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
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
About : A few weeks ago I was privileged to take part in a project which brought Porer and Pinbin, two Negkini speaking people from Reite (a village on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea) to the British Museum’s Ethnography Dept. They were with Dr James Leach (Head of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen) who has done extensive field work in their village over the past 15 years, and who hosted their visit to the UK this summer. Their visit to the BM was to take part in the latest stage of the Melanesia Project, a project bringing indigenous people from Papua New Guinea, The Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to look at and discuss objects in the collection to increase understanding of their social, cultural and spiritual significance, as well as details of what they are made of, how they are made and by whom.
The Melanesia Project explores the relationships between a wide range of indigenous art and artefact forms, socially-significant narratives, and the indigenous communities from which historic collections of Melanesian art derive. Focusing on the important but largely unstudied Melanesian collections in the British Museum, this project aims to bring new perspectives to both the study of indigenous art, and the understanding of ownership, heritage, and relations between museums and communities.
James and I had discussed meeting up during the project sometime before and then I had suggested using Diffusion Notebooks to create documentation of the process that could be easily shared with Porer and Pinbin’s own community (who enjoy a subsistence lifestyle in the Papua New Guinean rainforest without electricity or many of the communication technologies we take for granted). Our colleagues at the BM, Lissant Bolton (Head of Oceania Section) and Liz Bonshek (Research Associate) agreed, and I was invited to come in and observe and assist with the process.
It was a remarkable opportunity to see how people from a very different culture and civilisation respond to objects collected up to 170 years ago from their locality – how their relation to the objects was one rooted in the materials and the craft with which they were made. It was impressive to see the depth of tactile knowledge Porer and Pinbin have in their hands, how the act of touching was fundamental to their process of recognition of the plants and other materials used in making the objects as well as how they would have been made, as though the touching of the objects conducted a current to complete a circuit of memory.
Several of the notebooks of their observations of the objects made during the week are here to download, print out and make up. The notebooks, written in both English and Tok Pisin (the lingua franca of PNG) by James, have images of the objects as well as the people in the discussions, taken with digital cameras and printed out using a Polaroid PoGo printer (the sticky-backed prints placed directly into the notebooks). The notebooks were then taken apart and scanned in as flat A4 sheets to become Shareable PDf files. This enabled us to transform unique hand-written notebooks into digital publications that can be printed out, made up and shared as often as necessary. It was also an opportunity to give physical records to Porer and Pinbin that they could return to their village with and share their experiences and what they interacted with with their own community – making tangible some of the experiences that would be almost unimaginable and very difficult to communicate to people whose lives are lived within an entirely different relationship to the environment around them.
British Museum & Bookleteer | bookleteer blog [...] was used in the Melanesia Project to record, Porer and Pinbin, indigenous people from Papua New Guinea discussing objects… Comment posted on 7-1-2011 at 11:05
October Newsletter | Proboscis [...] Ethnographic Notebooks, British Museum Melanesia Project http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1301 [...] Comment posted on 11-2-2009 at 15:54
Dr.A.U.Dan'asabe As my name apire above. I am a consultant witch export all African Cultural Instruments. Regards. Dr.A.U.Dan'asabe. Comment posted on 10-14-2009 at 18:44
Card Making Sounds like a wonderful experience! How long has the project been running? Comment posted on 10-1-2009 at 13:51
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About : DodoLab Wants To Know is a community research tool which asks a series of simple questions designed to encourage reflection on the things that we have lost due to cultural, social and environmental change and what we’d like to bring back. This simple tool is meant to both collect information and encourage dialogue within communities and across generations. To use one of these books is to join the DodoLab research team and we encourage those who use them to share their findings with DodoLab (www.dodolab.ca).
