StoryCubes

playful cubes for storytelling, brainstorming ideas or playing games in three dimensions

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Diffusion engaging with the community, online and out in the world.

Residencies

an ongoing programme enabling residents at Proboscis studio to create eBooks and StoryCubes for their own projects.

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eBooks & StoryCubes created for learning and educational purposes

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Browse the collection of Diffusion Shareables: eBooks & StoryCubes

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Home » eBooks, One-Off Shareables, Residencies
Hard Hearted Hannah by Cartoon de Salvo
Submitted by on March 28, 2011 – 9:30 amNo Comment

Download
Classics From Nowhere A4 | US Letter PDF 1Mb Read Online
Music A4 | US Letter PDF 1.5Mb Read Online
Mysteries A4 | US Letter PDF 1.7Mb Read Online
Silent Characters A4 | US Letter PDF 1.5Mb Read Online
Tangled Relationships A4 | US Letter PDF 1.2Mb Read Online
The World of the Strange and the Bizarre A4 | US Letter PDF 1Mb Read Online

About : Cartoon de Salvo are now publishing four more books recording some of what is now over 100 improvised stage stories (and two updated books). Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories is a brand new, entirely improvised adventure. To begin we elicit a ‘simple title of, for example, a movie that’s never been made’ from an audience member. Then they choose a few songs from a playlist of our band’s repertoire. We think for a few seconds and then we start, working in those songs and the show lasts between 50 mins and up to 2 hours. We never limited ourselves to any place, genre or time. We place implicit trust in each other’s narrative instinct. The idea is, having been exposed to stories all of our lives, we all have a very developed sense of what should happen next.

This series of Diffusion eBooks explores some of the patterns that came randomly out of the air, as told by Brian Logan and illustrated by Alex Murdoch. The first two books were Classics from Nowhere’ – where we tapped into story structures from myths and fairytales and ‘World of the Strange and Bizarre‘ where our unconcious minds led us into some very odd situations indeed. Now we are adding four books looking at how Music we play influenced stories, how Mysteries created more complex storylines. Two more explore how Silent Characters and Tangled Relationships made for surprising turns in our yarns. The idea of course is these stories existed in their moment over the past two years; but when I discovered that Brian was writing them down the following day I thought I’d put them together with my illustrations that I was getting down in the van after each gig.

Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories is created by Cartoon de Salvo.
Co-commissioned by Farnham Maltings and the Lyric, Hammersmith

Published March 2011

Cartoon de Salvo are of the few companies in the UK working with whole story, rather than sketch-based, improvisation formats. Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories went on to become the Telegraph’s Top Ten Comedy Shows of 2008 and following the British Council Showcase in Edinburgh we were invited to take it to Washington DC’s Kennedy Center. We’re now working on a new long-form impro format called Made Up, in which we collaborate with a band; we’re next performing that at Pulse Festival in June 2011.

Read more about the artistic process on their blogs at www.theatrevoice.com and visit www.cartoondesalvo.com

Cartoon de Salvo is Rebecca Hurst, Brian Logan and Alex Murdoch and this show also involves performer Neil Haigh and musical director Paul Kissaun. Ed Collier is the producer and can be contacted on ed@cartoondesalvo.com

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

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Home » Residencies
Mare-Anne Mancio – Diffusion Residency Jan-Sept 2009
Submitted by on September 16, 2009 – 2:32 pmNo Comment

In the summer of 2008, Jason E Bowman, Curator of the Temporary Exhibitions Program at The Public gallery, West Bromwich commissioned me to assist him with the collation of materials relating to The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes, a performance art collective active between 1974-1981. It was Bowman’s intention to republish Elements of Performance Art, a seminal, out-of-print collection of exercises by Anthony Howell and Fiona Templeton, and to curate a retrospective of The Theatre of Mistakes’ practice in April 2009.

Click to continue reading “Mare-Anne Mancio – Diffusion Residency Jan-Sept 2009”

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Home » Publishing on Demand, Residencies
Stewart Home – Diffusion Residency, Nov 2008-March 2009
Submitted by on September 8, 2009 – 3:53 pmOne Comment

3929220329_5f1bea67df_oWith the residency I was looking for ways to expand my use of Web 2.0. The eBook Generator provides a useful format in which to distribute essays to those who prefer not to read longer pieces online. Therefore I was looking to integrate producing eBooks with my activities on social networking sites such as Facebook, while simultaneously drawing some of the audience that exists for the eBooks as a project in itself towards my own online activities.

My approach to this was to produce material that I felt would be of interest to my audience both on social networking sites and beyond them covering new(ish) material on subjects I’ve had a long interest in, including the London art world and psychedelic drugs. However, I adapted my material after discussion of the eBook project with Giles Lane. Giles not only showed me how to use the Generator, we also had several long conversations about building an audience for this project and how what I was doing might fit into this.

Taking part in this process reinforced my view that it is possible, if sometimes difficult, to move an audience from one web based content delivery platform to another. Sometimes this is a matter of moving with shifts in web usage. I moved to Facebook ahead of much of the audience I’d previously built on MySpace – but as the shift from the latter social network to the former built, most of my old audience followed me. Getting people using Facebook to download from the eBook Generator or to look at material on other social networks such as YouTube is not as difficult to get them to look at traditional websites. However, the overall lesson was, as ever, persistence pays off. Rather than changing the way I worked, this reinforced my view that I’d been using the internet in an intelligent manner.

In the future I’d be interested in looking at ways in which I might use the Generator to develop my work as a novelist. It would be interesting to create a serial style novel to be delivered chapter by chapter via the Generator. This would, however, be a major commitment and in my view would require some extra funding to promote it in order to reach a large enough audience for the amount of effort involved to be worthwhile.

I found Giles and his team very productive to work with, but also great fun – and I enjoyed my free ranging lunch break conversations every bit as much as the actual work!

