Hello again, welcome back. A little treat to spur on 2012 now, with an animated interactive poem by agency Studio Juice, written by singer Laura Marling and illustrated by artist collective Shynola, entitled The Beast. Taken from the song of the same name, from her latest album A Creature I Don’t Know, it describes the narrator’s affair with a character both alluring and sinister – a haunting tale of forlorn love. Marling is an amazing song-writer and poet, shown in both her previous work, and the verses she has penned for this project. These duet with the expressionistic scratchy illustrations and the narration, conjuring dreamlike spectres which course through the poem and the readers mind.
Projects like this, that intersect the realms of poetry and digital mediums and distribution channels, will hook new audiences that are used to more than just the written word. Despite my belief that pure text should be enough for interested readers, when done in this harmonious manner it works brilliantly. Kudos!
On December 15th we are launching a new series of eBook commissions called Material Conditions. This series asks professional creative practitioners to reflect on what the material conditions for their own practice are, especially now in relation to the climate of change and uncertainty brought about by the recession and public sector cuts.
The first set of 8 contributions will be published as eBooks made with bookleteer and available as downloadable PDFs for handmade books, online via bookreader versions and in a limited edition (50) of professionally printed and bound copies which will be available for sale (at £16 per set plus P&P). You can pre-order a set via paypal:
We’ll be releasing one eBook every day on Diffusion until the print launch on December 15th in our Clerkenwell studio, where copies of the full limited edition printed set of 8 books will be available.
(Material Conditions is part of Proboscis’ Public Goods programme – seeking to create a library of responses to these urgent questions that can inspire others in the process of developing their own everyday practices of creativity; that can guide those seeking meaning for their choices; that can set out positions for action around which people can rally.)
Most writers have one or two trusted readers-of-drafts, critical friends who are relied on to make suggestions and offer that gentle critique that we didn’t know we needed. And the closer we get to conventional publication, the more likely we are to find ourselves working with an editor who scrutinizes our text for errors, ambiguities, sloppiness and – horror of horrors – breaks with convention. With the publication of my essay on picnic and community, published using Bookleteer last month, I had the chance to reflect on the experience of ‘doing without’ an editor. It was stimulating but also a little scary.
In the summer of 2011, I needed to take a decision about finalising and publishing the work. Choosing Bookleteer presented me with a new option: it meant I could go all the way to publication without any editorial oversight.
Picnic was an unfunded project: no client, no defined audience, no expectations, no responsibilities. That may seem liberating but it also means no feedback, no reassurance, no confirmation. I kept the text to myself (apart from sharing it necessarily with my collaborator, the artist Gemma Orton) at the obvious risk of missing out on potentially valuable guidance, having mistakes spotted, and being seen as arrogant.
The key justification for me was that to submit to editorial control would have been a crass betrayal of one of the essay’s themes. The essay contrasts picnic with formal meals, it contrasts organisation with networking, and disorder with order, as a way of exploring our tendency to idealise community in structured, formal terms. I felt that by submitting to the convention of editing – a fundamentally conservative process – I would have contradicted that theme in a rather feeble way.
I was also aware that Picnic challenges people’s expectations, because it doesn’t fit easily into any recognised genre. An editor might have made valiant, corrosive efforts to turn it into this or that.
I don’t wish to imply that the editorial process is either redundant or pointless, but it may be that many writers come to be over-dependent on editors. Perhaps this is to do with perceived differences between non-fiction and fiction. Few musical composers or visual artists would expect to cede so much influence over what they do. On the whole, editing is a process for confirming convention and reinforcing norms, which may not always be what’s needed. By making the publication process realisable, it was Bookleteer that empowered me to remain consistent to the theme without compromise.
Being 18 in the past and today: using Bookleteer for a museum-based project with young people
by Katrina Siliprandi
Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service
Young people working on ‘Project 18’ carried out and recorded 39 interviews in people’s homes, at Norwich Castle museum and in residential care homes. They amalgamated quotes from these interviews with photographs of selected museum objects to produce both a printed booklet and an e-reader version using Bookleteer.
The project is a partnership between Norwich Castle Museum and the Mancroft Advice Project (MAP), a charity that provides help, education and training for young people through advisors, counsellors, youth workers and a drop-in centre. Project 18 helps young people to learn more about themselves, others and their community through the creation of an accessible small archive of oral history testimony about being 18 in the past and today, inspired by the museum’s collections.
Some people might expect paper copies to be of low importance and relevance to young people who are already comfortably immersed and swimming in the cyber ocean. Conversely, paper copies could be seen as important tools to present to those people who have travelled to positions of influence and governance where a more traditional background might place greater value on well-trodden methods of communication.
We found the reality to be that the young participants placed great store in the tangible form of the printed items. They valued something they could actually hold, see, feel and smell. This multiply dimensioned tangibility was something they could experience wherever and whenever they chose, rather than only when in contact with a screen. Just having something physical to keep, share and treasure was hugely important. In addition young people expressed their gratification about something that was a token, a signifier of their achievement and enhanced status. Of course this enhanced status works both in the way in which others see the young person and in the way in which they see and value themselves.
This effect was re-enforced by the good physical standard of the booklets themselves. The cost of short-run printing was impressive. We were not forced to order a huge bulk run to achieve economy (with concomitant waste), nor did we have to be miserly in distributing the booklets to the young people and their friends, museum and MAP staff, stakeholders and supporters.
