Phi Books, Book E cover, as presented in Berlin, November 2009

The difference between a cloud and fog is quite absurd, a fog is denser than mist, but it’s still a colourless gas, I’ve always related to its largely insipid qualities, perhaps that’s why this fog has ‘settled’ (as they say), though settled seems entirely the wrong word for either myself or this pallid miasma. Initially the fog allows nothing to emerge from it, and then the fog thins, yes, thins, allowing three dimensional shadows to form, reminiscent of the odd rays seen in the so-called crepuscular hours (proximate to dawn and dusk), like Jacob’s ladders climbing to the sun and the sunburst stained-glass-windows set into many of the front doors along this street. Something vast emerges from the fog

The Thingness of Books, the Bookishness of Things

If things are matter already configured then to a large extent I am more of a thing then my computational books. But is a thing the same..thing.. as an object? We are now making a Phi Film of the Phi Books which is not much of an object but is something - a performed book, not a vessel like a normal book (though I do not lreally ike to reduce books or computer programs to vessels). Most people would probably accept that one aspect of books is that they are things, one off artists' books are described by some people as art objects, differentiated from other types of books that are produced in multiple editions. Remediating the Phi Books into a computational film that is embeddded with a performance and receptive to specific situations is arguably only complicating things...

Left 'egg' and South book - my PhD project. A 'partcipatory' art work?

The Internationales Graduiertenkolleg "InterArt"International Research Training Group "Interart Studies" has given me a lot to think about since we got back from Berlin. Alexandra and I have both moved forward (I'm sure she wouldnt mind me saying) with our understanding of how metaphor has worked and could continue to work with our Phi Books Project.

We have now been considering what themes the reciprocal symposium might follow, I'm really interested in the idea of exploring participatory artworks - we had a good discussion about this in our Computing Department PhD group - I hope some of those present at that discussion will add their ideas to this new symposium: http://interartgoldsmiths.blogspot.com/

Eleanor Dare (PhD student, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths)