The event had a
packed schedule that touched on a wide variety of areas at the intersections of
art, making books, and publishing. A highlight for us both was hearing the
passion with which David Pearson
spoke about his design work. Pearson is an independent designer who worked with
Penguin books to produce the Penguin
Great Ideas series. The covers are elegant, witty and tactile. As Pearson
suggested, once these have been picked up it’s difficult to put them down. Dr Charlotte Knox-Williams gave an
eloquent paper in which she used Deleuze’s The
Fold to question and pick apart virtuality and the digital. Her talk was
accompanied by an inventive looped film that provided an interesting
counterpoint to her explication without ever being too distracting.
These days it’s
usual for conferences to be live-blogged, but this was the first such event
I’ve been to that was ‘live-zine’d’ by the Ladies of the Press, a pink-wigged
performance duo who produced a zine that responded to speakers in real time,
leading to an individualised Xeroxed publication at the end of the day.
Our presentation
consisted of a short spiel introducing the department and its aims, followed by
a first reading and performance of a new story written by Adam, called Posts From the Underground, with projected artwork by Dan and improvised music. Posts From the Underground is a short science fiction story set on the metro system in an unnamed
East European capital city. The narrative is stitched together from a series of
fragments in the form of postcards written and sent from this underground
network. Dan drew a picture for each of the eight fragments, which were shown
in order as Adam read the narrative. Dan led the improvised music, using an
ipad, an iphone, and a loop pedal. Adam contributed at times using a sampler
and a contact mic.
NAOMB
was the first time we had tried improvising together. They say that practice
makes perfect and we went in entirely unrehearsed. But although it was a little
nerve-wracking, it was a fun and memorable experience. We had good feedback
from audience members such as this:
and therefore concluded that the experiment was a success. We hope to publish the story as a series of eight postcards in the near future.
@sztockmann @utopianimpulse #NAOMB enjoyed very much ')
— Lorraine Warren (@doclorraine) March 20, 2013
and therefore concluded that the experiment was a success. We hope to publish the story as a series of eight postcards in the near future.
