playful cubes for storytelling, brainstorming ideas or playing games in three dimensions
Diffusion engaging with the community, online and out in the world.
an ongoing programme enabling residents at Proboscis studio to create eBooks and StoryCubes for their own projects.
eBooks & StoryCubes created for learning and educational purposes
Browse the collection of Diffusion Shareables: eBooks & StoryCubes
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 1.2Mb Read Online
About : found on the extraordinary retronaut site, a mad vision of London flooded and become Venice, from 1899.
First Published August 1899, Harmsworth’s Magazine
Sourced from retronaut & Forgotten Futures
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 940Kb
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Underside to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
Book a place at Underside (Friday 26th November) or the last event of this series, Sonic Geographies on December 10th.
Published November 2010
*** made with bookleteer.com ***
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3.2Mb Read Online
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Skyline to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
Includes a photo essay by Skyline’s event special guest, Simon Pope.
Book a place at Skyline (Friday 12th November) or one of the other forthcoming events, Underside & Sonic Geographies.
Published November 2010
*** made with bookleteer.com ***
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3.9Mb Read Online
About : a collaborative eBook created during the second City As Material Pitch In & Publish event on ‘River‘. Ebb and Flow documents a walk along the river from Hermitage Community Moorings in Wapping to Queenhithe and via the City to Turnmill Street (formerly on the banks of the now buried River Fleet) in Clerkenwell. Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #cityasmaterial
Book a place at one of the next events, on the topics of Skyline, Underside and Sonic Geographies.
Published November 2010
Authors : Ben Eastop, Martin Fidler, Fred Garnett, Giles Lane, Anne Lydiat, Alex McGlynn and Aurelia McGlynn-Richon
*** made with bookleteer.com ***
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 1.4 Mb
About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on River to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
Published October 2010
*** made with bookleteer.com ***
About : City As Material was a course devised and led by Giles Lane of Proboscis for students on Vassar College’s International Study Program in London. As part of the course the students each had to research and create an urban intervention project and document it via a Diffusion eBook. Some of the students also chose to use eBooks as part of their project itself (which are linked below). Descriptions of the projects and the research conducted during the course can be found on the course website: cityasmaterial.wordpress.com
Download
Chenxi Cai – London’s Canals, A Beginners Field Guide A4 | US Letter PDF 350Kb
Chenxi Cai – London’s Canals, Treasure 1 A4 | US Letter PDF 115Kb
Chenxi Cai – London’s Canals, Treasure 2 A4 | US Letter PDF 160Kb
Chenxi Cai – London’s Canals, Documentation eBook A4 | US Letter PDF 350Kb
Marie Dugo – Tube Torts A4 | US Letter PDF 710Kb
Marie Dugo – Tube Torts Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 610Kb
Lauren Dyson – Ludic London Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 1.6Mb
Sara Leon – Moda Mapping Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 1.1Mb
John McCartin – Trashscapes Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 1.4Mb
Avey Venable – ITS London A4 | US Letter PDF 930Kb
Avey Venable – ITS London Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF
Michael Zipp – Foundry: lost and found A4 | US Letter PDF 1.4Mb
Michael Zipp – Foundry: lost and found Documentation A4 | US Letter PDF 450Kb
Published December 2009
*** made with bookleteer.com ***
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 760Kb
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.
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 328Kb
About : Much of the drug smuggling, drug manufacturing and drug dealing centred on London in the 1960s remains undocumented. This is an outline of various links between people such as club hostess and showgirl Julia Callan-Thompson, murky underworld figures like Alan Bruce Cooper, and art world insiders such as Francis Morland.
Published June 2009
Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org
*** a ‘book’ (long edge binding) eBook created using the new Diffusion Generator ***
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 412Kb
About : A critical look at the Altermodern Tate Triennial 2009 and the incoherent theory underpinning it. Appended with an account of the International Necronautical Society talk that was one of a number of events used to frame the Nicolas Bourriaud’s Tate Britain show.
