This ‘Gallery-in-a-Book’ blog is part of the Liquid Reader project put together by Joanna Zylinska together with her students on the MA Digital Media at Goldsmiths, University of London.

WHAT IS A LIQUID READER PROJECT?

This project challenges the one-way, closed form of knowledge transfer in university education that is encompassed by the static, photocopiable ‘course reading pack’ - typically designed by course leaders and handed out to students. It engages media students in a dynamic process of devising instead a fluid, open-access, online ‘reader’, whose content and form are being negotiated, updated and altered by students themselves, under the guidance of the course leader. Using the freely available media platforms (online archives, educational wikis, YouTube, Blogger), students are able to both link to the already available textual and audio-visual material (essays, books, video clips) and upload their own documents and designs. They are thus actively involved in producing a ‘liquid reader’ - an innovative, student-centred, customisable learning tool which involves them in curriculum design. Via an involvement with the Open Humanities Press, and its Culture Machine Liquid Books Series, the project promotes the socially significant ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open learning’ under the open access agenda.

Take a look at the current incarnation of the Liquid Reader and find out more about the project by clicking here, or by following this link:
http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/Technology-and-Cultural-Form%3A-A-Liquid-Reader

WHAT IS A GALLERY-IN-A-BOOK?

At the beginning of our second core course on the MA Digital Media, called Technology and Cultural Form, students were asked to work on a series of photographs. We agreed that the photographs could be taken with a mobile phone camera, a fancy DSLR, a film camera or any other image capturing device. The only rule was that they had to be somehow related to one another (via content, form, method, etc.). This online gallery available here thus becomes part of the ‘liquid reader’ we’ve been working on. This obviously raises some interesting questions: Can a book ‘contain’ an art gallery? Is everyone an artist and a media producer today? What would Barthes and Foucault say?

Sunday, 21 March 2010

Paolo Ruffino









Studies for a FloppyTrip (2010)

These pictures are (part of) a series of photographs I took with my artist group, IOCOSE. The series is a remake of Bruce Nauman's 'Studies for Hologram' (1970). You can see the original work here.

We adapted the pictures to our project FloppyTrip, which is a drug made with floppy discs. We took pictures of some friends of ours who tried the drug. Shooting and print took a few days. All the pictures had been taken with a digital camera. I'm sure Nauman spent more time printing the pictures! Digital photography, in this case, made the production process easier. We could change colors with Photoshop, for example. Nonetheless, the idea behind both works was not determined, or simplified, by the technological innovations. And this is how it has always been. It might be easier to take a photograph nowadays, but this doesn't mean we are all artists... after all, Duchamp 'made' a work of art out of a toilet. A modern toilet with an automatic flush would not make his work easier!
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