Kate Pullinger's 'Line of Influence' at Binary Katwalk

Binarykatwalk is an online exhibition space for experimental digital work, curated by locative media/new media artist and writer, Jeremy Hight, and this month sees the launch of the Kate Pullinger section of The Line of Influence, which is:

…a series of a few artists selected to show their work alongside who influenced them and those they see as kindred spirits coming up. This is not an ordinary exhibition, but instead a chance to show how ideas and works progress over time and how no artist is a solitary force out there.

I’m honoured that Kate has chosen to include my own piece, Fitting the Pattern, alongside Flight Paths, the networked novel she co-creates with Chris Joseph, These Waves of Girls by Caitlin Fisher and Renee Turner’s She….

Fitting the Pattern in the Binary Katwalk open-gallery-network

Here’s an interesting, if somewhat absurd, possibility by artist and book cover designer, Stefanie Posavec. Writing Without Words ‘is a project that explores methods of visually representing text and visualises the differences in writing styles of various authors.’

Literary Organism - the structure of Part One of 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac

It’s absurd – and I don’t use the term pejoratively – because it’s a visualization that obscures meaning, therefore it’s paradoxical printed matter (you can buy prints), a visual oxymoron or an oxymoronic visualization, since the usual aim of information visualization is ‘to help people understand and analyze data.’ According to Wikipedia:

Visual representations and interaction techniques take advantage of the human eye’s broad bandwidth pathway into the mind to allow users to see, explore, and understand large amounts of information at once.

Which is the exact opposite of what a novel is about. Of course,  Writing Without Words is art so it shouldn’t have to make literal sense. But could this be a future way of navigating a digital book? Or, since information visualization is designed to ‘provide some means to see what lies within’, could this be a future way of judging a book, not by its cover, but by its data visualization? Intriguing questions.

Reminds me of a recent discussion stimulated by Kate Pullinger’s article, My Digital Evolution in Fiction for Internet Evolution. Kate said:

But I can imagine a time when books become more like art objects for people who like books, as opposed to people who like to read – the idea of being a big reader might not go hand in hand with being a lover of books, as it still does currently.

I agreed:

I look forward to doing most of my reading in future on a lovely e-reader… I also think the digital reading future may be liberating for the paper fabric book, turning book objects into wonderful works of art – interactive sculptural objects with stories to tell! Most objects will probably be RFID tagged anyway, so everything will be linked up to the web in one or another. All manner of things will be possible. Convergence will go many ways.

Sentence Drawings in the book version explain an approach to analysing 'On the Road'

Writing Without Words is a fascinating fetishization of the book as both object and container of information, which speaks to me about the absurdity of venerating the printed book as the only true and worthy carrier of literature and ideas.

Here are 99 Rooms full of mystery and intrigue.

Artists’ statement:

99rooms stemmed from the mystical, often apolocalyptically charming pictures created by Berlin artist Kim Köster within the countless vacated premises of East Berlin‘s industrial sector. Photos of these paintings were initially produced in digital form and then animated through a cooperative effort between Richard Schumann & Stephan Schulz and then subsequently complemented through a personal sounddesign from Johannes Buenemann. The final product of this year long effort is a scintillating intermediary world which invites the observer into an journey through its morbidly-beautiful rooms.

From the series Imaginary Posters by Randy Adams

More art coming soon!