Stewart Home
September 2009

The eBooks
Dope smuggling, LSD, organised crime & the law in 1960s London
On The Death Of Julia Callan-Thompson
Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern’ – an eclectic mix of bullshit and bad taste
Click This? MySpace & the Pornography of Corporately Controlled Virtual Life
Negotiating the Level 2 Project Space at Tate Modern
Very Naughty English Lady
Cunt Lickers Anonymous
A Journey To The Far Side Of Solipsism

1 comment - Latest by:
  • Paul
    This is a great blog, recommended it to friends on facebook
    Comment posted on 5-8-2011 at 18:48

Home » eBooks, Residencies
An A-Z of The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes by Marie-Anne Mancio
Submitted by on September 4, 2009 – 2:00 pm4 Comments

A-Z The Ting 2

Download
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: A A4 | US Letter PDF 2.2Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: B A4 | US Letter PDF 1.6Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: C A4 | US Letter PDF 1.8Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: D A4 | US Letter PDF 1.9Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: E A4 | US Letter PDF 1.9Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: FG A4 | US Letter PDF 2.1Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: H A4 | US Letter PDF 2.2Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: IJK A4 | US Letter PDF 1.5Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: L A4 | US Letter PDF 1.7Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: M A4 | US Letter PDF 1.9Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: NO A4 | US Letter PDF 1.6Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: P A4 | US Letter PDF 2.1Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: QR A4 | US Letter PDF 2.2Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: S A4 | US Letter PDF 2.1Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: TU A4 | US Letter PDF 1.8Mb Read Online
The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes: VWXYZ A4 | US Letter PDF 2Mb Read Online

Zipped Archive (all 16 eBooks) A4 | US Letter PDF 28Mb

About : An A-Z of The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes comprises 16 ebooks with documents (texts, letters, photographs, diagrams, artworks) drawn from this 1970s performance collective’s private archive and from original research conducted by Marie-Anne Mancio and Jason E Bowman. Each book has 26 pages, referencing the alphabet, however there is no more reason to begin with ‘A’ than ‘V,W,X,Y & Z’ and the democratic format of the set means entries are placed in unexpected proximity. Encouraging circuitous rather than linear, multi-perspectival rather than singular, readings and reflecting The Theatre of Mistakes‘ interest in chance, mutuality, and inconsistency, the A-Z is part introduction, part photo-essay, part-question, and part gossip.

Published September 2009

Marie-Anne Mancio is a writer and independent researcher who trained as an artist . She is intrigued by the notion of contradiction. Author of a doctoral thesis, Maps for Wayward Performers: Feminist Readings of Contemporary Live Art Practice in Britain (University of Sussex, 1997), countless art reviews, and a novel, Trio (forthcoming). She is currently collaborating with Jason E Bowman on curating a retrospective of The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes. Her website is www.hotelalphabet.net

*** created with www.bookleteer.com ***

4 comments - Latest by:
  • George
    Oh Sorry, I didn't realise the stupid format is part of the art. My mistake.
    Comment posted on 1-27-2010 at 21:07
  • George
    really f***king stupid format
    Comment posted on 1-27-2010 at 20:59
  • George
    interesting, but the format is pretty frustrating. Why is the reader olbiged to get scissors, staples and glue out, rather…
    Comment posted on 1-27-2010 at 20:53
  • Theatre of Mistakes at blog.hotelalphabet.net
    [...] Download your free set of e-books on seminal 1970s performance group, The Theatre of…
    Comment posted on 10-12-2009 at 11:00

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Dope smuggling, LSD, organised crime & the law in 1960s London by Stewart Home
Submitted by on June 2, 2009 – 12:36 pmOne Comment

dope_smuggling_book_cover

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 328Kb

About : Much of the drug smuggling, drug manufacturing and drug dealing centred on London in the 1960s remains undocumented. This is an outline of various links between people such as club hostess and showgirl Julia Callan-Thompson, murky underworld figures like Alan Bruce Cooper, and art world insiders such as Francis Morland.

Published June 2009

Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org

*** a ‘book’ (long edge binding) eBook created using the new Diffusion Generator ***

1 comment - Latest by:
  • David Scott
    My parents were very into LSD and I was exposed to it at an early age. I think more studies…
    Comment posted on 6-2-2009 at 17:19

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Hard Hearted Hannah: Classics from Nowhere by Cartoon de Salvo
Submitted by on April 23, 2009 – 4:20 pmNo Comment

hannah_classical_cover

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 924Kb

About : In 2008 Cartoon de Salvo created Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories. Each night is an brand new, entirely improvised adventure.  To begin we elicit a ‘simple title of, for example, a movie that’s never been made’ from an audience member. Then they choose a few songs from a playlist of our band’s repertoire. We think for a few seconds and then we start, working in those songs and the show lasts between 50 mins and up to 2 hours.  We never limited ourselves to any place, genre or time.  We place implicit trust in each other’s narrative instinct. The idea is, having been exposed to stories all of our lives, we all have a very developed sense of what should happen next.

This series of Diffusion eBooks explores some of the patterns that came randomly out of the air, as told by Brian Logan and illustrated by Alex Murdoch.  The first two books are ‘Classics from Nowhere‘ – where we tapped into story structures from myths and fairytales and ‘World of the Strange and Bizarre’ where our unconcious minds led us into some very odd situations indeed.  Over the coming months we’ll be publishing four more books on the themes of mysteries, music, silent characters and relationships.

Look out for the show on tour at the Plymouth Drum from 28th April – 25th May, The Showroom, Chichester on 6th May, Tobacco Factory, Mayfest, Bristol from 7th – 9th May and this summer at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre Workshop as part of the British Council Showcase.

Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories is created by Cartoon de Salvo.
Co-commissioned by Farnham Maltings and the Lyric, Hammersmith

Published April 2009

Cartoon de Salvo are of the few companies in the UK working with whole story, rather than sketch-based, improvisation formats. Read more about the artistic process on their blogs at www.theatrevoice.com and visit www.cartoondesalvo.com
Cartoon de Salvo is Rebecca Hurst, Brian Logan and Alex Murdoch with Neil Haigh, Paul Kissaun and James Turnbull.

