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.
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!)
Alan Chamberlain, one of our PU&P Augmented Reading participants, posted a link to the bookleteer Facebook page about a programmable surface that has been created by researchers at MIT and Harvard. The composite material which looks pretty much like a piece of paper can fold itself into a number of predetermined shapes (in this case a boat, a plane and a tent) when an electric current is passed through it. The ‘paper’ contains a number of foil actuators to make it fold and tiny electromagnets to ensure it stays folded.
Researchers believe that one application might be to create containers that can change their size to adjust to the amount of liquid being poured into to them. Another might be to make StoryCubes that can expand and shrink depending on how much is written on them or how many people are collaborating. But they probably haven’t thought of that specific use yet..
Read more about it on wired.com where you can also see a video of it in folding action.. (Thanks Alan!)
Tony and the students from Brunel getting to grips with bookleteer
It was a busy week in the studio last week. Thursday was PU&P 10: Augmented Reading which I’ll write about soon and on Wednesday we hosted a private PU&P for Tony White and his creative writing students from Brunel University.
Tony has been working with the Brunel students to encourage the use of writing as a way of understanding different disciplines. The students have been given the task of producing a piece of work inspired either by the working-class social history archive at Brunel University or by conversation and encounter with a person working in a different discipline. Wednesday gave them the opportunity to visit the studio and play with Bookleteer which is the format they will use to present these pieces of writing. I’m looking forward to seeing what they produce.
Tony is an old friend of Proboscis and an experienced bookleteer. In the summer of 2009 he created a series of eBooks as part of the Balkanising Bloomsbury project while he was writer in residence at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) supported by the Leverhulme Trust through their artists in residence programme. The story for Balkanising Bloomsbury was created by cutting up, remixing and re-narrativising fragments from various sources including the Sydney Morning Herald, transcripts from the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Richard Burton translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. You can find the Balkanising Bloomsbury eBooks on diffusion.org.uk.
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 my search for augmented cubes I came across these LED-lit origami cube by the Evil Mad Scientists. They are made from a single sheet of paper folded to make a cube with an LED and battery inside. The components are your basic LED Throwie however the way the cube folds calls for what the scientists call ‘3-D circuitry’.
For this, the scientists mark the circuit on the paper with a pencil then attach aluminium foil to either freezer paper (Do we even have this in the UK?) or a laser-printed image of the circuit. Once you’ve attached the foil to the paper using the heat of an iron, you fold the cube, insert the LED and battery and Bob’s your uncle!
The cut-out aluminium foil and the laser-printed image of the circuit
I have to admit I haven’t had a chance to try this out, and I’m certain that it’s a more challenging process than the very detailed instructions suggest, but I love the idea of combining this with the bookleteer eBooks and Story Cubes. I can imagine an eBook where the pages consist of circuit diagrams that the reader prints out and completes by ironing on aluminium foil. Of course, that would probably mean the reader putting as much work into making the book as the author..
Just a little reminder that we’re running Pitch Up & Publish 10: Augmented Reading tomorrow afternoon between 2 and 5pm.
We already have some great people signed up and there is still room for a few more so do drop us a line if you’d like to come along. You can reach us at bookleteer at bookleteer.com
The PU&P session will explore the many different experiences of making books that augment reading. Through conversation and hands-on making we aim to discover how digital technologies might inform the design of future reading experiences.
Recently I’ve written about a few artists who combine cut-outs with books (Yukon Terya, Nicholas Jones and Chisato Tamabayashi to name three..) and Brian Dettmer fits right into that category. For The Book Autopsies Brian takes old books which have ceased to be valued for their content and gives them new life as art objects. The books are cut by hand and no text or image is repositioned to create the final ‘autopsy’. Beautiful, pain-staking work.
A blog post from 2007 on centripedalnotion.com contains a statement from the Toomey-Tourell Fine Art website (one of the galleries who represent Brian Dettmer) about the process of making this work. I couldn’t find the statement on the website but included it anyway because I think it gives an insight into the motivation and the method.
Explanation of Book Dissections-
In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the cover of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and other surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose a book’s hidden, fragmented memory. The completed pieces expose new relationships of a book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.
Reading a boing boing post about Brian’s work I was interested in a commenter who said they would prefer Brian to make their own books to treat in this way and not use discarded books. While I think (as was pointed out by someone else in the comments) that this kind of goes against the concept of Brian’s work I think it’s an interesting idea in relation to bookleteer.
As with the pop-up eBook I’m working on, it would be possible to design a bookleteer cutout book where the designer does not cut the book but produces an eBook template showing where it should be cut in order to complete the book. How does this alter the idea of book-as-object and the role of book artist when the work of making the book is completed by the person who downloads it?
Augmented Everyday Objects by Yuken Terya: A McDonald’s Happy Meal Bag and a Toilet Roll
Ok, I have to confess that I came across these two images (above) of Yuken Terya’s work first and then I hunted around in the hope of finding that he had also worked with books and written material. And luckily for me, I came across the two projects below on Yuken’s website.
Lost and Found (above) features cut-up copies of The New York Times in which the image on the front page has been cut to form what look to me like dozens of pieces of clover (I could be wrong about that – there’s no information on the website about what they represent).
The Giving Tree Project (below) is a cut-out of a tree made from a book which stands out from the page in such incredible detail.
I’ve shown these projects because they fit with the augmented reading theme but I really recommend you visit Yuken’s website. to see his other projects.
Guilherme Martins has made a printable paper version of the Arduino board. This amazing project allows you to download the PDF file, print out the top and bottom layout, glue them to whatever support you like and start adding components. The PDF files, a list of the necessary electronic components and instructions are all available at Guilherme’s site here..
Perhaps it might be asking a little too much of your readers to ask them to build an Arduino board before they can read your book but I find the concept of printed and shareable electronics fascinating. Arduino boards are powerful pieces of electronics capable of a great variety of control tasks, but what if you printed simpler circuits onto paper for people to download and connect up. I imagine some of the circuitry that controls the Electronic Popables might be suitable for this kind of project.
Of course, if you also have a printer that’s able to print in conductive ink then you would save yourself a lot of time..
