Nine years later, we have witnessed the impact of austerity and related policies adversely affect civil society and people in numerous ways. Many egregious examples are set out in the 2019 report of the UN Special Rapporteur (Philip Alston) and documented elsewhere in cases such as the “Windrush Generation’s” terrible experiences of the “Hostile Environment”, the increasing number of deaths (especially suicides) of people with disabilities denied state benefits by being wrongfully assessed as “able” to work (often when demonstrably incapacitated or even with terminal conditions), or those “sanctioned” from receiving benefits for minor infringements or justifiably missed interviews. The sheer number of appeals the government loses in such cases (up to 80% in some areas) reveals the nature of this ideological assault.

Beyond this, there are social and cultural shifts that have occurred too. The increasing intolerance against people from abroad who have made their lives here; the growing confidence of explicit racism and hate for ‘difference’ of all kinds. The worrying advance of populist and nationalist tendencies and agendas, as well as the abandonment of the UK’s established role in Europe for an incoherent future of false promises and jingoistic hyperbole.

And in the past few months, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen a right-wing ‘Conservative’ government forced to adopt state-led interventionist policies of a type that they ridiculed in an election just a few months previously. Even then, their management of the situation has been haphazard at best, disingenuous and deceitful at worst, as well as incompetent and irresponsible in practice.

Over the past couple of months I have been contemplating how to respond to the pandemic and what Proboscis can do in our own small way. My first instinct was to act immediately, but then the potential of slowing down, of taking stock, of not being reactive but proactive took hold. Our daily lives, ways of working and methods of engagement have been drastically altered in the past few months, and the longer term outlook is that this will continue – not merely in direct response of the pandemic, but in concert with all the other forces, such as climate change impacts, which are just beginning to be felt. We are not going back to ‘normal’, no matter how much we may try or wish to. There is only going forwards and choosing to make a different future.

So what, in 2020, are the material conditions for being a responsible creative practitioner? How do we continue to make work that is socially, culturally and politically relevant? What adaptations – to modes, methods, materials, tools and venues – will we need to make as we move forwards? For many, being a creative practitioner is not just a career choice to earn an income but a vocation, a calling. How do we adapt to the changing circumstances and keep faith, keep true to our calling, foster hope in darkening times?

Viral Commissioning & Open Call

Over the past 25 years I have commissioned hundreds of different people to make pieces for publication – sometimes essays and articles, sometimes visual artworks, sometimes hybrid ‘projects’. I have always tried to commission pieces from new people and not to rely on a ‘pool’ of existing contributors. However, my reach is limited – my networks grow slowly and fitfully, a process that requires an ongoing diligence for developing new contacts and making new relationships.

So I have been pondering alternative ways to broaden out who participates and can use this platform to share their voice and perspective. This is more vital than ever given all the pressures described above and recent events around the world. Forces of oppression are visible everywhere, unleashed and egged on by would-be authoritarian regimes, revelling in the chaos and using the distractions for their own nefarious purposes.

One potential route is to adopt a ‘viral’ commissioning model, whereby I initiate a sequence of commissions and then invite those contributors to nominate and broker an exchange with a further person from their own networks to commission, who then nominates a further person and so on (with the aim that nominees ought not have previously been commissioned by Proboscis or bookleteer).

Another way is to adopt the ‘open call’ method and ask people to self-submit a publication on bookleteer and then to review and select from whatever is proposed to add to the series.

For Materials Conditions 2 I propose to utilise both methods.

The proviso is that Proboscis no longer has the ability to remunerate contributors financially. We stopped receiving grant funding for such activities from Arts Council England in 2012; bookleteer operates as a self-publishing platform that doesn’t charge users for its services (except for physical print-on-demand options) and its (minimal) running costs are covered by Proboscis from our income on other projects. I remain loathe to tie this activity into the agendas of funding organisations like ACE in exchange for (often inadequate) grant monies, so will explore alternative strategies for rewarding contributors.

Revisiting the Periodical

One option might be to initiate a new version of the Periodical – our former monthly subscription service (2012-15) which posted out selected bookleteer publications that had been professionally printed and bound using our print on demand service. Instead of remuneration, selected authors (who had already self-published on bookleteer) received 25 copies of their printed publication each.

