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
About : dangerous liaisons – some short and seedy criminal narratives. Third in a series of 6 eBooks and StoryCubes published weekly, feuilleton style.
Marseille Mix
My first encounters with Marseille were in the cinema, in films such as The French Connection, La Ville est Tranquille and Taxi. It seemed a strange place, dangerous, not conventionally beautiful, down at heel, but somehow attractive. I decided on the basis of this cinematic introduction that this was the city I wished to write about – exactly because it did not coincide in any way with what I considered to be a city, because of its defiance.
Marseille is an irreconcilable mix – of different cultures, different societies, different ideas about the planning, different images, different gastronomies. It evokes fantasy as much as objectivity. As a city it inspires dislike and fear but also pride and love.
It is not possible to investigate this city in a linear, coherent fashion, since the city is in no way linear or coherent.
Marseille Mix contains various methods of writing – narrative, essay, recipe, lists, conversations, chance remarks, and others. Sometimes it flows easily enough, sometimes it accepts the need for contradiction, disruption, lack of resolution. Of course the book is not really exactly like the city – it is a personal investigation, with its own points of view.
Published November 2008 in the Diffusion Transformations Series
William Firebrace is an architect, and teaches in various London schools of architecture. He has published one book, Things Worth Seeing (Black Dog 2001), has completed a second, Awake, and is now finishing a third, Marseille Mix, which should appear in 2009. Unit 2, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
About : ideal city – a personal tour of the destruction and reconstruction of the city. Second in a series of 6 eBooks and StoryCubes published weekly, feuilleton style.
Marseille Mix
My first encounters with Marseille were in the cinema, in films such as The French Connection, La Ville est Tranquille and Taxi. It seemed a strange place, dangerous, not conventionally beautiful, down at heel, but somehow attractive. I decided on the basis of this cinematic introduction that this was the city I wished to write about – exactly because it did not coincide in any way with what I considered to be a city, because of its defiance.
Marseille is an irreconcilable mix – of different cultures, different societies, different ideas about the planning, different images, different gastronomies. It evokes fantasy as much as objectivity. As a city it inspires dislike and fear but also pride and love.
It is not possible to investigate this city in a linear, coherent fashion, since the city is in no way linear or coherent.
Marseille Mix contains various methods of writing – narrative, essay, recipe, lists, conversations, chance remarks, and others. Sometimes it flows easily enough, sometimes it accepts the need for contradiction, disruption, lack of resolution. Of course the book is not really exactly like the city – it is a personal investigation, with its own points of view.
Published November 2008 in the Diffusion Transformations Series
William Firebrace is an architect, and teaches in various London schools of architecture. He has published one book, Things Worth Seeing (Black Dog 2001), has completed a second, Awake, and is now finishing a third, Marseille Mix, which should appear in 2009. Unit 2, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
This publication coincides with the Digital Cities: London’s Future exhibition at the Building Centre in London (21 Nov 2008-17 Jan 2009).
Published November 2008
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.
Beyond society’s canons of literature there are the outlaws – songs and stories that survive in the wild. Sea shanties are among the hardiest of these forms and all the more remarkable for having their roots in a vanished world of sailing ships. There is a raw surrealism in sea shanties that is bred from endless nights in the belly of tomb-like wooden hulks floating on deep swelling oceans. The wild ramblings (‘Cape Cod kids ain’t got no sleds/They slide down the hills on codfish heads’) are tempered by the disciplined, rope burned, rhythms of the nautical work song. It is this emphasis on hard manual labour, combined with a sailor’s wicked word play, which gives these songs their enduring appeal. You can sense their influence behind Shakespeare’s sea song in The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.
And you can hear them lurking in the sailors’ song in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon – ‘Sumatra, where the girls all look like Cleopatra, and when you’re done you’ll simply barter…’ Sea shanties move with a swagger. They tempt purple prose and have given birth to long rambling movies from Moby Dick to Pirates of the Caribbean. They’re proof that not all our genetic code is in the marrow – some of it is in songs like these.
