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City As Material, An Overview by Giles Lane & Hazem Tagiuri
February 24, 2011 – 2:15 pm | 2 Comments
City As Material, An Overview by Giles Lane & Hazem Tagiuri

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3.2Mb Read Online

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.

Published February 2011 in the City As Material Series

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.

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

City As Material : Sonic Geographies
December 10, 2010 – 5:48 pm | 2 Comments
City As Material : Sonic Geographies

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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

Published December 2010

Authors : Giles Lane and Haz Tagiuri

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

City As Material : Sonic Geographies eNotebook
December 6, 2010 – 2:18 pm | One Comment
City As Material : Sonic Geographies eNotebook

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 775Kb

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.

Book a place at Sonic Geographies (Friday 10th December) – check out the planned route.

Published December 2010

City As Material Underside eNotebook
November 23, 2010 – 11:46 pm | One Comment
City As Material Underside eNotebook

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 940Kb

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.

Published November 2010

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

City As Material : Skyline eNotebook
November 8, 2010 – 8:56 pm | One Comment
City As Material : Skyline eNotebook

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3.2Mb Read Online

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.

Published November 2010

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

City As Material : River eNotebook by Proboscis
October 28, 2010 – 11:46 am | One Comment
City As Material : River eNotebook by Proboscis

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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.

Published October 2010

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

City As Material Student Project eBooks
December 10, 2009 – 9:22 am | 3 Comments
City As Material Student Project eBooks

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About : City As Material was a course devised and led by Giles Lane of Proboscis for students on Vassar College’s International Study Program in London. As part of the course the students each had to research and create an urban intervention project and document it via a Diffusion eBook. Some of the students also chose to use eBooks as part of their project itself (which are linked below). Descriptions of the projects and the research conducted during the course can be found on the course website: cityasmaterial.wordpress.com

Download
Chenxi Cai – London’s Canals, A Beginners Field Guide A4 | US Letter PDF 350Kb
Chenxi Cai – London’s Canals, Treasure 1 A4 | US Letter PDF 115Kb
Chenxi Cai – London’s Canals, Treasure 2 A4 | US Letter PDF 160Kb
Chenxi Cai – London’s Canals, Documentation eBook A4 | US Letter PDF 350Kb
Marie Dugo – Tube Torts A4 | US Letter PDF 710Kb
Marie Dugo – Tube Torts Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 610Kb
Lauren Dyson – Ludic London Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 1.6Mb
Sara Leon – Moda Mapping Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 1.1Mb
John McCartin – Trashscapes Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 1.4Mb
Avey Venable – ITS London A4 | US Letter PDF 930Kb
Avey Venable – ITS London Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF
Michael Zipp – Foundry: lost and found A4 | US Letter PDF 1.4Mb
Michael Zipp – Foundry: lost and found Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 450Kb

Published December 2009

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

Reflections on the city from a post-flaneur by Ruth Maclennan
December 14, 2011 – 10:00 am | One Comment
Reflections on the city from a post-flaneur by Ruth Maclennan

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About : This is a polemical and personal exposé of the place of children in the city and in the art world. The artist examines the experiences of being a mother and an artist in the city, and the reactions of others to artists with children. Maclennan calls for new thinking and action, and the confidence to transform society and the street, taking on board the radical potential of children, and inspired by the experiences of being an urban artist-mother.

Published December 2011 in the Material Conditions series

Ruth Maclennan is a visual artist whose work includes video installations, photography, bookworks, drawings, live events, and curatorial projects. Her work often begins with her own encounter with a place â a neighbourhood of London, a futuristic capital city, a derelict building, a ruined railway station in a desert. Her single and multi-channel video installations focus on overlooked moments, material remains and fragments of stories that reveal unresolved conflict and suppressed realities.
www.ruthmaclennan.com 

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Sketches in the City by Radhika Patel, Mandy Tang & Hazem Tagiuri
May 25, 2011 – 11:15 am | Comments Off on Sketches in the City by Radhika Patel, Mandy Tang & Hazem Tagiuri
Sketches in the City by Radhika Patel, Mandy Tang & Hazem Tagiuri

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Sketches in the City 1 A4 | US Letter PDF 1.4Mb Read Online
Sketches in the City – British Museum A4 | US Letter PDF 1.4Mb Read Online

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.

