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.

The Final Stretch

It may seem that I have dropped off the face of the world in the last month or so. This is not so. I have, however, had little time to be working on this blog. I have always struggled, in my academic work, with the problem of the extra work that it takes to adequately record the process of creation, and I've fallen off the wagon a bit here. Basically, I have been too busy actually finishing Vectis to write about finishing Vectis. Now, however, I am nearing the endgame, and I can make a progress update.

I have made a great deal of progress, and in the process made many changes. The fourth section (Winter) has undergone a complete overhaul in its layout and contents. The original idea I had (a succession of photographs of the coast) never quite gelled together; the seasonal structure gave me a limited number of pages in which to realise the concept, which could very easily occupy a whole, larger book. There was no way to present all the coast in such a way. Furthermore, the actual process of walking and exploring the coast proved to be too great a task given my time. It didn't seem like I would be able to do the process any justice; I was also not entirely sure whether it would fit in with the rest of the book. Instead, I decided to resort to a completely different idea, making instead two virtual journeys; not the endeavour of a flâneur but of a robinsonneur, one who travels without moving. One of these journeys is visual (a procession of heavily treated aerial or satellite images), one textual (a procession of the names of settlements around the coast), though both are composed aesthetically on the page.

As well as making much other progress with the content, I have also (I believe) sorted out the problem with the bleeds, which was down to Indesign incorrectly exporting the bleed settings. I have sent off for another black and white test printing, which should arrive some time in the next few days. If my fix has been successful, I should be ready to have the book finally printed, in colour, some time next week.

I Dream of Colour Music

One of the most important unifying elements of Vectis is colour. Building on the ideas set out in this post I have designed a colour scheme that gives each season, each month and each journey its own colour.

Each of these three colour schemes form a progression, a spectrum, and could be linked up into wheels to reinforce the circular structure of the book.

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.

Judging a Book: The cover

Yesterday, I sent an incomplete version of Vectis off to lulu.com for a test printing. Particularly, I am interested in seeing if the bleeds work and all text remains readable at paper sizes. This marks an important point for Vectis; all the structure of the book is now in place, waiting only to be filled with joyous words and images. Much is already filled. All the photography for Summer and Autumn is done, and Autumn is about three quarters finished in every sense. But until this weekend, one task remained completely untackled.

In order to have the book printed, you see, it needs a cover.

Covers are an interesting element of book design. Many producers of artists books treat the cover as a completely integral part of the whole work, continuing themes from the inside to the outside. For me, however, the cover has a slightly different feel. The way I see it is as a frame; the frame is important to a work of art, and the frame should be appropriate (no elaborate gold-leafed rococo on the Kandinsky, please!), but it is not part of the work. It is slightly seperate from it. You can change the cover and still have the same book, in the way I see it anyway. 

Completed spreads

It's time to give a peek inside the book. I'm very close to being in a position where I can send a version off for test printing, and I've taken a few screenshots of some two page spreads, with a couple to show recent changes.

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?

Big Sky, Lorry Depot

A couple of new images. I've been a bit sparse with these lately but I don't want to post up everything I'm doing. Here's a couple of recent ones.

This one might need to be muted a bit. One of the biggest tweaks I've made recently to the structure is the idea of, rather than concentrating entirely on portrait format images, I've been looking at including more landscape format images, which will be stretched across two pages in the book. In the Summer walks, there will only be one landscape image per walk, which will occupy the centre two pages (each walk, apart from the title page and map, takes up 28 pages), and will signal a switchover, from the image being on the right side of a spread to the left side of a spread. This will help give the book a little more rhythm, I hope. In the Autumn walks (which are starting finally to come together), landscape images will be interespersed with the portrait ones in a more fluid rhythmic pattern. The decision on how to bring all this in to the Winter section is still pending.

Worth a Thousand Words: Text and Images

One concern that, as I assemble the book,  is becoming obviously very important to Vectis is the way text and images interact within the structure of a book, and withn a 2D medium (the individual page) generally. Thankfully, I can lay claim to knowing at least a little of what I’m talking about with both subjects: the first being one of the main focuses of my previous MA unit, and the second being the subject of my BA dissertation, I am already well grounded in both. I am also helped by the fact that each subject has a (to my mind) clearly written and definitive book on the subject. These are Keith Smith’s The Structure of the Visual Book and Simon Morley’s Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art, which have both been of immense help to me.

Some possible page layouts.

Playing around with Lorem Ipsum, showing four possible layout ideas. The way I've been planning things out at the moment I've been keeping text and image basically separated on to different pages (except where images contain textual elements), but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility to put some images in-line.

Seasons Don't Fear the Reaper

The idea of structuring the book around the seasons has suggested to me the possibility of using the year as a model for the book. 2012 is a leap year, consisting of 366 days; since the majority of the work takes place in this year, It would make for a book of that many pages, plus a number of extra pages at the beginning (pre-numbering) for contents and so forth; say 7, if we're going for calendar correspondences.

The book shall therefore be divided into four sections. I'll work based on the periods between solstices and equinoxes:

Spring: 21st March - June 20th:  91 days

Summer: June 21st - 20th September: 91 days.

Autumn:  21st September-20th December: 90 days.

Winter: 21st December-20th March (Including 29th Feb): 90 days.

