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So, I’m off to the SXSW Interactive festival in a couple of days, where I’ll be going to lots of talks, meeting people, and appearing on a panel. You should come to that if you’re around on Tuesday. It should be fun.

The panel’s about post-digital design, or what we could and should be thinking about when we can blend physical and digital formats in new and interesting ways. As part of my own preparations and thinking, I (surprise!) made a book.

The idea is, it’s a book to last you the week, through SXSW. A one-time pad for the festival. Customisable. Personal. Travel and accommodation details. You’re probably going to need those a lot:

Maps of Austin – different scales, and several basic grid plans. Useful for scribbling directions on, as well as navigation.

Planning diary. Schedule. All the talks that are happening, alongside your maps and diary. (Yup, that’s what the XML was for.)

I’ve never been to Austin or Texas before, so I stuck Wikipedia’s entry on Austin in there, and the Lonely Planet chapter on Texas (which you can buy and download here – nice). I did get in touch with Lonely Planet to discuss licensing this properly, but we ran out of time. One of the reasons this book is not for sale.

Finally, I wanted to use the book as my notebook for the conference – trying to avoid carrying around a guidebook, and a programme, and a schedule, and notes. (Remember the DIY Classic Notebooks?) There are 70-odd blank pages at the back, together with some helpful suggestions on what to write if you get bored or distracted.

That’s it. Pulled together in a few hours at the last minute despite planning it for ages. HTML -> XML -> InDesign for the talks schedule. Simple PDF resizing for the LP section. Basic-as layout for the rest, with some running heads and page numbers to minimise endless searching. Printed 10 through Lulu – £5 a pop, plus £25 to expedite shipping (because I left it until the last possible moment). Arrived in 4 working days. Done.

More photos at Flickr. More thoughts at SXSW and after. Do drop me a line if you’re going to be around.

For reasons that will become clear in a bit, I am currently wrangling various bits of SXSW-related data into different media. I couldn’t find the schedule in a useful form anywhere, although it is probably out there somewhere, so for anyone who might also find it useful, here is the complete Interactive schedule in XML:

↓ sxsw2010-schedule.xml

I make no claims for accuracy, well-formedness (no escaped characters and so on and so forth – buckled and updated), usefulness etc. Works for me.

That is all.

On Friday I went to The Story, a conference organised by Matt Locke of Channel 4. It was very good, and also confusing. In a good way. And because it was confusing this won’t be a straight trip report: it will be some hastily scrawled notes and some linked reflections. Attempt no summaries here.

[For some reason I still have Rabelais and Kharitonov and the Little Room in my head. I'm not sure why. Perhaps writing this will tell me.]

I say a conference in disguise because what happened and what nobody seemed to be expecting was that most of the speakers did not give talks, they told stories. This was most pronounced at the start of the day, at the height of the audience’s confusion: Cory Doctorow read his short story on the future of bookselling. Dr Aleks Krotoski outlined a personal history of making the BBC’s Virtual Revolution series [sidenote: if you haven't seen Aleks' 1984 project, go here and hit the slideshow button now]. John Spooner went for a walk around the idea of the neutrino. Tim Etchells prefaced his contribution with the words “its status as a story is debatable. But it’s definitely obscene.”

The effect was as if the audience had been tricked into attending a spoken word event, masquerading as a conference. The overarching themes of the day, as it unfolded, were lying and discomfort. Nobody said that aloud. I’m not sure if anyone else thought that.

Sydney Padua, of the marvellous Babbage and Lovelace comics, presented a metaslide on graphic storytelling: a graph of a presentation. A metapresentation for a metaconference.

[photo CC gill wildman]

Tony White, booktwo collaborator on Artists’ Ebooks, talked about his practice, and read Include Me Out over a pecha kucha-style slideshow, a layered context of story and backstory and format and source: all presented together, at once, overwhelming and slightly disturbing. It broke, quite deliberately, your attempts to understand everything. Possibly the most interesting effect of the day.

I wish I’d seen/participated in (what is the word for this?) A Small Town Anywhere, Coney’s piece of participative theatre. Find out more. Coney’s Annette Mees said “a format is a weird place to start when you want to tell a story.” This is devastatingly true.

Tassos Stevens said something like: “Meaning is found in complexity, the point at which things break and fall apart, where you have to make hard, difficult choices.” Yes.

In the theatre, play-testing is called “scratching”. (Speaking of play-testing, it’s Sandpit tonight. You should go.) What Coney does feels less like writing a story, and more like writing a framework, with associated tests and walkthroughs. A script that is run rather than followed.

[At lunch, I had a really, really good talk with Eliot about wikihistory, wikiality, the way in which truth and history and opinion are related and constructed, and the stories this tells and the stories that can be told with it. I need to write more—a lot more—about this, soon.]

