About : In February 2012 England was graced with a visit from the perambulating Canadian scholar, Professor William Starling of DodoLab, who is conducting research into the disappearance of the European Starling specs in contrast to the continued expansion of its North American cousin. An expedition of inquiry was mounted by members of DodoLab and Proboscis, visiting Thetford in Norfolk, central London and Oxford, where great murmurations of starlings were known, until recent years, to gather. These three books comprise their investigations, observations and musings.
Newsletter July 2012 | Proboscis [...] Andrew Hunter, Josephine Mills, Leila Armstrong, Giles Lane and Hazem Tagiuri Download Free : http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2587 Buy a limited edition set… Comment posted on 7-28-2012 at 21:32
Professor Starlings Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition | Proboscis [...] just published our latest entry in the City As Material series: ‘Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition’ – three books documenting the investigative excursions… Comment posted on 6-1-2012 at 15:25
About : An offshoot of City As Material, Sketches In The City is an occasional series of observational expeditions in various locations across the capital. Mandy, Radhika and I sketch, take photographs and write poems and prose to form a collaborative eBook with underlying themes. Focusing mainly on people and interactions in public places – places that shape, and are in turn shaped, by the people in them – we’ve produced two books so far, and are working on a third.
Sketches In The City was our first attempt, created as a result of visiting the busy Victoria and Waterloo train stations – places which reveal an interesting insight of the human character when bored or stressed. Highlighting the material we collected on the day, this tidy scrapbook was an playful experiment with little interpretation or narrative, letting us take the time to view hectic environments from a different perspective than usual and refine our creative processes.
Sketches In The City: British Museum showcase the unique architecture and exhibits in the British Museum, looking at how visitors observe and interact with them and one another, as well as their grasp on the intangible knowledge that exists amongst that which we can see and touch.
Published May 2011
Radhika Patel is a marketing assistant at Proboscis. Having completed her Future Jobs Fund placement with Proboscis (Nov 2010-April 2011) she is working on developing new marketing strategies.
Mandy Tang is a creative assistant at Proboscis. Having completed her Future Jobs Fund placement with Proboscis (July 2010-Jan 2011) Mandy’s work is focused on visual notation and illustration of projects, ideas and activities, as well as developing a special StoryCube game, Outside the Box, for encouraging outdoor play.
Hazem Tagiuri is a creative assistant at Proboscis.Having completed his Future Jobs Fund placement with Proboscis (July 2010-Jan 2011) Haz’s work involves blogging on bookleteer.com about zine culture; assisting with planning and running the City As Material project and working on a research project with the University of Cambridge.
About : This eBook presents an overview of 5 City As Material events run by Proboscis in Autumn 2010 and the collaborative eBooks created by the participants : Streetscapes, River, Skyline, Underside and Sonic Geographies. It is the 10th eBook in this initial series (other individual books were created by Tim Wright, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Ben Eastop & Simon Pope) – which will be published in a special limited edition slipcase set (using bookleteer’s Short Run Printing Service) in Spring 2011.
Giles Lane is the founder and director of Proboscis. He is an artist, researcher, designer and teacher and leads many of Proboscis projects including bookleteer.
Hazem Tagiuri is a writer and Creative Assitant at Proboscis.
About : Even when high above the city, the eye’s true desire is to be in the throng, far below. In this edited version of Pope’s City As Material photo essay, Skylines & Sightlines tells the story of its fall, the brute force rallied in order to regain its omnipotence and where it meets with an equally determined resistance.
Artist Simon Pope (1966. Exeter, UK.) lives and works in London. Recent work includes A Common Third at Danielle Arnaud, London (2010) and the film Memory Marathon (2010). He represented Wales at their inaugural exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Fine Art (2003) and as part of the artists’ group I/O/D, produced The Web Stalker (1997). More details at http://tinyurl.com/simonpope
About : The 2nd Book of Urizen is a work in progress by Tim Wright. He prefers to call it a walk in progress. This booklet represents a sketch of a larger, richer work which will take the reader along the south London stretch of a longer L-shaped walk. See http://goo.gl/VQeYe
In the final production, it is imagined that a full ‘broadcast quality’ geolocated rendition of the Blake’s Book of Urizen will be available – peppered with the imagined sounds of Lambeth in 1794 with music provided by Haydn, who was composing & performing in London at the time.