No comment so far

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Hard Hearted Hannah: the world of the Strange and Bizarre by Cartoon de Salvo
Submitted by on April 23, 2009 – 4:19 pmNo Comment

hannah_bizarre_cover

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 850Kb

About : In 2008 Cartoon de Salvo created Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories. Each night is an brand new, entirely improvised adventure.  To begin we elicit a ‘simple title of, for example, a movie that’s never been made’ from an audience member. Then they choose a few songs from a playlist of our band’s repertoire. We think for a few seconds and then we start, working in those songs and the show lasts between 50 mins and up to 2 hours.  We never limited ourselves to any place, genre or time.  We place implicit trust in each other’s narrative instinct. The idea is, having been exposed to stories all of our lives, we all have a very developed sense of what should happen next.

This series of Diffusion eBooks explores some of the patterns that came randomly out of the air, as told by Brian Logan and illustrated by Alex Murdoch.  The first two books are ‘Classics from Nowhere’ – where we tapped into story structures from myths and fairytales and ‘World of the Strange and Bizarre‘ where our unconcious minds led us into some very odd situations indeed.  Over the coming months we’ll be publishing four more books on the themes of mysteries, music, silent characters and relationships.

Look out for the show on tour at the Plymouth Drum from 28th April – 25th May, The Showroom, Chichester on 6th May, Tobacco Factory, Mayfest, Bristol from 7th – 9th May and this summer at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre Workshop as part of the British Council Showcase.

Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories is created by Cartoon de Salvo.
Co-commissioned by Farnham Maltings and the Lyric, Hammersmith

Published April 2009

Cartoon de Salvo are of the few companies in the UK working with whole story, rather than sketch-based, improvisation formats. Read more about the artistic process on their blogs at www.theatrevoice.com and visit www.cartoondesalvo.com
Cartoon de Salvo is Rebecca Hurst, Brian Logan and Alex Murdoch with Neil Haigh, Paul Kissaun and James Turnbull.

No comment so far

Home » eBooks, Residencies
On The Death Of Julia Callan-Thompson by Stewart Home
Submitted by on March 26, 2009 – 5:22 pmNo Comment

juliacallan_cover

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 390Kb

About : A look at the death of 35 year-old Julia Callan-Thompson in west London in 1979, showing how the authorities failed to fully investigate the circumstances.

Published March 2009

Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org

No comment so far

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern’ – an eclectic mix of bullshit and bad taste by Stewart Home
Submitted by on March 6, 2009 – 5:36 pmNo Comment

altermodern_cover

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 412Kb

About : A critical look at the Altermodern Tate Triennial 2009 and the incoherent theory underpinning it. Appended with an account of the International Necronautical Society talk that was one of a number of events used to frame the Nicolas Bourriaud’s Tate Britain show.

Published March 2009

Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org

No comment so far

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Click This? MySpace & the Pornography of Corporately Controlled Virtual Life by Stewart Home
Submitted by on February 20, 2009 – 5:22 pm2 Comments

myspace_cover

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 444Kb

About : An account of eighteen months of activity on MySpace, which led to being accorded the status of the platform’s top UK blogger; and ending with the lesson that it is better to quit while you’re ahead when dealing with corporate social networking sites, and thus avoid becoming locked into them.

Published February 2009

Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org

2 comments - Latest by:
  • Siward
    All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
    Comment posted on 11-23-2009 at 18:25
  • Time Traveller
    And Please Don't Forget To Mention Top Commenter Of The Year!
    Comment posted on 2-21-2009 at 19:05

Home » Community Projects, eBooks, eNotebooks, Learning, Schools & Education, Residencies
Kedu? scanned eNotebooks by children of Umologho
Submitted by on February 9, 2009 – 8:21 amNo Comment

Download
Kedu – eBook 1 A4 only PDF 644Kb
Kedu – eBook 2 A4 only PDF 608Kb
Kedu – eBook 3 A4only PDF 649Kb
Kedu – eBook 4 A4 only PDF 650Kb
Kedu – eBook 5 A4 only PDF 632Kb

About : eBooks help to promote ongoing communication between students in Umulogho Village, Nigeria and students in Watford schools.

Bev Carter’s eBook A Little Something About Me (generated by with support from Proboscis) was used to assist a series of workshops in six schools in Watford during 2008 to communicate through words, paintings and photographs the life, experiences and interests of students attending a secondary school in Umulogho, a rural village in Imo State, Nigeria, West Africa.

During school workshops copies of this eBook were handed out to the students and a discussion was encouraged and facilitated by Bev. The pupils really liked the eBook and it served to generate more curiosity and questions about life in Umulogho. As part of the process another eBook created to capture all the thoughts and enquries the students had.

The next eBook was called ‘Kedu?‘ This means ‘How are you? in Igbo, the main language spoken in Umulogho Village. This was a collection of further questions from students in Watford using pictures created by Umulogho students to give them added visual interest. In July 2008 copies of the ‘Kedu’ eBook were hand delivered to Umulogho Village by Tony Amaechi, a Trustee of Friends Out There, and some Umulogho Village students then filled in their response to the questions in the eBook. Five eBooks were collected by Tony on his return to the UK and some students told Tony that they had enjoyed filling in the eBooks, were thrilled to see their paintings scanned in to them and were happy to know that students in the UK were interested in them, their dreams and concerns.

In October 2008 the completed Kedu eBooks were taken back to some of the schools in Watford that had asked the original questions. The students were amazed and pleased to see they really had been given some answers to their questions, such as ‘are there any crocodiles in the village stream? – some Umologho students had seen some and others hadn’t. The eBooks got the Watford students talking about what time they wake up in the morning and what they do before school as most students in Umulogho were awake by 5.30 am and had gone to the village stream and back to collect water before going to school. The Kedu eBooks also gave the Umulogo students a space to ask some questions that they had for the Watford students such as ‘what seasons do you have in England?’ and ‘what religions do you have?’

