Our final Pitch In & Publish: City As Material event, Sonic Geographies, was held last Friday. A shortage of participants (probably due to the icy weather and weekday timing) meant that myself and Giles were alone in our wander though London, resulting in a slightly different walk then usual. Equipped with Audioboo, we set off to record the different sound properties of the city, in a far more leisurely and exploratory mode then previous events.
We had decided that rather than strain to produce a typical eBook with original work and concepts, which would be limited under the circumstances, we would instead purely document the day’s trip and link to audio recordings made during it. After capturing some of the ambient and wildlife sounds in Hyde Park (mingled with the hum of construction work and a talking animatronic tree), we entered the bustle of Mayfair and Soho. Surprisingly, in this sprawl the sound landscape was remarkably similar, and sometimes indistinguishable, when we were in enclosed courtyards and winding alleys, the geography creating immersive sound bubbles. Lastly, we managed to record the faint notes of a church organ, in the undercroft of the chapel at Lincoln’s Inn.
Back at the studio we created the eBook, lifting the images and GPS located maps of the recordings from Audioboo, and using a QR code to easily link to the relevant page. For the last few pages, we used images from “The Cries Of London” and “The Beggar’s Opera” playing cards sets, then a page consisting purely of a visualisation of white noise, to illustrate the change of the sound landscape in recent years – the cries of market traders promoting their wares has given way to a homogenised hubbub of engines and vehicles.
You can listen to the recordings made on Audioboo, and download the Sonic Geographies eBook on Diffusion here. Keep track of the discussion online with the #cityasmaterial hash tag on Twitter.
I’ve just noticed a handful of eBooks and Storycubes in the Diffusion Archive that relate to songs and sound, particularly relevant with our last Pitch In & Publish: City As Material event – “Sonic Geographies”, being held this Friday (which you can book a place for here).
Bird Song was created to accompany a sound installation at the Chiswell Walled Garden in Dorset, for this years b-side festival in September. Each side of the Storycube portrays a silhouette of a different bird in its natural setting, with its particular call represented in onomatopoeic text. It must have been a great visual piece when paired with the sound, especially with the three dimensional form of the Storycube, as the silhouettes start to resemble the shadows of actual birds.
I’ll be looking at the other song themed items soon, and starting to pick up on other collective trends when delving through the archive.
This Highlight isn’t actually in the Diffusion archive, as it was created via the bookleteer PPOD service, but I thought it’s a great example of another eBook accompanying an exhibition, similar to the one made for Cosmo China.
“Tales of Things: Objects, Stories & Voices from the BME Communities in Greenwich” was created alongside an exhibition celebrating Black History Month 2010, held at the Greenwich Heritage Centre. Cultural and personal objects were contributed from the Greenwich Black, Asian and minority Ethnic (BME) Forum, to tell stories of cultural identity and heritage.
Each page of the eBook has an image of a particular exhibit, and a QR code that is linked to a digital archive of stories and information for that object, allowing the reader to scan the codes with a phone or computer with a webcam, and access more information than is available in the eBook. This lends a sense of interaction and personal involvement with the object, as they have to physically seek out the tale behind it, not least the addition of pages at the back of the book for the reader to add their own images, tales and QR codes.
This was created to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Cosmo China, a handpainted ceramic studio and shop in Bloomsbury, London. To celebrate, Cosmo held a special exhibition of 20 plates painted by their artists (and a few special guests) for the occasion, which are showcased in the eBook.
Each page is devoted to one of the plates, and has a brief biography and picture of the artist. The simple format really allows the wonderful designs to shine through, and serves as a great souvenir of the exhibition, or even if the reader wasn’t there, an advert for Cosmo’s talent and charm.
Using eBooks to accompany exhibitions and galleries would make a refreshing change; a portable and attractive guide that trumps individual cards that often get lost or ignored. Curators could also provide an eBook notebook, for people to customise with stickers next to each exhibit that they find interesting – a personalised account of the event.
This archive review comes courtesy of my fellow Future Jobs Fund employee here at Proboscis, Mandy Tang. The Storycube and accompanying eBook were actually the very first publications she created here – the ambitious concept speaks volumes about her work.
Picking a path, the player follows the line around the cube, until they reach one of six destinations, each with a different icon representing a personality type. The player then checks the eBook to read the corresponding description.
“What Type Are You?” really takes advantage of the cube form – the shape is integral to the game (as Mandy says: “When holding a cube you find yourself tempted to see whats on the other faces”). It’s also the first game in the archive – hopefully it will inspire fellow game-makers to create more. Download it here, and play it for yourself.
This illustrated scheduler was created by Alice Angus, whilst experimenting with eBook notebooks. Each month (a page) is adorned with one of her works, and writing spaces for tasks and notes. The simple design framework, coupled with her lovely ephemeral illustrations, combine to be one of the most visually pleasing (and functional) eBooks in the Diffusion Archive, even more so with the A3 version.