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

Deep City by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
December 20, 2010 – 8:33 am | 2 Comments
Deep City by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 4Mb Read Online

AboutDeep 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.

Published December 2010 in the City As Material series

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

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

Ancient Lights, City Shadows
December 17, 2010 – 6:23 pm | 2 Comments
Ancient Lights, City Shadows

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 4.4Mb Read Online

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

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

An Unbooklet of Disappropriation: Situated Moments From The City
October 20, 2010 – 10:19 am | 4 Comments
An Unbooklet of Disappropriation: Situated Moments From The City

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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

Published October 2010

*** created with bookleteer.com ***

Nature In Exile by Hazem Tagiuri
July 16, 2012 – 3:44 pm | One Comment
Nature In Exile by Hazem Tagiuri

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About : A collection of fleeting poems that give voice to nature, in all its fine and savage guises.

Hazem Tagiuri is a writer and member of Proboscis. He blogs for bookleteer.com, co-runs and contributes to City As Material, and is a commissioning editor for the Material Conditions series alongside Giles Lane.
www.cargocollective.com/htagiuri

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition
May 30, 2012 – 6:40 pm | 3 Comments
Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition

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Book 1 – PerquisitionsA4 | US Letter PDF 4Mb Read Online
Book 2 – CongeriesA4 | US Letter PDF 15Mb Read Online
Book 3 – SpeculationsA4 | US Letter PDF 2.3Mb Read Online

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.

Published in the City As Material series, May 2012

Authors : Leila Armstrong, Lisa Hirmer, Andrew Hunter, Giles Lane, Josie Mills & Hazem Tagiuri

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

Skylines & Sightlines by Simon Pope
February 10, 2011 – 9:30 am | One Comment
Skylines & Sightlines by Simon Pope

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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.

Published February 2011 in the City As Material Series

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

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

The 2nd Book of Urizen by Tim Wright
February 7, 2011 – 9:45 am | 2 Comments
The 2nd Book of Urizen by Tim Wright

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AboutThe 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?”

Published February 2011 in the City As Material series

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.

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

River Gap by Ben Eastop
January 19, 2011 – 2:40 pm | Comments Off on River Gap by Ben Eastop
River Gap by Ben Eastop

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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.

Published January 2011 in the City As Material series

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

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

Layered
December 19, 2010 – 9:24 am | 2 Comments
Layered

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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

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

Ebb and Flow
November 4, 2010 – 1:17 pm | 2 Comments
Ebb and Flow

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3.9Mb Read Online

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

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

Streetscapes eNotebook by Proboscis
October 1, 2010 – 5:36 pm | One Comment
Streetscapes eNotebook by Proboscis

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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.

Published October 2010

*** made with bookleteer.com ***

10 Years of Diffusion
September 17, 2010 – 1:10 pm | 4 Comments
10 Years of Diffusion

10 years ago this month we published the very first series of Diffusion eBooks, Performance Notations, launching our particular brand of hand-made hybrid digital/paper publishing on an unsuspecting public. Over the past decade we have followed that series with several others of our own (and a few by partners and collaborators) such as : Species of Spaces, Liquid Geography, CODE, Short Work, Topographies and Tales & Transformations and published well over 400 eBooks (and nearly 200 StoryCubes too). In 2002 we published the design schematics allowing others to create their own Diffusion eBooks (with recent updates for all 4 design variations and right-to-left reading too) and followed that in 2006 with the first version of our online web application for creating eBooks & StoryCubes, the Diffusion Generator. Hundreds of eBooks and StoryCubes were created (not all published here) by its users over a two and a half-year period. For a more in depth history of Diffusion read this post from 2007.

In 2008 we won a small grant from the Technology Strategy Board to build a new prototype service that would be vastly more powerful and flexible than the old Generator – what eventually became bookleteer.com. The alpha version was launched at the end of September 2009 and we now have several hundred users who have created almost one thousand eBooks and StoryCubes with it during its first year, including some in languages such as Arabic and Hindi. In the past 6 months we’ve rolled out lots of new features, such as new sizes, customisable front covers and our exclusive Publish & Print On Demand service. We have also created a crowdfunding scheme for collaborators, partners and friends to support bookleteer’s technical development, Alpha Club. We’ve run a series of events, Pitch Up & Publish, introducing bookleteer to new users – both in our own studio in Clerkenwell and around the country with the Empty Shops Network.

