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i am so proud of myself! i have worked tirelessly to get this to a place in which i was happy and feeling confident about the results. a design that i felt like it would convey all of my own research and development without feeling stiffened by the design process. i am disappointed that i could not reach its final stage before thursday's review but at this point i am both happy that i have got so far in my work; and so exhausted by it i just want to nap and forget about it for maybe a week.

needless to say i will continue working on this project on my own time (of which there will be little with portfolio deadlines and other urgent commitments...) to be able to gain some bookbinding skills and hopefully sell this beautiful little publication to earn a little bit of money (hopefully anyway!). i will add my comments after tomorrow's review and will continue to update this padlet until i finish the first edition, binding and everything (in case you would like to keep track). probably at the end of this academic year i will download this padlet in a pdf (yes you can do that!) and store it for posterity, a pretty timeline and to archive all the comments i've made here that will have escaped my own journal.

see you tomorrow!

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i'm calling this the first edition, since i intend to make changes to it to alter ever so slightly so that the publication will look different every new edition and every new print. it's always in quotes because i will need to test it physically first to feel how successful it would be in presentation. if i feel like it is then this would remain the final design, perhaps changing the page order.

i am attaching the pdf next to this text box: each spread corresponds with a double-sided spread in printed form except for the first one and the text spread which might either correspond with the cover or exist on their own. i thought for the cover to simply be another tracing paper sheet to wrap it up. this might work better with a roll of tracing paper and this cover cut to to shape for every publication. this would depend on costs but it might add a special touch to this edition

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luckily the prototype does reflect in many ways how the final editions will look like when all the pages are sewn and folded. transparent, words jumbled together and a bit messy. however do have in mind images in the final design that are upside down will be upright when printed out!

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i am focusing on this particular slide as a final point in today's slides because this is exactly what i wanted these transparencies to look like. maybe i'd be happy for the smudges to go away but i will be embracing them. this one in particular though felt so satisfying it gave me the chills when it came out of the printer. the pictures align perfectly, the transparecies work well with each other and the design reflects almost exactly what the original drawing for it had captured for me. i have been very happy for the editions to be somewhat unpredictable and changing form through these two weeks, the process allows for that. but sometimes it is extremely satisfying to see something you had designed come to life exactly like you wanted it to. and this one in particular speaks a lot to me

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for this batch i focused on producing transparencies that would be natural to the medium they are being printed on. instead of setting a transparency setting on indesign and printing directly on one side of the page (which would ruin the little opacity the photographs have on their own anyway!) i chose to play with the layout of my designs so that i would be able to achieve a transparency that reflects the materiality of the tracing paper. it took a few tries and a few "failures" for me to figure out how my printer was working to get the results i wanted. i accidentally made a few, very interesting studies that i might or might not incorporate in the published editions. i thought i would include variation and difference and perhaps making this variation through printing is another fun way of doing just that. for the moment i am concentrating on legibility since i have put effort in the text and the words, but given the amount of work i have produced i have the option to produce versions which could be more visually focused and more playful than the ones with the text which i would rather leave to be read.

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today's the last day before the final review! unfortunately i had to leave the studio earlier than anticipated today but i did manage to make some more tests and studies with transparencies and composition that i think will shape very closely how the final editions will come to look like. to be able to refer to how it might look like as a book please refer to my work a few days back, where i tested the book format with the first images i printed on tracing paper. therefore this latest batch of tests is still work in progress though reaching very closely what the final design will be. i will include next to them examples of what my prototype for these editions would be + a pdf with the layout of what i would like for the final editions to be printed as (subject to change of course!)

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i just wanted to note how much i love the way this one print has turned out. this is a tree reflected on the lake of the Buttes Chaumont park in paris, where the water is not entirely still yet clear enough to act as a mirror. the transparency of the tracing paper and the delicate way in which it produces a printed image on its surface makes me squirm with excitement. making something like this, that produces such a strong feeling of glee and satisfaction really makes me believe in the inherent vitality of things, not just as humans reacting emotionally to them but material reality existing outside of us. i believe now that this print isn't beautiful just because i believe it to be but because the materials that create it have produced a vibrant image of something i hold so dear, like a memory on printed paper.

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more studies! these i cooked on a slower setting on indesign, deliberately choosing and writing text, curating and placing the photographs carefully, playing with composition and working from my previous studies on paper. this isn't quite the final result though, there's a lot more testing and playing to do with these spreads which will involve lying different spreads over each other and scanning to play with combinations and unexpected transparencies. i have annotated all pages (except one!) with all the little things i love and other details i need to fix that i could see better once they were printed. i would also like to try printing all of these double-sided tomorrow and looking at the crazy transparencies and illegibility that will produce. i'm certain i will find something unexpected, such as i have with each new iteration of work that i've churned out this project. every day has been like an amazing new little project all of its own and i only wished we had another 2 weeks so that i could really focus on it until completion.