Published August 2009
DodoLab is a dynamic and experimental co-creative lab for engaging with communities, organizations and events that is collaborative and fluid. A shared initiative of Render (University of Waterloo, Canada) and the Musagetes Foundation (Canada), DodoLab brings together creative researchers/practitioners, community leaders, educators and students to challenge accepted ideas, assumptions and methodologies and to develop insights into contexts, processes and situations. DodoLab is not a predetermined package, program or methodology, it is a process-based exploration that emerges out of the needs, challenges, concerns and ideas of the communities, organizations, groups and institutions we collaborate with and draws its strength from the rich combination of skills, knowledge and experience these collaborations contain. The environment, youth, knowledge sharing, leadership, social innovation and community are central concerns of DodoLab and our philosophy of cultivating true collaboration and co-creation reflects the firm belief that we cannot solve the complex problems we face if we don’t work together with openness and respect. DodoLab looks to build relationships with its collaborators that are meaningful and lasting and that emphasize shared responsibilities for action and learning. DodoLab is led by Andrew Hunter (RENDER). Probsocis continues to be a valued partner of RENDER’s and a significant contributor to the DodoLab initiative.
About : ‘The Lunar House “Re-enactment”’ was commissioned by King’s College, Cambridge and forms part of a report by the author on the Arts Council England and King’s College, Cambridge Art and Law Seminar: Interdisciplinary and New Media Arts, which was held in Cambridge in October 2007. The story also continues Tony White’s Balkanising Bloomsbury project, and was created by cutting up, remixing and re-narrativising fragments from various sources including materials relating to the work of artists Heath Bunting and Rod Dickinson. ‘The Lunar House “Re-enactment”‘ was devised as an opportunity to reflect more deeply upon the work of artist Heath Bunting, which had caused minor controversy amongst Art and Law seminar participants without its being fully discussed.
Published July 2009
Tony White is Leverhulme Trust writer in residence for 2008-09 at The UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He is theauthor of novels including Foxy-T (Faber and Faber) and the non-fiction work Another Fool in the Balkans. His most recently published work of fiction is Albertopolis Disparu (Science Museum Booklet), see http://sciencemuseum.org.uk/writer . 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 or in response to visual arts and interdisciplinary projects by London Fieldworks, Bob and Roberta Smith, Alison Turnbull, Chris Dorley-Brown, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, Alan Phelan and others. The Balkanising Bloomsbury project has been supported by Arts Council England through Grants for the Arts, by the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) and the Leverhulme Trust.
About : En este pequeño libro se muestran en forma breve algunas reflexiones que han guiado mi proceso creativo: esencialmente el lenguaje de la pintura relacionado con el gran interés de la vida en el planeta: su origen, sus extinciones y sus seres.
Estado de presencia provides a brief look at some of the reflections that have guided my creative process. Essentially the language of painting in relation to my passion about the planet: its origin, animals in danger and those already extinct and life in general.
Published July 2009
Cristina Luna nace en la Ciudad de México en 1963. Cursa estudios de música en el Conservatorio Nacional y realiza la licenciatura en Artes Plásticas en el área de gráfica en la escuela de pintura, escultura y grabado “La Esmeralda”. En 1994 es seleccionada en la Séptima Bienal Rufino Tamayo y en 1995 participa en la Bienal de Grafica de Puerto Rico. En ese mismo año es invitada a realizar una residencia artística en Villa Montalvo, en Saratoga California. En el año 2001 Cristina cambia su residencia de la Ciudad de México al pueblo de San Agustín Etla, Oaxaca donde pinta actualmente. Cristina ha tenido 16 exposiciones individuales de las cuales y ha participado también en diversas exposiciones colectivas tanto en México, Estados Unidos y Puerto Rico.
Cristina Luna was born in Mexico City in 1963. She studied music at the National Conservatory and holds a Bachelor’s degree in art from “La Esmeralda”, school of painting, sculpture and engraving. In 1994 Cristina was selected for the seventh biennial Rufino Tamayo and in 1995 participated in the Puerto Rico Biennale. That same year she was invited to be artist in residence in Villa Montalvo, Saratoga California. Cristina moved to San Agustín Etla, Oaxaca in 2001, where she currently lives and paints. Cristina has had 16 solo exhibitions and has been involved in several group exhibitions both in Mexico, United States and Puerto Rico.
