XYZ

Last week, my friend Alice and I went to see XYZ at Site Gallery in Sheffield. Site has some great exhibitions and its great to do stuff in the Steel City (rather than always having to hop on the train to London). XYZ is an artistic exploration of augmented reality, so I was really looking forward to it.

XYZ was commissioned by Site Gallery and is an augmented reality sculpture project, with sculptures generated by Sarah Staton and interpreted within virtual space by Chris Hodson. To view and experience these 3-dimensional virtual sculptures, you needed iPhone technology. After downloading the app (Junaio, in this case) and selecting the XYZ channel, you held the camera on your phone up to a black and white geometric image. Soon enough, the Junaio platform reinterprets reality, bringing the virtual into view.

In their own publicity material, Site Gallery question the material form of sculpture: "What happens to sculpture when it is rendered virtual? What do you gain and what do you lose? In virtual reality concrete can float, liquid can solidify, but the materiality of sculpture, the space it takes up in relation to bodies, its inherent gravity is gone". XYZ indeed raises some interesting questions about the nature of sculpture and of art itself. How do we judge an art form which is seemingly intangible?

Importantly, the tangibility of XYZ comes from the very corporeal act of the viewer / iPhone user - your act of bringing the art work into being itself is the tactile foundation of each sculpture. What I found interesting was the precariousness of manifesting the sculptures. Move your phone too quickly and they vanished; reach out to try to touch them (your hand blocking the motivating image) and they disappeared. Interestingly, this somehow made them precious. Intriguing and precious.

XYZ closed at Site Gallery last Saturday, but they've got lots of exciting things coming up... So Sheffield folk - keep an eye out and an ear to the ground!

BLA BLA

Interactive art film BLA BLA, by Vincent Morrisset is definitely worth checking out.

The story is divided into six chapters, which each tell us something about the act of communication. Crucially, in terms of the project's theme, just as the film itself is interactive so too is communication. As the viewer-user, your actions are what manifests the conversation with these quirky but lovable characters.

Tree of Codes

Jonathan Safran Foer's latest literary offering, published in late 2010 by Visual Editions, is an astonishing experiment in book art.

When you first take Tree of Codes in your hands, it seems like any other paperback. When you open it, though, you find that the pages have literally been cut to pieces. But carefully so. You see, Tree of Codes is a 'die-cut book', each page a web of cut-out largely-rectangular shapes, precise gaping holes where you'd expect to find written text. So unusual is this novel that Visual Editions have made a video showing the public's reactions to the book:

A few words have been spared, and it is these word-islands that form the narrative, an evocative tale of a man's coming to terms with death and confrontation with life. Foer's book has in fact grown out of another book, Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. Foer carved out his story from Schulz's, cutting most of the original and leaving the remaining resilient words in their original position on the page. Jewish-born Schulz did not survive the Second World War; his unpublished work is lost, cast from the pages of history. There is, therefore, a poignant irony to Foer's act of erasure.

Reading Tree of Codes is a delicate act. You must turn each page with fragile care. And as you read the text itself, which is deeply poetic in nature, words from pages-to-come intrude in the sentence you're reading, materialising through the holes from the depths of pages. Part-novel, part-sculpure, Tree of Codes is, if nothing else, an equisite artistic statement. It reminds us of the beauty of silence and empty space while its elegaic words speak with resonant voice. It enacts a history of loss while saluting a future poetics of form. As with conceptual art, you are likely either to love or hate this book, but there is no denying that Foer's Tree of Codes is at the cutting edge.

Typoo

"You are about to meet -- and we hope fall in love with -- Typoo, who is truly a character, whose blood is typewriter-ribbon blue, whose eyes are lifted to asterisk stars..." So begins the blurb for Earl Conrad's Typoo. The novel was published in 1969, and narrates the life story of the character from whom the novel takes its title.

The narrative itself is short and surreal. As readers, we follow Typoo from birth through his education, his experimentation with drugs, his romantic forays, Olympic career, time as a circus performer, car racing, and eventual demise.


Typoo's uniqueness stems from the fact that it uses typewriter symbols and letters to compose images for its narrative. As it announces on its dust jacket, "Typoo is a new kind of literary hero. His adventures are all the more real because his world is only paper and typewriter keys". Of the novel itself, it continues, "Typoo is a new kind of cosmos and literary adventure wrought from the ancient keyboard of a 1915 Underwood Typewriter".

Here's an example double page (though, of course, all the pages are different):

In this extract, from early in the novel, the reader is being introduced to Typoo's friends (left hand page), a gang of boys called 'The Heads'. From L-R, T-B, we have Pinhead, Fathead, Masthead, Bonehead, Blockhead, and Meathead.

The pleasure of reading Typoo comes precisely from its quirkiness. Every page is an unexpected surprise. even the book's dedication has an amusing irony:

SVK: Reading in UV

Ok, so a while back I raised the crazy (but really, wouldn't it be cool?) question of the possibility of a novel in 3D. Well, it might not sound so crazy now!

Sadly, no one has yet (to my knowledge) created the 3D novel, but cultural commentator and award-winning graphic novelist Warren Ellis is experimental with ways of reading. Ellis is collaborating with Matt "D'Israeli" Brooker on a graphic novel which will include UV printing.

The mysterious forthcoming graphic novel SVK will come with a special UV torch. When readers shine this torch on the pages, they reveal text printed in UV ink. And judging from the publicity buzz, this won't just be any text; the UV ink will be limited purely to character's thoughts, thus the UV makes up another ontologically distinct level of the narrative.

According to the book's producer's BERG, Ellis describes SVK as "Franz Kafka's Bourne Identity", whatever that means!

Now, I'm not really a graphic novel reader, but UV gimmickry is certainly tempting me!


Read the hype from wired.co.uk here.