Spectral archive
For the next several months I’ll be focused on Weymouths, a 12-book project I’ve been commissioned to produce for the 2012 b-side arts festival in the UK. The work will be installed during the summer Olympics in Weymouth, a seaside town in Dorset, England, where the official sailing competitions will take place.
From the project proposal—
Weymouths explores memory, geography and cultural identity through site-specific books that draw upon the linked histories of Weymouth, Dorset (UK) and Weymouth, Massachusetts (USA). Created for the 2012 b-side Multimedia Arts Festival and installed on-site at festival locations, 12 publications will be released to visitors during the 13-day festival. Among the goals for Weymouths is to create moments for rich, page-by-page engagement in the environment for the ambulatory visitor—the printed book as a participatory art project.
The 12 volumes will be produced and presented as reliquaries of collective memory—bound containers holding text, color and imagery. Historical records, lists, archival imagery, on-site photography, tweets, interviews, maps, street names, Google Street View, Wikipedia and other raw source material will be assembled into open, thought-provoking narratives—real and imagined.
Beginning with the 104 citizens of Weymouth, Dorset (UK) who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1635 to found Weymouth, Massachusetts (USA), the 12 books will be a celebration of temporal connections, disconnects and other trans-geographic structures that continue to hover between the twin towns, as well as a chance to “re-see” cultural identity in real-time.
Each volume will be produced using a print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine (EBM). Limited editions of 20 (a total of 240 books) will be installed at various festival locations. Each day during the festival a new volume will be revealed and installed, beginning with Vol. #1 on July 30 and ending with Vol. #12 on August 10, 2012. The books will be free to anyone exploring Weymouth during the 13-day period; they will slowly disappear from the installation sites as they are discovered and enjoyed by their new owners. Weymouths will encourage a slow, alternative presentation of time and space for visitors as they explore.
Weymouths is part of an exploration that began with Venetian Suite and continued last year with Memory Palace and 273 Relics for John Cage. Each draws together ideas about memory, place and the image within the contained book form.
Someone recently described Memory Palace as a spectral archive, which I define as traces and histories, memories of or like a ghost, collected and contained. This articulation of my book works appeals to me. The spectral archive favors the forgotten and conjures a shapeless narrative, more liquid than linear. A book of associations, loaded with suggestion and unspecified meaning; a dream tool. A rumination machine. The spectral archive is crafted with specificity, but it’s experienced on the user’s own terms, creatively and without restriction.
I want to produce this work publicly, like I did in Rome. As I generate stuff, even fragments of ideas, I’ll post them here.
Final prints
Just approved the final 16 x 24 archival pigment prints on rag paper at Laumont. These are for the show at Colorado Photographic Arts Center (January 10 through February 13) in Denver, CO.
Mixels go to Colorado.
I’m addicted to Khoi Vinh‘s new social collage-making app, Mixel. This is one of a small handful of apps that gives my iPad its reason for being — always on and I don’t even have to think about using it. Something that just lets me use my finger to cut up images and push pixels around feels so natural, but it’s also unlike any creative tool I’ve ever used. It’s intuitive and easy and dream-like; they’re ripe for interpretation.
And the sharing/social/remixing aspect of Mixel just takes it to a whole other place.
I’ve made dozens of collages with Mixel and I love a lot of them. And I’m curious about what would happen if these digital works were to make the jump into the print world.
Soon I’ll find out; a few weeks ago I submitted a few collages to a juried photography exhibit at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, which was calling for digital works made with mobile devices. The jurors were Brian Clamp of ClampArt in NYC and Chuck Mobley of San Francisco Camerawork and they selected the two car images.
So next week I’m going to review proofs at small (4″ x 6″) and larger (16″ x 24″) sizes and make a decision, get them framed and send them to Denver and maybe fly out for the opening on January 13. The show will be up until February 11.
The Espresso Book Machine
My first experience with the Espresso Book Machine.
There’s a kind of renaissance going on with the printed page right now, perhaps to counter our relatively new fascination with digital publishing. Last month’s NY Art Book Fair was evidence enough that there’s never been a better time for the self- or small independent publisher of paper-based works. A remarkably low barrier-to-entry and easy access to print-on-demand services like Blurb and BookMobile and Create Space are satisfying a growing artists’ book movement and fueling entirely new ventures, like print-on-demand publishing and artists’ book coops and self-publishing book fairs.
In the middle of this space has emerged something altogether different. It’s got one foot in the Google/Gutenberg epub swamp and another in the bookstore. It’s an inelegant, one-ton pile of plexiglas and hardware with a footprint a bit larger than a bathtub. The Espresso Book Machine doesn’t make coffee — it eats PDFs and spits out professional-grade paperback books. In a few minutes. For a few dollars.
As remarkable as it is, it’s additive technology cobbled together from component parts. It’s a mash-up machine, really not much more than a few Xerox printers, a glue-gun and some X-acto blades connected to the internet. The Frankenstein of printers. Which means that the EBM is not breakthrough technology, but more like an iterative step in the 600-year development of the printer, with the potential to support other, more innovative ideas (a print-on-demand library, for example).
That said, it’s a fantastic thing.
As soon as I heard that NYC had its first (and so far only) EBM at the McNally Jackson bookstore on Prince Street, I started thinking about a test project. It’s got some interesting restrictions — printing is 1-color black-only for the text pages, full-color cover, any size from 4″ x 4″ up to 8.5″ x 11″, and a minimum of 40 pages (max of 800).