I’m not much of a gamer, and I haven’t played Failbetter’s Echo Bazaar, but I’ve been watching a lot of other people play it, and marvelling at the richness of the story. (James Wallis has said: it is more story than game.) (From something Alexis Kennedy said, I remembered I am that most casual of gamers: “playing for shits & giggles” as he put it. Shooting friendly NPCs. Going for stars in GTA.)

To make the Echo Bazaar, it was necessary to remake narrative, by “making up cool names for stuff”. Magick is all about naming and control. So is journalism, and software engineering—related disciplines.

Someone dreaming about your story, in your world, is probably the highest form of praise. Fires in the desert: the points where you see what’s going on, how far you’ve come and where you can go next. Also the points that linger longest in the mind.

Half-way through Tim Wright’s story I wrote in my notebook: “Tim’s pulling a bait and switch.” He was—a quite devastating one, that left the audience stunned into silence. Lying and discomfort: only rivalled by Tim Etchells’ repetitive lists of celebrities dead and/or covered in semen. (cf Ulrich Haarbürste.)

The last note I have says: “Just a work of fiction.” I’m not sure what this refers to. Someone said it, and I thought: nothing is just a work of fiction.

A lot of people seemed to be struggling to justify their day at the conference—to themselves, and to their boss, real or imagined. Unsure why they were there, what they were getting out of it. An edge conference. I’ve made it sound darker and more confusing than it was: perhaps that’s my mood. Other reports are available.

Lying and discomfort. Sorry. I’ll stop saying that now.

UPDATE 4/3/10: Newspaper Club won!

Ten days ago, Newspaper Club asked me to make something to go in the Design Museum, where they’ve been nominated in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year awards. They wanted a one-pager to give away to visitors, and I’d suggested a map for a walk starting at the Design Museum and going… somewhere…

Accordingly, I took myself to Bermondsey the following weekend, and did what I always do when I have a nose for something but little notion of the quarry. Accompanied by Rimbaud – borrowed from the London 2010 project – I went for a walk.

A quiet, cold but clear Sunday took me along the river, from Tower Bridge over St Saviour’s Dock, past Cherry Gardens and St Marychurch, the Mayflower monument and Brunel’s tunnel, into the reformatted docklands of the Rotherhithe peninsular. It’s a strange landscape, under-populated and defined by water: the filled-in docks that lie just beneath your feet and the constant cry of seabirds. I found the narrative I needed, and a destination: Stave Hill, a strange and marvellous earthwork that rises impossibly from the spoil.

Somewhere along the way I had the realisation that Bermondsey and Rotherhithe form not a riverbank, but a coastline: a starting point for voyages and expeditions, a strand of possibilities. All the world embarked from this point: Conrad’s famous opening lines to Heart of Darkness – “What greatness had not floated on that ebb into the mystery of an unknown earth!” – look out from here; as do the mad expeditions of Brunel and Captain (Saint?) Christopher Jones. And so: we have a walk, a story, a history.

There were many sites, too, that it wasn’t possible to include – Cuckold’s Point, on the far side of Rotherhithe, fell just outside the realm of inquiry, but I’ll be sure to return in the Summer for the Horn Fair Procession. I thought the journey had ended at Stave Hill, but I was given one more sign as I returned to the underworld – as if a sign was needed: the great bulk of the Harmsworth Quays print works, “home of quality newspapers” that rises up at Canada Water. A final treat for those who follow the map.

You can pick up a copy of A Wide Arm Of Sea from the Design Museum from now until the 6th of June. As ever, huge thanks to Newspaper Club for indulging my ramblings (and I have some beta invites if you’re looking to make something yourself) – and there’s more about the paper and the awards on their blog.

More photos of the walk and the newspaper at Flickr.

… And there are still limited copies of Immanent In The Manifold City available for sale.

For those who expressed an interest, Immanent In The Manifold City, my newspaper concerning Walking Stewart, ubiquity and time travel in the Nineteenth Century, is now available for purchase, in an edition of 100 signed & numbered copies.

Tomorrow is T-day. Or iDay. Or whatever. It’ll be fun. Nobody knows *anything* yet. Well, apart from the folks at McGraw-Hill and Hachette, probably Kobo, and a whole host of others. But for the purposes of this discussion: nobody *knows* *anything*.

About the Tablet, that is. Because, actually, we know quite a lot. We know about authors and writing, and editing and publishing, and bookselling and reading. We know and understand the long-form narrative and its place between people, and in society. And I’m more comfortable with Apple getting in on the act than I am about Amazon, because Apple aren’t in the content game, and Amazon definitely are. And if Apple swoop in and solve ebook distribution like they solved (legal, paid-for, mainstream) music distribution with iTunes, then great. Amazon are having a pretty good crack at that with Kindle too, but I’d like to see more involvement from someone without such an aggressive history of pressuring publishers until their bones show (although I’m under no illusions), and Apple have a history of producing devices and interfaces that make people go “Oh, OK. I get it now. Neat.” Amazon are also showing signs of a more open, mulitplatform approach (iPhone app, epub, etc) but that’s another conversation.

