Finishing Up

Vectis is finished. The book is completed. There are a last few things to be done, that I will link to here as I finish them off over the next few hours.

Contents Page:

 

A contents page is available here.

PDF Download for the completed work:

 

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/94448765/Vectiswebfinal3.pdf


A Lulu purchase link, and a link to the blog for my next project, will be posted here sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Vectis Presentation

This is a video version of a presentation I gave this Tuesday on the subject of Vectis as part of my MA course. It explains a lot of the thinking about the work, including giving a more clear idea of the thinking behind the re-imagined Winter section. A full script follows after the cut.

Bibliography

 [provisional]

Books:

Austen, J. (2007) Mansfield Park. London: Penguin Classics. ISBN 0140623140
Benjamin, W. and Underwood J.A., trans. (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin. ISBN 0141036192
Blake, W. (1977) The Complete Poems. London: Penguin Classics. ISBN 0140422153
Coverley, M. (2010) Psychogeography. 2nd ed. London: Pocket Essentials. ISBN 1842433478
Danchev, A., ed. (2011) 100 Artist's Manifestos. London: Penguin Classics. ISBN 0141191799
Drucker, J. (2004) The Century of Artist's Books. 2nd ed. New York: Granary Books. ISBN 1887123695
Flanders, J. (2011) The Invention of Murder. London: Harper Press. ISBN 0007248896
Jones, J. ed. (2004) The Isle of Wight Bedside Book. Wimborne: Dovecote Press. ISBN 1904349366
Keats, J. (1994) Complete Poems of John Keats. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. ISBN 1853264040
Keiller, P. (2012) The Possibility of Life's Survival on the Planet. London: Tate Publishing. ISBN 1849760720
McDonough, T., ed. (2010) The Situationists and the City. London: Verso Books. ISBN 1844673642
Mitchell, V and Keith, A. (1998) Isle of Wight Lines. Middleton Press: Midhurst. ISBN 1901706125
Moore, A. and Campbell, E. (2008) From Hell. 8th ed. London: Knockabout Comics. ISBN 0861661411
Rackham, O. (1986) The History of the Countryside. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0460044493
Searle. A. (2004) Walking Isle of Wighr History. Wimborne: Dovecote Press. ISBN 1904349315
Sinclair, I. (2003) London Orbital. London: Penguin. ISBN 0141014746
Sinclair, I. (2002)  Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. London: Granta Books.
Smith, K.A. (1994) The Structure of the Visual Book. New York: Keith A. Smith Books. ISBN 0963768212
Watkins, A. (1988) The Old Straight Track. 2nd ed. Abacus: London. ISBN 0349137072



Websites:

Crickenberger, H.M. (2007) The Structure of Awakening. (URL http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/structure.html). (Accessed 26th January 2013).
Davis, D. (1991) The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction. (URL http://classes.dma.ucla.edu/Winter09/9-1/_pdf/3-Davis_Work_of_Art.pdf). (Accessed 26th January 2012).

Backdated entries.

I will edit this post with links to the backdated entries as I make them.

• Patrick Keiller - 'London'
• Five Styles of Book Design? 
• Robinsonnage 
• Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Consummatum Est

Vectis, the book, is essentially finished.

I am still proofing it for errors and small corrections, but every page is full of content that I am satisfied with, placed in its correct place. Now I have time to work on adding new entries to the blog (and expanding old entries) before the project must wrap up on the 29th of January. Probably the last thing I add will be an index or contents page in order to make the navigation of the blog a little easier.

The full colour version will be sent off to be printed on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.

The Test Book arrives!

The test book arrived on Friday morning. What with my birthday and other matters, I haven't been able to get a post together till now.

Progress report

The blog remains somewhat dark. For this, I aplogise; I have reached a stage of the project where it feels that working on the blog would be a distraction from the book; my current main focus is to have the entire book laid out in design terms, using placeholders and boilerplate text, in order that I can send a test off for printing next week (hopefully on Wednesday), in order to work out if there are any problems with the bleeds, the cover etc. I'll try and put together a post in the next few days that'll talk a bit in depth about some of the design decisions I've been making, particularly with regards to colour and the use of the book format. I'll also offer a sneak peek at some completed pages and spreads.

The second autumn walk was only half completed, due to inclement weather. Looking at the forecast, it may be next week before I can get out again; this is the one aspect of the project that really keeps me up at night, but it is not yet time to compromise.

In other news, I am made anxious by and am utterly perplexed to note that my blog has been linked to by the Guardian, probably due to the quotes from Oliver Rackham's History of the countryside. I note, with shame, that in that article, posted a month and a half ago, I suggested that I would have the history essay written 'within the next few weeks'. In fact, it still fails stubbornly to coalesce in any final form. Partly this is because my writing energies have been diverted by the essay on methodology and the poetry. I want to get at least one of these done before I send the book off though, so I've scheduled in a writing blitz in the university library for Tuesday, that's normally an environment that gets me going.

In the meantime, here's a nice picture.

I really should write about the Castle at some point, huh?

A Tagging System

I've been thinking about a good tagging/labelling system for this blog over the past few days, and I am still not sure. I've been toying around with the idea of categories, and I've got these main ones:

About - posts that are about the Vectis Psychogeography blog itself
Form - posts that are about issues relating to the design and aesthetics of Vectis
Content - posts that are about the contents and concepts of Vectis 
Asides - posts that are not directly related to the form or content of Vectis (research, digressions, notes on books, whatever).
Conversations - IM or email exchanges involving relevant information.

On top of this, I'll also tag posts with key words that are relevant to them. So this post's tags will be

About, tags

A tag about tags? Now how's that for metatextuality? Let's see how it works out.

Statement of intent

Welcome.

I am a post-graduate student at the Arts University College at Bournemouth, studying part-time for my MA in Fine Art. This blog is designed to be a record of and exposition of my current project, which is a book called Vectis, dealing with the psychogeography of the Isle of Wight (which is where I am from). Unfortunately, the creation of this blog does not coincide with the beginning of the project; I have been working on Vectis for three months or so now, but it does coincide with a major ramping up in the creative process. It seems at this juncture simultaneously like much has been done and nothing has been done. Really, the hardest part, for me, is over; I know the basic form and layout of the book, and thus I know the tasks I have to complete, and I have a fairly good idea of the order in which I will complete them. This blog will  document the creative process and act as a repository of writing and critical self-analysis. What I want to do is not to create an online version of the final book, but to create a document which is supplementary to. This blog will also fulfill an academic purpose as well as an artistic one, being at least an element of my submission for the Professional Development Portfolio portion of my second unit, if not the entire submission (we'll have to see how it goes, eh?). 

What you can expect to find here will be drawings, photographs and other visual artworks related to or in preparation for the final product; design sketches and proofs for the book itself; thoughts and comments on the creative process and general writings which will probably form the basis for some parts of the book.