A monthly service would be unfeasible now, both economically and practically. However, a twice or possibly three times a year posting out of selected publications could be viable.

It might also be a suitable way to develop a community around the Material Conditions 2 series – people who are invested reciprocally both as participating authors and members of an audience for the ideas and experiences of others.

If any of these possibilities interests you – contributing to the series or subscribing to a new version of the Periodical – please leave a comment to this post or respond via Twitter or on bookleteer’s Facebook page.

No rush: let’s do things slowly, with care and consideration.

Charlie Gere’s – Poems From My Chinese Typewriter

and Gareth Evans and Andrew Kötting’s, Another Alphabetarium of Kötting

Our TK Reite Notebooks project is perhaps the classic example, but we have made many others, such as the recent Field & Group Notebooks for the Antarctic Cities Youth Expedition.

Here is a simple guide to help understand the steps in the process.

Download the PDF here.

Giles Lane and Rachel Jacobs have put together two bookleteer books documenting Republic of Learning workshops about responses to climate change. We’ll be adding more books as the series continues.
View the collection here.

A?- The trip to #Antarctica is ending for the #AntarcticCitiesYouthExpedition but the most important part is about to start. Stay tuned for the creation of the #AntarcticYouthCoalition to inspire others to?protect #Antarctica @westernsydneyu @UTAS_ @CAPELatAm @Antarcticlegacy pic.twitter.com/Q6Ydycahhg

— Antarctic-Cities (@AntarcticCities) February 19, 2020

Giles Lane has designed a set of personal field notebooks and a group workbook for the participants of the Antarctic Cities project’s Youth Expedition to Antarctica. Five young people each representing one of the “Gateway Cities” have been selected to spend a week at the Chilean Base in Antarctica this February. Look out for the results soon!
“View the Collection here.”

I’ve recently re-worked some of my posts from my personal website into bookleteer eBooks:

Hiding in Plain Sight – Read Online or Download PDF

A Calculation is Not a Judgement – Read Online or Download PDF

The Data Sublime & A Poetics of Data – Read Online or Download PDF

Daemons of the Shadow World – Read Online or Download PDF

View other publications i’ve made on bookleteer here.

Over the past decade we’ve run a variety of workshops and engagement projects using bookleteer and its publishing formats to enable people to make and share things they value, both here in the UK and abroad. We’ve collaborated with research and academic partners (including museums and libraries) to devise practical toolkits for social and cultural action; as well as creating methods of sharing knowledge, discoveries and experiences outside the usual channels for public dissemination.

Bookleteer has become the foundation for a whole new way for local communities to develop their own self-publishing cultures, such as our work with Reite people in Papua New Guinea on the TKRN project.

There’s still plenty more to be achieved in the next decade…

People centric practice implies not just a human centred approach, but one which encompasses the whole context in which we live and work, and impacts on other creatures and lifeforms that are part of such environments – the more-than-human world. It addresses the whole ecologies of which we are part, on upon which we depend for our very existence. People does not have to mean exclusively human – we might consider other species (trees, birds, mammals etc) as peoples, as some indigenous humans have done, since they constitute their own societies and ways of being in the world. All have as much right to life as each other, it is only human hubris which champions our right to own and exploit everything else as paramount.

The booklet brings together, in a simple way, a set of principles and guides for working based on empathy, common sense, trust and agency. It is centred on establishing and following an ethos – through listening and responding, trusting and being trusted; anticipating consequences and reflecting on what you do. It adds into the mix principles for building trust borrowed from Baroness Onora O’Neill’s 2002 Reith Lectures, as well as the Precautionary Principle, Duty of Care and the Nolan Principles of Public Life. It also includes personal values: passion, intensity, intimacy, pleasure, obligation, responsibility, culpability.

Download on bookleteer, or read the online version.

The UnBias Fairness Toolkit is now available and free to download – you can read all about it in the Handbook below:

The titles are much inspired by the fantastic works of Edward Gorey and by long and venerable tradition of fictional books imagined by some of literature’s greats: Laurence Sterne, Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula LeGuin, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec & Stanislav Lem among many others.

