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inspiration

Shi Cheng: Short Stories from Urban China

Shi Cheng: Short Stories from Urban China, recently published by Comma Press, gathers ten fictions by writers from cities of varying affluence, nature and distance in contemporary China, not to mention the varying styles of prose and stances of the protagonists.

Dispelling the naive notion of a vast land of unified thinking, Shi Cheng (“ten cities”) tells not the comprehensive biographies of each city, but zooms in further, allowing the reader to connect with individual voices on an almost cellular level. Yet, as the editors suggest, when looking this close it’s possible that we can all relate to the universal human themes.

The stories collected here give a rich sense of the environments and their impact on modern men and women. Acting as cultural antennae, they send back vibrations of what life might be like for those in such places – alluring whispers of real lives. Keep a keen eye out for more from Comma Press.
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inspiration

‘Acquired for development by…’ – A Hackney Anthology

Allow me to highlight an intriguing new book by the recently established Influx Press, who specialise in site-specific fiction. ‘Acquired for development by… A Hackney Anthology’ is a collection of short stories and poetry inspired by the London borough of Hackney, penned by twenty-five established and upcoming writers.

It caught my interest as Giles and I have written a ‘speculative fiction’ piece for City As Material 2 (part of our collection of investigations, observations and musings on the cities we visited with Professor Starling, Dodolab and co, almost ready to go to print) which is rooted in distinct locations and events and informed by real-world experiences.

Despite all that flows in and out of these places over time – and indeed Hackney – they seem to maintain a certain character which influences those that live in them or pass through, seeping into creative works regardless of the author’s intent. I’m looking forward to picking up a copy, and will be keeping a keen eye out for the next offering from Influx Press.

Read a nice little interview they did with BookMachine here.

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inspiration

Book Sculpture Panoramas

Guy Laramee has produced these spectacular sculptures carved from old tomes, excavating covers and pages to build intricate panoramas of natural landscapes and ancient structures. A wonderful paradox of taking away to create, they look as if they have been unearthed, rather than meticulously composed. Mountain valleys and steppes, an idealised japanese garden complete with tiny raked contours, temples set in gaping caverns. Stunning scenes that blur the borders of perception, liable to make you forget their source material – images that linger in the mind, formed not by words in ink, but by hewn layers of the very matter they are printed on.

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ideas & suggestions

Narrative Immersion

I focused on how technology can enhance and change our engagement with narratives in a previous post, so I’m going to step back and look at the highly immersive nature of text-based books as a medium.

After recently finishing a book and scanning my shelves for my next literary foray, my eyes settled on a fairly large book, and although initially daunted by its length, knowing that it would take me a fair while to finish even if engrossed, I soon started to relish the idea. I realised I would have a portable, episodic experience that I could dip into for the next few weeks, becoming instantly immersed as I did so – the narrative spurring ever more interest and giving heightened importance to the outcome (due to discovering more about the characters and investing in their stories), and possibly even gaining relevance to external events as I progressed.

Being able to burn through an entire book in one go makes the experience rather like watching a film; reading it in parts is more akin to a TV series, or a video game with a story that is revealed as the player moves ahead. It could be suggested the latter two allow a greater level of expectation and intrigue to build between narrative points (due to the real-world time elapsed), but all three mediums still dictate visual messages to the audience, albeit being open to multiple interpretations. Books allow the reader to paint their own visuals in their mind, forming structures within, giving characters familiar faces from their own lives, and grasping unique meanings from what is said and done, filtered through their own past and ideologies. In short, they are dictated by readers as well as authors, leading to individual, self-contained experiences which change as they are reread later on in life.

It will be interesting to see how as technology constantly moves forward and the standard of presenting stories evolves beyond text and the spoken word how this experience might be preserved. Might it even be mimicked, through bespoke forms of virtual reality systems, or audio books where the choice of narrator is tailored to the listener?

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inspiration

Sorrows of the Moon: A Journey Through London

Hi everybody, my name is Elena and I have been working as an intern at Proboscis since mid June. On Proboscis’ website I posted some reflections of mine initially taking inspiration from a visual essay I am composing on the wall of the studio. The visual essay combines some impressions sprung from the observation of Proboscis’ work and some scattered ideas about geography and identity, the relationship between private and public spaces and the anatomy of the city. I’ll be posting some brief thoughts on inspiring books, remarkable exhibitions or curious places I think are worth sharing.

In response to Hazem’s post about Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night, I’d like to recommend another penetrating and poetic book which draws a personal trajectory on the map of London, that is Iqbal Ahmed’s Sorrows of the Moon: A Journey Through London, which explores petty story-lives of peripheral characters, often marked by resignation, loneliness, failure. This dominant tone of melancholy blurs and dampens the enthusiasm and the celebration of London diversity, underlining how the common destiny of the capital and of all the people inhabiting it for one reason or another is one of sorrow and isolation. Observed on a clear night from Parliament Hill, the moon, which acts as the unifying image across the book inspired by a poem of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal , wraps and encloses the city in a fate of sterility and desolation.

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inspiration

Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night

“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.

Read it here.

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inspiration

Drawn In

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.

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inspiration

The Book Barge

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!

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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.

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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.