The final instruction page. Landscape!
The brilliant people at Book Works have suggested redesigning the coverslip so it opens up to reveal the instructions inside, rather than having them as a page of the book.
I was uneasy about including diagrams or text within the book itself, and this way the diagrams are clearly visible but at one remove from the artwork. Best of all, we’re looking at using MAGNETS to open and close the coverslip. A very neat solution, and it will help make the book more of an object than a publication. Despite the ISBN it’s fast becoming an artist multiple rather than an artist book.
All this is good.
Pretending to stencil. It’s not part of olololo or the MAO residency, but it fits in somewhere.
Tamarin Norwood: pretending to stencil
THERE.
Just sent off all the final artwork to Book Works. The copyright text needs confirmation from Modern Art Oxford and there’s still some conversation to be had about the cover and colours for the foil-blocked title and text, but the hard work is done. Here’s how I finally resolved the instructions page: the angles are more open, some internal lines are thinner, and the layout is neater.
Well, that’s that.
Now I’m going out. I don’t care where, just out of the house.
Still not there by nearly.
All the central pages are with Book Works now, and all that’s really left is the instruction page. I’ve been showing the fourth mock-up of the book to as many people as I can manage, and offering varying degrees of guidance to see what they make of it all.
After many attempts in writing, this morning I decided neat diagrams with very brief text would be the best solution, allowing the text to carry some of the ambiguities I’m interested in without being too ambiguous to make sense.
Here are a few steps in my workings. I printed out the fourth version thinking it would be the final one, only to find the diagrams need adjusting. (And I’d forgotten to head the arrows.) Still, that shouldn’t take too long now I know what I’m doing. That’s the plan for tomorrow morning.
Good. It’s getting faster.
I’ve vectorized 17 of my 24 pages (sounds like sci-fi) and have been printing them out and testing them as I go. Testing them by just cutting along the lines with my scalpel makes a bit of a nonsense of all the vector precision, but it’s sufficient to show when something’s in the wrong place.
The pages need testing individually and also as a sequence. Once or twice I’ve found neighbouring pages capturing one another’s pleats and pivoting awkwardly, so they need separating out by inserting between them pages with different kinds of pleats. Squabbles.
Each time a page or a page sequence changes, there are changes in both the pencil’s movement ‘narrative’ and the circle’s overall composition. (Both the verb and the noun of ‘writing’?) With the current order I’m happy with the pencil’s movements but when you look at the circle as a whole (especially when you look at it all crisp in a photo) the heights of the cuts and pleats look too uniform. I’m going to take the pages apart again and work out which ones would work at different heights.
Some of these photos look like landscapes with a couple of buildings.