As part of this project, Grace has co-developed with local people an information booklet and a Patient Notebook using bookleteer to help communicate more about the condition and the medical treatments available, as well as to allow people to record their own medical information in a dedicated book of their own. A second book covering cervical cancer has also been produced. Recently the United Nations Populations Fund have been instrumental in enabling IHI to print around 15,000 copies of each of the information books for distribution to communities across Haiti.

A Kreyol (Haitian Creole) version of the book folding instructions is also now available (see below).

book_folding_instructions-kreyol

An unplanned server upgrade caused a cascade of problems deep in the core of the Generator, the software that does the actual hard work of taking your content and flowing it into the Diffusion eBook and StoryCube formats. It has taken considerable efforts by Joe Flintham, bookleteer’s principal developer with the forensic brilliance of Yasir Assam, bookleteer’s original software developer, to analyse the root problem, fix it then chase down all the ensuing changes in dependencies.

Here are two fabulous new books created by Canadian artist Joyce Majiski, who has been one of bookleteer’s most prolific and exquisite users for many years:

Since many subscribers were keen for the project to continue I will be considering options – the most likely being a once yearly round-up. If you’re interested in subscribing to this, please leave a comment on this post to let me know.

My work with anthropologist James Leach and the villagers of Reite in Papua New Guinea has defined much of my recent work with bookleteer and is shaping the trajectory of development in which it is heading. You can read about our fieldwork in PNG, about the TKRN project and the TKRN Toolkit or explore the lovely handmade books created by the community on the dedicated website I created for them. We are returning to Reite in April and May this year to do further work, and to expand the project into some neighbouring villages. We have also been invited to develop a parallel project with indigenous fieldworkers in the neighbouring island nation of Vanuatu. Later in 2016 we hope to facilitate some of the villagers from Reite to transfer their skills and knowledge of using the TKRN Toolkit to local people in Vanuatu.

This past year I have also been helping (in a small way) Grace Tillyard to develop her amazing Breast Cancer awareness and engagement programme for women in Haiti. The project is hosted by Project Medishare‘s Womens Health Centre in Port-au-Prince and recently received $60,000 in funding. Grace is currently co-developing with local people a new kind of Patient Notebook using bookleteer to help communicate more about the condition and the medical treatments available, as well as to allow people to record their own medical information in a dedicated book of their own. We hope to have a prototype ready this Spring for testing by the community.

LibraryPress Legacy
I have also been collaborating with Peter Baxter of Camden’s Library Service to extend and continue the work of introducing self-publishing using bookleteer into London’s libraries that was initiated in 2014 and 2015 through the LibraryPress project. Last week we held a professional development workshop for Librarians from Camden, Hackney, Brent, Hounslow and Harrow. Over the next few months the aim is for these librarians to use bookleteer to create publications with library users as part of the many events to promote reading and literacy that take place. We shall be selecting some of these to be printed and distributed as part of a special issue of the Periodical.

Lastly, I wish to share a stunning new book, Northern Musings, created by the Canadian artist and printmaker, Joyce Majiski:

What the series shows is a lineage stretching back to Saxon times of the struggle to assert and protect the inherent rights and dignities of ordinary people against the attempts by the wealthy and powerful to control and corral resources, assets and power for themselves, at the expense of everyone else.

Originally distributed to subscribers of the Periodical there are 35 sets remaining, each of which has been bound together with red satin ribbon in a special edition.
Each set costs £15 plus postage and packing: buy your’s here.

View the whole collection here – free to read online or download, print out and make up yourself.

I’d like to encourage other library authorities who are also interested in using bookleteer as part of their services to get in touch : we are more than happy to offer workshops and provide consultancy on how bookleteer can used by the public and integrated within existing projects and services.

We have created an additional resource to help plan layouts and work out how many pages you need when devising your content for bookleteer. Two PDF documents are available, one for planning landscape books and another for portrait books.
Download the Landscape Planner or the Portrait Planner.