unfortunately i will probably not have enough time to really conclude this project by thursday, given i still have to reach a final design (or designs!) and that i will have to learn how to stitch and bind it! these steps i will leave for after the project week is over, because i still would like to see this finished. i am planning to sell them at goodpress for an affordable price (£10 or less!) as an artist edition given they will be all special in some way! i was gonna call it a zine but Ricky reminded me it might not be classified as such given it's not serially printed like that. that's the least of my worries though.

tomorrow i will continue working towards a final result so that by review on thursday and final upload i will have as much as possible and continue afterwards. i must say i am very proud of myself (and exhausted!) for all the work i've put into this project. i am definitely a prolific type of person but i never knew that this kind of iteration would help in such a huge way.
i feel like this process has opened up a really wonderful new way of working for me and i'm looking forward to using it again whenever applicable! 💖

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this is a small selection of photographs that i have included in my studies so far, individually displayed for your satisfaction! these are all my own and they are what i would like to call my 'lifework'. i have been making photography since i was a kid and these are informed by many, many years of exploration and self-taught experiences with my camera and the world around me. i will also include some others which i find relevant to the kind of 'vitality in things' i'm basing this project on.

for many, many years i have been making photographs of that which i find there is something of interest to be looked at. these photographs weren't born of an academic 'new materialist' approach towards "things". they were an exploration of the towns i've lived and the travels i've taken and the places i've seen. that said, i am curious as to how i had never heard of the concept of new materiality since so much of my work would be an incredible example of the vitality that things display on their own right. for years i have photographed trash, discarded objects, dead little creatures, light reflections on walls, strange phenomena, everyday life really. all of these were simply feeding a curiosity in me that seemingly developed out of nowhere! and all of this time there was someone who had a whole book explaining in detail one very compelling argument as to why i was making them! sometimes i am fascinated by humanity. anyway, enjoy having a browse, i will have to browse my library in search of more photographs that speak to me to include in the publication! there are thousands of them so it will take some curation...

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this is the last batch of the day and approaching more and more to what the final publication will look like. the ink holds, the transparencies are beautiful. the text is jumbled but readable in parts and curiously enough only at a certain angle or on a plain background. the formatting of the text also creates shapes and spaces between, around and surrounding images, sometimes through images! all of this interplay between image and text is fascinating to look at and it is a great source of inspiration for what might be of it in the end. i hope to write something that comes from within and that speaks for myself without any kind of authority, just feeling. if the text becomes jumbled or scratched out or smudged by ink, i will simply let it be. not only does this make each printed edition special in its own right, it makes the meaning of the text slightly different each time it comes out the printer. one thing i do have to improve is the stapling. unfortunately my stapler is not good enough, i suspect the staples are not quite the appropriate size? for whatever reason they don't seem to be working properly: they don't pierce the paper well enough and it tends to rip in very ugly ways. so i think that the simplest way to achieve a good final binding would be to sew it together with a double stitch technique, simple and efficient and perfectly usable for a small amount of pages such as this example! i might reduce the number of pages to 10 to  keep it light both in writing, imagery and workload

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to finish off the day i decided to make some more studies, this time of images and text combined to test the transparencies, how much ink the tracing paper would take before it became too much and to test the booklet format afterwards. some of the pages still produce smudges which is a shame, though sometimes they add something interesting to what's being printed! for example some of the text in the first one has become partly illegible because of this mechanical fault, which to me speaks of the thing i'm trying to control here. perhaps these smudges will make the publication even more lively and vibrant. not under my total command but with an agency and temper of its own. accidents really can be miracles sometimes. the second spread though extremely busy both in text and image appears as if in harmony when scanned all together. this is another thing! the scanner makes everything look wonderful in ways that the naked eye cannot. there are nuances such as material and perspective that are lost of course, but aesthetically for me everything looks so much better somehow when scanned.

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using a viewfinder i had lying around i drew some frames that i might wanna try printing for the publication. i find a certain satisfaction by doing this kind of work by hand and having the exact size and layout i wanted right there and then. it's also really satisfying to get a precisely drawn composition by hand with very rudimentary tools! some of these might be too busy for tracing? but i guess i also wanted to explore quantity rather than minimal composition, similarly to the kind of photographic work i am partly inspired by in this project. next up i will include what came after this, as well as the original images and a gallery of some of my own photographs that have inspired me to focus on a 'new materialist' approach.

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i started this one to jot down some ideas of possible layouts and write some notes about how and why i wanted some pages to look like and what i could accomplish with it. drawing from previous experiments and imagination i filled the first page and quickly went onto develop some bigger sketches within the pages themselves, playing with layout and page distribution to distort images, text and graphics and experience a more similar sized version of what the final work could look like. i chose to make them on plain paper so as not to waste tracing for other more important tests before the final work. i will indeed purchase plenty more as i'm already running low, but if anything i'm thinking i will make a run of 10 for this publication and sell it at goodpress. probably keep one for myself. that way i'll make work for school and maybe earn some money from it! my dream is to save up one day to buy an A3 scanner so i don't have to go to the GSA library everytime i wanna scan my journal 💖this one also served as a way to plot pages to order them later for printing! there's a function on indesign which is what i'm currently using but i cannot get it to work right! it will only have max. 18 pages on an A5 scale so it's not difficult to figure out on paper fortunately

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today was even more straightforward than yesterday! i sat down for a little bit to reflect on the path i wanted to take and how that could happen and i decided to continue working on this publication route i've taken. i will now show you my studies for today and where i think i might be headed after this.

