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 : Four books exploring the process, methods, observations, insights and recommendations from a collaborative research project by Proboscis, the Centre for Applied Research in Education Technology (CARET) and the Crucible network at the University of Cambridge.
Published November 2011
Proboscis is a social and cultural innovation studio. The creative team for these books was : Alice Angus, Giles Lane, Frederik Lesage, Haz Tagiuri and Mandy Tang.
Agencies of Engagement | Proboscis [...] print out and make up the set for yourself on Diffusion or read the online [...] Comment posted on 11-17-2011 at 11:07
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 : 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 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 : Graffito is an iPhone/iPad app for collaborative drawing, an experiment in massive crowd-made graffiti. This eBook introduces the project and the team behind it, with photos and screengrabs of it in action at 2010’s Vintage@Goodwood festival.
BigDog Interactive is a small company of creative computer programmers who invent mobile applications, interactive art installations and live events.
Proboscis is an artist-led studio combining artistic practice with commissioning, curating, design and consultancy to explore social, cultural and creative issues.
Proboscis Newsletter October 2010 | newmediafix.net [...] by Mandy Tang http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2171 Graffito by BigDog Interactive & Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2146 Topographies and Tales StoryCubes by Alice Angus &… Comment posted on 10-26-2010 at 14:00
Graffito @ Tent Digital | Proboscis [...] adding to drawings by others, perhaps due to the more focused interaction in a smaller space. The eBook created… Comment posted on 9-29-2010 at 14:19
Graffito at London Design Festival | Proboscis [...] created a special Diffusion eBook about the project for the event – where we’ll have some PPOD printed copies… Comment posted on 9-17-2010 at 09:55
Download
T&T Cube 1 A4 only PDF 3.4Mb
T&T Cube 2 A4 only PDF 3.4Mb
T&T Cube 3 A4 only PDF 3.4Mb
T&T Cube 4 A4 only PDF 3.3Mb
T&T Cube 5 A4 only PDF 3.5Mb
T&T Cube 6 A4 only PDF 3.7Mb
T&T Cube 7 A4 only PDF 3.4Mb
T&T Cube 8 A4 only PDF 3.3Mb
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 : Travelling Through Layers is inspired by the discussions that took place during and after Paralelo : Technology and Environment, a meeting point for artists, designers and researchers in Sao Paulo in March/April 2009. A version of this publication was included in the publication Paralelo – Unfolding Narratives: in Art, Technology & Environment published by MIS, British Council & Virtueel Platform (2010).
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.
Giles Lane is an artist, researcher and teacher. He founded and is co-director of Proboscis, a non-profit creative studio based in London where, since 1994, he has led projects such as Urban Tapestries; Snout; Mapping Perception; Experiencing Democracy; Everyday Archaeology; and Private Reveries, Public Spaces. Giles is a Visiting Tutor on the MA Design Critical Practice at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and is a Research Associate of the Media and Communications Department at London School of Economics. Giles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2008 for his contribution to community development through creative practice.
Orlagh Woods is an artist whose work explores how diverse people and communities engage with each other and their environment – how they connect, communicate and are perceived both through digital and non-digital means. She has been working with Proboscis since 2004 and also curates a professional development programme for British Asian theatre company, Tamasha, in London.
Paralelo, Sao Paulo | Proboscis [...] running two social mapping workshops and designing a special Paralelo Diffusion eNotebook, Travelling Through Layers, for participants to capture… Comment posted on 4-15-2011 at 14:38
May Newsletter | Proboscis [...] StoryCubes by Lisa Hirmer http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1969 Travelling through Layers by Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1962 Coventry Market: public spaces, meeting places by Alice Angus http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1959 [...] 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 : Articulating Futures is a 4 day workshop that was designed and facilitated by Niharika Hariharan, commissioned and creatively supported by Proboscis (London) to mobilize young students to creatively think and articulate issues that are important to them and their future as young Indians. The first series of these workshops were held at Chinmaya Mission Vidyalaya, New Delhi between the 17th-20th November, 2009. These eNotebooks were created to help the students organise and share their ideas across the workshop, combining English & Hindi.
Working in collaboration with tutors, filmmakers and artists, Articulating Futures investigated subjects ranging from the change of identity of young Indians, their views on language, traditional cultures and the importance of a global/local societies. Through discussion, debate and creative exploration, this workshop resulted in a range of exciting and insightful ideas and scenarios developed by 16 year old Indian students that showcase their vision of themselves as unique in a fast developing homogenous culture in modern India.
You can read about the project in detail at http://articulatingfutures.wordpress.com/
Published December 2009
Niharika Hariharan is a narrative designer and a filmmaker, keen on working and exploring the intersection of design with related and non-related fields such as sociology, sciences, education and traditional knowledge systems. She has worked on numerous multi-disciplinary projects in the realm of social and community design, developing innovative research methodologies, scenario building and story telling techniques. Niharika was awarded the ‘TATA scholar’ in 2007 and her work has been exhibited at many national and international festivals and events. www.niharikahariharan.com
Case Study – Niharika Hariharan | bookleteer blog [...] Once the workshops were completed, Niharika scanned all of the eBooks as part of an archive of the event.… Comment posted on 9-22-2010 at 20:41
International languages & bookleteer [...] week we published Niharika Hariharan’s Hindi/English eBooks for the Articulating Futures project on Diffusion – they are a great… Comment posted on 12-7-2009 at 20:31
uberVU - social comments Social comments and analytics for this post... This post was mentioned on Twitter by proboscisstudio: new on #diffusion: Articulating… Comment posted on 12-4-2009 at 00:18
I recently came across Kevin Hamilton‘s Complex Fields site, and read his description of a workshop on Critique, Collaboration, Prototyping and how he used StoryCubes as part of it. I asked if he’d write a short summary to post here, which he’s kindly done:
SUMMARY: Kevin Hamilton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
In a couple of workshops now, we’ve used Storycubes to help start the group design process in a way that also establishes critical criteria for later evaluation and reflection. We’ve found that in group work, it’s all too easy to divide tasks early and not actually do the hard work of deciding together about goals, arguing about contexts and outcomes.
Our response to this was to devise a four-part system of critical criteria – CONTEXT, FUNCTION, PROCESS, and AUDIENCE. In the classroom, we ask groups to establish goals within each of these areas, so that they can later return to their stated goals and decide on how they achieved or departed from them. I recently married this structure to the Storycubes with some success.
The projects where I’ve used this technique involved the creation of interactive site-specific artworks. Each team received four blank cubes – one for CONTEXT, one for FUNCTION, one for PROCESS, and the fourth for AUDIENCE. I asked each team to fill each side of each cube with one possible item or goal. The result was six possible audiences, six possible functions, etcetera. The team could then mix-and-match to decide on one approach scenario to explore through physical prototyping or other methods.
One unexpected function of this process was to provide something of a “common enemy” in what for some seemed an overly artificial process. If a team’s members were new to each other or otherwise experiencing awkward interaction, they could at least unify around begrudgingly following the process of constructing Storycubes. (They eventually liked them, even if it seemed too elementary or formulaic at first.) The resulting cubes also added up to a sort of database archive for future iteration and design.
As part of our thinking into new business and revenue models for our own projects and practices, we’ve come up with a different approach for supporting the next stage development of bookleteer to relying on grants.
To progress bookleteer to a public ‘beta’ version in early 2010 – we’re looking for friends and supporters (initially organisations but also individuals) to join bookleteer’s Alpha Club. The club is an alternative support/fundraising concept, aimed at partners, friends, colleagues and sponsors who share in our ethos of ‘public authoring’, providing public access to tools of creation, production and distribution and who, as members of the Alpha Club, would like to be at the core of the emerging bookleteer community. For a modest, one-off contribution we hope Alpha Club members will help us raise our target of around £25k for the next critical phase of bookleteer’s development.
Membership of the Alpha Club will be exclusive to those who join during the ‘alpha’ stage of bookleteer’s development, establishing a founder group of friends, supporters and sponsors.
Benefits include:
Up to 5 bookleteer accounts per member & technical support;
access to the bookleteer APIs to experiment with;
a private pitch up & publish style training session at our studio
About : In August of 2009, Dodolab was invited by the Confederation Centre of the Arts to Prince Edward Island to respond to issues surrounding the Experimental Farm in Charlottetown. During our discussions about the future of this large parcel of picturesque land, the concept for the Postcard Places project developed out of an interest in the relationship between iconic landscapes and a place’s sense of identity.
Published October 2009
Lisa Hirmer has both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Architecture from Waterloo Architecture Cambridge. She joined DodoLab after completing a thesis about the significance of nature and wilderness in contemporary culture, particularly within a Canadian context. She currently splits her time between working with DodoLab and more traditional work as an Intern Architect. As an emerging landscape photographer, she is particularly interested in sites where the relationship between human intervention and natural process is ambiguous and complex. She recently won an Ontario Association of Architects Award of Excellence for her landscape photography.
Laura Knap has an education in architecture from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her work orbits in design, community building, photography, writing, and construction; and focusses on the agency, imagination and inhabitation of green spaces; as well as questions of sustainability.
