I’ve written about Metronome Press before, in a series of articles at the old STML Litblog in 2005 – 2006. If you recall, the Metronome series commissioned contemporary artists to write novels, presented as much as art pieces or artefacts as well as traditionally published books. At least one of the authors, Tom McCarthy, has gone on to considerable success in the mainstream.

What I most liked about Metronome back then was twofold: the unashamed presentation of such work as “art”, and the appropriation of the mundane apparatus of the art world for the funding, distribution and publicity of literature.

Metronome’s paperback series was sponsored by a series of patrons who were named in the back of the book. These included private individuals and arts organisations, private as well as state (being based in France, there’s rather more scope for the latter than in our own, arts-impoverished corporate politics). And the works were very clearly curated, emerging from a personal relationship between curator (editor) and artist (writer), in the service of a commission. (The exception being Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young And Evil, an immaculate resurrection of a text first published in 1933.)

Curation, commission, patronage: terms rarely heard in literature, and literature is the worse for it.

One attempt to change this has been going for a while now, and has just released three new works, bringing the series total to seven: Bookworks‘ exemplary Semina series. I’ve written about Semina before too, but it bears repeating for this occasion. The text of the original call for submissions makes the series’ intentions clear:

Semina takes its inspiration from a series of nine loose-leaf magazines issued by Californian beat artist Wallace Berman in the 1950s and 1960s. We are looking for artists and writers interested in experimental prose fiction, who transgress all the boundaries separating art and literature. Think of the ways in which Paul Gilroy theorised the history of modernism through the rubric of the Black Atlantic, W.E.B. Du Bois and double-consciousness, and the inescapable links between race and class: Anthony Joseph, Kathy Acker, Amiri Baraka, Samuel R. Delany, Darius James, Ishmael Reed, Ann Quin, Clarence Cooper Jr, Claude Cahun etc. Above all we’re looking for artists and writers willing to take risks with their prose and who demonstrate total disregard for the conventions that structure received ideas about fiction. [...]

Editing is expected to be a collaborative process between the editors and the commissioned artist/author, with the aim of producing a text sympathetic to the ambitions of the series. The editors would expect to work closely with the commissioned artist/author on any redrafts and revisions. You will be consulted at each stage of the process and expected to help take decisions about the way in which the work is presented in book form.

The series has already produced at least one masterpiece, in the form of Bridget Penney’s Index. Penney is exactly the kind of writer best served by the curatorial/patronage approach: previously published (by Polygon, in 1991) but little known outside enthusiastic artistic circles. The work was completed over a number of years, and brought to publication with the encouragement of series editor Stewart Home (a conversation between the two is available on Home’s site).

The three new novels released this week are The Dark Object by Katrina Palmer, HOE #999 by Jarett Kobek, and Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie by Home himself, a sample of which can be found in Wednesday’s Mattins.

A new work by Home is always cause for celebration. I was lucky enough to publish his last book, Memphis Underground, in 2007, but this isn’t log-rolling: I’ve been a fan of his work for much longer than that. Home is one of a class of writers fated to stay with each of his publishers only briefly, badly served and frequently misunderstood by critics; yet, he continues to produce work and to see it published (even when, as has happened, he resorts to trickery in the small ads), while moving (un)easily between the worlds of literature and art. Such a position makes him eminently suited to the position granted him by Semina: editor, curator, contributor and collaborator.

The type of work produced by Semina, and Metronome before it, and their inspirations before that, will never reach a mass audience, and they should not have to. But their literature is vital, buoying up and sustaining a complacent and frequently dull literary culture. We could learn much from the auteurs of the art world.

My question is: how do you track, monitor and analyse downloads? Particularly of free ebooks?

Imagine this scenario: there’s a free ebook. It’s hosted in one place, and there’s a single addressable URL to access it. This will probably be a pointer, rather than a direct link to the actual file. This means the file can be delivered, but some analytic measure can also be triggered: recording number of downloads and their point of origin.

Yes, it’s perfectly possible someone will repost the file elsewhere, and this will be untrackable. Without imposing arcane and nasty DRM, we will have to ignore this. We’re also ignoring official (and presumably paid-for and therefore separately tracked) downloads avilable via eBook vendors elsewhere.

We’re talking about a single, canonical, trackable address for a single eBook. Are people doing this? How? Thoughts and answers in the comments, please.

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Associated with this, I’ve been thinking a lot about artists’ books. That is, works of art in the form of a book. Ready-mades. Uniques (although the term doesn’t apply in this context). And Zines.

I’m thinking of things like the work of Mark Pawson, and Book Works. And the whole history of artists’ books.

