. No doubt they’ll also find many similarities in the sentiments expressed and antics undertaken by their elders, proving how core human experiences persist through generations.

Download, print and make for yourself on Diffusion here.

(You can read a bit more about the project here.)

Our output of this project, Agencies of Engagement, a set of four books designed to act as a creative thinking and doing tool, has just been published – via our short run printing service, as online bookreader versions, and on our publication hosting platform, Diffusion.

                   “We believe in creating and using tools that reflect our values and practices – making use of them in our projects and research enables us to embody this ethos in the ways in which we collaborate with our partners and share the outcomes. The structure of each of the four books has, at its core, our desire to inspire others and to illustrate ideas and practices – sharing not just the fruits of our work, but the processes and methods which we have employed. Publishing the books with bookleteer enables the potential for the insights and observations, methods and practices to resonate widely both through sharing physical and digital versions. This was also a core value for the project’s output, that it would be of value not just to CARET and Proboscis as documentation of what we achieved, but to others as a guide for developing their own engagement practices. “

  – Giles Lane

Method Stack describes a number of the engagement methods and practices used by Proboscis in our engagement work as well as other tools and sources of inspiration.

Project Account sets out the process used in the project as a case study for others to guide their own engagement practices.

Drawing Insight illustrates the observations and insights of the project in a simple and accessible way.

Catalysing Agency explores the need and concept for using a ‘Catalyst’ (an individual acting as a change agent) to trigger meaningful engagement with wider communities.

For the printed sets, twenty five copies are contained within a limited edition, handmade slipcase (displayed above left); the remaining copies are bound with handmade wrappers (above right).

Download, print and make up the set for yourself on Diffusion here.

]]> http://bookleteer.com/blog/2011/11/agencies-of-engagement-a-creative-thinking-and-doing-tool/feed/ 0 http://bookleteer.com/blog/2011/10/sewn-paper-sculptures/ http://bookleteer.com/blog/2011/10/sewn-paper-sculptures/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:31:59 +0000 hazemtagiuri http://bookleteer.com/blog/?p=5121 If you’ve been following this blog even remotely, you might have sussed my interest in papercraft and recycled materials, possibly partly due to my own artistic limitations. I’m in awe of artists who can do what I can’t – produce highly visual and sculptural pieces, rather than simply text, and particularly transform paper, something I use purely as a medium to scribble on and create artifices, into more then just a 2D vessel.

Continuing in this tradition, I’d like to share the work of Jennifer Collier, spied via the good folks at Fast Co Design. Using a sewing machine, she stitches found pieces of paper as if they were cloth, into all manner of three-dimensional sculptures. Shoes, clothes, everyday objects, even a camera and a typewriter – I think there’s a delicious absurdity in crafting a model of a tool, using the material it usually spews out.

In response to Hazem’s post about Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night, I’d like to recommend another penetrating and poetic book which draws a personal trajectory on the map of London, that is Iqbal Ahmed’s Sorrows of the Moon: A Journey Through London, which explores petty story-lives of peripheral characters, often marked by resignation, loneliness, failure. This dominant tone of melancholy blurs and dampens the enthusiasm and the celebration of London diversity, underlining how the common destiny of the capital and of all the people inhabiting it for one reason or another is one of sorrow and isolation. Observed on a clear night from Parliament Hill, the moon, which acts as the unifying image across the book inspired by a poem of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal , wraps and encloses the city in a fate of sterility and desolation.

Elena, who is with us at the Proboscis studio under the Leonardo Da Vinci scheme, used a very eloquent excerpt from Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night by Sukhdev Sandhu, in her post accompanying the visual essay she is currently composing, Mapping The Streets. The book runs parallel with some of the themes we’ve been exploring for City As Material, particularly the notion of an outsider’s forays into a hidden landscape – in this case, ironically, a world normally veiled by the light of day.