About : The Octuplet: Story of Our Lives is the first published story in English by Dutch visual artist and illustrator Babette Wagenvoort. It tells the strange story of eight human-beings living inside their mother, while they prepare for their future. One of the octuplets seems better equipped for life than the others… Much like Babette’s visual work this story balances between reality and fiction, between poetry and prose.
Babette Wagenvoort (MA RCA) is best known for her red drawings from the series ‘Life According To A Rectilinear Personality‘, which she published daily on her website for years. As an illustrator she has worked for several publications like VPRO Gids, De Volkskrant, Vrij Nederland, Opzij and Hollands Maandblad in The Netherlands and the BBC, Le Gun and Dazed & Confused in the UK. Her drawings can be found as commissioned public art works and animations in schools, as wallpaper designed for Maxalot, but also as wall drawings, animations and installations within more regular exhibition spaces. She teaches drawing at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague and is curator of ‘Volkskrant Oog‘, an online platform for artists of the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. A new book with Babette’s drawings called ‘Mood Swing – An Alphabet of Moods’ will come out in July/August 2009.
*** a classic landscape eBook & StoryCubes created with the new Diffusion Generator ***
Selected and Introduced for Short Work by Bronac Ferran, independent researcher and writer and Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven still causes a shiver to flow through my body now, re-reading it many years after I first heard it. This is poetry of feeling. There is a sense in which one is there, doomed forever to consider what the raven means with his incantation ‘Nevermore’. In this version, Poe’s near hallucinatory intensity is combined with a translation into French by the great poet Stéphane Mallarmé and stark images by Edouard Manet to form a magical combination.
Mallarmé and Manet, fountainheads of modern poetry and painting, were good friends in Paris in the 1860s and 70s. There were many points where their lives touched – indeed they lived in the same street and met almost daily. Mallarmé’s house was a kind of early social network node – the meeting point for a group of artists and poets called Les Mardistes who met on Tuesday evenings. We see in this work, a rare example of a great poet and great painter working in true confluence – both responding to another work and in the process, both honouring and transforming it. In many ways, this work seems to me to be a milestone – in advance of Mallarme’s later work – which broke with conventions of form and presentation in deeply significant ways. The influence of Mallarmé in terms of his dissolution of form, breaking down of the poetic into its essential parts and core components, sifting out sound, silences, analogies and tonal clarities has been acknowledged by many great 20th artists – from May Ray to Pierre Boulez and John Cage. His singular experiments which beautifully combine abstraction with performativity appear ever more significant over time as we look today at the emergence of software code and machine language as drivers of 21st cutural expression. His experiments with form exploring and revealing underlying latencies may be seen as a linguistic and poetic decoding. These were exciting developments that led directly to many of the most important aesthetic and cultural innovations of the 20th century and preceded the emergence, in particular, of serialism, concretism and forms of machine/computer art. We trace these experiments into process-based and open works of the 60s including Computerized Haiku, computer poetry devised by Margaret Masterman (with Robin McKinnon-Wood) of the Cambridge Language Research Unit as well as earlier tense exchanges between Boulez and Cage on the importance of otherwise of chance in composition and performance. Now, in the 21st century, when remix and recombinant processes are accepted as mainstream and hypertext is common we can only imagine what it might have been like to take those first steps, to reorganise the order of things and shift a cultural modality forever.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer and critic, famous for his stories of the macabre, and often credited as the creator of detective fiction.
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was a French poet and critic, perhaps best known for his typographic experimental poem, Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard.
A few weeks ago I came across Kevin Macleod‘s website, incompetech, where he has created a series of free graph and notepaper generators for making all sorts of useful and intriguing designs. We’ve combined a small selection of his page designs into Diffusion eBooks as examples of how we can further extend the Shareable Notebook range, and offer custom and personalised eNotebooks for different purposes.
About : BlakeWalking is a new way of conversing, participating, publishing, performing & *creating* on the hoof. The aim of Blakewalking is to Transform an everday walk into a *Visionary Experience*. We want you to join us out on the streets, on the web & on your mobile – making notes, recording thoughts & feelings, responding to the world we walk through – and the world *within*! See http://www.timwright.typepad.com/L_O_S for more details.