Publishers have been confused about their roles for some time. And I’m trying very hard not to be inconsistent on this, because I’ve spent several years urging publishers to get on board with new technologies and try new things, but equally I hope there’s space for a lot of publishers to get back to concentrating on what they do best: acquiring, editing, producing and publishing books. I’d like to have seen more happen in the last few years, but if it hasn’t, we should probably stop scrambling to get on the latest bandwagon (vanilla Books-as-Apps, I’m looking at you), and concentrate on the basics: ebook production, metadata, integrated marketing, quality and consideration. There is a lot to be done, but this or that device will never be the be-all-and-end-all of the future of publishing.

In March, I’m going to South By Southwest, the Austin, Texas-based megafestival encompassing film, music, and all things digital. I’m talking on a panel put together by Chris Heathcote about post-digital design, and why the future isn’t just on screens, alongside Aaron Straup Cope and Michal Migurski of Stamen, and Ben Terrett and Russell Davies of RIG. It should be fun.

I’ve never been to SxSW before, and it has an interesting history of book-related stuff. After last year’s debacle, there are panels analysing what went wrong – and plenty more on every aspect of the new book industry, and pretty much everything else under the sun.

The thing is, I can barely afford to go. And I’m not sure how I’ll be spending the five days I’m there for. And so, I’m offering a good-size chunk of my time to any individuals or businesses who can’t attend themselves, but would like a detailed report on the buzz, on specific panels or themes, from any part of the Interactive festival. Rates are negotiable, as is the mission, but if you can’t attend, and would like some inside information from someone who understands the book business as well as the interactive one, and who will be having plenty of chats with interesting folk over those five days, get in touch.

Photo CC Martin LaBar

I’ve just started Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future (indeed, I read a bit of the opening of the first of the seven short stories therein on today’s Mattins). The second story—an excellent and extraordinary fantasy of the Eiffel Tower run amok—begins with a meditation on reading and bookmarking.

You know when you’re reading an author, and you get the sense you could reach across time and space, and shake their hand? Like if you met them in the street, or in a shop queue, you could talk to them, and get on famously, and not run out of things to talk about, because you would talk about books, and the reading of them, and the treasure of their stories. (Other writers I feel this way about: Gabriel Josipovici; and Yevgeny Kharitonov, sending up his own little fireworks in a locked room.)

Like Kharitonov, Krzhizhanovsky was banned from publication in his own lifetime, but through the kindness of NYRB Classics and the generosity of Joanne Turnbull’s translation, we can read him now. And so I excerpt thus, from the story “The Bookmark”:

The other day, as I was looking through my old books and manuscripts tied tight with twine, it again slipped under my fingers: a flat body of faded blue silk and needlepoint designs trailing a swallowtail train. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time: my bookmark and I. Events of recent years had been too unbookish and had taken me too far from those cabinets crammed with harbariumized meanings. I abandoned the bookmark between lines as yet unread and soon forgot the feel of its slippery silk and the delicate scent of printing ink emanating from its soft and pliant body wafered between the pages. I even forgot… where I had forgotten it. Thus do long sea voyages part sailors from their wives.

True, books had crossed my path here and there: rarely at first, then more often; but they did not read bookmarks. These were travelling signatures glued pell-mell into crookedly cut covers; along the rough and dirty paper, breaking ranks with the lines, brown-gray letters—the colour of military broadcloth—rushed; these reeked of rancid oil and glue. With these crudely produced bareheaded bundles, one did not stand on ceremony: shoving a finger in between the sloppily pasted signatures, one tore the pages apart the better to leaf through them, tugging impatiently at the raggedy, tooth-edged margins. One consumed these texts posthaste, without reflecting or delectating: both books and two-wheeled carts were needed then strictly to supply words and ammunition. The one with the silk train had no business here.

And now again: the ship was in port, its gangway down. Library ladders scanning the spines of books. The statics of frontispieces. Silence and green reading-room lampshades. Pages rubbing against pages. And, finally, the bookmark: just as it had been, all that time ago— except that now the silk was even more fade, and its needlepoint design covered in dust.

I pulled it out from under a paper mound and placed it in front of me—on the edge of the desk; the bookmark looked affronted and slightly grumpy. But I smiled at it with warmth and affection: to think of all the voyages we had taken together—from meanings to meanings, from this set of signatures to that. Now, for instance, I recalled our difficult ascent from ledge to ledge of Spinoza’s Ethics—after almost every page I had left my bookmark alone, squeezed between the metaphysical layers; then the breathlessness of Vita nova where, at passages linking one poem to the next, my patient bookmark had often to wait until the emotion that had taken the book out of my hands subsided, allowing me to return to the words. And I couldn’t help remembering… But all of this concerns only the two of us, me and my bookmark: I’ll stop.