This selection is taken from the collection of Andrew Draskóy on his website Shanties and Sea Songs. As he suggests these lyrics are best heard sung and three good albums provide a starting point:
Sailor’s Songs and Sea Shanties (Highpoint, 2004)
Blow the Man Down: a Collection of Sea Songs & Shanties (Topic, 1995)
Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys (Epitaph, 2006)
About : never look at the map – a confusing entry into the city. First in a series of 6 eBooks and StoryCubes published weekly, feuilleton style.
Marseille Mix
My first encounters with Marseille were in the cinema, in films such as The French Connection, La Ville est Tranquille and Taxi. It seemed a strange place, dangerous, not conventionally beautiful, down at heel, but somehow attractive. I decided on the basis of this cinematic introduction that this was the city I wished to write about – exactly because it did not coincide in any way with what I considered to be a city, because of its defiance.
Marseille is an irreconcilable mix – of different cultures, different societies, different ideas about the planning, different images, different gastronomies. It evokes fantasy as much as objectivity. As a city it inspires dislike and fear but also pride and love.
It is not possible to investigate this city in a linear, coherent fashion, since the city is in no way linear or coherent.
Marseille Mix contains various methods of writing – narrative, essay, recipe, lists, conversations, chance remarks, and others. Sometimes it flows easily enough, sometimes it accepts the need for contradiction, disruption, lack of resolution. Of course the book is not really exactly like the city – it is a personal investigation, with its own points of view.
Published November 2008 in the Diffusion Transformations Series
William Firebrace is an architect, and teaches in various London schools of architecture. He has published one book, Things Worth Seeing (Black Dog 2001), has completed a second, Awake, and is now finishing a third, Marseille Mix, which should appear in 2009. Unit 2, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
About : Blocks of Change takes a look at the brick industry in Peterborough and how it changed the landscape and social make-up of the city. It is one of three eBooks created by Proboscis as part of a pack of ‘Impressions’ of the city, its people and environment for the Perception Peterborough project. Blocks of Change was created and designed by Karen Martin.
Perception Peterborough is a dynamic and creative visioning project which brought together key local representatives with creative thinkers to develop innovative approaches to the challenges and opportunities facing Peterborough. Proboscis was commissioned to develop and lead a series of creative workshops alongside consultants Haring Woods Associates.
Published September 2008
Proboscis is a non-profit, artist-led creative studio based in London, UK. The team working on Perception Peterborough were: Alice Angus, Niharika Hariharan, Matt Huynh, Giles Lane, Karen Martin, Carmen Vela Maldonado and Orlagh Woods.
About : Lines of Mobility is a brief exploration of the role that the railways played in shaping the social, environmental and spatial landscape of Peterborough. It is one of three eBooks created by Proboscis as part of a pack of ‘Impressions’ of the city, its people and environment for the Perception Peterborough project. Lines of Mobility was created and designed by Karen Martin.
Perception Peterborough is a dynamic and creative visioning project which brought together key local representatives with creative thinkers to develop innovative approaches to the challenges and opportunities facing Peterborough. Proboscis was commissioned to develop and lead a series of creative workshops alongside consultants Haring Woods Associates.
Published September 2008
Proboscis is a non-profit, artist-led creative studio based in London, UK. The team working on Perception Peterborough were: Alice Angus, Niharika Hariharan, Matt Huynh, Giles Lane, Karen Martin, Carmen Vela Maldonado and Orlagh Woods.
Perception Peterborough | metaspectiveblog [...] can also download the beautiful eBooks created by Proboscis as part of the impressions here. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:Like [...] Comment posted on 5-13-2013 at 12:57
About : Bus Adventures traces a series of journeys taken by bus through Peterborough and its villages chatting to locals, taking images and recording sounds. It is one of three eBooks created by Proboscis as part of a pack of ‘Impressions’ of the city, its people and environment for the Perception Peterborough project. Bus Adventures was designed and created by Orlagh Woods with Karen Martin.
