About : A Conversation Between Trees is our latest project, a touring artwork that connects forests in the UK with forest regions in Brazil. This book is a literal exploration of the Materials needed, Conditions set, Research conducted and Audience involved, creating a series of snaphots – new conditions of practice – to share with those interested in our work.
Active Ingredient is an award winning artist-led group founded in 1996, creating interactive artworks that merge art, technology and science, bringing together location, social networking, bio and environmental sensing, data collection and play. www.i-am-ai.net
About : We admire people who can keep the show on the road. The show, of course, could be anything: a marriage, a business, a career, even an outlook or philosophical stance which might fly against the prevailing winds. The show, in a creative and specific sense for this book, is the artist in pursuit of the work they are creating or the work they feel they need to make. What motivates and inspires us? What does it take to bring our ideas to the screen? How do WE keep the show on the road?
Born in Dublin, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (Desperate Optimists) have made a circuitous route via theatre, visual art and writing to arrive at film-making. Over the past 8 years they have produced, written and directed 10 acclaimed short films under the title CIVIC LIFE, and a feature film HELEN, all screened extensively around the world. www.desperateoptimists.com
About : Extracts from notebooks and photo documentation evoking the strategy within nature of torpor or hibernation as a way of surviving limited resources and inhospitable environment; the speculation that hibernation is a latent ability in humans.
London Fieldworks was formed in 2000 by artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson as a cross-disciplinary, collaborative practice working across social engagement, installation, video and animation, situating works both in the gallery and in the landscape. Recent projects have created speculative works of fiction out of a mix of ecological, scientific and pop cultural narratives. www.londonfieldworks.com
About : Citizen movements like “Occupy” indicate that the boundaries between government, business and civil society have been blurred to such an extreme extent that the “voice of the people” is no longer a factor in the equation. What makes this movement different from others is that through advocacy, activism and technology we are able to connect with one another quickly to amplify a transnational “people’s voice” generated through social media, citizen journalism and grass root community collaborations.
As long as we stand together we are strong together. Finding ways to stand strong together across our differences is where we need to put our energy. Our “together work” is to compassionately deconstruct the oppressions that have divided us so we can become reconnected through actually listening to one another. This process of listening and sharing is the bridge that can help us create an new awareness of one another and our shared global society. We need to commit to the belief that standing strong together over the long term is our life work and pathway.
Janet Owen Driggs is a writer, artist and curator who, along with Matthew Owen Driggs, frequently participates in the collective identity “Owen Driggs”. www.performingpublicspace.org
Jules Rochielle is a socially and politically engaged artist interested in innovative public practices and collaborations. www.julesrochielle.com
About : Music, Collaboration and Place are important to me in terms of creativity. I’ve combined my photography with the lyrics of “Reconvexo” by Caeteno Veloso, which speaks of an identity rooted in a place and it’s culture, as well as collaboration and remixing during the creative process. This booklet is about the place I chose to live. The place I call “home”. A place I can return to after being away.
Karla Brunet is an artist, researcher and university professor. She has participated in many photography and digital arts exhibitions in Brazil, Europe and the USA, and is interested in projects where art, science and technology intersect. www.karlabru.net
About : making/do: big idea, small budget, can do is the story of making my first piece of “land art” and reflects on two years during which I moved countries, shifted from an urban to rural environment, and re-calibrated my art practice in order to keep on making work despite a lack of funding.
Jane Prophet is a British artist living in the US. She has worked with new media for two decades and integrates it with traditional materials to produce ‘surprising and beautiful objects’. She makes photographic pieces, temporary installations, objects and video. www.janeprophet.com
About : People interact around food. Conventional mealtimes are ordered occasions when social relationships are reaffirmed. But picnic is different, often characterised by a wobbly combination of conviviality and disorder. So what does it tell us about the way we think of ‘community’?
Kevin Harris is an author and community development commentator, and has written the Neighbourhoods blog since 2003. He is also the founder of consultancy, Local Level.
Gemma Orton is a visual artist – visit her website.
About : Sites and Strategies, selected artworks 2003-2011 contains short texts and images of recent artworks and projects by artist Gair Dunlop including : Atom Town, The Tomorrows Project and Century 21 Calling.
Published by Gair Dunlop October 2011
Gair Dunlop makes artworks which explore entropic Modernism: the New Town, the military airfield, the film archive and the memory of progress. Beginning as a photographer in London, he gained a degree in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London, and now has an MSc with distinction in Electronic Imaging from Duncan of Jordanstone College, Dundee. He is interested in combining elements of site-specific practice with digital technologies.
