Blog archive August 2018
<< June 2018 / November 2018 >>
28.08.18 / 01 / void null at greenbelt
So I went to Greenbelt to do Future Present book promotion and a sort of Grace service. It was hard work, because I am still needing a crutch and not to walk too much and have good sleep, and a festival isn’t the best place for those things.
But I found these guys. I was told it was some techno thing with visuals, 11pm in a geodesic dome in a patch of woodland. I was expecting something quiet and pretty not this:
They had seen Henke but not Ikeda even though their stuff looked like a cross of the two. There was also a pretty deep-space-nebula section which you can see part of on their website trailer. And James said he hadn’t seen 2001 until after making it!!
I went to see their show two nights, just because it was a good thing to go to bed on.
05.08.18 / 01 / crutches
I haven’t been able to go to several cultural events in the last few months - my hip injuries have been playing up badly so I’ve not been walking or standing unnecessarily. I was using an Asian-granny folding walking stick to get around which wasn’t the best thing. I realised that this is going to be something that recurs every 5 years or so for the rest of my life so I should be better prepared. I found these carbon fibre crutches, but c. £500 for a pair is a bit much - although compared to the price of an iPhone which lasts 5 years?
So I got an aluminium pair (silver-grey colour) - still cooler than the usual NHS crutches. Maybe if I lived on them all the time carbon fibre would be worth it just to look flash but I can’t wait to be better and stop using them. I have to go to Greenbelt in 3 weeks time to promote the Future Present book!
02.08.18 / 01 / future present book
So finally the Future Present book is published! Jonny Baker and Cathy Ross decided that they wanted to publish a book/zine of all the contributions to the Future Present conference. We started putting it together in April 2017, the design was more or less finalised by January this year but it took until May to finish all of the bits - logos, ISBN number, final image choices etc.
Jonny chose to publish it privately with money raised via Kickstarter. This enabled us to design the book as we wanted and not to be beholden to any publisher's budgets or design rules - we had suffered compromises over previous books, especially over colour printing. We wanted this one to be as colourful and visual as a magazine or an art book. There was a long-running discussion about whether it was a book or a zine - the density of much of the text pushed it towards a book but we tried to break it up with photos and poems.
The Kickstarter campaign ran for the month of June. The book was printed by Park Communications who handle many high end magazines and books. Sales are handled by Proost. We had to have it out by Greenbelt!