Perception Peterborough is a dynamic and creative visioning project which brought together key local representatives with creative thinkers to develop innovative approaches to the challenges and opportunities facing Peterborough. Proboscis was commissioned to develop and lead a series of creative workshops alongside consultants Haring Woods Associates.
Published September 2008
Proboscis is a non-profit, artist-led creative studio based in London, UK. The team working on Perception Peterborough were: Alice Angus, Niharika Hariharan, Matt Huynh, Giles Lane, Karen Martin, Carmen Vela Maldonado and Orlagh Woods.
About : insideout 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.
About : Proboscis are running a creative workshop on September 18th at ZAIM, Yokohama as part of the Dislocate08 festival. The workshop is the initial stage of our research for Sensory Threads, engaging artists, urbanists, designers, technologists, musicians and dancers in an active investigation into the sensorial patterns and rhythms to be found in our environment. The area around ZAIM in Yokohama will become our research field as we seek out and evidence the recurring, overlapping and intersecting sounds and movements that take place as we act in, and react to, our environment.
Sensory Threads is a work-in-progress to develop an instrument enabling a group of people to create a soundscape reflecting their collaborative experiences in the environment. For this interactive sensory experience, we are designing sensors for detecting environmental phenomena at the periphery of human perception as well as the movement and proximity of the wearers themselves. Possible targets for the sensors may be electro-magnetic radiation, hi/lo sound frequencies, heart rate etc). The sensors’ datastreams will feed into generative audio software, creating a multi-layered and multi-dimensional soundscape feeding back the players’ journey through their environment. Variations in the soundscape reflect changes in the wearers interactions with each other and the environment around them. We aim to premiere the work in 2009.
Sensory Threads is being created by Proboscis in collaboration with Birkbeck College’s Pervasive Computing Lab, The Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary (University of London), the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and the School of Management at University of Southampton.
Published September 2008.
Proboscis is an artist-led creative studio based in London, UK. The Sensory Threads workshop is being led by Giles Lane and Karen Martin with Frederik Lesage.
Attempting to remember my own things past recently, I thought back to first reading the opening overture of Swann’s Way as a teenager on holiday in Ireland. This astounding, swirling, sensuous evocation of the process of recollection unfolds voluptuously to create a mindscape of Marcel. I still haven’t read the whole book, but the opening remains one of my favourite pieces of prose, sonorous and delicious.
It was a revelation to first encounter this book which described how exactly we struggle to tease strands of dreams back into consciousness, how complex is the fabric of our musings and yearnings of nostalgia. And it’s impossible to write about Proust without trying and failing to write like him, sentences coiling and drifting like cigar smoke.
Recently I was on the underground pretentiously carrying over my shoulder the “Proust Society of America” book bag which I bought on a trip to New York for a meeting at the Mercantile Library where that society meets. On the tube a man sitting opposite asked if I’d read Proust, then told me that since his retirement he’d read the whole thing six times but never met anyone else who had even dipped in. He’d heard of the New York group, but found nothing like it in London. When I posted this news on the if:book blog (www.futureofthebook.org/blog), I soon heard from a London-based Proust Close Reading Group. It’s good to know that the Web connects Lost Time lovers too, because I’ve just been listening to another pundit sounding off on Radio 4 about the limited attention span of the digital generation. Of course my frenetic, twittering, mashed up excuse for a brain may find it hard to marshal a rational counter argument, but I believe that attending, Proust-like, to how exactly the mind works as it multi-tasks and clicks through layers to uncover depths beneath will surely be more fruitful than indulging in the same old moral panic about what’s newly new. There’s a magic about the transliterate way people read the world in the 21st Century, and we need a Marcel to document the texture and quality of that engagement.