About : Cartoon de Salvo are now publishing four more books recording some of what is now over 100 improvised stage stories (and two updated books). Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories is a 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 were ‘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. Now we are adding four books looking at how Music we play influenced stories, how Mysteries created more complex storylines. Two more explore how Silent Characters and Tangled Relationships made for surprising turns in our yarns. The idea of course is these stories existed in their moment over the past two years; but when I discovered that Brian was writing them down the following day I thought I’d put them together with my illustrations that I was getting down in the van after each gig.
Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories is created by Cartoon de Salvo. Co-commissioned by Farnham Maltings and the Lyric, Hammersmith
Published March 2011
Cartoon de Salvo are of the few companies in the UK working with whole story, rather than sketch-based, improvisation formats. Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories went on to become the Telegraph’s Top Ten Comedy Shows of 2008 and following the British Council Showcase in Edinburgh we were invited to take it to Washington DC’s Kennedy Center. We’re now working on a new long-form impro format called Made Up, in which we collaborate with a band; we’re next performing that at Pulse Festival in June 2011.
Cartoon de Salvo is Rebecca Hurst, Brian Logan and Alex Murdoch and this show also involves performer Neil Haigh and musical director Paul Kissaun. Ed Collier is the producer and can be contacted on ed@cartoondesalvo.com
About : This publication was produced for DodoLab’s program in Thetford, Norfolk, UK, commissioned by Deborah Smith as part of Thetford Art Projects and funded by Breckland Partnerships. The project took place in March, 2011, and featured community collaborations along with interventions and installations in public spaces. The project used a collection of images and stories of local creatures (past and present, real and imagined) as fables or parables to encourage reflection on the state of Thetford today.
Published March 2011
DodoLab is an art and design based program lead by Lisa Hirmer and Andrew Hunter that researches, engages and responds to contemporary community challenges, with a particular focus on the natural world, social systems, the built environment and cities in transition. They employ creative public interventions that are truly collaborative, encourage and evolve out of dialogue and critical reflection, and that strive for tangible and meaningful outcomes. DodoLab is consistently interested in the barriers to adaptation and change and engaging the public in public through projects that involve individuals and organizations who bring a diversity of experience and expertise. DodoLab’s always evolving methods of engagement reflect Hirmer and Hunter’s backgrounds in art, design, architecture, education, writing, image making and installation. Both DodoLab principals are Adjunct Faculty and Researchers at Waterloo Architecture (University of Waterloo School of Architecture).
DodoLab is a program of Waterloo Architecture funded by Musagetes and enhanced by commissioned collaborations with individuals and organizations in Canada and Internationally (including universities, municipalities, social service organizations and the arts). Since its launch in the spring of 2009, DodoLab has worked across Canada, in the United Kingdom and Croatia. Current active projects include work in Waterloo/Wellington Region, Greater Sudbury, Rijeka (Croatia), Lethbridge (Alberta), Prince Edward Island, Norfolk (United Kingdom) and in Toronto (with Harbourfront Centre and the Textile Museum of Canada). DodoLab works on an ongoing basis with such like-minded collectives as BrokenCityLab (Windsor) and proboscis (London, UK) and has been actively engaged with the Musagetes Cafe´ program.
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About : Alice Angus and Joyce Majiski created this StoryCube set for Topographies and Tales. They are designed to be played with, used as a thinking tool for ideas about landscape, navigation, myths and environments, belonging and home. Pile them up together, throw them like dice, arrange into maps, build into landscapes of stories…
Topographies and Tales is about the relationship between people, identity and place. It unearths local and personal stories and myths exploring how concepts of landscape are shaped by ideas of belonging and home.
It is a personal exploration of the intimate way people form relationships with their environments, it takes a journey through the tall tales and perceptions the artists encountered on their travels in the west of Scotland and the Yukon.
Topographies and Tales was a long term collaboration between Alice Angus and Canadian artist Joyce Majiski, that included a film, creative lab and publications. The collaboration began in 2003 in Ivvavik National Park in the Canadian Arctic then in Glenmore Lodge in the Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland, the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture in Dawson City, Canada, Joyce’s Tuktu Studio in Whitehorse and the Proboscis Studio in London.
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.
