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 book documents some of the research and traders involved in Alice Angus’ As It Comes project exploring independent shops and traders in Lancaster, England. It was made by Caroline Maclennan, a local student at Lancaster University who worked with Alice and also includes work with local historian Michael Winstanley who collaborated with Alice. As It Comes was commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts for their Talking Shop regeneration programme, and was supported by the Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce.
Published December 2010
Caroline Maclennan is a History of Art and Fine Art student at the University of Lancaster specialising in installation and digital art. Caroline undertook a creative placement on Alice Angus’ As It Comes project in Summer / Autumn 2010.
Trading drawings, tea and mince pies | Proboscis [...] This week we had Caroline Maclennan in the studio using bookleteer to create a download-print and make sketchbook of… Comment posted on 1-12-2011 at 12:31
About : an eBook and a set of StoryCubes about Alice Angus’ new project, As It Comes commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts and Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce for their Talking Shop series. An exploration of the independent shops and market stall traders of Lancaster, Alice has created a series of drawings that are printed on 2 metre long cotton banners with hand-embroidered details, which are hung in the windows of a shop at 18 New Street on from the 10th November to 16th December 2010.
Published November 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.
Introducing… the Periodical | bookleteer blog [...] for projects such as Professor Starling’s Expedition, Material Conditions, City As Material, As It Comes, Agencies of Engagement and… Comment posted on 7-14-2012 at 07:51
About : an illustrated storyboard for a new film about Proboscis’ Sensory Threads project, illustrated by Many Tang and scripted by Karen Martin & Alice Angus.
Published September 2010
Mandy Tang recently joined Proboscis as a Creative Assistant on a 6 month placement supported by the Future Jobs Fund through New Deal of the Mind. She has worked on various iPhone games projects as a Junior Concept Artist and is currently interested in expanding her knowledge in the field of Creative Arts.
October Newsletter | Proboscis [...] Streetscapes eNotebook by Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2175 Tangled Threads by Mandy Tang http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2171 Graffito by BigDog Interactive & Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2146 Topographies… Comment posted on 10-27-2010 at 11:20
Proboscis Newsletter October 2010 | newmediafix.net [...] Streetscapes eNotebook by Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2175 Tangled Threads by Mandy Tang http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2171 Graffito by BigDog Interactive & Proboscis http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2146 Topographies… Comment posted on 10-26-2010 at 13:56
Tangled Threads | Proboscis [...] Tangled Threads consists of a storyboard in the form of a Diffusion eBook, that reflects upon the different projects… Comment posted on 9-20-2010 at 14:38
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
About : Ode to Dawson is an artists book made mostly using print-based methods, including digital, linoleum and monoprint techniques. The book also includes sewing, beading, drawing and painting contributions. Co-ordinated and created by Joyce Majiski and John Steins (with 41 contributors) Ode to Dawson was created during the Riverside Arts Festival in Dawson City, Yukon August, 2010
Published August 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
Proboscis Newsletter October 2010 | newmediafix.net [...] Jennifer Sheridan http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2115 Ode to Dawson by Joyce Majiski & John Steins http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2111 Excavations in the Temple Precinct of… Comment posted on 10-26-2010 at 13:57
Download StoryCube 1 – 1970 A4 only PDF 600Kb StoryCube 2 – 1980 A4 only PDF 1.5Mb
StoryCube 3 – 1990 A4 only PDF 1.5Mb
StoryCube 4 – 2000 A4 only PDF 1.1Mb
StoryCube 5 – 2010 A4 only PDF 1.8Mb
StoryCube 6 – 2020 A4 only PDF 1.6Mb
StoryCube 7 – 2030 A4 only PDF 2Mb
StoryCube 8 – 2040 A4 only PDF 2.1Mb
StoryCube 9 – 2050 A4 only PDF 1.7Mb
StoryCube 10 – 2060 A4 only PDF 800Kb
About : “I have lived like a fool and wasted my time”, Guillaume Apollinaire A Sort of Autobiography is a possible story of Waren Craghead’s life projected both back to his birth in 1970 and forward to his death in 2060. Each decade of his life is represented by a storycube as a rough self-portrait. Drawn in various styles and encoded in different ways, the cubes tell a story of transformations – of mark-making, of physical appearance and of a life seen through drawing.
