Workshop is a detour through the city of Ghent guided by environmental data. Fit up with a self-made antenna, city walkers are dwelling through the electro magnetic fields of Ghent.

Reminds me lots of my “Tense Nervous Headaches” project. Would be good to share our ideas.

Was thinking about this today, after the IF article I read yesterday.

“With the growing popularity of ebooks, partnerships between writers and videogames studios need to be exploited… Consider how authors such as Iain M Banks, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson have been inspired by game culture. So why the paucity of novelist/game crossovers?”
more here …

Nick Montfort has written about the article also …

The latest e-zine platform58 issue 007 – ‘buildings’ with my ‘trouble at the big house’ artwork is now online: 

A new drawing, made for the latest Platform58 e-zine. Exploring the issues around the (March 09) Fred Goodwin pension scandal, and his home targetted by protesters. Telling the story from multiple angles, in comic style.

I’ve been bothered about this story for a while, about the unfairness of it all, how he buggers things up so hugely and gets rewarded for life. I know the UK media carped on about this for ages, but I still can’t understand how this could be allowed to happen. How many other stories like this are there at this present time, with rich elites being heavily rewarded for failure, while millions lose their jobs?

Guantánamo Boy, a novel that pulls no punches in its depiction of the torture, isolation and injustices suffered by prisoners at the notorious camp. The book focuses on Khalid, an ordinary 15-year-old from Rochdale who spends his time playing computer games, hanging out with his mates in the park and wishing he had the guts to tell his Irish classmate Niamh that he fancies her. However, within days of arriving in Karachi on a family visit to relatives, Khalid’s life turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare when he is abducted from his aunt’s house and ends up being held for two years, without charge, in the world’s most notorious prison. Continue reading Brilliant subject for a book

I made this drawing “The Gite Set” - over the last couple of days:
It explores the recent phenomenon of English people emigrating to France and running gites. It studies the subject from a number of angles - such as reasons why people want to do this, how dreams can be undone, socio-economic factors driving this, and I mix this with an invented story. These are all superimposed on each other like layers of acetate, to try to reveal a bigger picture and show how things are connected and linked up.

I’m describing this as “Diagram Art” - a mixture of mind maps/ decision diagrams/ flowcharts/ system diagrams/ moodboards/ graphic novels. They engage with social and current issues - but issues which are part of my life - as I have actually considered doing something like this. It’s my attempt to explore quite serious subjects and explain them in depth in a fun accessible way.

Basically I see this as the first one of a series of drawings , exploring subjects from multiple angles.

I think this would work printed big - A0 or A1? More on this later, as I’ve written quite a few notes while this work evolved.

Last Thursday I had the privilege to see Nick Montfort lecturing at Goldsmiths Uni. Was really excellent to see him in person, and he’s a really excellent presenter, though sadly I didn’t get a chance to talk to him at the end. I’ve been interested in Interactive Fiction for some years now, and have incorporated this into some of my projects - especially Paxton Interactive and Buddy Rivers, both of them projects from last year. I’m interested in the idea of creating a shell, environment or story structure, that a visitor (or reader) can explore in many many ways, and so each visitor experiences a different story. He’s inspired me to have a go at another project!

Here’s the blurb from his lecture:

“Stories give pleasure and provoke not only because of what happens in them, but also because of how they are told. It is not just the sequence of incidents that makes Lolita, Ulysses, or The Odyssey so compelling, but also the perspectives used, the order in which events are related, and the distance of the narrator from the characters. Nick will describe techniques for automatic narration, discussing an implemented architecture for interactive fiction development. The system allows many different sorts of interactive fiction to be programmed, and, using a general plan for narrating, allows the telling to change during interaction.”

Japanese bookstores are preparing for what they expect to be the publishing phenomenon of the year: Das Kapital – the manga version.

“The comic, which goes on sale early next month, plays into a growing fascination among Japan’s hard-working labour force with socialist literature and joins a collection of increasingly fierce literary critiques of the global capitalist system.

In recent decades, while Japan Inc was still delivering collective prosperity to the nation, public criticism of companies has been muted. Unions were weak and acquiescent. But now, as the country sinks into its second recession in seven year, the sackings begin and the gap widens between rich and poor, a growing number of Japanese believe the problem lies with capitalism itself.
Continue reading Karl Marx goes manga in a Kapital comic strip