Published June 2009
Tim Wright is a digital writer, a cross platform media producer and a director of XPT Ltd. See www.xpt.com or follow @moongolfer on Twitter.
*** a landscape ‘classic’ eBook made with the new Diffusion Generator ***
About : An eBook made for participants in a workshop with the Sutton-in-the-Isle Youth Group, where we are making a short video (part of Proboscis’ Sutton Grapevine project). The group is collaborating to make a video about their recent trip abroad to meet other young people from around the world and exchange stories for their Your Stories project.
The eBook is a record of the first session’s activities, questions and a storyboard sketch. It captures the process of thinking and the questions we asked in the first session, as well providing a notebook for the group to write on, draw over or change as the sessions continue.
Published June 2009
Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. In 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the first Artist in the Park residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon, organised by Parks Canada.
Orlagh Woods is an artist whose work explores how diverse people and communities engage with each other and their environment – how they connect, communicate and are perceived both through digital and non-digital means. She has been working with Proboscis since 2004 and also curates a professional development programme for British Asian theatre company, Tamasha, in London.
*** a ‘book’ (long edge binding) eBook created using the new Diffusion Generator ***
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 ***
About : The Thirty-Six Stratagems is collection of ancient Chinese proverbs whose origin is unknown, but is understood to date back to the late Ming or early Qing dynasty. Contemporary versions are all derived from a tattered book discovered at a roadside vendor’s stall in Sichuan or Shannxi in 1941, first coming to wider attention in 1961 when published in the Chinese Communist Party’s Guangming Daily newspaper.
The Stratagems (an alternative title was The Secret Art of War) are often paired with Sun Tzu’s celebrated Art of War, but lean more heavily towards the fields of politics, diplomacy and espionage. The text restricts itself to simply naming each strategy with a brief explanation, often containing allusions to the I-Ching, or Book of Changes – modern editions often also contain illustrative stories from folklore and history.
Six multiplied by six equals thirty-six.
Calculations produce tactics which in turn produce calculations.
Each side depends upon the other.
Based on this correlative relationship, ploys against the enemy are devised.
Rigid application of Military theory will only result in defeat on the battlefield.
Unknown first publication date, believed late Ming or early Qing dynasty
Sourced from Wengu and Wikipedia Translated by Stefan Verstappen
*** a ‘book’ (long edge binding) eBook created using the new Diffusion Generator ***
About : ‘Would be Disciplined’ continues Tony White’s Balkanising Bloomsbury project. The story was created by cutting up, remixing and re-narrativising fragments from various sources including the Sydney Morning Herald, transcripts from the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Richard Burton translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. ‘Would be Disciplined’was supported additionally by the Australia Council, Performance Space, Sydney, and the Institute of Advanced Studies at University of Western Australia, Perth. The story was written at UWA as part of a series of events to mark the culmination of Barbara Campbell’s 1001 Nights Cast. A version of the story is also archived on the project’s website at http://1001.net.au
Published May 2009
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. His most recently published work of fiction is Albertopolis Disparu (Science Museum Booklet) – see http://sciencemuseum.org.uk/writer . 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. Balkanising Bloomsbury has been supported by Arts Council England through Grants for the Arts, and by the Leverhulme Trust. 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.
About : With the increase in youth crime and violence we need to find new ways of dealing with the issue. ICT has proven to be a good initiative to capture the mind of young people. The real challenge is getting them to participate, this is where the iStreet Lab come in. The iStreet Lab presents an innovative experimental formula to tackle the problem at its roots. Providing expertise and creating a platform for information exchange and collaboration with those directly associated with the issues relating to crime and violence. The iStreet Lab is a revolutionary invention enabling its users to share knowledge using the tools provided.