Warren Craghead III is an artist and curator living in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA with his wife and two daughters. He is constantly drawing. His work explores spontaneous narratives that process and encode everyday life and the written word into discrete, pictographic, nonlinear stories that can be encountered everywhere: a sticker on a pole, a booklet in a newspaper, a postcard in the mail, an image on a website, a collage in a gallery. He has exhibited and published his work internationally, including the Xeric Grant winning Speedy, HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE and several collaborations with poets and writers, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006. He received an MFA in 1996 from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia in 1993, and attended the Skowhegan School in 1993. More of his work can be seen at www.craghead.com
Telling Worlds by Frederik Lesage | Proboscis [...] helped to shape one particular collaborative exchange with Warren Craghead in a work titled A Sort of Autobiography. By… Comment posted on 4-20-2011 at 08:58
Comics, Cubed | bookleteer blog [...] Craghead’s “A sort of Autobiography” is a comic spanning ten StoryCubes, each detailing a decade of his life, and… Comment posted on 9-6-2010 at 08:03
Giles Lane and another one here : http://scottmccloud.com/2010/08/10/now-thats-and-experimental-comic/#comments Comment posted on 8-14-2010 at 21:52
Giles Lane there's a great review of this piece here : http://warren-peace.blogspot.com/2010/08/sort-of-autobiography-cool-comics-ideas.html Comment posted on 8-14-2010 at 21:48
May Newsletter | Proboscis [...] DIFFUSION EBOOKS & STORYCUBES A Sort of Autobiography by Warren Craghead http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1977 Cemetery Litmus Test by Andrew Hunter http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1999 iPhone App… Comment posted on 5-20-2010 at 09:07
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 : A book of drawings by Alice Angus made during a week long project exploring Granville Arcade in Brixton Market on the first leg of artistsandmakers.com Empty Shops Network Tour to six towns across England, created by artist Dan Thompson. Alice joined Dan, Jan Williams (Caravan Gallery), Steve Bomford, Natasha Middleton and podcaster Richard Vobes, for lively discussion and to create new work on site, you can hear Richard Vobes podcasts of about the project here.
The tour has been organised by the Empty Shops Network, with the first event happening just a week after the project was conceived at a meeting of organisations involved in bringing empty shops and spaces into meanwhile use. After Brixton, the Empty Shops Network project will visit five further towns, with dates in Shoreham by Sea, Coventry, Cumbria and Durham to be confirmed in coming weeks. See artistsandmakers.com for details.
You can see drawings and images from the Brixton week here.
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 : 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 ***
A few weeks ago I came across Kevin Macleod‘s website, incompetech, where he has created a series of free graph and notepaper generators for making all sorts of useful and intriguing designs. We’ve combined a small selection of his page designs into Diffusion eBooks as examples of how we can further extend the Shareable Notebook range, and offer custom and personalised eNotebooks for different purposes.
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.
About : Inspired by the enthusiasm for Paper/Digital Hybrids at the recent PaperCamp in London, we have prepared a range of Diffusion Notebooks. Proboscis has designed custom Diffusion eNotebooks for many of our own projects going back five or more years, however we’d not created generic ones that could be used off the cuff. This selection of Notebooks is based on some simple notepaper designs that we like to use: blank and lined pages, graphs and squares. Each Notebook is made up of 4 sheets of paper with 14 pages for you to use. The Multipurpose Notebook combines five types on 7 sheets (26 pages). Print them out using different paper stocks and colours for different effects. Once you’ve filled them up, take them apart, scan the pages and you’ve got an instant digital shareable notebook.
Customisations : We are happy to design customised variations of these Notebooks (with more pages, additional page designs or various combinations of the ones used here). Please add your suggestions to the comments section below and we’ll endeavour to oblige. We are also happy to take on design commissions to create Notebooks for exhibitions, conferences or other activities.