The next stage will be to create another eBook to continue the communication between the schools in Umulogho and Watford. The eBook is an excellent resource for schools: students like the pocket sized feel, it’s a great way to capture conversations and enquiries and, even though the school in Umulogho Village doesn’t yet have a computer or internet access, we were still able to send and receive paper copies – using more traditional means of connection and communication.

Bev Carter
February 2009

For more information please contact Bev Carter (Friends Out There)

Published February 2009

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Home » Residencies
Diffusion Residents
Submitted by on February 7, 2009 – 2:20 pmNo Comment

Proboscis is currently hosting three Diffusion residents:

  • Alex Murdoch, founder and director of theatre company Cartoon de Salvo who is developing a series of eBooks re-presenting Hard-Hearted Hannah, a long-form improvisation show that toured for 53 performances in 2008. 
  • Stewart Home, artist and writer, who is re-publishing out of print texts and new pieces.
  • Marie-Anne Mancio writer and curator, who is creating an ‘encyclopedia’ of eBooks about 1970s experimental performance artists, The Theatre of Mistakes

Follow their publications in the Residencies Series.

No comment so far

Home » eBooks, eNotebooks, Residencies
Dominion Dundas by Seth
Submitted by on February 3, 2009 – 12:10 amOne Comment

dominion_dundas_cover  

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 1.9Mb

About : The Dominion Dundas eBook has been produced to accompany the exhibition of Canadian cartoonist Seth’s model city at the Dundas Museum & Archives (Dundas, Ontario, Canada). Organized by RENDER (University of Waterloo), Dominion takes Seth’s distinct vision of urban space off the printed page and into the format of an installation infused with the cartoonist’s characteristic air of melancholy and ambiguous nostalgia. This eBook features images of 10 of Seth’s buildings and has been developed as a story collecting tool to accompany the exhibition, encouraging museum visitors to reflect on their own town’s history and to share stories of buildings, people and sites of the area.

Published February 2009

Seth is the cartoonist behind the painfully infrequent comic book series Palookville. Currently he is serializing the story Clyde Fans between its covers. This is a task that has gone on for a decade now and will likely continue for several more years. His books include It’s A Good Life I You Don’t Weaken, Wimbledon Green, Bannock, Beans and Black Tea, and the above mentioned Clyde Fans Book One. One volume of his sketchbooks has appeared under the title Vernacular Drawings and another will likely appear within the following few seasons. His books have been translated into 5 languages.

As a book designer he has worked on a variety of projects including the recent Penguin reprinting of The Portable Dorothy Parker. He is the designer of the 25 volume series The Complete Peanuts and the upcoming two volume series on Canadian master cartoonist Doug Wright. As an illustrator/hack he has produced commercial works for almost all of the major Canadian and American magazines. His work has appeared inside and on the cover of the New Yorker. Last year he serialized the story George Sprott (1894-1975) in the New York Times for 25 weeks and will appear in an expanded form as a book in the spring of 2009.

Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario with his wife and three cats and appears to rarely leave the basement.

For more information about RENDER and the Dundas Museum visit:
www.render.uwaterloo.ca
www.dundasmuseum.ca

1 comment - Latest by:

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Bring Me Sunshine by Tony White
Submitted by on December 22, 2008 – 8:45 amNo Comment

bring_me_sunshine_cover

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 417Kb

About : ‘Bring Me Sunshine (after Dubravka Stojanovic)’ continues Tony White’s Balkanising Bloomsbury project. The story was created by cutting up, remixing and re-narrativising fragments from various sources including London’s Metro newspaper, and transcripts from the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to create a completely new story. A number of pilot publications in the Balkanising Bloomsbury series were previously published as part of a Diffusion case study residency in November 2007.

Published December 2008

Tony White is a writer and author of novels including Foxy-T (Faber and Faber) and the non-fiction work Another Fool in the Balkans. He co-edited the fiction anthology Croatian Nights (Serpent’s Tail/VBZ) and edited the Brit-pulp collection (Sceptre). Tony has edited and published the artists’ book imprint Piece of Paper Press since 1994 and produced fiction in collaboration with visual arts and interdisciplinary projects by London Fieldworks, Bob and Roberta Smith, Alison Turnbull, Chris Dorley-Brown and others. Tony is currently 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.

No comment so far

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Negotiating the Level 2 Project Space at Tate Modern by Stewart Home
Submitted by on December 5, 2008 – 10:19 pmOne Comment

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 463Kb

About : In September 2007 Tate Modern announced Stewart Home had begun a year-long engagement as writer-in-residence at their Level 2 Gallery. His brief was to write texts responding to exhibitions showcasing new emerging international artists. This publication reproduces some of those texts.

Published December 2008

Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org

1 comment - Latest by:
  • fx15
    Thanks a lot :]
    Comment posted on 10-23-2009 at 18:48

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Very Naughty English Lady by Stewart Home
Submitted by on December 5, 2008 – 2:30 pm2 Comments

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 708Kb

About : Transcriptions of prank calls to prostitutes that demonstrate how commodified sex, like everything else done in an alienated society purely for money, lacks excitement and imagination.

Published December 2008 

Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org

2 comments - Latest by:
  • mark
    ...this concept reminds me a bit of Jonny Trunk's "Dirty Fan Male" CD's - except those are genuine & deeply…
    Comment posted on 3-9-2013 at 20:57
  • Edith
    Thoughtful post and well written. Please write more on this if you have time.
    Comment posted on 7-3-2009 at 20:47

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Cunt Lickers Anonymous by Stewart Home
Submitted by on November 28, 2008 – 3:55 pmOne Comment

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 677Kb

About : An almost fictionalised account of the sleaziest aspects of the London art and literary worlds in the mid-1990s. This is for broad minded adults, please do not read if you are easily offended.

Published November 2008

Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org

1 comment - Latest by:
  • Dr. Zombie
    Would have liked to downloaded pdf, but couldn't. Wanted to see if title and corresponding content had anything more…
    Comment posted on 11-3-2009 at 23:13

Home » eBooks, Residencies
A Journey To The Far Side Of Solipsism by Stewart Home
Submitted by on November 28, 2008 – 2:34 pmNo Comment

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 455Kb

About : How to go beyond punk but remain punk by grooving to soul and funk, as well as sixties garage acts like The Troggs (with the truly filthy origins of their name revealed for the first time ever)!