Published May 2009
Richard Pierre-Davis is one of the co-founders of Mongrel and one of the four core members that made up the media artist collective. Richard has been a media artist and workshop practitioner since 1995, and his emphasis rests strongly on the facilitation of new media events within communities, providing them with the tools to create their own expressions of culture or creating a framework within which this expression can form itself. Richard’s work as a core member of Mongrel has led to an expertise from the shared experiences of working with many special groups from Aboriginal Australians to Navajo Indians, University faculties and students to some of the most deprived innercity communities.
mervin Thomas-Jarman is founder and director of mongrelStreet has been a street activist for more than twenty years. In 1995, he co-founded the avant-garde digital arts group ‘Mongrel Collective’, and in 1999 started the mongrelStreet Initiative to produce projects for street youth around the world. His first production was ‘When The Screen Goes Black’ a workshop produced for youth in the Stone Bridge Park area of Harlesden NW10, working with the Social Inclusion Unit of Brent Council. In 2003, under the mongrelStreet umbrella, he established the Container Project in Palmers Cross Jamaica, working with the community and local youth with challenging behaviour that had earned them the label ‘hard to reach’. In 2008 he created the iStreet Lab a community multimedia-training unit in a 240 litre garbage disposal wheelie bin.
About : This double-sided StoryCube has been designed for the Dodolab intervention at the 5th World Environmental Education Congress in Montréal, May 10-14 2009. Dodolab is a collaborative and creative intervention exploring different approaches to the concept of sustainability, resilience and adaptability. It is organised by Andrew Hunter of Render @ University of Waterloo and Shawn van Sluys of Musagetes Foundation. Giles Lane of Proboscis will be participating to engage delegates in creating a landscape of ideas using the cubes, as well as social mapping activities using a Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion Map.
Published May 2009
Giles Lane is an artist, researcher and teacher. He founded and is co-director of Proboscis, a non-profit creative studio based in London where, since 1994, he has led projects such as Urban Tapestries; Snout; Mapping Perception; Experiencing Democracy; Everyday Archaeology; and Private Reveries, Public Spaces. Giles is a Visiting Tutor on the MA Design Critical Practice at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and is a Research Associate of the Media and Communications Department at London School of Economics. Giles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2008 for his contribution to community development through creative practice.
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.
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.
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
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H2O StoryCubes A4 only PDF 3.83Mb
About : H2O looks at the materiality of water to speculate on its cultural and political significance at the turn of the 21 century. We can begin reflecting on who we are and what we want to become by understanding the place that water holds in social life and cultural change.
Published March 2009 in the Diffusion Transformations series
Alejandra Canales is a Chilean-born performance artist and independent filmmaker, concerned with the social and political dimensions of artistic practice. Based in Sydney since 1998, she has undertaken studies in film and video production and has worked in several roles for independent films. In 2005 she completed a Master Honours at AFTRS where she directed two documentaries A Silence Full of Things and Switch on the Night. Currently she is a recipient of a scholarship to complete a Doctorate of Creative Arts at University of Wester Sydney where she works on the project Rendering Water: a documentary fiction on the cultural future of water. She also received an Ian Potter Cultural Trust grant to progress on her new multi-platform documentary film Solid_Liquid_Gas_H20.
Anne Ransquin is a Belgian photographer and historian working across photography, design, film and community media. She has participated in as well as conducted several photographic workshops such us Suburbancrossings digital photography workshop with young refugees from Sudan and Chad in collaboration with Information and Cultural Exchange and the University of Western Sydney. She has also contributed to several independent film projects in Chile, Australia and Belgium in her capacity as a still photographer as well as an assistant director. Currently she is developing a photodocumentary project in Arles and will assist Spanish artists at the Biennal of Contemporary Arts in La Havana/Cuba (March 2009). She is a member of the Belgian photographers collective, Collectif Caravane.
Juan Francisco Salazar is a Chilean born, Sydney-based media anthropologist and video maker. He lectures in communication and media studies at the University of Western Sydney where he is also a research member in the Centre for Cultural Research. He has published extensively in areas of indigenous and community media, climate change and social change. He has produced several documentaries and experimental films which have been exhibited internationally.