To kick-off Diffusion’s next decade we’re devising a new series of events, Pitch In & Publish, and adopting a new model of participatory publishing for our curated series. Rather than selecting individuals to create eBooks as we have done for previous series we will host events where people can collaborate in designing and creating a series of publications with others. Proboscis will define the series theme and individual topics for each issue, which will be put together during a one-day event. We will be publishing the collaborative publications (which could be an eBook or a series of StoryCubes) on this site and we will be inviting the participants to use bookleteer to create their own personal contributions to the series. A limited edition run of the publication will be printed using the PPOD service for participants. Pitch In & Publish will launch in October 2010 with the first series, City As Material. Topics will include: river, streetscapes, skyline and underside.

Details on dates, guests, topics and how to participate – http://cityasmaterial.eventbrite.com/

Mare-Anne Mancio – Diffusion Residency Jan-Sept 2009
September 16, 2009 – 2:32 pm | Comments Off on Mare-Anne Mancio – Diffusion Residency Jan-Sept 2009
Mare-Anne Mancio – Diffusion Residency Jan-Sept 2009

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

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

Ethnographic Notebooks, British Museum Melanesia Project
August 31, 2009 – 3:00 am | 6 Comments
Ethnographic Notebooks, British Museum Melanesia Project

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Notebook 1 A4 only PDF 1Mb
Notebook 2 A4 only PDF 2.1Mb
Notebook 3 A4 only PDF 1.1Mb

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.

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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.

Madang 5 Aug 2009.

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.

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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.

Giles Lane
August 2009

H2O by Alejandra Canales, Anne Ransquin and Juan F. Salazar
March 25, 2009 – 8:50 am | One Comment
H2O by Alejandra Canales, Anne Ransquin and Juan F. Salazar

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H2O eBook A4 | US Letter PDF 258Kb
H2O StoryCubes A4 only PDF 3.83Mb

AboutH2O 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.

Pharmaceutical Cubes by Kenneth Goldsmith
October 3, 2008 – 2:33 pm | One Comment
[gallery]

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Pharmaceutical Cubes PDF 1.2Mb 

About : While watching the 6:00 nightly news on one of the major U.S. television networks recently, I was struck by the amount of ads placed there by the pharmaceutical industry. From bladder control to mood-enhancement, an elderly viewership is clearly receptive to these types of products. But what struck me more than the frequency with which these ads ran was the fact that half of the, say, two-minute ad was given up to a double-speed announcer warning of the drug’s side-effects. For a full minute, what sounded to my ears like a new type of sound poem emerged: a litany of complaints and horrors that arise from steady use of these “wonder” drugs. The text was spoken so fast that I could barely understand what was being uttered.

Curious to know more, I went on the drug’s websites and found more than I ever could imagine. Zoloft, for example, provides a 43-page information PDF beginning with a chilling opening paragraph entitled “Suicidality in Children and Adolescents.” The first sentence reads, “Antidepressants increased the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in short-term studies in children and adolescents with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders.” It’s a numbing document for reasons both having to do with the terrifying content as well as the sheer amount of it: Zoloft is nearly 7,000 words long.

I have often talked about how today in writing, quantity has trumped quality; it is the writer’s job to manage the amount of available language. In sculpting these documents, I found my perfect material. Squeezed into 1-point type, then justified, I created columns of unreadable texts: words as texture. When folded into cubes, these warnings – secretly embedded into the pills we take – are reconstituted into three-dimensional forms, creating a new type of placebo. If language, as William S. Burroughs claims, is a virus from outer space, then this panacea for our psychotropic ills – delivered in linguistic torrents – proves Burroughs right by having opposite effect of virally compounding our diseases rather than curing them.

Published October 2008 in the Diffusion Transformations Series

Kenneth Goldsmith‘s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, “Trans-Warhol,” that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, “sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith” premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive.
More about Goldsmith can be found at:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Goldsmith