Warren Craghead’s  “A sort of Autobiography” is a comic spanning ten StoryCubes, each detailing a decade of his life, and possible future life. Its interesting that this was reviewed as a comic in its own right by Warren Peace, despite being hosted online by Diffusion, rather then distributed in print.

“Pandora’s Box” by Ken Wong, retells the Greek Myth on a cube which readers must open to continue the story.

Contending with the rise in popularity of web comics, and the theory of the “infinite canvas” (i.e the size of a digital comics page is theoretically infinite, allowing an artist to display a complete comics story of indefinite length on a single page),  these works make use of space, a concept that can be imitated, but not recreated, on a computer screen. Whilst web comics allow readers to digitally interact, readers can physically interact with and manipulate three-dimensional comics; an entirely different reading experience.

These poems can be viewed – or made – in the context of Alec’s other poetic forms; the mesostic name poem; circle poems and the related windmill turbine text designs and wordrawings; and the grid poem and sliding puzzle poem objects derived from these.

A windmill turbine poem by Alec Finlay from his artists residency at Kielder

A few months after finishing the Story Cube poems Alec recreated two wooden box versions of the cubes to be exhibited as part of Thoughts Within Thoughts at Arc Projects Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria.

The transformation of the work from paper to wood makes me wonder when is a Story Cube not a Story Cube? Alec’s wooden cubes give the impression of greater importance and permanance than the paper cubes – yet they are essentially the same content. Is it the paper material, the ability to make, undo, and remake the cube, the potential for sharing the cubes as digital files or the cube form that give Story Cubes their character? Or some combination of these that might vary from project to project? These two sets of Story Cube poems seem to me to be an illustration of the questions I was exploring in earlier posts about how the choice of materials for eBooks and Story Cubes affect the reader’s perception of the finished object.

Download the cube poems on diffusion.org.uk

Read more about Alec’s work on www.alecfinlay.com

One of my favourite sets of Story Cubes is the Pharmaceutical Cubes created by Kenneth Goldsmith in 2008.

Inspired and intrigued by the extensive warnings and disclaimers that accompany advertisements of pharmaceutical drugs, he found that these documents sometimes covered 43 pages or almost 7000 words. Kenneth took six of these documents and re-formatted them for the Story Cubes. Fitting all of the text on one cube meant that the font had to be reduced to 1-point. When justified and coloured the result is a set of unreadable Story Cubes created entirely out of words.

Describing the ideas behind the cubes and their construction Kenneth writes:

“I have often talked about how today in writing, quantity has trumped quality; it is the writer’s job to manage the amount of available language. In sculpting these documents, I found my perfect material. Squeezed into 1-point type, then justified, I created columns of unreadable texts: words as texture. When folded into cubes, these warnings – secretly embedded into the pills we take – are reconstituted into three-dimensional forms, creating a new type of placebo.”

I love the idea of words as texture or words as material. It places writing firmly in the realm of craft and making, reminding us that through the length and flow of the text writers are shaping books as much as any designer. For example, these images by Dave McKean would probably look quite different with more or less text on the page. It’s also a reminder that when I’m thinking about the form of the eBook and Story Cubes with projects such as pop-up eBooks and cube cameras I shouldn’t forget about words entirely..

Read more by Kenneth Goldsmith about his inspiration and download the Story Cubes at diffusion.org.uk

And now I’m off on holiday for a few days and Hazem is going to be writing for the bookleteer blog while I’m gone. I think I’ll let him introduce himself.. Enjoy!

This week bookleteer has been supporting the project Seven Days in Seven Dials: a week in the life of London’s Culture Quarters organised by Dan Thompson of the Empty Shops Network. Over the past days more than 30 young staff of 9 arts organisations based in Seven Dials, Covent Garden, London have been working to put together a temporary exhibition at 18 Shorts Gardens. The exhibition opens tomorrow (Saturday 10 July 2010) and runs until Friday 23 July.

Working with professional podcasters, photographers and artists the participants have been exploring the history of the area, cultural and historical links between the organisations involved in the project, and individual experiences of the participant’s day-to-day activities within their organisations. There is a short video on YouTube that gives an idea of the work they’ve been doing and the fun they’ve been having.

Alice has been in Seven Dials all week along with Karine and Shalene from Proboscis to show participants how to use bookleteer and helping them transform their material into eBooks and StoryCubes.

Read more about the project on artistsandmakers.com and see pictures of it on Dan’s Flickr stream.