I rarely take notes, or form plans on paper, but even I’d be tempted to break this habit if it was on this canvas. I’d imagine it would initially be hard to write over the illustrations – I wouldn’t want to spoil them!
Perhaps having a beautiful notebook makes you more organised. Try it yourself – you can download it here.
This set of Storycubes was part of a briefing pack for the Perception Peterborough workshops, set up to develop environmental initiatives and tackle green issues that Peterborough might be facing in the future. Created by Matt Huynh and Proboscis, these beautiful cubes were intended t0 visually display the themes in the project and kick start ideas. A set of eight cubes, linked together with stickers, they can be manipulated into many shapes, each formed side showing a set of illustrations with a common theme.
I love Matt Huynh’s style; wonderfully quirky and charming, they work so well on the small panels, almost resembling an abstract comic, or an illustrated Rubik’s cube. Whilst twisting the cubes into different forms, its hard to resist becoming mesmerised, as the different colours and shapes unfold inwards and outwards, kaleidoscopically.
It would be interesting to see comic authors working within this format, each set of panels representing short tales that can be switched around, letting the reader form the story by making different shapes. This relates to Hypercomics, which I’ve blogged about before, where different outcomes are possible with each read, shifting the reading experience from flat and passive, to three dimensional and interactive.
September was a busy month here at Proboscis and on bookleteer: we sent seven books to be printed via the PPOD service as well as 10 different StoryCubes. The range of publications was very broad, from books about exhibitions and art projects to a book in Arabic about a major archaeological excavation in Sudan and a special notebook for a symposium on digital engagement and another full of QR codes. The StoryCubes included an 8 cube ‘cube of cubes’ set by artists Joyce Majiski and Alice Angus on their Topographies & Tales project, a promotional cube about bookleteer itself and a cube by artist Melissa Bliss to promote her installation, Bird Song, at the b-side media festival in the Isle of Portland.
The photo above shows the various StoryCube and printed eBooks :
James Leach is an anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen who has conducted field-work in Papua New Guinea for approximately 17 years. I recently spoke to him by Skype to talk about a project which also involved two of his friends, Porer and Pinbin from the village of Reite, who had travelled to the UK in August 2009. Part of their visit to London included participating in the British Museum’s Melanesia Project. This project was designed to gain insight into the BM’s ‘largely unstudied’ Melanesian collections. Although I won’t get into to too much of the project’s overall aims and process (see both James’ work and the BM link for more details), part of the project involved inviting people from different areas of Melanesia to provide context about the objects in the collection by explaining how these objects are made, are used, and what their significance is. The exchange also represented an opportunity for the BM to build new relationships with the populations from where these objects originated.
Sample project: Melanesia Project
According to James, both Porer and Pinbin knew a lot about materials and the ways in which some of these objects were made which meant that the exchange could lead to some fascinating insights. Having worked with James in the past, they were also familiar with how to work with anthropologists.
As part of the exchange, James invited Giles Lane to drop by and demonstrate how to use the eBooks to record the event. Giles showed them all how to put the eBooks together and also brought a small portable Polaroid printer that could quickly and easily print digital pictures in a small format that could then be glued onto the eBook pages.
This was certainly a case of using the eBooks to capture information (see here for previous post where I introduce what I mean in by this) – in this case James described using the eBooks asa way to produce a realtime record that involved “capturing the moment of what we were doing and what we were seeing”. Representatives of the BM were also recording the exchange but using the eBooks served as a complimentary archive of what had happened. While the exchange was taking place, James would write down some of what Porer and Pinbin were saying in both English and Tok Pisin next to the images glued down in the eBooks. The addition of the eBooks to the process was partly challenging for James because it involved an additional set of tasks in an already hectic and brief exchange. Nevertheless, James felt that it proved to be a positive addition to the session because it provided a better record of the process of the exchange itself. He felt that although other methods for collecting and presenting information were better suited to the documentation of the knowledge being imparted of the objects by his two friends, the way in which the eBooks were used provided a simple, quick and accessible way of sharing what had taken place during the meeting.
Later on, the eBooks were re-scanned and subsequently reprinted into the professionally printed and bound version of the eBooks. James then distributed copies of the new books in Reite as well as at the local University in Papua New Guinea, and other regional institutions who were interested in what they had been doing. The eBooks were useful for giving people a feel for what had taken place, particularly for people who were unfamiliar with anthropology as a discipline.
Challenges, recommendations and suggestions
James used a wonderful way of describing his work as an anthropologist as being comprised of “moments”. He felt that the eBooks were used at the right moment in the process of conducting this type of research. Although he was unsure as to how this type of practice could fit in other parts of his work, he could see how this process would be helpful in situations requiring the documentation of how people “respond to images or information for themselves”.