Published March 2009
Stewart Home is an artist who has used social networking sites such as MySpace as the location for much of his non-gallery work in recent years. He is also the author of many books of fiction and cultural commentary, including 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), and The Assault on Culture: Utopian current from Lettrisme to Class War (AK Press 1991). His latest novel is Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Online resources relating to Stewart Home’s work can be found at
www.stewarthomesociety.org
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 280Kb
About : A guided walk through Historic Southwark.
Published June 2008
Kevin Flude’s main interests are the history, archaeology and museums of London. He has been proprietor of And Did Those Feet (Cultural Heritage Resources) since 1982. It has allowed him the opportunity of working in a variety of fields in the Heritage world. He is currently Director of the Old Operating Theatre Museum in Southwark; Associate Lecturer at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London and Worcester University and Course Director for the Elderhostel programme in London which provides study tours, lectures and walks on the history, archaeology architecture and art of London. Visit his blog here.
Over a week in late July/early August 2007 Proboscis hosted a writing workshop for four teenage girls. The girls were invited to participate as part of the Case Study Residencies programme and spent an intense five days in the Proboscis studio during which they conceived, created, wrote, designed and produced illustrated stories to be published via the Diffusion Generator.
The week began with an introduction to Proboscis and the project and the girls talked about their experiences of writing and illustrating stories – what they enjoyed doing, what they found hard, why they wanted to achieve etc. All four were keen artists and writers interested in Manga; they discussed the kinds of things they currently wrote and the problems they faced. All of them commented that they very rarely finished stories – ideas came and went – and that they would move onto another story before they had finished the previous one.
A walk around Clerkenwell and Smithfield Market, an area steeped in history and vibrant with everyday life and change, formed the basis for the girls’ stories. Each of the girls was given a digital camera and sound recorder to capture images and sounds of the area that interested them. Our route took us past Mount Pleasant, through Finsbury down to Clerkenwell Green and St John’s Gate, through to Charterhouse Square, round Smithfield and St Barts, up Saffron and Herbal Hills and back to Rosebery Avenue. Using a small library of books about London’s past and present, we researched histories of some of the building, who lived in these places and what took place there. In particular the girls became fascinated with a former Victorian school building erected on the site of Clerkenwell’s notorious House of Correction, an underground prison of the 17th and 18th Centuries.
Using the walk, their research, and the photos and sounds recorded on the walk as the source material, we spent a few hours as a group planning a master narrative and skeleton storyboard. This set out a single plot and selection of characters which they could all use and base their stories around, with individual stories deviating from this central concept as they chose. Once the bones of the narrative were in place we spent a while coming up with the elements to be included in each scene using the StoryCubes to think about what should and shouldn’t be included.
Concentrating on the storyboarding was quite a difficult task and different to the girls’ usual methods of writing, however it provided a useful framework for working out the characters, their relationships and the major events of the main story. We pushed them to come up with the skeleton story but also let them know that they had the freedom to do what they liked with the stories after this – they could miss out chapters, start at a different point or change whatever they wished.
Focusing on the school and the prison as the place of the story, the characters’ images and their names became important to the girls and they did more intense work on the various chapters and the characters throughout the week. The illustrations for the eBooks were drawn first before being scanned. Some of them were then coloured using Painter and Photoshop. The girls worked on the drawings and stories simultaneously, making decisions as they went along about what images were needed and where. A lot of the Manga-style images were shared between a number of the girls with several of the same characters appearing in more than one of the girls stories. This interweaving of narrative and character giving this series of eBooks a particular coherence and sense of multiple authorship.
By the end of the five day workshop each of the girls had completed the stories and illustrations for at least one eBook; over the next couple of months these were refined and edited before being published on the Diffusion site in November 2007.
