Making Books as a Ritual

I was recently reminded of Donald Parsnips Daily Journal: a publication made and distributed daily by the artist Adam Dant in the Spitalfields over a five year period. The artist printed 100 copies each day and handed them out on his way to work.

Donald Parsnips Daily Journal - 8th July 1998. Image Source: Artnet.

When I first came across the artwork, during my BA in Fine Art I was inspired by it (and by a similar, and more intimate artwork by a friend Rose Clout), particularly for the artist's focus and persistence; the fact that day in and day out they kept creating. Collectively the body of resulting work had impact, in much the same way as a retrospective of On Karawa's date paintings might have; the artworks are tangible results of a quest for perfection. Some of the glow from these works may come from the realisation that the artist has sacrificed some part of their life to this cause. To a young artist as I was, there was something heroic in this and perhaps romantic; the struggling artist personified.

On Kawara's Today series. Image Source: Art Bouillon.

Ten years later when I embarked on my MA in Book Arts, I dabbled in this ritualistic process myself over the course of the works:

Your Day is My Day was a publication I created daily, produced and printed on the same day and left in a location related to the content. The intention was that someone would find the 'book' and realise it relates to the place they were standing and perhaps make them conscious of where they were at that moment and what they were doing; a prompt for self-reflection.

This idea morphed into another work of art a year later. For a group show called Overdue I placed a book wrapped in paper in a vitrine in Camberwell College's library. The book contained a QR code on the front, which linked to an ebook created by me that could be downloaded each day. The book changed each day, implying the fluidity of books within the digital realm.

Wrapped book in vitrine

Detail of artwork in one of the ebooks.

The next time I worked in a similar way was for an exhibition at bookartbookshop as part of Collective Investigations. I created four stacks of book pages, each with a brief story on each (relating to the place in the shop where they were left) and embedded with a QR code. When scanned the the viewer would be taken to a page online, where the text would be redrafted day by day until it became unrecognisable.

One of the stacks of paper in situ.

None of these projects were carried out on the scale of Adam Dant's or On Kawara's, but each was difficult and rewarding in their own way. On the positive side the projects pushed me to work to a deadline each day and the time constraints meant I couldn't be too precious about the end result. The time-pressure and the ongoing nature of the works pushed me to be inventive and think of something new each day and these ideas, although not groundbreaking themselves, did germinate other ideas for later artworks. The only real negative of this way of working was that the rushed nature of some of the works meant that individual details were not completed with the standard of quality I would usually work to.

[Chris]

Karen & and the Interactive Narrative

If you've not met Karen before let me introduce you, she's been my very own life coach for the past few weeks - she has taken me on a very interesting journey.

A message from Karen from Blast Theory on Vimeo.

Karen is real person, who asks you questions over a period of ‘sessions’ to get to know your personality and build up a profile of you from the information gathered. The app is free for iPhone and Android.

When we first meet Karen she shows us her office and sets the first appointment. Exchanges take place face-to-face, as if you were using Skype, and appointments are set according to her schedule, not yours.

First meeting with Karen. Image credit: Blast Theory.

The exchanges aren’t actually happening live (the footage of Karen is pre-loaded), but she responds to what you say and seems to genuinely get to know your character. What's more she is quite unpredictable and the sessions evolve dramatically.

I feel like I am encroaching into 'spoiler' territory here, perhaps it would be best to download Karen, let her get to know you, and come back to this when you’re done. One small warning – she does produce a final report about you, but it costs £2.99 (she could have warned me first!). You don’t necessarily need the final report to enjoy the app though, as she feeds back a lot of this along the way.

Karen likes asking questions. Image credit: Blast Theory.

At its heart Karen is a story, one that evolves over a period of days, about a woman and how she has been shaped by life. By involving us in the narrative (i.e. making us answer psychological questions along the way) we are prompted to draw parallels with our own life and circumstances.

The time-based element of the app (the fact that it evolves unpredictably session by session over days) is an excellent device to draw us into the narrative as it asks us to invest our time and enthusiasm. The fact that Karen is a real person makes her communications seem personal and bring on that pang of excitement we get from real-life interactions.

The naturalistic set-up (i.e. using ordinary-looking locations, real-life scenarios and the Skype-like delivery) give the whole thing an air of authenticity, making the story credible and relevant.

The experience reminded me of the choose-your-own adventure books I read as a kid, but instead of the story being mythical or fantastical, it was down-to-earth and relatable. It made me wonder whether there is a market for choose-your-own fiction for adults? Something that, like Karen, is about real-life choices.

Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The nearest thing I have heard of that sounds similar is a new novel by Iain Pears called Arcadia made exclusively for the Apple app store.


 Chris

OpenLibrary and the endless library

Welcome back after our summer break, we hope you had a nice few weeks!

To ease us back, I thought I'd start with a gentle post about one of my all-time favourite websites - OpenLibrary.org. For the uninitiated the goal of OpenLibrary is to be "an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published".

As well as being a catalogue, OpenLibrary also contains millions of scanned copies of books that can either be downloaded, borrowed or read online completely for free. Below is a  selection of the the books to read and books to borrow.

This library is a huge resource -  according to the stats for the past month they had over 7m unique visitors, who borrowed over 95,000 books!

Open library is a resource I have used in three art projects (twice as integral parts of the work and once in the background):

For The Good Reader: Between the Lines, I created a narrative about Paris comparing my own recollections to the stifled descriptions from travel guides. Using a QR code reader readers can borrow electronic copies of each of the guidebooks referred to.

For The Unassuming Collection I created a fictional narrative about a library, illustrated by images from existing books. A QR code on each page linked to the full book behind each of the illustrations. The intention was to create a real library that sat behind the fictional one.