Published November 2008

Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org

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Matt Huynh – Diffusion Residency, August 2008
Submitted by on September 15, 2008 – 8:22 pmNo Comment

Matt Huynh is a comic creator and illustrator based in Sydney, Australia. In August 2008 he visited London for a Diffusion residency at our studio in Clerkenwell. Matt worked on two Diffusion projects whilst on the residency; in his own words, “The eBook is a format developed for easy, viral distribution, so my challenge was to take it in the other direction to create a unique version of the eBook that would be difficult to reproduce and mass distribute.” The first project resulted in a single unique work adapted from the eBook folding format. Matt’s eBook, Anytime, contains an artist’s statement about the work and his process.

The second project, insideout, used the eBook as the format to create and distribute a free comic – “a playful 27 page comic-booklet about the contradictions of affection (with ghosts).”

“When it came to developing the ‘eBook’ format, I was inspired to reflect its encouragement of sharing creative processes and ideas in the comic book’s subject matter and style.

The comic’s aesthetic is almost completely created with soft pencils. In commercial comics processes, the penciling stage is one of the initial processes in creating a work’s visual aesthetic. Here, I’ve chosen pencils, sometimes with my construction lines even peeping through, as the final aesthetic to capture and showcase this project’s ambition to share process.

It was with the transparency of process at the forefront of my mind that I was inspired to have the protagonists of ‘insideout’ appear as ghosts, and it was with the aim of being open to embrace and share ideas and processes that I modeled the narrative to concern these ghosts’ conflicting attitudes towards demonstrating and receiving affection and their fear to venture outside the door of their haunted home.”

The eBooks
insideout
Anytime

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insideout by Matt Huynh
Submitted by on September 15, 2008 – 8:20 pmNo Comment

Download A4 only PDF 7.4Mb

Aboutinsideout is a playful 27 page comic-booklet about the contradictions of affection (with ghosts). This work was created during his residency with Proboscis UK in August 2008 – visit the project’s mini-site to read it online, download the eBook or Matt’s actual drawings and read about Matt’s process:

In the spirit of this format’s advocation of creating and sharing ideas, I’ve decided to –

+  release this little ditty completely free;
+  release this work’s hi-res images for use under the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-share alike license; and
+  open up some insight into my materials and process.

Published August 2008

Matt Huynh is a comic creator and illustrator based in Sydney, Australia. In August 2008 he visited London for a Diffusion residency at Proboscis’ studio in Clerkenwell.

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Anytime – artist statement by Matt Huynh
Submitted by on September 15, 2008 – 11:36 amNo Comment

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About : Anytime is an artist’s statement by illustrator Matt Huynh about his Diffusion Residency at Proboscis in August 2008.

Published September 2008

Matt Huynh is an artist and illustrator, and member of the artists collective Popperbox. www.matthuynh.com

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Home » Learning, Schools & Education, Residencies
Lisa Hunter – Diffusion Residency, July 2008
Submitted by on September 14, 2008 – 2:16 amNo Comment

Diffusion Residency with Proboscis, July 2008
Lisa Hunter
Collections Manager, Dundas Museum and Archives
Dundas, Ontario, Canada.

In my curatorial work with the Dundas Museum and Archives, I work with a local history collection, within the environment of a supportive local community, to produce exhibitions and related programming.  At the heart of my curatorial approach is the concept of storytelling, and most of my projects have been based on some form of information exchange with members of the community.  The primary goal of my residency with Proboscis was to explore ways in which I could build on the most successful aspects of these projects, and to develop additional and alternative approaches to the exchange and presentation of historical material.  Specifically, I wanted to learn how I might incorporate eBooks and StoryCubes into the work that I do at the museum, and to see how these tools might lead to new programs or projects.

The best approach for me was to begin by “jumping right in” and producing an eBook.  The technical and intellectual process of making my first eBook became a way of thinking through how I might use the eBooks (and StoryCubes) at the Dundas Museum.  Additionally, having the opportunity to speak at length with Giles, and other members of Proboscis, about the many innovative and creative ways in which the Generator has been used by others, was a very significant aspect of this residency.  Being in the studio, and being able to share ideas and to have an open exchange, was invaluable.  Further, having the opportunity to put some distance between myself and the museum allowed me to see things a bit more objectively, which is often difficult to do when you are in the thick of the day to day work.

I think the greatest benefit of this residency was that it resulted in a definite shift in my thinking about how a museum can interact with, and respond to, the community it serves.  My approach has always been to encourage dialogue between the museum and the public, but the tools for doing so in an informal yet elegant way have been missing.  Consequently, those efforts to facilitate exchange have been sporadic.  Those of us who work in smaller museums can often feel very limited in our ability to disseminate ideas, partly because of a longstanding tradition of thematically narrow, expensive and poorly distributed publishing ventures.  The Generator, conversely, allows for spontaneous, experimental, low cost initiatives that can be distributed more widely than was ever possible.  I think that our future success as a museum will depend on our ability to continue and deepen an ongoing exchange with our local community, and that the eBooks and StoryCubes are excellent tools for us in this regard.

Although the actual residency was for a one week period, I feel that my work with it is just beginning.  Not only have I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how past projects might have been enhanced or done differently with the utilization of the Generator tools, but I have also been developing a number of future initiatives, in consultation with other members of the museum staff.  While it seems that the eBooks and StoryCubes will need some time to become an automatic part of our curatorial “toolbox,” (i.e. to become a part of our organizational culture), there is a lot of enthusiasm and interest within the organization at this time.  There are currently two eBooks under development, and a plan in place to create a StoryCube set for a senior citizens’ education program in the coming weeks. Other uses are also being considered for future projects.