The eBooks
Kiddie Crunch Time – Vanda Rjechko
KCT– Grandma’s Story – Georgia Hudson
Crunch! – AyaOluwa Aloa
Deep_’n_Dark 2: Mo(u)rning Rises – Eloise Mitchell
Deep_’n_Dark 1: Dusk Descends – Eloise Mitchell
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 2.65Mb
About : Maggie Hunter produced her eBook while visiting London in the fall of 2007. It consists of photographs and writings based on her daily walks around the city highlighting the sites that she was most intrigued by including the the observatory at Greenwich and the sphinxes at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle. During her time in London, she also collaborated with her father Andrew on the three Accidental Menagerie eBooks.
Published January 2008
Maggie Hunter is a grade 6 student living in Dundas Ontario, Canada.
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3.2Mb
About : Part 3 of a series of eBooks created as part of a Case Study Residency. Being a collection of images compiled by the artist with his daughter while wandering about London and its environs in search of beasties on the dates of November 28th and 29th, 2007. The reader should note that this is by no means a complete archive of the creatures observed.
Published November 2007
Andrew Hunter is the Director/Curator of RENDER, an interdisciplinary art based research, teaching, production and presentation centre at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Hunter also works as an independent artist, writer, and curator and has produced exhibitions, writings and publications for art galleries and museums across Canada, in the United States and Europe. He was a contributor to the Proboscis project Navigating History. For his Generator Case Study, Hunter will visit London in November of this year to develop a poetic, illustrated guidebook in collaboration with his 11 year old daughter Maggie.
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3.2Mb
About : Part 2 of a series of eBooks created as part of a Case Study Residency. Being a collection of images compiled by the artist with his daughter while wandering about London and its environs in search of beasties on the dates of November 27th and 28th, 2007. The reader should note that this is by no means a complete archive of the creatures observed.
Published November 2007
Andrew Hunter is the Director/Curator of RENDER, an interdisciplinary art based research, teaching, production and presentation centre at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Hunter also works as an independent artist, writer, and curator and has produced exhibitions, writings and publications for art galleries and museums across Canada, in the United States and Europe. He was a contributor to the Proboscis project Navigating History. For his Generator Case Study, Hunter will visit London in November of this year to develop a poetic, illustrated guidebook in collaboration with his 11 year old daughter Maggie.
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 3.1Mb
About : Part 1 of a series of eBooks created as part of a Case Study Residency. Being a collection of images compiled by the artist with his daughter while wandering about London and its environs in search of beasties on the dates of November 25th and 26th, 2007. The reader should note that this is by no means a complete archive of the creatures observed.
Published November 2007
Andrew Hunter is the Director/Curator of RENDER, an interdisciplinary art based research, teaching, production and presentation centre at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Hunter also works as an independent artist, writer, and curator and has produced exhibitions, writings and publications for art galleries and museums across Canada, in the United States and Europe. He was a contributor to the Proboscis project Navigating History. For his Generator Case Study, Hunter will visit London in November of this year to develop a poetic, illustrated guidebook in collaboration with his 11 year old daughter Maggie.
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 136Kb
About : a short walk on Kensington.
Published October 2007
Kevin Flude‘s main interests are the history, archaeology and Museums of London. He has been proprietor of And Did Those Feet (Cultural Heritage Resources) since 1982. It has allowed him the opportunity of working in a variety of fields in the Heritage world. He is currently Director of the Old Operating Theatre Museum in Southwark; Associate Lecturer at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London and Worcester University and Course Director for the Elderhostel programme in London which provides study tours. lectures and walks on the history, archaeology architecture and art of London.
During 2007 Proboscis is hosting a programme of short residencies enabling artists and writers to spend up to five days in Proboscis’ London studio exploring the potential of the DIFFUSION Generator for creating eBooks and StoryCubes. The participants include:
The results of the case studies will be published on DIFFUSION in the Generator Case Study category. We’ll announce some public events in late 2007 where case study participants will discuss using the Generator and the Shareables they have created with it.
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 1.6Mb
About : the first in a series of eBooks created by Paul Goodwin as part of Proboscis’ Generator Case Study Residencies. This eBook acts as a catalogue for the Peckham Rising exhibition curated by Paul.