October Newsletter | Proboscis [...] The Postcard Places Project by Lisa Hirmer with Laura Knap http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1602 [...] Comment posted on 11-2-2009 at 15:53
Dodolab » Blog Archive » Two New eBooks [...] just published two new eBooks, Lisa Hirmer and Laura Knap’s Postcard Places project from our PEI lab and an… Comment posted on 10-21-2009 at 00:43
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.
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.
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.
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.
British Museum & Bookleteer | bookleteer blog [...] was used in the Melanesia Project to record, Porer and Pinbin, indigenous people from Papua New Guinea discussing objects… Comment posted on 7-1-2011 at 11:05
October Newsletter | Proboscis [...] Ethnographic Notebooks, British Museum Melanesia Project http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1301 [...] Comment posted on 11-2-2009 at 15:54
Dr.A.U.Dan'asabe As my name apire above. I am a consultant witch export all African Cultural Instruments. Regards. Dr.A.U.Dan'asabe. Comment posted on 10-14-2009 at 18:44
Card Making Sounds like a wonderful experience! How long has the project been running? Comment posted on 10-1-2009 at 13:51
About : This double-sided StoryCube has been designed for the Dodolab intervention at the 5th World Environmental Education Congress in Montréal, May 10-14 2009. Dodolab is a collaborative and creative intervention exploring different approaches to the concept of sustainability, resilience and adaptability. It is organised by Andrew Hunter of Render @ University of Waterloo and Shawn van Sluys of Musagetes Foundation. Giles Lane of Proboscis will be participating to engage delegates in creating a landscape of ideas using the cubes, as well as social mapping activities using a Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion Map.
Published May 2009
Giles Lane is an artist, researcher and teacher. He founded and is co-director of Proboscis, a non-profit creative studio based in London where, since 1994, he has led projects such as Urban Tapestries; Snout; Mapping Perception; Experiencing Democracy; Everyday Archaeology; and Private Reveries, Public Spaces. Giles is a Visiting Tutor on the MA Design Critical Practice at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and is a Research Associate of the Media and Communications Department at London School of Economics. Giles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2008 for his contribution to community development through creative practice.
About : These 30 epithets form a kind of experimental prose poem that uses the 140 character constraint of the micro-blogging service Twitter as its structure. They were composed as a contribution to the catalogue for Larissa Hjorth’s CU: the presents of co-presence, a project exploring SMS culture. Each epithet was prefaced with the hashtag #tweetome and first published via Twitter on February 22nd 2009.
Published March 2009
Giles Lane is an artist, researcher and teacher. He founded and is co-director of Proboscis, a non-profit creative studio based in London where, since 1994, he has led projects such as Urban Tapestries; Snout; Mapping Perception; Experiencing Democracy; Everyday Archaeology; and Private Reveries, Public Spaces. Giles is a Visiting Tutor on the MA Design Critical Practice at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and is a Research Associate of the Media and Communications Department at London School of Economics. Giles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2008 for his contribution to community development through creative practice.
About : The minimal compact: An “open source” constitutional framework for post-national collectivities (v0.1.1) First written and published online in 2003, the Minimal Compact is a manifesto for creating a constitution between people, based on open-source software concepts and practices, that goes beyond the framework of the nation state.
Published March 2009
Adam Greenfield is a writer and critical futurist, and as of 2009 holds the position of Head of Design Direction, Service and User Interface Design for Nokia. He has spent the past ten years exploring the intersection of technology, design and culture, with a strong focus on issues around ubiquitous computing. His 2006 book on the subject, Everyware, has been acclaimed as “groundbreaking,” “elegant,” and “soulful” by Bruce Sterling, and “gracefully written, fascinating, and deeply wise” by Wired’s Steve Silberman. His book The City Is Here For You To Use (Do Projects, forthcoming) explores the impact of these technologies on urban form and metropolitan experience. Previously a rock critic, San Francisco bike messenger, PSYOP sergeant, and head of the information architecture department for the Tokyo office of the notorious early Internet consultancy Razorfish, Greenfield most recently co-taught the “Urban Computing” course at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program with Kevin Slavin. He currently lives and works in Helsinki, Finland, and blogs at speedbird.wordpress.com. His Twitter feed can be found at twitter.com/agpublic.
About : eBooks help to promote ongoing communication between students in Umulogho Village, Nigeria and students in Watford schools.
Bev Carter’s eBook A Little Something About Me (generated by with support from Proboscis) was used to assist a series of workshops in six schools in Watford during 2008 to communicate through words, paintings and photographs the life, experiences and interests of students attending a secondary school in Umulogho, a rural village in Imo State, Nigeria, West Africa.
