Featured in the upcoming London Art Book Fair 2011, held at the Whitechapel Gallery, is The Portable Reading Room. Brainchild of Wild Pansy Press, this flat-pack pop-up booth acts as a gallery, bookshop, social space and studio, and will be debuted from the 23rd to the 25th of September. It’s an intriguing idea – a really dynamic way to interact with people, showcase work and raise the profile of the press.
The Portable Reading Room, pre-assembly
We’ve had similar concepts for future City As Material events – how about constructing a portable library and making station, that can travel to places lacking access to experimental publications or a self-publishing initiative, and could benefit from a little D.I.Y impetus? The Proboscis circus comes to town!
This Saturday, the 10th of September, we’ll be running a book-making workshop at the New Cross People’s Library, now reopened after its closure by the council in May, and currently staffed by local volunteers, aided by Bold Vision.
We’re asking participants to bring lists and photos of their favourite books, to create a set of eBooks with bookleteer that reflect the kinds of books, things and services people would like to see in their community library.
Join us from 11.00 am – 1.30 pm at…
New Cross Library 283-285 New Cross Road London SE14 6AS
Hope to see you there.
Open till the 21st September, on a temporary license from Lewisham Council, the Library hopes to be granted a new tenancy, and is therefore holding a fund-raising tea party on the 17th of September. Donate £10 or more to attend, and be thanked in tea and cakes!
I’m giving a shout out to two upcoming zine fairs, both held on the 25th of September 2011 – an unfortunate clash, alas.
“THE BRISTOL COMIC AND ZINE FAIR
When: Sunday 25th September 2011, 12pm – 6pm Where:Start the Bus, 7-9 Baldwin Street, Bristol, BS1 1RU (map)
FREE ENTRY
The Bristol Comic and Zine Fair brings UK self-publishers together for a one-day market, offering a wide array of comix, zines and other alternative publications. There will be stalls from individual creators, and a communal table full of work from across the small-press underground.”
It’s run by Bear Pit Zine, who describe issue 1, “Upheaval” as a “collection of comics, narrating various disruptive possibilities, imaginations, and alternative futures for the city of Bristol.” This strikes a chord with the sort of themes Proboscis have explored in the past, and aim to do in the future. I’ve just ordered a copy, as we visited Bristol as part of the City As Material series – it’ll be interesting to see an insider perspective.
There’s also…
THE SHEFFIELD ZINE FAIR, at Brezza, 10-14 Wellington Street, Sheffield, S1 4HD, from 11am to 6pm. Get in touch via sheffieldzinefair@hotmail.co.uk.
Hello, hello. Apologies for the lack of posts in the last two weeks – we’ve been away for the summer break, and have only just got back. To all faithful bookleteers who are still following… we salute you!
“3AM is the dark heart of the city, when the carefully repressed anxieties, aspirations and dreams of its emotionally parched inhabitants can no longer be contained”
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.
I’ve been following Julia Rothman’s excellent blog, Book By Its Cover for a good while now, and first heard about the concept behind Drawn In months back, but for some reason its actual release evaded me. I’ve re-discovered it now, and immediately snapped it up from Amazon, as we’re planning a new series looking into the methods and practices artists use to do their work, and also because I featured Ying-Chieh Liu’s exquisite sketchbooks recently.
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.
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.
A document of the five City As Material events we ran in London last year, this eBook collects the blog posts penned after each event, a selection of photographs taken, as well as an introduction to the project and our motives for undertaking it. Created in place of an individual eBook for Sonic Geographies, due to the absence of a special guest, this account of the series provides a narrative that was lacking from the other books produced, detailing the experience from each event on the day, not just the resulting output, and hopefully intriguing potential future collaborators.
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.
I’ve found Etsy to be a great source when looking for remarkable zines, often not featured anywhere else; either a sign that unfortunately, no-one has picked up on them yet, or the author is simply satisfied with creating and making their zines available to whoever stumbles upon them. Certainly the latter can make the reader feel as if they have discovered a hidden treasure of their own volition, rather than via the many zine groups floating about the internet, or word of mouth within the community.
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.
I’ve just discovered The Book Barge, a canal boat that acts as a floating bookshop and workshop space, currently touring around the U.K. The interior looks amazing, and not least of all, inviting – perfect for a relaxed perusal of its shelves. Normally moored in Staffordshire, in May it set off on a six-month tour to highlight the struggle of independent bookshops to readers across the country, buying essential items using only its own stock as currency. Curious and commendable – best of luck!
