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?

Tuesday, 13 April 2010

Alejandra Cháker M.







City of Lambs

This project is a commentary on how people act, move and function in a mechanical way in London. Here, everyone walks without looking where they are going or who is behind them. Everyone is in a hurry. If somebody touches them, an automatic phrase: ‘I’m sorry!’, is uttered. Visually, the moving crowd resembles a herd of sheep.

The Industrial Revolution in England clearly had a great impact on people’s behaviour and ways of living in big cities. In my images I translate this industrial/mechanical/capitalist/sheep-ish way of life into a phantom image of ‘lambs’ - not only because lamb is English ‘best’ meat as well as symbol, but also because that’s how things seem to work here in London. Making use, via Photoshop, of the ambiguity, mechanical reproduction and copying, I have produced graphic serial images of lambs, which I have then inserted into city spaces to depict what I call a ‘City of Lambs’.
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