Update : two new variations have been added – music staves and storyboards.
Update (22/5/09): the notebooks have been completely re-created using our new Diffusion Generator and now include landscape as well as portrait options and both Diffusion eBook bindings (book and classic).
Matt Huynh is a comic creator and illustrator based in Sydney, Australia. In August 2008 he visited London for a Diffusion residency at our studio in Clerkenwell. Matt worked on two Diffusion projects whilst on the residency; in his own words, “The eBook is a format developed for easy, viral distribution, so my challenge was to take it in the other direction to create a unique version of the eBook that would be difficult to reproduce and mass distribute.” The first project resulted in a single unique work adapted from the eBook folding format. Matt’s eBook, Anytime, contains an artist’s statement about the work and his process.
The second project, insideout, used the eBook as the format to create and distribute a free comic – “a playful 27 page comic-booklet about the contradictions of affection (with ghosts).”
“When it came to developing the ‘eBook’ format, I was inspired to reflect its encouragement of sharing creative processes and ideas in the comic book’s subject matter and style.
The comic’s aesthetic is almost completely created with soft pencils. In commercial comics processes, the penciling stage is one of the initial processes in creating a work’s visual aesthetic. Here, I’ve chosen pencils, sometimes with my construction lines even peeping through, as the final aesthetic to capture and showcase this project’s ambition to share process.
It was with the transparency of process at the forefront of my mind that I was inspired to have the protagonists of ‘insideout’ appear as ghosts, and it was with the aim of being open to embrace and share ideas and processes that I modeled the narrative to concern these ghosts’ conflicting attitudes towards demonstrating and receiving affection and their fear to venture outside the door of their haunted home.”
About : insideout is a playful 27 page comic-booklet about the contradictions of affection (with ghosts). This work was created during his residency with Proboscis UK in August 2008 – visit the project’s mini-site to read it online, download the eBook or Matt’s actual drawings and read about Matt’s process:
In the spirit of this format’s advocation of creating and sharing ideas, I’ve decided to –
+ release this little ditty completely free;
+ release this work’s hi-res images for use under the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-share alike license; and
+ open up some insight into my materials and process.
Published August 2008
Matt Huynh is a comic creator and illustrator based in Sydney, Australia. In August 2008 he visited London for a Diffusion residency at Proboscis’ studio in Clerkenwell.
About : The first eBook that I made is titled “Notebook Drawing” and I made it just using drawings that I had on hand. I always carry a notebook and pencil with me and afterwards I use the drawings in other art projects and in other books that I make. I didn’t have a subject in mind at that moment, so I used my somewhat obsessive notebook-making as the subject, and created some text for my first Diffusion eBook. I was not happy with the vertical page flip design of the original ebook and re-thought it in a horizontal format which suited my concept better. When I print this book out for myself, I use an ivory or buff colored paper to simulate the color of the original notebook pages. I felt a little shy about submitting this book because it seems a bit narcisisistic in comparison to the socially engaged work that I see on the Proboscis website.
Published May 2008
Zea Morvitz is an artist living near San Francisco in Northern California. She received an MA in painting from the University of California in Berkeley and has since exhibited work in the U.S. and in Europe. Her current work involves drawing and painting on mass-produced books that were discarded and on their way to landfill. In this work four to sixteen books are arranged on the wall in a grid configuration. She also makes and binds books, working primarily in graphite and mixed media. Trained as a book designer, she continues to be interested in graphic design. She and her husband, photographer Tim Graveson are working on an collaborative project titled “Worked Books” that will be installed at the Market Place Center in Armagh, Northern Ireland in August, 2008. Besides being an artist, Morvitz works as a curator and administrator for Gallery Route One, a small nonprofit, community based art organization in Point Reyes Station.
Dawn Burnham Thank you so much.....the drawings are poignant and comforting like rain on Sundays. Good luck with all endeavours. Comment posted on 10-9-2009 at 13:50
Ngawi I've downloaded the book. Thanks for sharing, nice sketch Comment posted on 8-28-2008 at 01:36
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