Pitch Up Publish 10: Augmented Reading took place last Thursday and thanks to our excellent participants I had a fantastic afternoon. Alan Chamberlain from Mixed Reality Lab, David Crowley and Jeremy Millar from the RCA, James Bridle and Josh, Rob and Fabia from getmorelocal were knowledgable, inspiring, provocative and entertaining and I ended the afternoon with more questions than answers and hope that we can get together for another attempt to unravel the potential of augmented reading in the future!

Plenty of arm waving during discussions – got to be a good sign!

Each of the participants had their own take on what counts as augmented reading and it was great that this covered online and offline, technological and no-tech concepts. Discussions around questions of whether augmenting written text with audio, video or intereactive content augments or diminishes the reading experience, what role do books-as-objects play in our life as we move towards electronic readers and iPhone apps and how much we can expect readers to construct their own reading experience were fascinating and opened up new ways for me to think about books, their place in our lives and authoring and reading.

Getting hands-on and exploring augmented reading through a bookleteer project that combined eBooks, StoryCubes, Second Life and QR codes

One of the most interesting conversations for me was hearing everyone’s ideas about the bookleteer eBooks and StoryCubes and how these might be used to augment the creation, reading and symbolism of books and text. We talked a lot about collaborative construction of stories and text especially how the StoryCubes hide some stories at the same time as they allow you to reveal others and considered how bookleteer might allow groups to collaboratively produce eBooks. This was such an intriguing question that we’re currently trying to figure it out as we collaborate with the Augmented Reading participants to produce an eBook of our cumulative notes. I’ll let you know how it turns out.. 

Stripes rule! But checks are pretty cool too..

(All photos by Karine and Shalene – good work girls!)

While I was thinking about augmented reading in preparation for yesterdays PU&P (which was fab – thanks guys!) Giles showed me the Trail Song project by Julie Myers who he commissioned as part of the Transformations series.

The Whyte Museum Archive, Banff, describes a Trail Song in this way:

“A Trail Song uses a well known song or tune but replaces the lyrics with words of its own. These words reference objects, people and places experienced on the journey” (Trail Songs Magazine (1954) – The Whyte Museum Archive, Banff, CAN).

In 2009 Julie created her own Trail Song around a journey from San Francisco, US to Banff, Canada – 1,345 miles by car, coach and ferry. The Trail Song lyrics were captured in an eBook while a set of four StoryCubes show photographs of the people and places she encountered on different stages of the journey. Julie writes:

“In the tradition of the Trail Songs of North America, we invent lyrics as we travel from place to place. Like modern day Songlines these songs tell about the geography and the people of the landscape, each song refers to a direction or path taken and is matched to the video footage we shoot en route. The original tune is something we might overhear on a street corner, in a café or on the car radio.”

I think my favourite part though is the video where you see snippets of her family’s journey as they travel north and hear them singing their Trail Song as they go. Augmented reading indeed!

You can read more about the project and download the eBook and StoryCubes at the diffusion website.

In contrast to Rita King’s technologically-minded Story Cubes project, Alice made a set of Story Cubes for Landscapes in Dialogue that only exist as physical objects. Yet for me these 72 paper cubes have an equally interesting relationship to technological processes…

The cubes were made to support a short video about a trip Alice made to Ivvavik in the Canadian Arctic. Alice used Story Cubes as a way of story boarding this film. The images on the cubes were a mixture of thumbnail images from the key bits of the footage, writing done while out there, sections of the unfinished script, quotes and drawings. Arranging the 70-plus cubes in different configurations produce unexpected juxtapositions and relationships between the images on the 6 sides of the cubes. Assuming there are 72 cubes would mean there are 432 images in this 3-dimensional story board. Although Alice was printing the images onto stickers and then sticking these onto the pre-cut cardboard Story Cubes produced by Proboscis, the final Story Cubes are conceptually identical to those made using bookleteer.

Alice describes how the Story Cubes were used in the process of making the film:

“Because there was so much material and it was hard to work out what was essential it was helpful to have to focus it down to the labels and then once they are stuck on the cubes you can only choose to show some of the sides – other sides are always hidden so I used them to work out what to keep and what to edit out of the film and more importantly what the overall shape of the film would be. Its a very immediate and physical way to try out changes looking at what happens if you associate this clip with that and so on.”