So I decided to use it as the basis for a proposal I was writing for an arts festival in the UK — 12 volumes that would be “Espresso’d” and installed at different locations during the 2-week event, to coincide with the 2012 Summer Olympics. Since it was so easy, why not design and print Volume #1 and photograph it for the proposal? And that’s exactly what I did — it’s a 224-page, 1-color information graphic. I’ll post more about the project later, after I hear back from the festival producers.
The EBM at McNally Jackson is somewhere between “print-on-demand” and “see-you-next-week.” There’s a long queue for the service and it was suggested I check back in a few days to see when the book would be ready. Later, I was told there were no guarantees and I could pay a $25 fee to move to the front of the line (on top of an already-confusing set-up fee structure that includes a free proof; the printed book itself was about $12). I did, and got it the next day. I guess it’s a good thing that there’s great enough demand to keep it in business, but I’m willing to bet NYC could use a few more of these machines.
The bottom line — the printing is awesome. Super rich blacks and good tonal range on the photos (which were taken from Google Street View and already washed out). The text stock is a generic 60 lb. white or cream (I chose white), and a choice of dull uncoated or satin coated bright white 100 lb. cover.
The perfect binding is eerily perfect.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that all of the world’s 50 Espresso Book Machines are networked, so the PDF I feed it on Prince Street can be printed again, on-demand, in London or anywhere else. My latest dream — to lease one of these things, stick it in an empty storefront, and open an instant bookstore with an entirely digital inventory.
The Manual.
I’m so pleased to announce that I’ve been asked to write for The Manual, “a new, beautifully crafted journal that takes a fresh look, in print, at design on the web.” It’s published by Andy McMillan, edited by Carolyn Wood and designed by Jez Burrows — and it began as a Kickstarter project!
It’s an honor for me to be in the company of folks like Liz Danzico, Frank Chimero, Jeremy Keith, Duane King, Ethan Marcotte, Tiffani Jones Brown, Nina Stössinger and others who have already written or will be writing for future issues. Look for me in issue #3 (early 2012).
Installing the book.
So how does one install a book?
This installation is only one instance of 273 Relics for John Cage. The book is present and the book is an object — to be touched and handled. To spend time with the book: so the special tables elevate it (39 inches from the floor), making it easy to view, giving it an honorary position.
30 images were extracted from the process as a slow 30-minute projection, and two audio recordings of the 52 texts (ordered randomly) are on the headphones. And Relic 241 is there, leaning back — kind of like a spectator to the whole thing.
These events form a particular instance of the project, as it was installed in North Carolina on October 7. But the project is alive, and I imagine other permutations are possible — I like to think that a future installation might produce different works, different configurations. What if all 160 photographs could be installed. Scattered on the floor, leaning against different walls. A giant, immersive video projection, in a darkened room. And the beautiful Untitled Pixels, which didn’t even make it into this installation (there wasn’t room).
Within a few hours, one of the books (#1) had been taken. It’s a small edition of 10, so this came as a surprise, but then I loved that its new owner, unknown by me, had chance determined something entirely new for the work. In an almost Cage-ian move, the disappearance is now part of the work. I gave book #2 to Beverly Plummer. Book #3 will be sent to the John Cage Trust, and #4 will be donated to the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center.
273 Relics for John Cage, the book, represents each part of the project, but it also is the project. The book is an index — it’s both a catalogue of the work, and the work itself. I hope to produce a second, larger edition soon.
Ink and paper
I don’t want to handle the books or open them wide, for fear I’ll break the spines, etc. But I did open one long enough to take some photos, which I’ve added to the project page. The only thing missing now is the photographic print, and the tables. Both will be ready just before I leave for North Carolina on Wednesday.
I spent some time at the New York Art Book Fair at PS1@MoMA last night and I’ll go back for a closer look. An unbelievable amount of awe-inspiring work, a crazy-beautiful output of ink and paper on display. And my own mixed reaction — reassured to know there’s a potential audience for what I’m doing, but more than a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of finding it.
Untitled pixel
Individual pixels of solid color from 273 Relics for John Cage. Each one was selected via chance operations out of 12 million, from the photograph of John Cage’s mushroom-collecting basket. Hand-mixed inks match the RGB values (as close as the printer could get), then printed on Mohawk 100 lb. cover (20″ x 26″). Six different editions of 10 each. This one is Untitled pixel (relic 243). Thinking about identifying each with an x-y coordinate.
Moving pictures
273 Relics for John Cage (A Likeness Is an Aid to Memory) from Paul Soulellis on Vimeo.
It only took about 12 solid hours, but I somehow figured out how to produce a 30-minute HD digital video. In some ways Apple has made this process super easy with iMovie ’11, but the device/color/quality output options are completely bewildering and require a crash course in the history of digital audio-visual compression (plus lots of Apple hardware technical specs and a few visits to the Apple store).
Anyway, I couldn’t be happier. This is a slow-scale, full-screen, meditative work. It’s something to enter on your own terms. It’s a 30-minute presentation of the relics (30 of them), each one dissolving into the next. I’m absolutely in love with the dissolves — they add an entirely new dimension to the work, as the relics are juxtaposed (a bit like a slow page-turn in the book, but different). And within each dissolve is a secondary kind of animation — the pixels shimmer and quiver as they move from frame to frame.
There’s no audio, but this will be projected at a large scale in the gallery space while I’m performing the 52 texts. Audio from my visit to the John Cage Trust will also be playing, sometimes distracting from my spoken words, other times barely audible.