I immediately set out to buy it, but soon discovered it was available in full online, as it was originally commissioned by Artangel Interaction as a web project, with chapters, or “episodes”, released monthly. The website uses ever-shifting, distorted pixels and visuals as a backdrop and ambient sound paired with the text, both emanating an eerie nocturnal resonance, as the reader delves deeper into this insightful and poetic work.

Read it here.

Drawn In shows the creative processes and personal musings of 44 artists from different disciplines, by opening up their private sketchbooks and asking how they use them. It looks fascinating – I’ve always pondered how artists with industrious work ethics manage to actually get everything done! Can’t wait to receive this.

On Wednesday, Simon Pope, Gordon Joly, and Stefan Szczelkun joined us in the Proboscis studio, to talk about the StoryCube Cairn project, and embark on a group walk using a QR coded cube and a mobile phone as wayfinding devices.

Before the event, we were asked to devise walking routes to create individual cubes, each side featuring a QR code, linking to a particular geographic spot on an online mapping service (Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, etc) – a start point, four waypoints, and a destination. Using an API Gordon coded, and the bookleteer API, entering the six location URL’s automatically generated a StoryCube. My route, based around memorials and tributes in different forms is available here.

Meeting just after 2.00pm, Simon and Gordon gave a summary of the project, and a recap of the development process so far. We talked about the current limitations of Google Maps when creating the cubes, particularly the inability to share manually added, user designated routes with other people (they require two waypoints to locate the route), and had some interesting ideas regarding the next stage of the project. What about a mix of map links, audio files and videos – an interactive tour, scanning QR codes near points of interest to access audio descriptions and related videos? Or, a quasi treasure hunt, requiring players to obtain QR code stickers for the cubes (discouraging them from scanning all the codes at once – cheating!)  from certain spots to get the next destination?

We decided to use Simon’s cube for our first trial, his route focusing on locations acted on by “centrifugal and centripetal” forces – each point “acting as an attractor of sorts, which in some instances cannot be reached, yet which pulls the walker towards it”.

After departing from the studio, Giles scanned the first code to get our start point – the ramp under West Smithfield. Once there, we scanned the next spot, the middle of Charterhouse Square. All was going smoothly. However, after reaching the third spot, the omnimous brick circle in Golden Lane estate (the “Unplace” we featured in the City As Material: Streetscapes event), we were unable to load the next, despite trying with numerous phones – bad signal, or bad omen? Despite this, we were afforded time to ponder its unusual acoustic properties once again, and plot a cunning plan to subvert this synchronised failing of technologies… cheat!

Simon told us his next waypoint, the Curve Gallery in the Barbican Centre, which we arrived at via its winding walkways (after ceremonially scanning the code we missed). Another hurdle faced us here, as to gain entry to the exhibition, we were expected to don quarantine-esque shoe covers, and couldn’t enter as a group. Bah. The penultimate spot, another circle, on Monkwell Street, beckoned.

From there we were awarded our destination, the Museum of London, or more specifically, outside its entrance. Here, we asked if we were able to get into the recently renovated green space below, and were told “perhaps, but you might not be able to get back up!”. Rather than risk it, we retired to the pub right next door, content in a mostly successful first run of a StoryCube Cairn route.

We’re brimming with ideas for what might be possible next. Until then, view all our routes, and download the cubes yourself here.

Simply using the existing text from the bookleteer blog and full-page photographs as covers for each section, in a book, turns transitory blog posts and assorted snapshots into a publication that can stand on its own right, demonstrating the transformational effect and credence associated with a printed document (although it’s also readable online), made possible with the eBook format.

Read City As Material: An Overview with the online bookreader below, or download, print and make via Diffusion.

This couldn’t be more true for anyone viewing Ying-Chieh Liu’s reprinted sketchbooks, containing stunning, ethereal illustrations from her numerous travels. It’s an interesting concept to reproduce a personal sketchbook (in I assume, its raw form), without interpretation or much of a narrative, but when they contain such intriguing artwork it’s hard not to be engrossed.

View her Etsy store.