About : At the Water’s Edge Finding that so much of her work on human relationships to land and urban space leads to issues around rivers and water Alice Angus is beginning a series of water based investigations exploring different perspectives of what it means to care for the environment and how it can affect the way in which water environments are managed and cared for. The dialogues are being recorded and shared as Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes. Through encounters, journeys and conversations with people who experience rivers in different ways the series aims to bring the discussion of environmental issues to a human dimension and consider how human creativity, spirituality and inventiveness in everyday life; from city workers to gardeners, urban planners to bus drivers, amateur botanists to academics is both witness to environmental change and fundamental to creating solutions to environmental issues.
A Conversation with Joyce Majiski
Joyce Majiski is an artist, naturalist and river and wilderness guide whose work focuses on the natural world. This eBook includes excerpts from a conversation with Joyce about two rivers; the Tatshenshini and the Firth. Both wilderness rivers in North Western Canada.
Published August 2008
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Selected and Introduced for Short Work by Garrick Jones, musician, academic and founder of the Ludic Group.
The Great Learning by Confucius was written around 500BC and forms the basis of much of Chinese political discourse and philosophy. These books were required texts for admission to Chinese administration for over 1500 years. They seek to provide a framework that unites the spiritual and the material with higher goals through self-cultivation, inquiry and learning.
The books are influential today in Chinese thought, were relevant throughout the Communist era, and were used didactically during the reign of the Emperors – as such they are essential reading and provide powerful insight into this great Culture. They are essentially materialist and promote the agency of the individual within society.
The English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981) famously used them as the libretto for his astonishing compositions – the forms of which were in turn uniquely inspired them. A set series of musical pieces which can be sung by any number of people, with any level of proficiency – and which, to my mind, demonstrate the emergent outcomes of complex, adaptive systems applying simple instruction sets.
Confucius (Master Kong/K’ung-tzu, 551-479 B.C.E.) is among the world’s most influential thinkers and teachers, his philosophical teachings guiding the Chinese Empire for over two thousand years.
About : an eNotebook created for a Treasure Hunt at Manningham Library, Bristol.
Published June 2008
Kevin Harris is a community development consultant and writer (Local Level). He blogs on neighbourhoods, neighbourliness, social capital and life at local level.
Kevin Flude’s main interests are the history, archaeology and museums of London. He has been proprietor of And Did Those Feet (Cultural Heritage Resources) since 1982. It has allowed him the opportunity of working in a variety of fields in the Heritage world. He is currently Director of the Old Operating Theatre Museum in Southwark; Associate Lecturer at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London and Worcester University and Course Director for the Elderhostel programme in London which provides study tours, lectures and walks on the history, archaeology architecture and art of London. Visit his blog here.
Bookmarks about Diffusion [...] - bookmarked by 2 members originally found by SK8erchick00 on 2008-12-09 The Bankside Walk by Kevin Flude… Comment posted on 1-4-2009 at 03:45
Jim De Young Neat little idea. I have a more detailed Bankside walk in my book London Theatre Walks. Would love… Comment posted on 7-2-2008 at 01:10
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.ca, www.curating.info
Download Manchester Beacon Workshop eBookA4 | US Letter PDF 1.8Mb Manchester Beacon Workshop StoryCubesA4 only PDF 1.9Mb b.TWEEN StoryCubesA4 only PDF 3.8Mb
About : The eBook is a document of the ideas, issues and challenges for an “an online service that maps connections between people, places, knowledge and creative activity in Manchester” – an new tool for public engagement and knowledge transfer for Manchester to be commissioned by the Manchester Beacon Project and Just b. Productions. It records the activities of workshop facilitated by Proboscis in Manchester in June 2008; 16 StoryCubes created during the workshop are also available, as well as 24 of the StoryCubes created by delegates and the public at b.TWEEN08 as part of the ‘landscape of ideas’ for the commission brief.