During school workshops copies of this eBook were handed out to the students and a discussion was encouraged and facilitated by Bev. The pupils really liked the eBook and it served to generate more curiosity and questions about life in Umulogho. As part of the process another eBook created to capture all the thoughts and enquries the students had.
The next eBook was called ‘Kedu?‘ This means ‘How are you? in Igbo, the main language spoken in Umulogho Village. This was a collection of further questions from students in Watford using pictures created by Umulogho students to give them added visual interest. In July 2008 copies of the ‘Kedu’ eBook were hand delivered to Umulogho Village by Tony Amaechi, a Trustee of Friends Out There, and some Umulogho Village students then filled in their response to the questions in the eBook. Five eBooks were collected by Tony on his return to the UK and some students told Tony that they had enjoyed filling in the eBooks, were thrilled to see their paintings scanned in to them and were happy to know that students in the UK were interested in them, their dreams and concerns.
In October 2008 the completed Kedu eBooks were taken back to some of the schools in Watford that had asked the original questions. The students were amazed and pleased to see they really had been given some answers to their questions, such as ‘are there any crocodiles in the village stream? – some Umologho students had seen some and others hadn’t. The eBooks got the Watford students talking about what time they wake up in the morning and what they do before school as most students in Umulogho were awake by 5.30 am and had gone to the village stream and back to collect water before going to school. The Kedu eBooks also gave the Umulogo students a space to ask some questions that they had for the Watford students such as ‘what seasons do you have in England?’ and ‘what religions do you have?’
The next stage will be to create another eBook to continue the communication between the schools in Umulogho and Watford. The eBook is an excellent resource for schools: students like the pocket sized feel, it’s a great way to capture conversations and enquiries and, even though the school in Umulogho Village doesn’t yet have a computer or internet access, we were still able to send and receive paper copies – using more traditional means of connection and communication.
Bev Carter
February 2009
For more information please contact Bev Carter (Friends Out There)
In Autumn 2008 Proboscis won a Feasibility Study grant from the Technology Strategy Board to investigate the potential for third party sites to add access to our Diffusion Generator online software to their systems, enabling their own users to be able to create and publish eBooks and StoryCubes directly from their sites. Over the next couple of months we will be developing a re-engineered prototype of the Generator designed to allow 3rd parties to hook into it through an open API (Application Programming Interface) and offer their own users eBook and StoryCube creation.
As the popularity of Diffusion grows – we have now passed an average of 110,000 downloads per year – Proboscis needs to develop sustainable revenue streams (e.g. from licensing the API to 3rd parties) to keep Diffusion going, and to create successful and meaningful partnerships with potential users (museums, galleries, universities, companies etc) who wish to add this unique publishing system to their own sites. The feasibility study and the re-engineered Generator will enable us to model these potential revenue streams and demonstrate a functioning service to other potential partners.
Later this year we aim to unveil the new Diffusion Generator and welcome expressions of interest from organisations and institutions who would like to test the API. I’ll be at BookCamp on January 17th and would be delighted to hear from anyone interested in working with us.
About : Proboscis are running a creative workshop on September 18th at ZAIM, Yokohama as part of the Dislocate08 festival. The workshop is the initial stage of our research for Sensory Threads, engaging artists, urbanists, designers, technologists, musicians and dancers in an active investigation into the sensorial patterns and rhythms to be found in our environment. The area around ZAIM in Yokohama will become our research field as we seek out and evidence the recurring, overlapping and intersecting sounds and movements that take place as we act in, and react to, our environment.
Sensory Threads is a work-in-progress to develop an instrument enabling a group of people to create a soundscape reflecting their collaborative experiences in the environment. For this interactive sensory experience, we are designing sensors for detecting environmental phenomena at the periphery of human perception as well as the movement and proximity of the wearers themselves. Possible targets for the sensors may be electro-magnetic radiation, hi/lo sound frequencies, heart rate etc). The sensors’ datastreams will feed into generative audio software, creating a multi-layered and multi-dimensional soundscape feeding back the players’ journey through their environment. Variations in the soundscape reflect changes in the wearers interactions with each other and the environment around them. We aim to premiere the work in 2009.
Sensory Threads is being created by Proboscis in collaboration with Birkbeck College’s Pervasive Computing Lab, The Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary (University of London), the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and the School of Management at University of Southampton.
Published September 2008.
Proboscis is an artist-led creative studio based in London, UK. The Sensory Threads workshop is being led by Giles Lane and Karen Martin with Frederik Lesage.