The whole project is meant to conjure up the sense of Blake striding around his home patch, composing and declaiming – perhaps even singing – one of his great ‘prophetic’ works. Tim Wright continues:
“I’m hoping to explore what it’s like to walk around London alone with one’s thoughts and ideas; to be considered different or perhaps even mad.
I also want to explore a pet theory of mine that birth, miscarriage, childlessness and the pain of children growing up and apart from their parents were all things on William’s mind at that time – if even he didn’t quite know it.
By focussing on this theme it may also be possible to develop the voice of Blake’s wife, Catherine, who never had children, but instead dedicated herself to Blake, working ceaselessly as his creative partner to help produce great works such as The Book of Urizen. What was life like for her? And what discussions took place between William and Catherine about the prospect of never having a family?”
About : I live and work on a barge at Bow Creek. This ebook tries to sum up my fascination with the partial disjuncture between the land and a floating vessel – both connected and disconnected at the same time, creating a one-step removed relationship with the city. You can see this ‘gap’ expressed all along the river – interrupted glimpses between buildings and riverside structures that both obscure the river and provide moments of promise.
Ben Eastop is an independent art consultant and curator working predominantly in the public realm. He has worked collaboratively with a range of institutions, local authorities, museums, architects and commissioning agencies, with both emerging and well established artists and arts practitioners.
His work has ranged from permanent and temporary commissioning, to cross-disciplinary research projects and site-specific events, often in challenging and unconventional locations. He is co-founder of a new London based agency, Difference Exchange www.differenceexchange.com which seeks to use the notion of difference as a driver for collaborative, international projects linking contemporary art with academia and industry. River to River is an international, inter-disciplinary research project in partnership with TrAIN research centre examining cultural responses to climate change and the socio-political implications of globalisation as defined by rivers.
Recent projects have involved experiential engagement with specific landscapes, seeking to unfold new understandings of the social and political meaning of landscape resulting from human intervention. In partnership with artists and curators, these projects have evolved a hybrid practice, blurring the boundaries between artistic production, curation and event management in which the audience is seen as an essential element of a new work. Projects include Grain, with Tim Eastop and Andrew Dodds. www.grain244.com
About : Deep City was born first as a photo-montage and script for the Microsoft Social Symposium of early 2010 on “smart cities”. When I was 19, I was accepted in an architecture course, chose product design instead but stayed fascinated by cities and their ability to shape us and our understanding of the world. The eBook is a further exploration a year after that talk, to try to extract the individual elements we see in cities over and over again, to help me develop some sort of vocabulary for the cities I know and love, building blocks that make them all melt into one another. I used the photographs I have been taking in the cities I have lived in and visited for the past 5 years or so.
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is a product & interaction designer interested in the potential of smart & connected objects (sometimes known as the internet of things). She runs Tinker London, a design studio in East London, talks about emotional robots for Lirec.eu and works on her own projects at designswarm.com
About : a collaborative eBook created during the fourth City As Material Pitch In & Publish event on ‘Underside‘. Layered documents a walk from Whitechapel to Clerkenwell considering the ‘shadow’ of the city. Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #cityasmaterial
Published December 2010
Authors : Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Giles Lane, Radhika Patel, Hazem Tagiuri and Mandy Tang
Diffusion Archive Highlight: Deep City | bookleteer blog [...] special guest for the Underside event and helping to co-ordinate the resulting collaborative eBook, Layered, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino was asked… Comment posted on 11-24-2011 at 12:32
About : A collaborative eBook produced by the participants of City As Material : Skyline (12th November 2010) – Ancient Lights, City Shadows contains the traces of a walk around the City of London, which flow through the book as a a skyline of altitude measurements punctuated with drawings and photographs created along the way. Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #cityasmaterial
Published December 2010
Authors : Martin Fidler, Giles Lane, Radhika Patel, Simon Pope, Hazem Tagiuri and Katherine Willis
Two new eBooks for City As Material | bookleteer blog [...] the 5 collaborative eBooks published last Autumn : Situated Moments from the City, Ebb & Flow, Ancient Lights, City… Comment posted on 11-24-2011 at 12:56
About : an ebook documenting the audio recordings made on the fifth City As Material : Sonic Geographies event, 10th December 2010. Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #cityasmaterial
City As Material: Sonic Geographies | bookleteer blog [...] listen to the recordings made on Audioboo, and download the Sonic Geographies eBook on Diffusion here. Keep track of… Comment posted on 12-14-2010 at 22:36
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Sonic Geographies to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Underside to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
Book a place at Underside (Friday 26th November) or the last event of this series, Sonic Geographies on December 10th.
