Author: hazemtagiuri

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events

Bookleteer at Platform Festival

We’ll be running a drop-in Bookleteer workshop at the upcoming Platform Festival, which celebrates the launch of Islington’s new arts venue for young people, held during the 15th to the 31st of July.

If you’re aged 13 – 19, bring your ideas and digital content – photographs, stories, text, art – on a USB key drive, or create a Dropbox account and share the relevant files, and we’ll sign you up to Bookleteer, help you create your eBook or Storycube, then print and make it, for you to take home on the day and share online.

We’ll be there on Monday 25th July,  from 2 – 4 pm, at:

Platform
Hornsey Road Baths
260 Hornsey Road
London
N7 7QT

Read more here. Hope to see you there!

Categories
inspiration

Book Sculpture Portraits

Knowing my penchant for unusual pieces created from books and paper, Giles turned me on to the extraordinary work of artist Nicholas Galanin, who hand-carves 3D portraits from lengthy volumes, as if they were inverted sculpture blocks. The source models for these surreal, paper death masks were first captured with a 3D scanner to produce an exact digital rendition of the subject, then cut out and bound at the back – a sculpture you can actually leaf through.

Click on the picture below to view the Flickr gallery.

Categories
inspiration

Diffusion Archive Highlight: Pharmaceutical Cubes by Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith, poet and founder of UbuWeb, created this series of six StoryCubes, each inscribed with the side effects of a certain prescription drug. The text is rendered in illegible 1-point type, so that the words become texture – some resembling the grooves in a vinyl record, another a peculiar lilac coloured static noise. Kenneth also provides an interesting point in regards to their physicality:

“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.”

Download and make them for yourself on Diffusion.

(You can also read a more in-depth post about these cubes, penned by our former blogger, Karen Martin, here.)

"Prozac" and "Effexor"

 

Categories
inspiration

Stop Sharpening Your Knives

An anthology series of poetry and illustration, Stop Sharpening Your Knives has been around for a good few years, and is currently accepting submissions for its 5th edition. I had the good fortune to hear a performance by one of its editors, poet Jack Underwood, at the launch night of the London Word Festival a few months back, who was equally hilarious and heartfelt. No doubt he’s got good taste as well, eh?

Categories
inspiration

Diffusion Archive Highlight: Expeditions in Paper Science

Created at our first Pitch Up & Publish event by Matthew Sheret, co-founder of We Are Words + Pictures, Expeditions in Paper Science is a compilation of blog posts written for his website. Matthew says:

“I’ve long been interested in the idea of physicalising web articles, and while an industry has solidified around POD in the last few years they remain a step removed from the immediacy I’m itching for. Bookleteer instantly unlocked that; simple cut-’n’-paste gave me a nice little document I’ve been throwing around since.”

Download, make and read it on Diffusion.

Categories
inspiration

Video games vs Penguin Classics

Olly Moss (a hugely talented illustrator and graphic designer, which I’ve had the good fortune to recently discover) created these redesigned covers for a number of his favourite video games, inspired by Romek Marber’s classic designs for Penguin Books in the 1960’s. This seemingly unsuited clash of mediums works so well, no doubt aided by the supreme wit and iconic cult references in Olly’s work. He’s als0 redesigned posters for classic films in his “Films in Black and Red” series, which, needless to say, are ace.

Categories
inspiration

Diffusion Archive Highlight: Ancient Lights, City Shadows

A collaborative eBook produced as a result of our City As Material: Skyline event, Ancient Lights, City Shadows features mixed media collected on the day and material we were inspired to create after our wander through the city.

Adorning the cover is one of Martin Fidler’s intricate skyline drawings, opposed with an ambiguous photograph of Tower 42, taken from ground level, looking up – once the image is reversed, it resembles surreal train tracks, running into the horizon. Flowing throughout the book are two lines, mapping our elevation over distance and over duration, captured via a iPhone GPS / Altitude app. They stream through notebook scraps and photos, providing a locational narrative – we liked the idea of extending and distorting this digital data into an abstract visual, creating our own man-made skyline for the backdrop of the eBook.

Read Ancient Lights, City Shadows below, using our online bookreader, or download on Diffusion.

Categories
inspiration

Writer App

Instead of featuring a publication today, I’m looking at something which might aid in creating one. Writer, by Information Architects, is an ultra minimal word processing application for Mac and iPad, designed to hold your attention purely on the task at hand – writing. It has no formatting options, one font, one size, and can be set to focus only on the sentence you’re currently working on, fading the rest of the text out, so you “think, spell and write one sentence at a time”. I’ve been using TextEdit recently to compose any creative pieces I’ve been working on (often, handwritten first, then edited in) to avoid distractions, so I can appreciate Writer’s intention. We’ve recently got an iPad 2 in the studio, so I might have a tinker with this – I can imagine it would be useful for writing on the fly during City As Material events or whilst lounging in the studio, free from the dreaded desk and it’s vast, blank screen!

iA Writer for Mac from Oliver Reichenstein on Vimeo.

Categories
inspiration

Diffusion Archive Highlight: Three Essays by Samuel Johnson

Selected by writer and journalist Bill Thompson, this eBook compiles three of Samuel Johnson’s essays in a slim, portable format; Rambler 2, pondering the nature of ambition and self-deception, Idler 48, in which he speaks of  how we ‘play throughout life with the shadows of business’, and Adventurer 95, exploring the process of writing and original ideas. As Bill says, “They are the perfect refuge from the blogosphere and, since they require no external power, excellent for those long journeys when your laptop battery dies before you reach your destination and the only discarded newspaper to hand is yesterday’s Daily Express.”

Read Three Essays on Diffusion.

Categories
inspiration

“Four Twenty” Zine by Alexander McLuckie

Another zine from Holy Ghost, this time from one of its founders, photographer Alexander McLuckie. A 20 page, black and white photography zine, each copy of Four Twenty has a uniquely coloured cover in various vivid shades. Check the image of a bunch of them stacked in a box – a paper rainbow!

Available via the Holy Ghost Shop.