The workshop and StoryCubes installation was facilitated and documented by Proboscis for Just b. Productions by Giles Lane and Karen Martin.
eBooks for Evaluation and Reflection | bookleteer blog [...] Articulating Futures eBooks from diffusion.org.uk. Read about StoryCubes at bTween here. Find out more about eNotebooks [...] Comment posted on 9-7-2010 at 08:07
Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), written when he was only 20, laid the foundations for many of the artistic and critical hierarchies that have remained constant since in the literary world.
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in London saw the growing mechanisation of print publishing, and a concurrent boom in both literary production and criticism. Equally, new sales and distribution models increasingly enabled writers to make a living independent of the aristocratic patronage that had been their commonest means of support in earlier times.
The glut of writing, and divorce of that writing from the values and aesthetics associated with the ruling classes, prompted a vigorous tussle for critical supremacy among those who believed themselves qualified to pronounce on literature. A widely influential – and hotly contested – intervention in this tussle, Pope’s Essay on Criticism seeks to antedate his creative activities in the Greek and Roman past, by replacing the overt eulogising of aristocratic values with an insistence on the primacy of the classical canon. Pope aims to draw from this composite ancient and modern canon a set of precepts from which his contemporary literature and criticism can be judged.
The age of the blogosphere has seen an equivalent explosion in writing, criticism and debate. While few now read Homer, Pope’s essay addresses questions of authority, quality and cultural legitimacy that, online, are as vigorously contested as ever.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is one of the most acclaimed English poets of the early eighteenth century. Amongst his well known works are The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad,Essay on Man and his translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey.
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eNotebook 1 by Graham A4 only PDF 145 Kb
eNotebook 2 by Michael Evans A4 only PDF 176 Kb
eNotebook 3 by Agnieska Gryglewicz A4 only PDF 163 Kb
eNotebook 4 by Laura A4 only PDF 136 Kb
eNotebook 5 by Lucy K Wills A4 only PDF 180 Kb
eNotebook 6 by Alex Haw A4 only PDF 197 Kb
About : Six eNotebooks completed by participants at geeKyoto2008 (Saturday May 17th 2008, Conway Hall London).
About : Sublimation is the result of a collaboration between three artists. Tim Graveson is a photographer, Joyce Majiski is a printmaker and multi-media artist, and I make books and paint onto mass-produced books. Tim Graveson, who is my husband, and I and Joyce Majiski went on a rafting trip down the Alsek River in the Yukon Territory of Canada. Joyce was one of the guides on this trip and she had persuaded us to go because of the sheer beauty of the place. The trip culminates at Lowell Lake at the foot of Lowell Glacier — where we camped for a couple of days. When we got back we stayed with Joyce and came up with some ideas for a collaborative exhibition of work based on this trip. And Joyce and I started to make some books together. I also wanted to make some books that would incorporate all of our work. Sublimation turned out to be one book where I could bring all of the strands together. Using a book found by Joyce, I made some pages based on the subject of Sublimation. Until Joyce explained it to me, I thought sublimation only referred to a psychological state, I did not know it had a chemical and an alchemical meaning. While staying with Joyce, I came across one of her eBooks and immediately wanted to design one of my own. After I’d begun the unique altered book on Sublimation, I decided it would be just right for an eBook. In the course of making it I came up with some ideas about page layout using the standard vertical eBook format.
Published May 2008
Zea Morvitz is an artist living near San Francisco in Northern California. She received an MA in painting from the University of California in Berkeley and has since exhibited work in the U.S. and in Europe. Her current work involves drawing and painting on mass-produced books that were discarded and on their way to landfill. In this work four to sixteen books are arranged on the wall in a grid configuration. She also makes and binds books, working primarily in graphite and mixed media. Trained as a book designer, she continues to be interested in graphic design. She and her husband, photographer Tim Graveson are working on an collaborative project titled “Worked Books” that will be installed at the Market Place Center in Armagh, Northern Ireland in August, 2008. Besides being an artist, Morvitz works as a curator and administrator for Gallery Route One, a small nonprofit, community based art organization in Point Reyes Station.