Lee Johnson I wish more artists wuld make the trip to Cuba like Anne Ransquin, the more they see of outside culture… Comment posted on 10-17-2009 at 08:55
George Stubbs (1724-1806) is recognised as one of the most original artists of the eighteenth century. His singular ability to translate the study of nature into extraordinarily balanced compositions marks him out from all other practitioners in the field of animal painting. Although his wide-ranging subjects also included portraits, conversation pieces and paintings of domestic and exotic animals, Stubbs is best known for painting horses, and his reputation was established among noblemen devoted to racing and breeding horses who recognised in him a shared sympathy for the English countryside and rural ways of life.
Stubbs’s career as a painter of horses was rooted in his extraordinary knowledge of equine make-up. In his early thirties, between 1756 and 1758, Stubbs spent eighteen months dissecting and drawing the bodies of up to a dozen horses at a remote farmhouse at Horkstow in Lincolnshire. Out of this unflinching and painstaking industry came a publication called The Anatomy of the Horse and a steadfast commitment to the pursuit of reality.
In A Memoir of George Stubbs, the only contemporary account of the artist’s life and career, Ozias Humphry described Stubbs’s working methods in Horkstow:
‘The first subject which was procured was a horse which was bled to death by the jugular vein – after which the arteries and veins were injected – Then a bar of iron was suspended from the ceiling of the room, by a teagle of iron to which iron hooks were fixed – under this bar a plank was swung at 16 inches wide for the horse feet to rest upon – and the horse was suspended to the bar of iron by the above mentioned hooks which was fastened into the opposite side of the horse that was intended to be designed, by passing the hooks through the ribs and fastening them under the back bone – and by these means the horse was fixed in the attitude which these prints represent and continued hanging in the posture six or seven weeks, or as long as they were fit for use –
His drawings of a skeleton were previously made – and then the operations upon this fixed subject were thus begun. He first began by dissecting and designing the muscles of the abdomen – proceeding through five different layers of muscles till he came to the peritoneum and the pleura, through which appeared the lungs and the intestines – after which the bowels were taken out, and cast away. –
Then he proceeded to dissect the head, by first stripping off the skin and after having cleared and prepared the muscles, et cetera, for the drawing, he made careful designs of them and wrote the explanation which usually employed him a whole day.
Then he took off another lay of muscles which he prepared, designed, and described, in the same manner as is represented in the book – and so he proceeded until he came to the skeleton – … It must be noted that by means of the injection [of wax or tallow] the muscles, the blood vessels, and the nerves, retained their form to the last without undergoing any change of position.
In this manner he advanced his work by stripping off skin and clearing and preparing as much of the subject as he concluded would employ a whole day to prepare design and describe, as above related, till the whole subject was completed.’
The first edition of The Anatomy of the Horse featured eighteen plates etched by the artist from his drawings, and more than 50,000 words of meticulous scientific text, and its publication in 1766 earned Stubbs instant and lasting appreciation, not least from the animal painters who followed him. ‘[Try] to imagine, for a moment,’ wrote Sir Alfred Munnings, President of the Royal Academy of Arts, ‘Stubbs at his work setting up and dissecting horse-carcasses in the barn there, making detailed drawings, for plate after plate with all the names of the muscles and finally engraving each plate himself, this latter part of the work, an entirely new departure for him, being spread over something like a period of six years, we may then begin to grasp the magnitude of this labour of love.’
Forty-two of Stubbs’s drawings for The Anatomy of the Horse survive in the Royal Academy Collections. Of these, eighteen are scrupulously finished on fine paper, made to be engraved for publication, and drawn to the same scale. The other twenty four are working drawings. Of the eighteen engravings in the accompanying eBook, many have drawings in Piccadilly that directly relate to Stubbs’s original plates. Fifteen of these are from the old set of eighteen, and five belong to the twenty-four working drawings.