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at the moment, however, i am reading (as part as my contextual and theoretical research) 'vibrant matter' by jane bennett. this is to inform my work with a post-humanist background to it, in this case, a new materiality in which the author argues, all things possess independent of human interaction or intervention. this way of interpreting 'inert' objects as i had known them till recently, is unknown to me and will require extensive reading, analysis and critique for me to be able to apply it somehow to the thing(s) in question which may or may not become a final part of my work in this workshop

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all of that to say i am enjoying this line of work??? i would like to keep exploring tracing paper, in particular printing photography and perhaps graphics to accompany the text, which would somehow linked to the original. perhaps with extracts from the transcript, possibly with a critique towards the pharmaceutical industry and their profit motives tied to colonialism and the archive as an imperial institution. in a proper essay this would require extensive research, but in something that will be as deeply personal as it will become, i think that i will allow myself the liberty of allowing my emotional self to speak for me this time.

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first of all, i'd like to point out that the marks with ink were all made by a metal ruler. i love the clean stroke it leaves on the page, and because the metal doesn't hold any ink after application it's really easy to use and very clean (both in its hard edge and use!) when it's not ink it's just a posca 17, the thickest available atm. very satisfying marks but definitely not as bold in edge as the ruler!

the apparent linearity of the marks give me a sense of contuinity within the text. partly indicating the direction in which it should be read, while at the same time obscuring it, the marks on the page add another layer of illegbility to the text. the original, a dialect from southern scotland, includes words that we are used to nowadays, but it also includes grammar and vocabulary that has been lost over the centuries since we have been able to digitally transcribe this text.

this is something that fascinates me, the fact that something that for millennia, passed from generation to generation by word of mouth and later by someone who, according to this journal had some sort of office (like a botanist or a pharmacist would, though we are unsure of their training), decided to document in writing this traditional knowledge. this however did not seem to help conserve much of it since the language became so antiquated nobody can undersand certain sections of it anymore. this, coincidentally, is one of the major issues when it comes to conservation, archives and museums.

institutions such as archives and museums, which are tipically tasked with preserving the legacy of whatever subject of study they are focused on (among other things!), have a terribly difficult endeavour ahead of them. we would want to think that for a manuscript of this sort, for example, that the most straightforward way to preserve it is to simply store it away like we have done for centuries. surely it is accessible, and nowadays it has been digitized and transcribed thanks to digital technologies. this fossilization of the object is, in fact, death. the object, removed from its context and legacy, has not only lost all meaning because of age and change of practices in medicine but because it was removed from the place it was born, the community to which it served and the practices towards which it would have found an use.
now, we could assume that, by the time this particular object would have reached the archive it would have already been detached from its context and thus the loss became irreparable so much so that the archive in which it is housed no longer holds a responsability towards its return.

but what about art and museums? archives and museums are not much more than imperial institutions that preserve the legacies of the powers that found them. especially in art museums, where collections tend to be a mixture of looted artefacts from colonial endeavours, purchases from private collections of dubious origins, donations from wealthy donours looking to evade taxes in exchange for cultural capital and white supremacy guiding purchases made by the curatorial team. in this context, the objects and artworks which become part of the colonial structure of the museum, are a violent form of separation of the object from its original context and community.

artwork isn't just a pretty thing that people with spare time and education looks at in a white cube with artificial lighting and a little bit of text provided from the curator so that you may not feel intellectually challenged (let alone humiliated!)

art, if it holds any value at all (apart from the typically assigned monetary and as a commodity) is a part of the community in which it was made. it embodies the values and aspirations of those who participate in the environment in which it became alive in and thus provides a sense of belonging and value to the artwork, the artist themselves and the community. its value its proportional to this crucial relationship between context - creator - community. no one element can or should be separated from the rest, for their meaning is as one. a "creator" as a pure individual has nothing to do or say, no materials to work with and no peers to relate to or people to show work to. these three elements hinge on one another and cannot be separated at any time.

so when a museum acquires and displays a work of art in their "universal" and "neutral" space, they are killing the work. by removing it from its context (and trying, unsucessfully, to put it back through the text) they are destroying the power that the work held within the community. it is only by providing spaces within the context of the work and respectful of its power and message, that organizations and collectives could one day, achieve something akin to what has been idealized by the white cube.

this requires breaking the  museums, galleries and private collections that hoard and store art as if it were a precious commodity with which to trade in rather than give back to the community where it belongs, where it can provide meaning to its peoples and a sense of community. a network of spaces and galleries could be created with the money that would become distributed by breaking these monopolies, launching the biggest independent movement of art and culture we have ever seen, anywhere in the world. right here! in our doorstep!!

but the powerful don't give up their position in the hierarchy. it must be ripped from them. so until then, we must organize to build networks in which artists and communities can become stronger together by way of collaborating with each other. the state has never been a trustworthy ally to our cause and it is time we organize ourselves.