Joyce Majiski is an artist, biologist, naturalist and guide whose work with printmaking, installations, artists books and video focuses on the natural world and relationships between nature and humans. Her recent projects include the groundbreaking Three Rivers project where the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Service invited prominent artists, writers and journalists to join native people on three simultaneous journeys along the Snake, the Wind, and the Bonnet Plume rivers. www.joycemajiski.com
Giles Lane Fixed. Comment posted on 10-15-2012 at 16:40
Michael TT cubes 5 to 7 need different links http://diffusion.org.uk/storycubes/TTcube5_cube_portrait_2pp_A4.pdf Comment posted on 10-5-2012 at 13:11
October Newsletter | Proboscis [...] Topographies and Tales StoryCubes by Alice Angus & Joyce Majiski http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2140A StoryCube about bookleteer.com by Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2135 My Work… Comment posted on 10-27-2010 at 11:21
Proboscis Newsletter October 2010 | newmediafix.net [...] Topographies and Tales StoryCubes by Alice Angus & Joyce Majiski http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2140 A StoryCube about bookleteer.com by Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2135 My… Comment posted on 10-26-2010 at 13:56
Some Recent PPOD books | bookleteer blog [...] full of QR codes. The StoryCubes included an 8 cube ‘cube of cubes’ set by artists Joyce Majiski and… Comment posted on 10-8-2010 at 15:32
About : A StoryCube created to accompany a sound installation in Chiswell Walled Garden, Isle of Portland, Dorset, UK in September 2010 for b-side festival.
Published September 2010
Melissa Bliss is an artist based in London who works with people in particular communities and geographic areas – www.livingcinema.org
Proboscis Newsletter October 2010 | newmediafix.net [...] My Work at Proboscis by Karine Dorset http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2130 Bird Song by Melissa Bliss http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2122 Graffito Vintage Festival ScrapBook by… Comment posted on 10-26-2010 at 14:00
Some Recent PPOD books | bookleteer blog [...] Angus on their Topographies & Tales project, a promotional cube about bookleteer itself and a cube by artist Melissa… Comment posted on 10-8-2010 at 15:32
About : In-Site Toronto is a series of newly commissioned artworks presented on the portal pages of several wireless internet hotspots in the Wireless Toronto network by artists Jeremy Bailey, Brian Joseph Davis, Dave Dyment, Willy Le Maitre, Fedora Romita, and Swintak. Curated by Michelle Kasprzak, produced by YZO, and supported by Wireless Toronto, Spacing Magazine, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
YZO is a media arts collective committed to the production, development and distribution of electronic media art through net based projects and site-specific public art exhibitions.
About : A book of drawings of Coventry indoor Market, by Alice Angus, commissioned for the artistsandmakers.com Empty Shops Network Tour created by artist Dan Thompson . It follows from her earlier commission to draw Granville Arcade in Brixton for the tour, also an eBook available on Diffusion.
Published May 2010
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 : an eBook by Alice Angus to accompany a set of drawings (Ecologies, Time, Landmarks, Traces, Wilderness, Perception, 2010) created for a touring show during the 25 year anniversary of Ivvavik National Park in Canada which was created by a historic Aboriginal land claim settlement. These works are a reflection on the experience of a Parks Canada residency in Ivvavik and the long term issues of ownership, belonging, common space and environment, raised by the trip.
Landscapes in Dialogue is connected to Topographies and Tales a body of work in collaboration with Canadian artist and guide Joyce Majiski exploring the perceptions of landscape and of the North. You can read more at: Topograpies and Tales
Published March 2010
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 : For the Voz/Voice exhibition in Whitehorse (2009) I invited viewers to participate in my installation Canto; 10 etched copper cylinders which turn like prayer wheels. Each wheel related to an endangered species, space or culture. Viewers were asked to add their “wishes or prayers” and this eBook is a compilation of the notes they left in each wheel. Images printed from the etched copper plates before they were rolled into the cylindrical wheel appear alongside the notes. For more information on the LLAMA Project and Joyce Majiski see www.llamaproject.com
Published March 2010
Joyce Majiski is an artist, biologist, naturalist and guide whose work with printmaking, installations, artists books and video focuses on the natural world and relationships between nature and humans. Her recent projects include the groundbreaking Three Rivers project where the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Service invited prominent artists, writers and journalists to join native people on three simultaneous journeys along the Snake, the Wind, and the Bonnet Plume rivers. www.joycemajiski.com
May Newsletter | Proboscis [...] Canto: a collection of wishes Book 1; Whitehorse, Yukon Canada by Joyce Majiski http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1843 Welcome to the Imagination Age by Rita… Comment posted on 5-20-2010 at 09:08
About : A practical, step-by-step guide to using empty spaces for arts and community projects – and while empty shops are a focus, the skills can be applied to other temporary and meanwhile projects. Produced by the Empty Shops Network with support from the Meanwhile Project and a-n magazine.