I have been trying to set the structure out in various text files and in indesign, but I think I'll have to make a physical model of the book in order to be able to get a real sense of how this all pans out, whether this is a good idea and whether any fudging will be necessary

I will also need to pick up the pace a little on the first section, though I have photographs, sound recordings and notes on all three of the first walks; the season draws to a close. One of the interesting things about the actual making of Vectis is that, due to the writing and other considerations, the first section shall probably take the longest to produce in terms of post-production, though I already have almost all the material I need on hand. I shall be walking all three routes again in the next few days, before moving out.  Already autumn's chill is in the air. The 21st is the first day of autumn, and will be time to begin considering the longer range walks.

Some Early Images

Now that I have a graphics tablet, work can begin in earnest on making images. First, here's a couple of images I made a few weeks back based off of an early morning photoshoot of which you've seen one photograph already (as this blog becomes more established, I will upload all the work, except perhaps the vast bulk of raw photographs, I have so far done for this project, reformatting it as necessary). 

As you can see, images  are probably the area that needs the most work...

The Origins of the Project

Vectis is a multimedia art project, designed to be finally realised in the form of a book containing images and words. This book will be produced in the tradition of the artist's book, that is to say, the physical structure of the book (pages etc.) and it's overall design will be conceptually important features of the final product. What this means is that, if all goes to plan, Vectis will not properly be able to be understood in any format but the book as I have designed and realised it. Any other presentation format will be a record of the work rather than the work itself, much as a photograph of a painting or a recording of a concert. 

The purpose of the book, as previously stated, is to explore the psychogeography of the Isle of Wight. Psychogeography is a fairly nebulous term, which I have deliberately avoided attempting a precise definition of. Literally it just means "mental geography", but the word carries all sorts of interesting associations. It sounds like 'psychology', but also a bit like 'psychopathy'; it would seem to be a word that describes a science, yet psychogeography is not really a scientific practice in the least. It is, as much as it is anything, a crystallisation of an intellectual tradition that Merlin Coverley, in his only slightly breathless introduction to the subject fittingly entitled 'Psychogeography', identifies as stretching back to British literary luminaries including Defoe and Blake, going on down the years to include such diverse figures as Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Baudelaire, Guy Debord, Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair. Coverley explicitly identifies psychogeography, through these and other writiers, with the experience of two particular cities; London and Paris. This is, to my mind, problematic. Leaving out the fact that Coverley notably fails to identify any writers that are not white men*, he also explicitly aligns his view of psychogeography with a strain of urbanist thinking that is, in it's essence, utopian.

I should clarify here that when I say that a train of thought is utopian, what I mean specifically is it comes from a tradition of western thought that recognises the possibility of utopia in a hazily (or, worryingly precisely) defined future, rather than that it assumes that the present day city is a utopian place. A continuous theme that pervades all the way through from the mysticism of Blake to the post-Marxism of the Situationist International  (via Chartism, Das Kapital, the Paris Commune etc. etc.) is the essentially Christian idea that history is a process that will lead first to tribulation and decay, and then to a better and more glorious world. In London/Paris centric psychogeography this finds itself expressed in the idea that the city (these two cities in particular) are great cultural engines that have either failed to start or are winding down because of the machinations of often nebulous systematic oppressors, expressed through modifications to and restrictions on the architecure and physical geography of the cities themselves. If the workers could be liberated, if the 'mind-forged manacles' could be shattered, if the zoning laws could be abolished, ah, what then? What better and more glorious world might we build?

My problem with this intellectual tradition is, I will admit, largely a political one. I believe, essentially, that the majority of the London/Paris writers have, whilst in many cases particularly in the 20th century espousing radical left wing views, failed to confront an essential parochialism at the core of their being. In one short, vulgar phrase, what is it that makes their homes so fucking important? It can hardly be a coincidence that London and Paris are cities that have sat at the centre of two of the vastest and, frankly, most unpleasant empires in the history of the world. Focusing particularly on the London tradition, which is more relevant to my studies, it seems obvious to me that much of the writing identified as psychogeography forms part of a tradition of small-minded intellectual imperialism that exists even within (indeed, especially within) the UK itself, where London becomes the centre of all things and a yardstick by which to measure all other places by. Part of my intention with Vectis, then, is to redress the balance a little by using the methodology of psychogeography (particularly as developed by Iain Sinclair and the admittedly broader-thinking Patrick Keiller) to deal with a much more marginal place.

The name Vectis comes from 'Insula Vectis', the Latin name for the Isle of Wight; this is the subject of the project. The island is an interesting place both because of what it is and what it is not; and this is a subject I shall expand upon in future posts. It is difficult to summarise, but I shall mention one, perhaps rather esoteric sounding point. The surface of the earth is a (rough) sphere. In euclidean geometry, this can be represented as a plane in which all straight lines become circular paths leading back to their point of origin. The centre of this plane, and thus the centre of the world, can be anywhere. We should also note, again perhaps somewhat occultly, that an island, unlike a city, has a discrete physical existence within defined geographical boundaries (its coastline) rather than defined political boundaries; that it is a product of nature rather than a product of man but is still invested with the same significance of being a distinct place we give to cities. 

Yes, I know I'm waffling.

That will probably be all for today; I have some errands to run. I am loath to set a schedule for updates to occur on certain days, as I tend to work unevenly (some days I can achieve nothing, other days I end up staying up all night hammering away). I will say, however, that I hope the updates can at least be frequent; hopefully, they will also be interesting.

*And pretty much all white heterosexual men to boot. I can do something about that at least.