At the same time, having the e-booklet available has given an easy flavour of the project and its purpose to outsiders such as funders and government agencies, both national and local. We feel this kind of attention-catching and information giving is much more likely to lead to interaction and positive responses and outcomes than just a paper communication in the general wasteful paper blizzard. In this way, perhaps counter-intuitively, the e-booklet has provided us with a more permanent resource than traditional paper copies for those that we wish to inspire and involve in financially supporting future projects.
Maybe, too, by putting the booklet on the internet we will benefit from some degree of good fortune as people anywhere in the world stumble on the project. One person’s happy discovery could be promulgated world-wide with astonishing rapidity.
Project 18, a collaboration between Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service and MAP, looked at what it’s like to be 18 now, and what it was like to be 18 in the past. This eBook, uploaded earlier this week to Diffusion, is a collection of stories gathered by young people from some of the older participants involved, alongside images of relevant objects from the Museum’s collection, as well as feedback from those who took part in the workshops and other activities.
Designed with comic book style panels for each story and vivid colours throughout (which look great contrasted with the monochrome photographs and historic objects), Project 18 provides snapshots of lives from what must seem to be another world for most younger people these days, in a format they’ll most likely be familiar with and enjoy. No doubt they’ll also find many similarities in the sentiments expressed and antics undertaken by their elders, proving how core human experiences persist through generations.
Download, print and make for yourself on Diffusion here.
In April 2011, Proboscis began a collaboration with the Centre for Applied Research in Education Technologies (CARET) and Crucible at the University of Cambridge, on a research project exploring the nature of groups and group behaviours within the context of the university’s communities and the design of software platforms for collaboration.
Our output of this project, Agencies of Engagement, a set of four books designed to act as a creative thinking and doing tool, has just been published – via our short run printing service, as online bookreader versions, and on our publication hosting platform, Diffusion.
“We believe in creating and using tools that reflect our values and practices – making use of them in our projects and research enables us to embody this ethos in the ways in which we collaborate with our partners and share the outcomes. The structure of each of the four books has, at its core, our desire to inspire others and to illustrate ideas and practices – sharing not just the fruits of our work, but the processes and methods which we have employed. Publishing the books with bookleteer enables the potential for the insights and observations, methods and practices to resonate widely both through sharing physical and digital versions. This was also a core value for the project’s output, that it would be of value not just to CARET and Proboscis as documentation of what we achieved, but to others as a guide for developing their own engagement practices. “
– Giles Lane
Method Stack describes a number of the engagement methods and practices used by Proboscis in our engagement work as well as other tools and sources of inspiration.
Project Account sets out the process used in the project as a case study for others to guide their own engagement practices.
Drawing Insight illustrates the observations and insights of the project in a simple and accessible way.
Catalysing Agency explores the need and concept for using a ‘Catalyst’ (an individual acting as a change agent) to trigger meaningful engagement with wider communities.
For the printed sets, twenty five copies are contained within a limited edition, handmade slipcase (displayed above left); the remaining copies are bound with handmade wrappers (above right).
Download, print and make up the set for yourself on Diffusion here.
If you’ve been following this blog even remotely, you might have sussed my interest in papercraft and recycled materials, possibly partly due to my own artistic limitations. I’m in awe of artists who can do what I can’t – produce highly visual and sculptural pieces, rather than simply text, and particularly transform paper, something I use purely as a medium to scribble on and create artifices, into more then just a 2D vessel.
Continuing in this tradition, I’d like to share the work of Jennifer Collier, spied via the good folks at Fast Co Design. Using a sewing machine, she stitches found pieces of paper as if they were cloth, into all manner of three-dimensional sculptures. Shoes, clothes, everyday objects, even a camera and a typewriter – I think there’s a delicious absurdity in crafting a model of a tool, using the material it usually spews out.
Jen Stark creates fantastical, multicoloured paper sculptures which transgress the humble medium, composing simple sheets into three-dimensional works of art using every spectrum of the rainbow. The intricate layers, the shapes they form, and the sheer vibrancy of her work are mesmerising – what’s more, they’re all hand-cut. Perhaps it’s not wise to delve too deep into her catalog, if you have any pressing work to do…
I paid a visit to the London Art Book Fair last Saturday at the Whitechapel Gallery, and have finally got around to writing a brief piece about it now – we’ve been swamped in the studio.
Along with large publishing houses, the fair played host to a number of small publishers and unique handcrafted artists’ books. A few of my picks…
An enjoyable exhibition called Sense and the City is now on at the London Transport Museum, which explores new ways how our understanding, experience and perception of the city is continually re-shaped by the rapid changes occurring in technology and IT.
The same categories of space and time are radically put into question as the access and fusibility of information is massively altered and boosted by open data, smartphones, and a blizzard of new apps. It is noteworthy to realise how the unconstrained use of these devices make us think of the city, of its vastness and complexity, in a totally different way. It seems we can cover the city, physically and imaginatively, much easier and faster than before. However, the abundance and redundancy of data produced and incessantly consumed, add intricacy and diverse levels of meaning to our vision of the city.
A distinguishing feature underpinning any present project or prototype for future research – as the ones presented by the Royal College of Art – is the restless attention on every consumer’s feeling and perception of the environment which has to be shared and fall in the public domain. The only risk is to accumulate data over data just for the sake of it, and the question is whether out of this over-exposure to information and stimulus we’ll ever find a substantial thread.