Published as a Diffusion eBook February 2010
Dan Thompson is an artist and writer with an interest in using redundant spaces which has taken in theatres, cinemas and empty shops. He has written widely about empty shops for arts and regeneration magazines. he is founder of the Revolutionary Arts Group and the Empty Shops Network.
uberVU - social comments Social comments and analytics for this post... This post was mentioned on Twitter by proboscisstudio: new on #diffusion: Empty… Comment posted on 3-29-2010 at 22:26
About : A Short Film about War is a narrative documentary artwork made entirely from information found on the worldwide web. In ten minutes this two screen movie takes viewers around the world to a variety of war zones as seen through the collective eyes of the online photo sharing community Flickr, and as witnessed by a variety of existing military and civilian bloggers. See the film at animateprojects.org.
A Short Film about War was developed with help from New Media Scotland and Alt-w.
Script by Jon Thomson, Alison Craighead & Steve Rushton.
Essay by Lisa Le Feuvre.
Published by Animate Projects, February 2010
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator and writer based in London. She is Senor Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths. Between 2005 and 2009 she directed the contemporary art programme at the National Maritime Museum, commissioning work by Dan Holdsworth, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Lawrence Weiner, Simon Patterson, Renée Green and Jeremy Millar. In 2009 she curated the exhibitions Joachim Koester: Poison Protocols and Other Histories at Stills, Edinburgh and Economies of Attention from the Arts Council of England Collection. In 2010-11 she will co-curate with Tom Morton British Art Show 7 and edit Failure, published by MIT Press / Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Animate Projects Limited is a UK-based, not-for-profit arts organisation, developing initiatives that explore the relationship between art and animation, and the place of animation and its concepts in contemporary art practice. We offer artists a unique space to create work and develop initiatives that allow an international audience to engage with the work via broadcast, gallery, cinema and online. Animate Projects is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. animateprojects.org
uberVU - social comments Social comments and analytics for this post... This post was mentioned on Twitter by proboscisstudio: new on #diffusion: A… Comment posted on 2-16-2010 at 05:30
About : I Feel Different is a provocative multi-media exhibition that explores both the experience of feeling different from others and the transformational power of art to make one feel differently. Featuring Nao Bustamente, James Luna, Monica Duncan and Lara Odell, Lezley Saar, Susan Silton, Nina Yhared (1814), David Wojnarowicz and Raquel Gutierrez. Curated by Jennifer Doyle and on view at LACE through 31 January 2010.
Published December 2009
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) both champions and challenges the art of our time by fostering artists who innovate, explore, and risk. LACE moves within and beyond its four walls to provide opportunities for diverse publics to engage deeply with contemporary art. In doing so, it furthers dialogue and participation between and among artists and those audiences.
About : “State of the Union” is a thirty-two page pamphlet published by Printed Matter and a separate thirty-one print installation. Both projects focus on the U.S. states that have amended their constitution through defense of marriage act ballot mesures to explicitly define marriage as between a man and a woman.
Each page (or print) is dedicated to one of these states and includes the state ballot title, text of the ballot measure and the official voter results in numeric count and percentage. All text is printed in white Humanist font on a solid lavender background. The opacity of both the printed text and the lavender background are controlled by the numbers of “yes” and “no” votes received. The shade of the lavender background is tied directly to the “no” votes in the state. The higher the percentage of “no” votes, the more opaque (saturated) the lavender becomes. For example, if thirty-five percent of the vote was against the measure, the lavender is thirty-five percent opaque. Likewise, the opacity of the ballot text is linked to the “yes” vote and becomes more prominent with the higher “yes” percentage. Lavender was chosen as the dominant color because of its historical association with the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered rights and liberation movement.
Every ballot measure has been copy edited by the artist to reverse the negative connotations and render marriage between any two people legal. “State of the Union” is a poetic call to action and a necessary record of this shifting and contentious moment in history.
Robert Ransick is an artist who works in a wide range of media and has exhibited in New York City at such venues as Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, Exit Art, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Howard Greenberg Gallery and White Box Gallery. In addition he has shown at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Illinois and at the Palazzo delle Esposizione in Rome, Italy, among others. He has received funding from Franklin Furnace and the Mellon Foundation and has been an artist in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art and technology. He has worked as a curator and cultural producer in collaboration with Creative Time, the Aperture Foundation, and Blindspot. He is a co-creator of the Blur conferences and other events focused on current creative practices in digital art and culture. Previously, he was the Director of the Photography Department and the Director of the Computer Instruction Center at The New School. He has taught at The School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, and The New School for Social Research. BFA, Photography With Honors, The School of Visual Arts; MA, Media Studies, The New School for Social Research. He is currently a full-time faculty member in digital arts at Bennington College.
