My involvement with the eBooks case study can be considered a continuation of my ongoing collaborations with Proboscis both as an independent artist/curator and as Director of RENDER (University of Waterloo, Canada).

Working with my daughter Maggie (11), our goal was to produce a series of image-based eBooks based on walks around the city of London. This approach is consistent with one dominant thread in my practice which involves the exploration of places and histories through walking (my recent project “Dark Matter” which involved documented walks on the Somme battlefield of WW1, is a good example of this approach). We also chose to work with a walking/photographing approach as this was Maggie’s first visit to London and so we adopted a form of sightseeing. Maggie determined the primary focus which was animals (in any form) and their presence in the city determined where we went and what we photographed. Basically we used the eBook format to produce “souvenir” books of our visit that documented a rather idiosyncratic approach to the city.

The eBook was an ideal tool for this kind of informal exploration allowing us to produce in a very quick and simple fashion a concrete document of our explorations that now exist as sketches for future more intense investigations. I can certainly see continuing to use these as both a unique kind of sketching/story-boarding tool and as a very effective way of disseminating works in progress. I should add that in addition to this series, Maggie produced her own eBook as a school report on her trip and it is certainly a format ideally suited for such a project.

Andrew Hunter

The eBooks
London Journal
An Accidental Menagerie 3
An Accidental Menagerie 2
An Accidental Menagerie 1