The third way I have used Open Library is to catalogue a small collection of books that was part of an exhibition called Folles de leur Corps at Cafe Gallery Projects, by Sharon Kivland. This was a great way to group the books so a more permanent record could be kept.

I hope this post has given a suggestion of the artistic possibilities of OpenLibrary - the potential of it seems immense to me.

[Chris]

Real Words in Virtual Space: War of Words VR

A few weeks back I bought myself a new gadget for the princely sum of £2.60: Google Cardboard, a flat-pack virtual reality headset that you can make at home in under ten minutes. For the uninitiated Cardboard is effectively just a box with two lenses that you slot a smartphone into to view virtual reality apps.

Headset with the back open.

The one thing that drew me to Cardboard in the first place was an app called War of Words VR by the design agency Burrell Durrant Hifle, based on the BBC TV programme of the same name. The app is incredibly simple - it recounts Siegfried Sassoon's poem The Kiss through text, narration and an animated rendering of a WWI battle ground.

Stereo view of the title - the viewer looks down to play the sequence.

As the app starts the full text of Sasson's poem can be seen against a misty virtual landscape, with a gun in relief below the text. A narrator starts to read the poem, the gun then comes to life, moves through the space, a bullet is fired and the viewer can then choose to move their head to follow the bullet as it hits its target (a soldier). Once the narration and the visual action finishes the poem materialises (see image below) to be read once more.

Stereo view. Poem materialises at the end of the sequence.

I was frustrated at first that I couldn't read the poem in full at the beginning, to get my own sense of the text, however at the end I had chance to read the poem myself and I found my response was informed by what I had seen and heard.

What I was most intrigued about before was the idea of text floating there in a virtual space - the idea that moving through space could reveal sentences and a textual narrative might emerge. This app doesn't quite do that, but layering text between other elements in 3D space does allow for interesting juxtapositions; in this case the simplicity of the text layered against the gun at the beginning and the text layered against the wounded soldier at the end casts the poem in a different light.

I feel that the immersive dimension to the app moves the visual elements away from being merely illustration and more toward being a lens through which to view the poem.

I'm looking forward to seeing how other apps use the medium and whether there is an even more creative way to use text in virtual space.

{Chris}

GUEST POST → Text in the City (Robert Good)

 Robert Good (Art Language Location organiser) reflects on how other artists have relocated texts away from the printed page.

in the reflected sky was a three-part installation by Collective Investigations for Art Language Location (ALL), installed in Cambridge during October 2014. 

Whisper it, but books are boring.

Not the content - there are plenty of interesting texts to be found, sampled and enjoyed - but the context in which that text has been placed and offered to us for consumption is, too often, dull. The paperback, in particular, tends towards mere utility, with its frequently mealy paper, single digit font sizes and abhorrence of white space. But even a book which is without doubt an object of great beauty and desirability is like a mono recording in a stereo world.

For books are designed for the private, solitary consumption of words. We curl up with a good book, adopting the foetal position on the womb of the sofa. We become lost in a book, adrift from the anchors of the everyday. Turning inwards, there is no externality, nothing beyond. A book is the wafer of communion between reader and text: miraculous maybe, but nevertheless a functional go-between in a private exchange.
Artists who present text in other formats and in other places are therefore performing an act of liberation. The words are rescued from the confines of the printer's galley and set loose to breathe amidst the joyous possibilities of The Real World. Here, text can truly flourish: it becomes social.

In Art Language Location we see this transformation of text in a magnificent array of guises. Text on the wall, text on the floor, text on the river, text at the bus stop. Text to be sat on, text to be walked over, text to be eaten. Text inhabits the world.

This relationship between text and place can work in several ways.




 

Lilian Cooper, 24 hours in Cambridge, 2012

First, it is an interruption: an unexpected encounter and a confrontation. The consumption of words is no longer on the reader's own terms, for the reader has chosen neither the content of the text nor the time and place of the encounter. It is a violation of the quotidian routine. This provides the text with a force that it does not possess on the printed page.
In Lilian Cooper's work these interruptions are gentle yet insistent, beautifully realised reminders of the world around us that we so often forget to see.



 
 

Susie Olczak, Perception, 2014

Second, there is an enriched visual hit. The superimposition of text onto the everyday creates an additional layer. Our observed landscape is at once both aesthetically modified and also made to serve as a substrate, on top of which the text can lie.
So with Susie Olczak's work: its punchy playfulness creates a set of buzy new sense-data. Our retinas respond; then our brains set to work on the process of assimilation and interpretation.




 

Guy Bigland All the four-letter words I could find on the Casimir Lewy Library webpages 2015

But then there is a third relationship: the way in which the content of the text interacts with the borrowed landscape of its location. The words themselves, which on the sofa trigger private thoughts and private responses, now cannot avoid referencing public objects and the world beyond, conversing with the surrounding visual array.
In Guy Bigland's intervention for the Casimir Lewy Philosophy Library, the content of the text, its placement and its mode of display all echo and comment upon the library itself. Placed right outside the entrance to the library, it becomes a mirror with which the institution can view itself.







 

Adding of context to text is like adding sound to movies, or colour to photos. There is new vitality, a richness and an added dimension. A synaesthesia between text and context. Text becomes social, experiential. Of course the nature of the intervention between text and place is almost limitless in possibilities. But a successful intervention always seems to create a dynamic between the two, a buzz of interactivity where the visual and the verbal meet and spar. Context enhances text like switching on the surround sound and feeling the boom of the subwoofer.



[Robert Good]