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, 4 May 2010

Katarzyna Jaworska











A human.

The project shows a friend of mine, during her pregnancy, in the hospital and after the delivery of her baby.

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’.

Sunday, 28 March 2010

Safia Benaouda












I took pictures of messages written anonymously on various bathroom stalls in the Goldsmiths library. It is an unconventional form of self-disclosure which occurs quite frequently, suggesting an inherent need to connect with others that is not necessarily motivated by the concern for attention or recognition.

Tuesday, 23 March 2010

Roman Knipping-Sorokin










Following our course discussion about the body, media, cyborgs and the work of Stelarc and Orlan, I asked myself what kinds of other "body modifications” there are which may perhaps be more common and more accepted in our society. Then I had an opportunity to accompany a friend of mine as he was getting a new tattoo, and to document it.

For me tattoos are fascinating art objects, which have a strong power of expression. In different cultures tattoos are used for diverse purposes, for instance as religious or cultural signs to affiliate one with a specific group or culture. Tattoos are also used as body decoration and fashion statements, as it can be seen in different subcultures.

The shoot was the first time I saw the process of tattooing. When the tattooist started working, using a modern tattoo-machine, and I saw how the skin was being injured by this artificial machine, I felt strange. The mixture of this artificial liquid - an impurity with the blood of my friend's mixed in - evoked in me an urgent wish to wipe off the ink from the skin and stop any further mixing. However, this injection of the ink, which was an introduction of an impurity into the body, was purposeful. The realization that the alteration of the human appearance occurring in front of my eyes was permanent made the whole situation and atmosphere feel somewhat occult.

Furthermore, in relation to our last lecture about the archive of images, a connection to tattoos can be made here. The tatooed person becomes an image carrier as well as a story-telling medium. He or she thus functions as a moving archive, a unique visual media narrator. Of course the visibility of these signs and stories depends on the particular tattooed part of the body. The signs can either be shown to everyone or just to a selected group of people.

All in all, for me a tattoo is a symbol of the eternal wish of humankind to change and modify the body by using the technology of its time.

Laura Lotti










personal synesthetic urban journal AKA: light and music feed me (and on a trip they're even more nutritious).

these are some shots 'stolen' from my reportage on the road among music festivals in mty, mexico and austin, texas.

the pictures play on the relationship and interconnection between sounds and visions (like the david bowie song, just to keep the theme..)

hope the force of the light and strength of the contrasts manage to convey the energy of music, or at least what it means to me.

soundtracks:
cumbia
The Death Set
Yppah
Yacht
Lazaro Valiente
Crystal Fighters
Cloud Nothings
Pearl Harbor

art (real one):
Equipo Plastico

Natalia Urazmetova








Driftless

I chose the 'freeze frame' as a method for producing this series of images. Its source of inspiration lies in the debate on photography and cinema. The images are stills from the video I recently shot. The idea of transience/disappearance versus the impulse against stability/stasis becomes central to them. Taking into the account the 'Performing Philosophy' framework, I attempted to visualize Deleuze's idea of the void, or interstice, that emerges in the context of his Time-Image conception: a suspended position of intellectual opportunity and potential, a position within a spatial gap where the interval offers us the ‘insight of blindness’, where thought becomes the exteriorization of expression. The idea of stillness becomes a starting point for the consideration of the multiple temporalities that arise at the intersection of still and moving image. The aim here is to create a pause for thought about suspended moments of transition. Taking into account the fact that visuals operate rather indirectly and metaphorically, this series is nevertheless an invitation on my part to reflect on the generative and irresolvable encounter between stasis and motion.

Viviana Miliaressi








Seeking a trace of the human