The Anatomy of the Horse is a supreme achievement, but Stubbs’s belief in scientific inquiry as the basis for art should not blind us to the fact that his subsequent portraits of thoroughbed racehorses are more than just paintings of record for they absorb us on so many levels; by engaging the personality and feeding the spirit, they compel examination. To see Stubbs’s work solely as a reflection of the Enlightenment aspirations of his aristocratic clients is to neglect its phenomenal aesthetic quality and its lasting, but frequently overlooked impact on the later development of western art.
About : Measure Once, Cut Twice is an examination of how an arts organisation like Proboscis produces creative collaborative artworks – specifically their ‘participatory sensing’ project, Snout. The concept of cutting is developed as a means of understanding how objects, people, and practices temporarily come together to produce exceptional moments of social engagement.
Published March 2009
Frederik Lesage is a PhD candidate in the Media and Communications department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. His doctoral thesis deals with the collective construction of artistic conventions among artists who design and use information and communication technologies.
Introducing the eBook Observer | bookleteer blog [...] began to take shape while conducting some research on a previous Proboscis project called Snout (read Measure Once, Cut… Comment posted on 8-26-2010 at 12:39
Mike Ipswich The pages in the pdf are not in sequential order and some of them are upside down. Is this… Comment posted on 10-17-2009 at 17:37
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
About : These 30 epithets form a kind of experimental prose poem that uses the 140 character constraint of the micro-blogging service Twitter as its structure. They were composed as a contribution to the catalogue for Larissa Hjorth’s CU: the presents of co-presence, a project exploring SMS culture. Each epithet was prefaced with the hashtag #tweetome and first published via Twitter on February 22nd 2009.
Published March 2009
Giles Lane is an artist, researcher and teacher. He founded and is co-director of Proboscis, a non-profit creative studio based in London where, since 1994, he has led projects such as Urban Tapestries; Snout; Mapping Perception; Experiencing Democracy; Everyday Archaeology; and Private Reveries, Public Spaces. Giles is a Visiting Tutor on the MA Design Critical Practice at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and is a Research Associate of the Media and Communications Department at London School of Economics. Giles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2008 for his contribution to community development through creative practice.
About : The minimal compact: An “open source” constitutional framework for post-national collectivities (v0.1.1) First written and published online in 2003, the Minimal Compact is a manifesto for creating a constitution between people, based on open-source software concepts and practices, that goes beyond the framework of the nation state.
Published March 2009
Adam Greenfield is a writer and critical futurist, and as of 2009 holds the position of Head of Design Direction, Service and User Interface Design for Nokia. He has spent the past ten years exploring the intersection of technology, design and culture, with a strong focus on issues around ubiquitous computing. His 2006 book on the subject, Everyware, has been acclaimed as “groundbreaking,” “elegant,” and “soulful” by Bruce Sterling, and “gracefully written, fascinating, and deeply wise” by Wired’s Steve Silberman. His book The City Is Here For You To Use (Do Projects, forthcoming) explores the impact of these technologies on urban form and metropolitan experience. Previously a rock critic, San Francisco bike messenger, PSYOP sergeant, and head of the information architecture department for the Tokyo office of the notorious early Internet consultancy Razorfish, Greenfield most recently co-taught the “Urban Computing” course at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program with Kevin Slavin. He currently lives and works in Helsinki, Finland, and blogs at speedbird.wordpress.com. His Twitter feed can be found at twitter.com/agpublic.
About : The Tongue Conceals Time uses randomly grouped words and phrases from print and electronic media to create poems that celebrate the hints of chaotic beauty found in happenstance associations. The poems and tales embrace absurdism as well as the emergence of patterns and structures in seemingly dissociated material.
Published February 2009
Historian and poet Shae Davidson currently serves as a member of the Creative Synthesis Collaborative, and has worked as an instructor, researcher, and museum director. His prior publications include historical essays, reviews, and policy analysis; his poetry has appeared in journals in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
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
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)
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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
really f***king stupid format
Comment posted on 1-27-2010 at 20:59
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
[...] Download your free set of e-books on seminal 1970s performance group, The Theatre of…
Comment posted on 10-12-2009 at 11:00