Published October 2007
Paul Goodwin is a writer, curator and urban researcher. He is director of the Re-Visioning Black Urbanism Project based the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London. The project explores new modes of inhabiting, imagining and making cities from progressive black and culturally diverse perspectives by organising exhibitions, film screenings, lectures, seminars and publications. Paul is also a creative consultant for IniVA‘s (Institute for International Visual Arts) Mapping Project and a member of the Franco-British Council for whom he co-organised (with Bonnie Greer) an international symposium on the “Challenges of Cultural Diversity in the UK and France” in November, 2006. Paul is currently in the process of setting up a new strategic urban intervention office and think tank with the architect John Oduroe that will launch in London in 2008.
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Download A4 | US Letter PDF 160Kb
About : A learning diary for Year 4 students at Jenny Hammond Primary School to keep during the Experiencing Democracy Workshop, June 2007.
Published June 2007
Loren Chasse is a sound artist and educator based in San Francisco, California.
Giles Lane is founder and Co-Director of Proboscis.
Orlagh Woods works for Proboscis as part of the core team with particular responsibility for creative development and evaluation.
Download A4 only PDF 824Kb
About : an eBook documenting the outcomes of the Pollution Mapping Workshop on London Fields held at Space Media in November 2005. Created for the Social Tapestries project, Robotic Feral Public Authoring.
Published November 2005
Proboscis is an artist-led studio. The creative team on this project included Alice Angus, Camilla Brueton, Giles Lane & Orlagh Woods.
Download A4 only PDF 868Kb
About : an eNotebook for residents of the Havelock Estate to record and share information, stories or memories etc about the local environment. Created by Proboscis as part of our Social Tapestries project, Conversations and Connections (2005-06), funded by the Ministry of Justice.
Published November 2005
Proboscis is an artist-led studio. The creative team on this project included Alice Angus, Camilla Brueton, Kevin Harris, Giles Lane & Orlagh Woods.
Download A4 only PDF 492Kb
About : an eNotebook created by Proboscis for a community workshop on pollution sensing in London Fields, held at Space Media in November 2005. The workshop was part of the Social Tapestries project, Robotic Feral Public Authoring.
Published November 2005
Proboscis is an artist-led studio. The creative team on this project included Alice Angus, Camilla Brueton, Giles Lane & Orlagh Woods.
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 2.2Mb
About : Confluences, Interfaces and Passages, on the meeting of things and the spaces between
This eBook by Canadian visual artist Joyce Majiski, is a glimpse of her musings, observations and far fetched connections made between the Yukon wild landscape and inner city London, England.
Published November 2005
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
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About : documentation of a bodystorming experience workshop held at the London School of Economics in April 2004.
Published April 2004
Alice Angus is an artist and co-Director of Proboscis.
Giles Lane is founder and co-Director of Proboscis.
Victoria Peckett was an LSE student volunteer on Urban Tapestries.
Download A4 only PDF 164Kb
About : an introduction to the Urban Tapestries project, originally written to accompany a talk by Giles Lane for BBC R&D in March 2004.
Published March 2004
Giles Lane is founder and Co-Director of Proboscis.
Download A4 | US Letter PDF 128Kb
About : ‘Wapping Ghost Ship’ is a mash-up of nineteenth century journalism in the East End of London by the Uncommercial Traveller (aka Charles Dickens) with contemporary psychogeography by the Mass Transit Lounger (aka Steve Beard). The result is an example of Anthropofferjist fiction.
Published March 2002
Steve Beard is a writer who has produced essays for the ‘journal of fierce sociology’ Inventory, collaborated with London Fieldworks on two installations and is working with the visual artist Victoria Halford on a film about the Health and Safety Laboratory at Buxton. His essays and articles have been compiled in two volumes, Logic Bomb and Aftershocks. His latest novel is Meat Puppet Cabaret.