The residency with Proboscis was an extremely useful, thought-provoking, energizing experience, and I feel very privileged to have been invited to take part.  The new insights I gained are being shared with my colleagues at the museum, and I am hopeful that it will be the basis for a new, creative approach that will permeate our organization.  Working with Proboscis has been very inspiring, and has given me a fresh enthusiasm for pursing my curatorial goals.

The eBooks

Button Doll
Despair
Forget Me Not

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Diffusion Residencies
Submitted by on September 14, 2008 – 2:10 amNo Comment

This summer we have been delighted to host two international Diffusion residencies at Proboscis – one with curator Lisa Hunter from Dundas, Ontario Canada, and the other with Matt Huynh, an illustrator and cartoonist from Sydney Australia. The aim, as with our initial Case Study series last year, is to explore new uses and contexts for Diffusion (the Generator and eBook/StoryCube formats) by working closely with individuals from a wide range of practices in the studio. Sharing our experiences of Diffusion, knowledge of the formats (their potential and constraints) and tips for using the Generator, we are collaborating with the residents to realise new opportunities for creating and using Diffusion Shareables in different contexts and situations.

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Button Doll by Lisa Hunter
Submitted by on August 14, 2008 – 12:48 pm2 Comments

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 1.4Mb

About : This eBook is one component of the Community Story Telling Project of the Dundas Museum and Archives, a series of initiatives which offer opportunities for sharing memories, ideas and stories. The eBook was developed by Lisa Hunter during a residency with Proboscis in July/August 2008, and focuses on a unique and popular object in the collection of the Dundas Museum and Archives, the Button Doll. This unusual object was created between 1929 and 1932 by Emma Lewis of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and was donated to the museum in 1964. This eBook invites museum visitors to look carefully at the doll, and share their reflections and observations about it.  A series of eBooks focusing on a variety of objects in the collection of the museum will be produced using this format. 

Published August 2008

Lisa Hunter is Collections Manager at the Dundas Museum and Archives, a community history museum in Dundas, Ontario, Canada.  In addition to caring for a large social history collection, she develops exhibitions and related community outreach projects.  She has worked in a variety of roles in museums and galleries across Canada, and holds a Master of Museum Studies from the University of Toronto.

2 comments - Latest by:
  • l wilson
    hi, my friend and i are trying to revive button doll making and have recently hand written a book which…
    Comment posted on 5-3-2009 at 21:03
  • Deb
    great site!! definitely worth bookmarking
    Comment posted on 1-15-2009 at 21:49

Home » eBooks, Residencies
Despair by Lisa Hunter
Submitted by on August 13, 2008 – 12:26 pmNo Comment

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3Mb

About : This eBook is the second in a series of publications that make publicly accessible a number of rare archival documents and books in the collection of the Dundas Museum and Archives. Normally not available to the public due to its extreme fragility, a poem from the 1853 publication A Floral Forget Me Not, by Henry F. Anners, has been reproduced with a number of related botanical illustrations from the book. The eBook will be utilized as a component of an education program focusing on the Victorian use of the “language of flowers.”

Published August 2008

Lisa Hunter is Collections Manager at the Dundas Museum and Archives, a community history museum in Dundas, Ontario, Canada.  In addition to caring for a large social history collection, she develops exhibitions and related community outreach projects.  She has worked in a variety of roles in museums and galleries across Canada, and holds a Master of Museum Studies from the University of Toronto.

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Forget Me Not by Lisa Hunter
Submitted by on August 12, 2008 – 9:30 pmNo Comment

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 2.2Mb

About : The Dundas Museum and Archives has in its collections a large number of archival documents and books which cannot normally be accessed by museum visitors, due their extremely fragile nature.  Forget Me Not is the first in a planned series of eBook publications that will make these archival materials accessible to the public, despite their conservation restrictions. During a residency with Proboscis in July/August 2008, Lisa Hunter produced this edition, which utilizes an 1853 work in the museum’s collection by Henry F. Anners, The Floral Forget Me Not. In the eBook, an excerpt of the original text is paired with contemporary photographs of a Victorian cemetery, giving readers a glimpse into the literary, aesthetic, spiritual and social aspects of the time.

Published August 2008

Lisa Hunter is Collections Manager at the Dundas Museum and Archives, a community history museum in Dundas, Ontario, Canada.  In addition to caring for a large social history collection, she develops exhibitions and related community outreach projects.  She has worked in a variety of roles in museums and galleries across Canada, and holds a Master of Museum Studies from the University of Toronto.

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Home » eBooks, Residencies
The Ballad of Louis The Monkey (part 3) by Andrew Hunter
Submitted by on August 1, 2008 – 12:07 pmNo Comment

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3.1Mb

About : Part of an ongoing series of narrative projects by Canadian artist, writer and curator Andrew Hunter. Inspired by a found stuffed toy, the series features a central character whose history and identity is constantly evolving and shifting based on the context of each presentation. This eBook captures the core elements of the third project in the series which took place in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in the spring of 2008. Previous projects have been presented at Harbourfront Centre (Toronto) and the Anna Leonowens Gallery at NSCAD University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). 

Published August 2008

Andrew Hunter is the Director/Curator of RENDER, an interdisciplinary art based research, teaching, production and presentation centre at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Hunter also works as an independent artist, writer, and curator and has produced exhibitions, writings and publications for art galleries and museums across Canada, in the United States and Europe. He was a contributor to the Proboscis project Navigating History.

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Curating.info Conversations: Karen Gaskill by Michelle Kasprzak
Submitted by on June 30, 2008 – 2:12 pmNo Comment

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About : Karen is currently the Director and Curator of Interval. and a Researcher at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool. She is also currently completing her practice-based PhD in Digital Media and Social Practice at the Digital Research Unit, The University of Huddersfield. The interview with Karen covered topics ranging from getting outside of the white cube to the expanding role of the audience. This interview, the second in the series of eBooks that will be released on www.curating.info, is intended to become part of a larger conversation. Comments on the topics raised in this series of eBooks are welcomed, and responses may be collected later into a companion eBook.