Robert Ransick lives and works in New York City, but spends a good deal of time in Southern Arizona.
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Trail Song eBook A4 | US Letter PDF 2Mb
Trail Song StoryCube 1 A4 only PDF 1.6Mb
Trail Song StoryCube 2 A4 only PDF 700Kb
Trail Song StoryCube 3 A4 only PDF 700Kb
Trail Song StoryCube 4 A4 only PDF 740Kb
About : “A Trail Song uses a well known song or tune but replaces the lyrics with words of its own. These words reference objects, people and places experienced on the journey” (Trail Songs Magazine (1954) – The Whyte Museum Archive, Banff, CAN).
In the tradition of the Trail Songs of North America, we invent lyrics as we travel from place to place. Like modern day Songlines these songs tell about the geography and the people of the landscape, each song refers to a direction or path taken and is matched to the video footage we shoot en route. The original tune is something we might overhear on a street corner, in a café or on the car radio. www.juliemyers.org.uk/trailsong
From San Francisco, US to Banff, Canada, March 26 – April 8th 2009 – 1,345 miles by car, coach and ferry
StoryCube 1 – From Golden Gate to Fort Bragg
StoryCube 2 – From Fort Bragg to Cresent City
StoryCube 3 – From Astoria to Vancouver Island
StoryCube 4 – From Vancouver to Banff Avenue
Published December 2009 in the Diffusion Transformations series
Julie Myers is an artist and lecturer and lives in London. Using technology as a way of mediating social interactions, her work is concerned with space and place, collective knowledge and shared experience. Previous work has been commissioned by Arts Council England, NESTA, The British Film Institute, The British Council, AHRC, The Institute of Contemporary Art and The National Portrait Gallery, London. Industrial collaborators include, Adobe Systems, USA, British Telecom, UK and Philips Multi Media, FR. http://www.juliemyers.org.uk http://www.axisweb.org/openfrequency/juliemyers
Baby Product Reviews Kudos for giving such a terrific website. this site happens to be not only useful but also bvery imaginative too.… Comment posted on 1-5-2010 at 19:30
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 December 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.
uberVU - social comments Social comments and analytics for this post... This post was mentioned on Twitter by proboscisstudio: new on #diffusion: Blakewalk… Comment posted on 12-1-2009 at 19:25
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.
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 : 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 ***
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 ***
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.
Proboscis is currently hosting three Diffusion residents:
Alex Murdoch, founder and director of theatre company Cartoon de Salvo who is developing a series of eBooks re-presenting Hard-Hearted Hannah, a long-form improvisation show that toured for 53 performances in 2008.
Stewart Home, artist and writer, who is re-publishing out of print texts and new pieces.
Marie-Anne Mancio writer and curator, who is creating an ‘encyclopedia’ of eBooks about 1970s experimental performance artists, The Theatre of Mistakes.
About : The Dominion Dundas eBook has been produced to accompany the exhibition of Canadian cartoonist Seth’s model city at the Dundas Museum & Archives (Dundas, Ontario, Canada). Organized by RENDER (University of Waterloo), Dominion takes Seth’s distinct vision of urban space off the printed page and into the format of an installation infused with the cartoonist’s characteristic air of melancholy and ambiguous nostalgia. This eBook features images of 10 of Seth’s buildings and has been developed as a story collecting tool to accompany the exhibition, encouraging museum visitors to reflect on their own town’s history and to share stories of buildings, people and sites of the area.
Published February 2009
Seth is the cartoonist behind the painfully infrequent comic book series Palookville. Currently he is serializing the story Clyde Fans between its covers. This is a task that has gone on for a decade now and will likely continue for several more years. His books include It’s A Good Life I You Don’t Weaken, Wimbledon Green, Bannock, Beans and Black Tea, and the above mentioned Clyde Fans Book One. One volume of his sketchbooks has appeared under the title Vernacular Drawings and another will likely appear within the following few seasons. His books have been translated into 5 languages.
As a book designer he has worked on a variety of projects including the recent Penguin reprinting of The Portable Dorothy Parker. He is the designer of the 25 volume series The Complete Peanuts and the upcoming two volume series on Canadian master cartoonist Doug Wright. As an illustrator/hack he has produced commercial works for almost all of the major Canadian and American magazines. His work has appeared inside and on the cover of the New Yorker. Last year he serialized the story George Sprott (1894-1975) in the New York Times for 25 weeks and will appear in an expanded form as a book in the spring of 2009.
Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario with his wife and three cats and appears to rarely leave the basement.
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