This summer we have been delighted to host two international Diffusion residencies at Proboscis – one with curator Lisa Hunter from Dundas, Ontario Canada, and the other with Matt Huynh, an illustrator and cartoonist from Sydney Australia. The aim, as with our initial Case Study series last year, is to explore new uses and contexts for Diffusion (the Generator and eBook/StoryCube formats) by working closely with individuals from a wide range of practices in the studio. Sharing our experiences of Diffusion, knowledge of the formats (their potential and constraints) and tips for using the Generator, we are collaborating with the residents to realise new opportunities for creating and using Diffusion Shareables in different contexts and situations.
About : At the Water’s Edge Finding that so much of her work on human relationships to land and urban space leads to issues around rivers and water Alice Angus is beginning a series of water based investigations exploring different perspectives of what it means to care for the environment and how it can affect the way in which water environments are managed and cared for. The dialogues are being recorded and shared as Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes. Through encounters, journeys and conversations with people who experience rivers in different ways the series aims to bring the discussion of environmental issues to a human dimension and consider how human creativity, spirituality and inventiveness in everyday life; from city workers to gardeners, urban planners to bus drivers, amateur botanists to academics is both witness to environmental change and fundamental to creating solutions to environmental issues.
A Conversation with Joyce Majiski
Joyce Majiski is an artist, naturalist and river and wilderness guide whose work focuses on the natural world. This eBook includes excerpts from a conversation with Joyce about two rivers; the Tatshenshini and the Firth. Both wilderness rivers in North Western Canada.
Published August 2008
Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. In 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the first Artist in the Park residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon, organised by Parks Canada.
Proboscis is proud to announce our first ‘StoryBox’ of digitally printed and die-cut StoryCubes: an 8 cube set printed on both sides which enables people to explore Proboscis, our projects, themes and ideas in three dimensions.
This is the first of a number of StoryBoxes which we will be publishing in the next year. Future ones include creative works by sound artist, Loren Chasse; a special set on our Snout project; a 27 cube set about Social Tapestries and a new edition of the Gordon Pask cubes, first shown last year in the Maverick Machines exhibition, Edinburgh.
Custom Printed StoryCubes Proboscis is now offering a service to design and manufacture custom printed StoryCubes – e.g. for marketing campaigns or communication projects – for single or double-sided cubes with as many different StoryCube designs as you like.
Please contact us for pricing at sales(at)proboscis.org.uk
A set of 7 StoryCubes created for Survey Sampling International Ltd as marketing tools for their offices in the UK, France, Spain, Holland, Germany and Scandinavia.
About : An eBook for the Lattice Forum (07/03/2008), a day event exploring issues of cities and sustainability arising from Lattice: Collaborative Anarchaeologies of the City. It looked at the workshop’s achievements, discussed the ways culturally diverse communities engage with their environment and considered issues of creative cities and sustainability. Proboscis spent three weeks in Western Sydney working with ICE (Information and Cultural Exchange) hosting a collaborative workshop and exchange labs with Western Sydney artists/ cultural producers and Thai community architect Kasama Yamtree.
Published March 2008
Lattice::Sydney participants include: David Capra, Ali Kadhim, Sanez Fatouhi and Amin Palagni, Ben Hoh, Tiffany Lee-Shoy, Fatima Mawas, Ben Nitiva, Matt Huynh, Tak Tran and Tina Tran of Popperbox, Denis Asif Sado, Trey Thomas, Maria Tran, Todd Williams and Kasama Yamtree.
newmediafix.net » Blog Archive » Proboscis March 2008 Newsletter [...] (2 eBooks) - http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=295 Proboscis, ICE et al - Lattice::Sydney Unwrapped - http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=289 Todd Williams & S Squire -… Comment posted on 3-27-2008 at 17:57
About : Juxtapostions and Reflections
Based on a long term collaboration with Alice Angus for our project Topographies and Tales, this eBook contains a collection of images, reflections and current thoughts regarding journeys we made for the project and those that have arisen as a result. Published in 2 Parts.
Published December 2007
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
About : Juxtapostions and Reflections
Based on a long term collaboration with Alice Angus for our project Topographies and Tales, this eBook contains a collection of images, reflections and current thoughts regarding journeys we made for the project and those that have arisen as a result. Published in 2 Parts.
Published December 2007
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
Diffusion is brought to you by Proboscis, a non-profit organization. Support our work with a secure donation by credit card or Paypal:
You may prefer to support us by purchasing a pack of StoryCubes to make your own story landscapes with – for storytelling projects, workshops, education or evaluation activities.
[...] Remix Reconvex Reconvexo by Karla Brunet [...]
Comment posted on 1-6-2012 at 03:30