Published June 2008

Michelle Kasprzak is a curator, writer, and artist. Since winning the InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre Emerging Electronic Artist award early in her career, she has exhibited her work throughout North America and Europe, and has been featured in numerous publications and on radio and television broadcasts syndicated worldwide. She completed her MA in Visual and Media Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal in spring of 2006, and later that year was awarded a curatorial research residency at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA) in Finland. She has published essays on art in CV Photo, Spacing, and Mute, and her most recent curatorial project was Otherworldly, a video programme that is currently touring urban screens around the globe. Michelle is currently based in Edinburgh.
michelle.kasprzak.cawww.curating.info

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Case Study – Balkanising Bloomsbury by Tony White
Submitted by on April 7, 2008 – 4:48 pmNo Comment

In 2007 I received an Arts Council England Grants for the Arts award that had two aims: to buy time and space to continue on a work-fiction-in-progress, and to explore creative writing in interdisciplinary and research projects.

The work of fiction that I have been developing has a working title of Balkanising Bloomsbury. The project aims to explore a ‘Balkanist’ seam in Anglophone literatures such as fiction and travel writing, as well as other kinds of writing e.g. in the news media – i.e. to explore how ideas about ‘the Balkans’ are created and perpetuated in literature about the region. Within Balkanising Bloomsbury I’ve been creating completely new stories by cutting up, remixing and re-narrativising fragments from a number of historical and contemporary sources. The aim is that my new stories then reflect back critically on the source texts, but also create a new work of fiction.

As part of this project I also wanted to explore the potential for distributing the resulting fragments/ chapters/ short stories in an immediate way, but also aspects of the research process involved. I wanted to share bibliographical references for all of the Balkanising Bloomsbury stories, both in relation to each story/chapter/fragment, but also across the project as a whole. I’m aware that in literary publishing such material is generally hidden, certainly it’s not usually published as part of the finished book – though it may be alluded to in a brief ‘Author’s Note’-type acknowledgement.

The Diffusion Generator seemed to offer a unique means to share not only the stories as I write them, but the thinking, processes and resources being used to create these new works of fiction.

In discussion with Proboscis I set a number of aims for the case study:

  • Within the framework of the residency my plan was to select a number of stories from Balkanising Bloomsbury and to publish these stories in the Diffusion eBook format, together with research and other data relating to the stories.
  • I wanted to explore how the resulting Diffusion eBooks might function across e.g. literary blogs and research networks online, as well as for other kinds of outputs e.g. in readings or creative writing workshops. In other words to explore how the ebooks could be used to create a community around the work in progress in advance of any ultimate print publication of the finished work in book form.
  • I wanted to work within the Diffusion eBook format to design templates that could be used to publish further stories beyond the life of the residency. This required working with the Diffusion format to design an infrastructure that could accommodate the kinds of information that would need to be published alongside the stories themselves, and which could then grow as the project develops.

The first step was to learn how to use the Generator itself – working within the various editorial and production processes that the interface requires. Through much of the residency this involved trial and error: pushing one or two stories through the process, getting it wrong, starting again, getting it wrong, starting again etc. Either Karen Martin who was facilitating the residencies, or Giles Lane, were generally on-hand and could point out what I was doing wrong.

Learning how to use the sketchbook and drafting stages within the Generator, e.g. with the version of the Generator I was using, there was a stage during the drafting of each ebook where I needed to replace all punctuation from my original texts, as it wasn’t being recognised in the final stages of the process. The guides available within the Generator interface were very useful in this respect also – as accents and other diacritical marks need to be handled carefully. I also experimented with various word processing programmes to see which produced the most glitch-free transfer in to Diffusion. Bypassing MS Word completely, copying and saving my stories out of Neo-office Open Document formats into plain text via the latest Mac Text Edit software seemed to be the simplest way to do this.

Secondly I designed a bibliography format that would enable me to very simply drop the relevant bibliographical material for each story into the last pages of each eBook. But which could also be used to generate a series bibliography that would be able to be updated and republished every time I publish another story. This required e.g. a ‘titling’ convention to be established. The first iteration of this series-wide bibliography (‘Bibliography v.01’) is at http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=199

I also designed formats and forms of words for the various other bits of metadata that would need to accompany each book: A sentence that would explain the bibliography; the Creative Commons licence to be used and how to represent that in the footnotes; funding acknowledgements; acknowledgements of appearance in other publications; a short, generic Abstract text that could be used across the series and adapted where necessary; an acknowledgement of the Case Study Residency, etc.

The Creative Commons licence that I’ve used for the Diffusion eBooks of Balkanising Bloomsbury is an ‘Attribution – Non-commercial – No Derivatives 2.0 UK licence. See http://creativecommons.org./licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/
It’s not possible to put links to CC licences within the eBooks themselves, but we can put a link to this on the Diffusion page for each book – alongside the links to e.g. slashdot, digg, stumble that Proboscis have built into the format.

Within the 5-day residency I published six stories from Balkanising Bloomsbury in the Diffusion eBook format, together with a first version of the Bibliography.

Following the intensive period of the residency, I now feel that I’d be able to log on to the Generator and using the design templates that I developed for Balkanising Bloomsbury, publish further fragments/stories/chapters of the work in progress, together with all the relevant bibliographical and research data. I will also be able to generate and update new iterations of the designated Bibliography as the project grows. The Bibliography is given version numbers, so that readers/users would be able to easily identify the most recent version, but also dig back in and access snapshots of the project’s growth.

I plan to continue using the Diffusion Generator over the coming year or so, as I continue work on the Balkanising Bloomsbury project. Within this continued use, I’d like to explore the possibility of developing a visual/graphic form that could be used in subsequent eBooks from the series, and that would add to the bibliography, abstract etc to further illuminate the creative process behind the stories.

