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

Rebecca Miller









I have been exploring the landscape of media produced by other people on the computer and in technical training videos. As a visitor to these created and produced spaces, I have been thinking about what it means to take a picture literally. I have used screenshots and scanners to take my pictures. With these souvenirs I have used Photoshop to re-mix these images into pictures that align with what I begin to understand and see by visiting these media spaces.

The light blue and yellow series are images from an IBM cleanroom, where they manufacture ICs. The abstract landscape series is the side view of a microwave transistor, magnified 2,500 times. Both images taken from ‘Cleanroom Technology and procedures II a guide for semiconductor Cleanroom Personnel’ copyright semiconductor Services 2009. I have re-mixed the yellow and blue images into wallpaper motifs from different eras to reflect my feeling that technology becomes
furniture/decoration after a while, changing as styles and trends change. The more abstract series suggests that technology can be operated by and relate to anyone even if they don’t understand what is going on inside of its hard-shell. Technology becomes a malleable language that adjusts to different levels of literacy and non-literacy.
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