About : The first eBook that I made is titled “Notebook Drawing” and I made it just using drawings that I had on hand. I always carry a notebook and pencil with me and afterwards I use the drawings in other art projects and in other books that I make. I didn’t have a subject in mind at that moment, so I used my somewhat obsessive notebook-making as the subject, and created some text for my first Diffusion eBook. I was not happy with the vertical page flip design of the original ebook and re-thought it in a horizontal format which suited my concept better. When I print this book out for myself, I use an ivory or buff colored paper to simulate the color of the original notebook pages. I felt a little shy about submitting this book because it seems a bit narcisisistic in comparison to the socially engaged work that I see on the Proboscis website.
Published May 2008
Zea Morvitz is an artist living near San Francisco in Northern California. She received an MA in painting from the University of California in Berkeley and has since exhibited work in the U.S. and in Europe. Her current work involves drawing and painting on mass-produced books that were discarded and on their way to landfill. In this work four to sixteen books are arranged on the wall in a grid configuration. She also makes and binds books, working primarily in graphite and mixed media. Trained as a book designer, she continues to be interested in graphic design. She and her husband, photographer Tim Graveson are working on an collaborative project titled “Worked Books” that will be installed at the Market Place Center in Armagh, Northern Ireland in August, 2008. Besides being an artist, Morvitz works as a curator and administrator for Gallery Route One, a small nonprofit, community based art organization in Point Reyes Station.
Dawn Burnham Thank you so much.....the drawings are poignant and comforting like rain on Sundays. Good luck with all endeavours. Comment posted on 10-9-2009 at 13:50
Ngawi I've downloaded the book. Thanks for sharing, nice sketch Comment posted on 8-28-2008 at 01:36
About : This eNotebook has been created for geeKyoto2008. Proboscis and the organisers have collaborated to design this notebook for delegates (and others who can’t make it to the event) to share their thoughts and ideas, observations and hopes, fears and aspirations for the future of the planet. The completed eBooks will be collected up, scanned and made into an online library of ideas to inform and help shape future geeKyoto events. If you can’t attend but would like to share your ideas download and make up the eBook, fill it in and post it to Proboscis at 1st Floor, 24 Rosebery Avenue, London EC1R 4SX, UK. We will scan it in and add it to those completed during the event.
geeKyoto2008
Fixing The Broken World
10:00 – 16:30 – Saturday 17th May 2008. Conway Hall, London. £20.
We broke the world. Now what?
A one day conference in central London organised by Mark Simpkins and Ben Hammersley, with designers, technologists, artists, architects, policy-makers, explorers, economists and scientists, and clever people like you, to discuss the future and how we’ll live in it.
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Of the Origin and Design of Government in General A4 | US Letter PDF 300Kb
Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession A4 | US Letter PDF 350Kb
Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs (Part 1) A4 | US Letter PDF 340Kb
Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs (Part 2) A4 | US Letter PDF 330Kb
Of the Present Ability of America A4 | US Letter PDF 520Kb
Appendix A4 | US Letter PDF 450Kb
Bombarded as we are with advertising and propaganda looking to link products or candidates to the concept of freedom, we tend to lose sight of how radical a set of ideas democracy, personal liberty and human rights really are, and how recently, really, the fight to make them the universal rule began. The best antidote to that forgetfulness is Common Sense, the book that, in a very real sense, can be credited with raising the American public will to revolution. It was a radical and deep document then. It is still radical today. Would that we had more writers with Paine’s passion, skill and clarity today.
Mark Wilensky But surprisingly, kids "get" Paine's Common Sense, and almost easily find similarities between 1776 and now. As a fifth-grade teacher… Comment posted on 11-16-2008 at 05:47
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