He also suggested that as objects in themselves, the professionally bound versions of the eBooks were useful as a way to disseminate general information about the exchange:
“[…] As something to give people, they’re an extremely nice thing. People are very keen. I also took some to an anthropology conference before I went [to Papua New Guinea] and would show them to people and they’d immediately say “Oh, is that for me?” People kind of like them. They’re nice little objects.”
However, since many people of Papua New Guinea don’t have access to Internet, resources like Bookleteer or the Diffusion website proved to be significantly less of an advantage for distributing this information (they obviously can’t download a copy of the eBook).
I want to come back to the way James used the idea of “moments” to describe his work and apply it to the way in which the eBook was designed and used. We could say that each project I have described to date was composed of a series of moments and that nested within these projects was the eBook component which in itself was composed of its own series of moments. In reference to my previous post on the distinction between capturing and publishing, the trajectory of how eBooks were designed and used in some of these projects was composed of both capturing and publishing moments. For example, the way in which the eBook was used on the Melanesia Project included both a capturing moment as part of the exchange with the British Museum and a publishing moment in which Giles and James printed-out scanned copies of the original eBooks and made them available online or passed hardcopies out to people who were interested in learning more about the project (or, in some cases, who just wanted to get their hands on a free neat little object).
These series of moments were significant because they each involved different challenges and successes. In James’ case, it seemed both the capturing and publishing moments proved valuable – in the case of the former as a way to capture “the moment of what we were doing and what we were seeing” during the exchange, in the case of the latter as a way to distribute printed copies of the eBooks. But both capturing and publishing in this particular case also faced challenges that suggested there were some additional key moments that made-up an eBook’s trajectory as part of a project. Here are two moments that I want to add to describe an eBook’s trajectory:
Appropriation: James had only a cursory knowledge of how the eBooks worked before the exchange took place. In other cases, (for example see Ruth Sapsed’s work with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination) we saw how people had attended “Pitch-up and Publish” events as a way to test the eBooks and decide whether or not they could fit into the way these people executed their projects. For the Melanesia Project, James took the risk of adding the eBooks as an extra element to the project in part because he trusted Giles’ work and his abilities to adapt the eBooks to these particular circumstances. In this case, therefore, moments of appropriation and capturing took place at the same time. I will therefore use appropriation to describe how people decide the way in which eBooks relate to their pre-existing practices for capturing and publishing information.
Design and printing: It may seem that “design and printing” and “publishing” should be categorised as part of the same moment. The reason for making the distinction is that I want to highlight how the physical process of composing the eBook’s pages and physically making the eBook, whether it be printing it out or cutting and folding its pages into a notebook, are distinct from the publishing category I defined earlier. Both capturing and publishing necessarily involve designing and printing an eBook. But the way in which they are designed and printed and the way in which such a design will be evaluated as part of the project will likely be very different.
Of course, in making-up these four distinct analytical categories, I may be over-emphasising distinctions between moments that are in fact all bundled-up and confused in time and space. But the reason for making these distinctions is so that I can begin to develop a typology of how eBooks are part of all of these very different kinds of projects.
Next time, I’ll examine the Diffusion website in greater detail.
I’m going to be delving into the Diffusion archive to highlight my favourite eBooks and StoryCubes on a regular basis, in a bid to showcase how people have used them in exceptional and innovative ways.
First off is “Cummerbundery Volume 1: The Collected Tweets Of Brandon Cummerbund” by Russ Bravo, an eBook compiling various tweets from his Twitter comedy alter-ego, Brandon Cummerbund – a “Victorian wit, man about town and amateur taxidermist”. These hilarious, satirical and often surreal vignettes are presented very simply, (almost in the manner of a Twitter feed) and the contrast between Cummerbund’s ridiculous, outdated manner and activities, and the short functional format of Tweets, is genius. Some choice snippets:
“Fusty Montgomery borrowed putter. Twigs in the
marmalade. Mrs C went shopping. Staff nervous.
Eggs overcooked. Monkey of the day: gibbon. “
“Toast has its uses in hand to hand combat. Chum
of mine: Mangrove van Flagbutterer – well meaning
Dutch philanthropist. Breakfast: kedgeree.”
“Aged aunt coming to stay. Attempts to book
holiday in Folkestone have failed. Mongoose
acquired, named Wilf. Cheese: Red Leicester.”
This move from transitory digital messages, to a permanent print publication has an interesting by-product. When the Tweets are placed alongside each other in print form, they resemble diary entries, or, due to the lack of dates, verse; both forms befitting of a Victorian chap.
Brandon Cummerbund - A striking resemblance to Simon Callow?