There is a conceptual relationship between these Story Cubes and the digitally produced film as the images move from the computer to the tangible world of the Story Cubes then back into the computer for their final composition into a linear film that I really like. To me, the use of Story Cubes for story boarding seems a great illustration of the non-linearity and tangibility of handmade objects that digital processes find hard to replicate. And I love that this process can be part of the production of a digitally created film.

As I explore Story Cubes I thought I would investigate how artists have used these objects in more successful ways than  my fabulously unsuccessful pinhole camera experiments.

Rita J. King of Dancing Ink Productions was commissioned by Giles to contribute to Transformations on diffusion.org.uk. Transformations asks writers, artists, performers, thinkers and makers to respond to two questions from different perspectives, why are we who we are? and, what do we want to become? In response to these questions Rita created 27 Story Cubes exploring aspects of how we construct our identity in a technological world and the role of imagination in this. The Story Cubes were only one aspect of the work which went by the title The Imagination Age. As Rita describes it “The Imagination Age is a broad approach to rethinking systems through a prism of technology, held up to amplify the bright beam of the imagination.”

In the first instance, 27 Story Cubes were designed on paper. These are meant to act as a catalyst in the physical world for people to build stories in the way children build castles out of blocks. You can download these Story Cubes here..

Rita then recreated these physical cubes as virtual cubes within Second Life. The cubes could now transcend physical constraints of scale, gravity and fixed-ness and they explore the potential of the virtual world to stimulate and inspire creativity as it becomes possible to construct ideas which previously could only exist in imagination. There is a video  showing the Second Life StoryCubes on YouTube.

Finally, Rita blended the two virtual and physical worlds to create a hybrid digital/physical space. The 27th cube has an Augmented Reality marker which can be activated at www.1000inchesinloveland.com using a webcam. This allows you to see the alternative reality of the 27th cube created by Rita.

In my opinion The Imagination Age takes the bookleteer concept of using digital networks to enable the sharing of handmade physical objects and extends and transforms it. As a result of Rita’s personal interests and skills the project opens up the question of what is handmade? The Second Life Imagination Age Story Cubes were crafted by Rita using digital processes, are these cubes any less handmade than the paper ones because of this? Another question concerns the different kinds of communication and social networks that let us share bookleteer objects; there are increasing numbers of these networks and how do we find out which type of sharing is most appropriate for our needs? For me, Rita has started a new way of thinking that goes beyond the content of the eBooks or Story Cubes to consider processes of production, consumption and dissemination. Thanks Rita!

Read more about the project at diffusion.org.uk

Without seeing my post on Thomas Hudson Reeve and his paper cameras, Niharika suggested we try to turn StoryCubes into pinhole cameras. When we mentioned this to Giles we discovered that a project he had commissioned by Tina Keane for Coil Journal of the Moving Image had involved pinhole cameras and there were still a few unused ones around. So we began…

We improvised with the bathroom at Proboscis as a darkroom and a packet of sun-print paper from the Tate Gallery Shop standing in for proper photographic paper. This paper seems to be intended to be used for photograms but we thought we’d see how it worked in the pinhole camera.

Setting up the first experiment

For our first experiment we aimed the cube camera at the Clerkenwell skyline. We opened the lens, waited for five minutes then went inside to develop our picture. We were rewarded with a beautiful piece of blue paper.. NOTHING had made it onto the paper!

The second experiment and a photogram of scissors

While we tried pinhole experiment 2 turning our camera on an apple (hey, if it’s good enough for Isaac Newton..!) we also set up a photogram trial with a scrap of paper to give us an idea of exposure times. The photogram turned out pretty well, we left the camera for another 5 minutes after developing the photogram and got.. another piece of blue paper.

Our output: some keys, half a spoon, a pair of scissors and two squares of blue paper..

I was googling around the other day searching for interesting things people had done with cubes and I came across the website of Thomas Hudson Reeve, a New York based artist who have creates paper pinhole cameras.

What I like about these cameras is that the they are inseparable from the photographs they take. The camera is made out of a sheet of photographic paper shaped into a cube (with the photo-sensitive side on the inside of course). The cube is sealed to keep out the light and a tiny pinhole made into one side. The paper is exposed to light via this pinhole then the camera is unfolded and the paper developed to reveal the print.

Four photographs/paper cameras by Thomas Hudson Reeve

You can see the folds on the final print showing where the cube camera used to be, and the pinhole is visible too. The prints give a sense of the entirety of the scene photographed as you see images from where light fell not only directly onto the back of the cube, but fell slanted onto the sides, top and bottom.

See more on the website www.papercams.com…