I think there are opportunities and affordances for doing things in the eBook space, with artists. Distribution. Links. Algorithmic transformations.

So, in the tradition of marking out the territory via the strategy of buying domain names, I’ve registered artists ebooks .org. There’s not much there yet. Consider it a starting point.

Thoughts welcome.

I’ve been spending the day listen to friends twitter from NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference at the South Bank, and an Arts Council England summit on the future of literature just round the corner. NESTA was established by the government in 1998 with an endowment of £250 million. Just last week, ACE announced £16.5 million of Lottery funding for the Southbank Centre, the same week I discovered that my full-price membership of that institution no longer lets me take in a friend for free.

Meanwhile, the slash and burn of the literature sector continues (others too: film, theatre, visual arts, but lit’s what I know). Since launching London Lit Plus 2008 last week I’ve been hearing the same story from all over: we don’t have any money. They cut us off. It’s depressing, and frustrating. I’ve long been an exponent of using the internet and related technologies to bypass the need for huge investment, but real-world activities still need real-world money.

A tale of two literary magazines illustrates the point: The London Magazine, one of the longest-established literary journals in the world, has seen its budget drastically reduced, but they say “we are determined to continue, and to reach out to a wider audience.” Pen Pusher is a fantastic little magazine, only two years old, “publishing the best and most inspirational new fiction, poetry and features”. In that time they’ve proved that there is an audience for what they do, yet they were refused ACE funding on the basis of ‘insufficient priority’ (you can help by responding to their Sponsor-a-Page campaign).

I believe these audiences are better served by helping small organisations reach people directly rather than funding big-org beanfeasts so Gordon Brown can tell some of the countries wealthiest people that “innovation is the most important thing for Britain’s future”, not least because small companies use what they’re given better – they have to. I hope this year’s LL+ will be a show of defiance in the face of the bureaucrats who trade on our culture while contributing nothing to its economy.

I did get that GPS unit, and thanks to quite a lot of Googling I’ve managed to hack it to my laptop to update my location on Google Maps (screenshot above) – which involved teaching myself rudimentary Python and exploiting my new, poor PHP skills. What I did learn was how fun technology on your own terms is; just as we’re moving past the stage of being passive consumers of TV and other media, so we’re taking control of technology at it’s most base level too. But I digress…

In my research, I’ve discovered I’ve been partially beaten to the punch by more professional services. CrowdScapes uses Yahoo’s ZoneTag service to pull in Flickr photos near your location – at the moment it’s limited to Nokia N-series phones in the US, but you can get a taste by hitting “Launch” and entering your location here. It’s pretty cool.

Patrick from mscapers pointed me towards the fascinating stuff that Hewlett Packard are doing with a bunch of UK artists, mostly centred around their research centre in Bristol, from fun locative games like Hidden Danger UXB! which can be played anywhere (providing you’ve got a GPS-enabled HP tablet – anyone?), ‘playable’ guides to specific locations (e.g. The Tower of London), to more meditative experiences like always something somewhere else.

‘always something somewhere else’ is a generative mediascape that creates a temporary map in a location as the user is asked to seek out certain base materials such as glass, stone, and water. As they reach each material they hear the beginning of a fictional narrative about another person in a far off location standing next to the same material. As the map is created the user can return to the points they marked to hear the stories fold in on themselves and conclude.

The associations with storytelling here remind me strongly of earlier, less-tech’d-up locative artworks, particularly the operatic climate-change tour And While London Burns, and Janet Cardiff’s awesome The Missing Voice (which I believe is still available on request from the Whitechapel Gallery, but I’ll double-check). Story-telling is incredibly well-suited to this medium – does anyone have any other examples of such experiments?

For myself, I’m going to keep hacking away – I think I missed a trick not getting a Bluetooth GPS to work with my phone, so that might be the next step. I’m particularly interested in what geocached information we can hack out of Google Book Search:

Literature is inescapably intertwined with our everyday environment. By making this visible, we can encourage and spread it, and send it in new and exciting directions.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is the website and nom de guerre of artists Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge, based in Seoul, South Korea. Their art takes the form of text, usually parodying the manifesto or thesis form and accompanied by jazz soundtracks, delivered either as film, or, on the web, flash movies. You can watch the films on their website (the above is from Cunnilingus in North Korea, their most recent work is Morning of the Mongoloids, for Lisboa20).

The artists’ state their intentions with these web-based movies thus: “We try to break as many rules as possible. We try to express the essence of the Internet: information. Strip away the interactivity, the graphics, the design, the photos, the illustrations, the banners, the colours, the fonts and the rest, and what’s left? The text.”