At time of writing I’ve just completed a tour of Australia under the aegis of the 1001 Nights Cast project by Australian artist Barbara Campbell, which was supported by Australia Council, Performance Space, Sydney, and a number of university and cultural partners in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. I have been giving readings and leading creative writing workshops with various communities – writers groups, students etc. The workshops have been designed around the process I’m using for Balkanising Bloomsbury, and the Diffusion eBooks have been a very useful part of the workshop structure and its delivery. For example: Rather than taking books to these events, I’ve been able to direct my various hosts to the Diffusion site and have print-outs waiting for me at the various locations – we’ve been able to assemble these in the workshops and I’ve been giving readings from the resulting copies of the Balkanising Bloomsbury stories as part of my introductory comments. The books have also been used as a free give-away to workshop participants. I am planning further Balkanising Bloomsbury creative writing workshops within the UK and will continue to use the Diffusion eBook format as a central part of how I deliver them.

Some interesting evidence for the community-building potential of the Diffusion eBook format came from blog activity that resulted from my publishing the Balkanising Bloomsbury eBooks on the Diffusion website.

I sent out an e-notification both to my own marketing lists (on 12th November 2007) and via posts on Facebook, which produced numerous responses. I also posted an announcement to the Balkans Academic News group on yahoo, of which I am a member – this e-list goes out to >6,000 users internationally. The announcement was published to the list on 21st November 2007.

Within a day or two of our publishing the Balkanising Bloomsbury fragments, the future-publishing blog http://BookTwo.org – run by James Bridle of http://aptstudio.com and www.shorttermmemoryloss.com – had linked to the site, discussed the Diffusion format at length and used Vimeo to upload a ‘how-to’ video, showing users how to assemble to ebooks from hard copy printouts. This post (from 14th November 2007), and the video, are at http://booktwo.org/notebook/paper-ebooks/

This then was linked to and commented upon by various other blogs including:
Tim Etchells (15th November) at http://www.timetchells.com/notebook/november-2007/file-under-rain/
Fog Soup (15th November) at http://fogsoup.wordpress.com/2007/11/15/textual-remixes/

At time of writing I don’t know how many downloads there have been of the Balkanising Bloomsbury ebooks, but it may be possible to check any peaks in traffic against the dates of these various blog postings?

An unexpected benefit of BookTwo’s support was that Proboscis had planned or discussed the possibility of producing an in-house ‘how-to’ video with residency participants, but were able instead to post James Bridle’s video directly on to the Diffusion site. A final sharing day where all the various case study residents met and discussed each other’s work was very useful. Since completing the residency I have joined the Diffusion Generator User Group on Facebook, and will use that to share further developments with other users as the project grows, but also to maintain contact with new iterations and development phases of the Generator.

I really value the time and work that Proboscis put in to designing and delivering these residencies – it was an incredibly useful and productive process for me, which more than delivered on the residency aims that we established at the outset.

Tony White
April 2008

The eBooks
Bibliography v0.1
The Scene
Hyde Park
Do You Hear That?
Bottle Orchestra
Ahead in the Line
Gobbledegook

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Home » Learning, Schools & Education, Residencies
Case Study – Teenagers’ Writing Workshop, Summer 2007
Submitted by on March 5, 2008 – 1:32 pmNo Comment

Over a week in late July/early August 2007 Proboscis hosted a writing workshop for four teenage girls. The girls were invited to participate as part of the Case Study Residencies programme and spent an intense five days in the Proboscis studio during which they conceived, created, wrote, designed and produced illustrated stories to be published via the Diffusion Generator.

The week began with an introduction to Proboscis and the project and the girls talked about their experiences of writing and illustrating stories – what they enjoyed doing, what they found hard, why they wanted to achieve etc. All four were keen artists and writers interested in Manga; they discussed the kinds of things they currently wrote and the problems they faced. All of them commented that they very rarely finished stories – ideas came and went – and that they would move onto another story before they had finished the previous one.

A walk around Clerkenwell and Smithfield Market, an area steeped in history and vibrant with everyday life and change, formed the basis for the girls’ stories. Each of the girls was given a digital camera and sound recorder to capture images and sounds of the area that interested them. Our route took us past Mount Pleasant, through Finsbury down to Clerkenwell Green and St John’s Gate, through to Charterhouse Square, round Smithfield and St Barts, up Saffron and Herbal Hills and back to Rosebery Avenue. Using a small library of books about London’s past and present, we researched histories of some of the building, who lived in these places and what took place there. In particular the girls became fascinated with a former Victorian school building erected on the site of Clerkenwell’s notorious House of Correction, an underground prison of the 17th and 18th Centuries.

Using the walk, their research, and the photos and sounds recorded on the walk as the source material, we spent a few hours as a group planning a master narrative and skeleton storyboard. This set out a single plot and selection of characters which they could all use and base their stories around, with individual stories deviating from this central concept as they chose. Once the bones of the narrative were in place we spent a while coming up with the elements to be included in each scene using the StoryCubes to think about what should and shouldn’t be included.

Concentrating on the storyboarding was quite a difficult task and different to the girls’ usual methods of writing, however it provided a useful framework for working out the characters, their relationships and the major events of the main story. We pushed them to come up with the skeleton story but also let them know that they had the freedom to do what they liked with the stories after this – they could miss out chapters, start at a different point or change whatever they wished.

Focusing on the school and the prison as the place of the story, the characters’ images and their names became important to the girls and they did more intense work on the various chapters and the characters throughout the week. The illustrations for the eBooks were drawn first before being scanned. Some of them were then coloured using Painter and Photoshop. The girls worked on the drawings and stories simultaneously, making decisions as they went along about what images were needed and where. A lot of the Manga-style images were shared between a number of the girls with several of the same characters appearing in more than one of the girls stories. This interweaving of narrative and character giving this series of eBooks a particular coherence and sense of multiple authorship.

By the end of the five day workshop each of the girls had completed the stories and illustrations for at least one eBook; over the next couple of months these were refined and edited before being published on the Diffusion site in November 2007.

The eBooks
Kiddie Crunch Time – Vanda Rjechko
KCT– Grandma’s Story – Georgia Hudson
Crunch! – AyaOluwa Aloa
Deep_’n_Dark 2: Mo(u)rning Rises – Eloise Mitchell
Deep_’n_Dark 1: Dusk Descends – Eloise Mitchell

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