Especially as it is important in practice—since any encounter obligates—to repay the past given us with some bit of the future. In other words, rather than tucking the bookmark away at the book of the drawer, I should include my old friend in my next reading; instead of a series of memories, I should offer my guest another bundle of books.

And Krzhizhanovsky’s discourse on the bookmark, and the process of reading, like a long journey (Sinclair’s walks, or Josipovici’s opposite of bicycling), reminded me of another piece of writing, that I had to hold in my head all day, and spend an hour tracking along the shelves, retracing those old journeys, back a decade to a dog-ear I had left in another house, another time, on another trip.

Albert Hourani, in his History of the Arab Peoples, quotes a legal and medical scholar of Baghdad, ‘Abd al-Latif (1162/3—1231), on the scholar as one of the ideal types of man. I copied it out then, in that house, and have done so again, now. Here you go:

I commend you not to learn your sciences from books unaided, even though you may trust your ability to understand. Resort to professors for each science you seek to acquire; and should your professor be limited in his knowledge take all that he can offer, until you find another more accomplished than he. You must venerate and respect him… When you read a book, make every effort to learn it by heart and master its meaning. Imagine the book to have disappeared and that you can dispense with it, unaffected by its loss… One should read histories, study biographies and the experience of nations. By doing this, it will be as though, in his short life space, he lived contemporaneously with peoples of the past, was on intimate terms with them, and knew the good and bad among them… You should model your conduct on that of the early Muslims. Therefore, read the biography of the Prophet, study his deeds and concerns, follow in his footstep, and try your utmost to imitate him… You should frequently distrust your nature, rather than have a good opinion of it, submitting your thoughts to men of learning and their works, proceeding with caution and avoiding haste… He who had not endured the stress of study will not taste the joy of knowledge… When you have finished your study and reflection, occupy your tongue with the mention of God’s name, and sing His praises… Do not complain if the world should turn its back on you, it would distract you from the acquisition of excellent qualities… know that learning leaves a trail and a scent proclaiming its possessor; a ray of light and brightness shining on him, pointing him out…

For a long time now, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film London. And so, this year, I’m doing something about it. I’m studying it: watching it again and again, mining it for references and meaning, analysing and locating shots and scenes.

London lends itself to this process, more than any other film I know. Composed entirely of short, fixed-camera shots, together with a single-narrator voiceover, it takes place over a fixed length of time (January-December 1992, a single year), and within a fixed sphere: the city I live in.

So as well as cataloguing and visiting the locations, I am filming them too. I don’t know exactly where this project will go – where it will take me – but it starts on London Bridge, eighteen years ago and last Saturday. I filmed the above, badly, in the driving wind and rain. It replicates Keiller’s opening shots from 1992. I will probably have to reshoot, and would love to do so with a cruise ship, as in the original, but I will take what the Thames throws up.

Why now? This, like 1992, is the year of a general election, a subject which the original film revolves around – and not only that, but one that is quite likely to result in a Tory victory, as in 1992. This is the one event depicted in the film that doesn’t happen – if it happens more than once – every year. But also because it feels right. Because Keiller’s vision is coming around again, bracketing the boom years.

I’m covering the project on its own blog, where you can see some of the ruminations so far, and follow the ongoing progress. Right now, I still need help locating some of the shots. They’re all in this Flickr set, and if you recognise any of them, please do leave a comment.

“London”, says Robinson, “was the first metropolis to disappear.” But the narrator disagrees: in his words, and in Keiller’s shots – the preponderance of swirling waters, and trees in the wind, set against the weathered streetscape – the film emphasises the city’s mutability, but also its persistence. It is this change, and this permanence, that I shall be exploring for the next year.

I’ve been wanting to play with Layar, the augmented reality browser for iPhone 3GS and Android for a while. So I did. As a test case, I’ve created a layar for Noticings, the utterly awesome photography game created by my friends Tom and Tom.

It lets you see and find Noticings near you (if there are some within a reasonable distance. It works. It’s nice. It’s available in Layar now.

Why did I do this? You still have to ask? Well, I have a hunch that Layar might be one of the possible ways to implement a version of Storypoints, the locative storytelling thing I proposed some time back. I’ve started hacking at that.

All will be revealed at a later date. Until then, play with Layar*, and play Noticings.

* Unfortunately, Layar is not currently available for the iPhone, unless you downloaded it before they pulled the current version from the App Store. It should be back soon. Android users can get it from the market.