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Skyline to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
Includes a photo essay by Skyline’s event special guest, Simon Pope.
Book a place at Skyline (Friday 12th November) or one of the other forthcoming events, Underside & Sonic Geographies.
About : a collaborative eBook created during the second City As Material Pitch In & Publish event on ‘River‘. Ebb and Flow documents a walk along the river from Hermitage Community Moorings in Wapping to Queenhithe and via the City to Turnmill Street (formerly on the banks of the now buried River Fleet) in Clerkenwell. Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #cityasmaterial
Book a place at one of the next events, on the topics of Skyline, Underside and Sonic Geographies.
Published November 2010
Authors : Ben Eastop, Martin Fidler, Fred Garnett, Giles Lane, Anne Lydiat, Alex McGlynn and Aurelia McGlynn-Richon
City As Material : River | bookleteer blog [...] along the way and started to sketch out the structure of the collaborative publication – Ebb and Flow –… Comment posted on 11-4-2010 at 13:19
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on River to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
About : a collaborative eBook created during the first City As Material Pitch In & Publish event on ‘Streetscapes‘. The Unbooklet of Disappropriation explores a journey around Smithfield, the Golden Lane estate, the Barbican and Postman’s Park and is focused around the discovery of an ‘Unplace’ with unusual acoustic properties. It has been designed not just as a document of the journey, but also as something which readers can use to add their own contributions to – by tearing out one of the pages and leaving their own messages in similar places, or using the Twitter hashtags (#cityasmaterial and #ddiof) to continue a distributed conversation.
Book a place at one of the next events, on the topics of River, Skyline, Underside and Sonic Geographies.
Authors : Fred Garnett, David Jennings, Giles Lane, Anne Lydiat, Hazem Tagiuri & Tim Wright
eBook Observer – Diffusion categories | bookleteer blog [...] on Diffusion.org.uk. It’s interesting to note that the recent series of Pitch In and Publish (for example) involves testing… Comment posted on 10-27-2010 at 09:07
Proboscis Newsletter October 2010 | newmediafix.net [...] The UnBooklet of Diasappropriation: Situated Moments from the City http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2188 Passivhaus Field Trip eNotebook by Rob Annable http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2182 Streetscapes… Comment posted on 10-26-2010 at 13:59
Pitch In & Publish: Streetscapes | bookleteer blog [...] focus – the eBook chronicling our journey there, and our experience within. Thus, the “Unbook of Disappropriation: Situated Moments… Comment posted on 10-20-2010 at 10:21
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Streetscapes to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
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[...] Andrew Hunter, Josephine Mills, Leila Armstrong, Giles Lane and Hazem Tagiuri Download Free : http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2587 Buy a limited edition set…
Comment posted on 7-28-2012 at 21:32
[...] just published our latest entry in the City As Material series: ‘Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition’ – three books documenting the investigative excursions…
Comment posted on 6-1-2012 at 15:25
[...] just published our latest entry in the City As Material series: ‘Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition’ – three books documenting…
Comment posted on 5-31-2012 at 10:21