Liverpool to Liverpool: Chronicles of an Aimless Journey

Liverpool to Liverpool tells the story of an epic journey by Simon Faithfull from Liverpool, UK, to Liverpool, Novia Scotia. Faithfull made about six drawings a day throughout his journey, documenting the minutiae of daily life on land and sea, from Liverpool to Liverpool, with his Palm Pilot. This book includes 181 digital drawings, and Faithfull’s often wry, imagist commentary on the landscapes he was passing through and the humans he encountered – from English Liverpudlians crouched under umbrellas to Canadian Liverpudlians with moustachioed lips and pick-up trucks – as he drew them. The book serves as a reminder of Liverpool’s maritime past, its historical dependence on the shipbuilding industry and transatlantic trade, and the survival of these global connections today. Both the words and images in this fascinating book attest to the survival of the texture and detail of individual everyday lives even in our restlessly mobile world.

You Are Here

berliner mauer

From interrogating Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideas of a new age of the altermodern to the daily life of a political actitivist in the World Bank-backed last dictatorship in Europe -Belarus, You Are Here goes a way to offering a sort of field book for contemporary Europe. A continent where young artists and activists blend forms and travel in their work, living in one country while all the while subtly interrogating their home countries’ traditions and expectations. A generation has come of age in a post- Wall Europe who no longer feel obligated to answer the national questions, but instead answer to their unique personal experience, one of borderless work and travel, mediated by translation and the Internet. Such instances of artistic, intellectual and activist projects are given space in You Are Here, offering the chance to see whether such young practitioners really are writing from a freedom and plurality born in 1989 back into a new, wider and pan-European tradition in 2009.

Edited by Line Madsen Simenstad and John Holten
Texts and artwork by Ann Cotton (AUS), Anna Bro (DK), Agnieszka Drotkiewicz (POL),
Martin John Callanan (UK), Volha Martynenka (BEL), Francesca Musiani (IT), Christophe Van
Gerrewey (BE), Urszula Wozniak (GER)

9 November, 2009
English (with Polish, German, Belarussian, Danish)
ISBN 978-3-00-028868-5

Book Release Party @ Basso Berlin (Köpenickerstr 187, Berlin-Kreuzberg) 21 Uhr, Mittwoch, 11. November

Seascape book

Charting the span of Susan Collins’ Seascape, from its earliest online manifestations to its gallery exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, a publication on the Seascape project has been produced by Film and Video Umbrella. The book features newly commissioned essays by Sean Cubitt and Nicholas Alfrey and includes an extensive colour plate section of archive seascape images.
The book is now available from the De La Warr Pavilion shop and other art bookshops. To order a copy online email books@fvu.co.uk

photo of Seascape bookphoto of Seascape bookphoto of Seascape book
ISBN 978-1-904270-30-0
visit www.fvu.co.uk for further details

Migrating Reality

Location of I text by Martin John Callanan published in Migrating Reality book and conference.

Migrating Reality
ISBN 978-9955-834-01-4

Electronic and digital systems generate completely new forms of migration. In the creative arts, new phenomena related to migration and the synergies of disparate systems are emerging. Artistic products evolve from traditional forms into hybrid digital forms. Analog products are being digitized; data spaces are trans-located from one data storage system to another; existing sounds, images, and texts are remixed and fused into new datasets.

The book is based on international conference and exhibition Migrating Reality which took place on April 4-5, 2008 in Galerie der Künste, Berlin, Germany, and on material submitted to the online magazine balsas.cc. As with the conference, the exhibition, and the on-line projects, the book is an overview of the migration topic from various perspectives, not excluding the use of a variety of languages. For example, we offer the reader an interview with Žilvinas Lilas “Bastymasis man būtų daug priimtinesnis žodis” conducted by Vytautas Michelkevičius in Lithuanian and the text “Kulturtransfer in der Frühen Neuzeit – eine andere Realität der Migration” by Philipp Zitzlsperger – an essay on migration from a historians perspective. The ideas presented textually in the book shift back and forth from essays and articles to projects and back to essays. The territories shift from social space to virtual space and eventually land us back in a realm of physical, political, economical, and historical reality.

Publisher
KHM – Kunsthochschule für Medien
Verein zur Förderung kultureller Praxis e.V.
VšĮ Mene

Editorial board
Mindaugas Gapševičius, John Hopkins, Žilvinas Lilas, Vytautas Michelkevičius

Silicon Fen – the book

cover of Silicon Fen book
Silicon Fen
With texts by Iain Sinclair, Simon Willmoth, Steven Bode, Sean Cubitt and Tom Williamson
ISBN  978-1-904270-27-0

A record of a long-running visual arts project that took place at venues across the east of England between 2004 and 2007, Silicon Fen considers how landscape in general (and the East Anglian landscape in particular) has been both affected and reflected by technology.
Including documentation on works for Silicon Fen by artists Suky Best, Susan Collins, Dalziel + Scullion, Annabel Howland, Stephen Hughes and TNWK

For further information please visit the Film and Video Umbrella website

Letters 2004-2006: Book review

A review from RAM Publications, N.American distributors for my book:

Martin John Callanan’s brilliant new book is a stroll down Albert Camus Lane for this artist whose work has consistently explored the clash between the fact of human existence and governments with digital databases which could delete anyone with a single keystroke. Any member of modern society can identify with Callanan’s letters to government authorities, in which he essentially – and subversively – challenges their right to define if he exists according to their records. Each letter poses a deceptively simple question or even inane rhetorical statement and the collected responses (from eminences ranging from the secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury to the offices of President Mubarak of Egypt) reveal the absurdity of bureaucracy and the egos of those that claim power. A wonderful exploration from the London-based artist; one of his best-known projects transmits the phrase “I am Still Alive” to available cell phones, laptops and PDAs in a given area, a poignant plea for recognition from cyberspace.

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