The Phi Books

Merging virtual with physical space by performing house stories

2010-12-13T06:52:00.000-08:00

Us in our dazzling motion capture outfits.

2010-12-13T05:07:00.000-08:00

Screen shot of our left hands as we spoke about our rooms, x, y, and Z.

13/12/10. We have now recorded six sessions, the first two talking about our rooms, today 4 captures - talking about our rooms, how we feel in them , important things that happened in them, we are testing the software in order to develop a consistent methodology, which will involve other users.

Interactive film-participation and consent

2010-06-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

London, March 2010, Goldsmiths University of London – Inter-Art symposium with Berlin and Copenhagen Universities

London-Phi fIlm-Games of participation

2010-06-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

Stockholm Conference- Stories is our life

2010-05-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

all started...before we meet

2010-04-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.mail-archive.com/netbehaviour@netbehaviour.org/msg05494.html

Berlin- Performing the books and asking people to expand Phi territories

2010-02-01T11:11:00.000-08:00

The paper we presented in Berlin which somehow got lost

2010-02-01T04:20:00.000-08:00

The paper we presented in Berlin which somehow got lost:
Eleanor Dare, Alexandra Antonopoulou:
Paper submission for “Interart Studies” at the Freie Universität Berlin

Phi Books: Research territories through narrative
A creative methodology for collaboration and thinking through practice

Abstract
Phi books is a paper based on a collaborative project between Alexandra Antonopoulou, a designer and children’s book writer-illustrator, and Eleanor Dare, a computer artist. The Phi books use the house as a metaphor for interdisciplinary collaboration. The two researcher-artists use narrative, making and performance to explore how borders, walls and doors facilitate collaboration. The paper interrogates the difficulties and pleasures of collaboration between different disciplines working within the same research field. The project uses, stories theory, drawings, maps, charts, found objects, photographs, dreams, spies, keys, overheard conversations and meta-critical observations.

The artists are going to present their interpretations on the project as a paradigm of joining their individual practices and ending up with a common result that celebrates both collaboration and individuality.

The project is a response to the inadequacy of historical models for both theorising and practicing creative research collaboration, and to an apparent lack of theoretical mobility across diverse disciplines. Both papers emphasise the co-constitution of theory and practice.

Introducing the Phi Books

In the spring and summer of 2009 Alexandra Antonopoulou and Eleanor Dare began an experimental research project which we are calling Phi Books: Research territories through narrative. The project resulted in the generation of two artist’s books, in other words the book form was our medium, in the same way that other artists might use paint, stone, or a programming language. Both of us have been individually involved with the book form as the ground for our creative practice and were interested to investigate ways in which we might work collaboratively. To clarify further, Stephen Bury defines Artists' books as ‘books or book-like objects over the final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control; where the book is intended as a work of art in itself’ (Bury, 1995).

But beyond this undemanding definition, we also wanted to investigate our own anxieties about collaboration. Our research areas were very similar, but they were different at the same time. This reminded us of English terraced houses; even if they all have the same architecture, they are different from the inside, as they are occupied by different people. The houses were a great metaphor for our research since they were enclosing the idea of ownership. How can you own your research and at the same time collaborate with a person who possesses the same territory? Do you have to put up walls?

What does taking possession of a place mean? As from when does somewhere become truly yours? Is it when you ‘ve put your three pair of socks to soak in a pink plastic bowl? Is it when you heated up your spaghetti over a camping-gaz? Is it when you used up all the non matching hangers in the cupboard? Is it when you’ve drawing pinned to the wall an old postcard showing Carpaccio’s ‘Dream of St Ursula’? Is it when you experienced there the throes of anticipation, or the exaltations of passion, or the torments of a toothache? Is it when you’ve hung suitable curtains on the windows, and put up the wall paper, and sanded the parquet flooring? (Perec, 1997, p. 24)

In our case though, it sounded much more ‘comfortable’. We both knew we had already been to each other’s ‘house’, to each other’s minds and it felt so natural to share our furniture and bits and pieces. This means that we were not afraid of each other because we had already shared ideas; but in this case there was also the title of our common project, that made things more formal. We were neighbours in two English houses: ‘The Phi houses’.

The two volume Phi Books that have emanated from our collaboration involve fiction writing as well as paper and digital models, photographs, drawings, notes, conversations, code segments, paintings, food, baths, trips to galleries, and observations of people and everyday life. As we shall explain in this paper the work is algorithmically based but also interrogates the difficulties and pleasures of both structured and extempore collaboration, while outlining some of the complex forms and interactions that both verbal and non-verbal researches can involve. Though each book is identified as either Alexandra’s or Eleanor’s book, they were in fact passed between us upon completion of each story, so that we wrote individually 6 stories , for each book, 24 stories in total, with separate pages of reflexive (or diffractive) journaling, and in addition a great deal of non-verbal material. So finally each book- house contained stories by both of us. We used this collaborative weaving of
narratives and the use of metaphor as a form of understanding each other, ourselves, and identifying out individual research area; The books therefore tell multiple stories, about characters, authors, research processes, negotiations, problems, creative provocations and our own lives.

As well as the question of inadequate historical models for theorising and practicing creative research, and the lack of theoretical mobility, the methodological and theoretical questions reflect our individual research interests; which is computation and artists’ books for Eleanor and ‘narrative in education, design and research’ for Alexandra. Eleanor’s questions include:

In what ways we can use both a priori analogical structures and heuristic play to facilitate explorative research processes?

How can computational processes be meaningfully re-mediated as aids to creative collaboration?

There is also an investigation into the limits of a priori structures for creative collaboration, and production, drawing upon theoretical critiques of rigid goal orientation as outlined, for example, by Hubert L Dreyfus (1972), Lucy Suchman (2005) Gaver and Sengers (2004) Gaver, Boucher, Pennington and Walker (2006).

Alexandra is using fairytale and storytelling elements, odd situations and secrets, families, cats and speaking plates of grapes mixed with theoretical references to explore the connection between narrative and identity; how performing self and collective identity affects collaborative territories; how research borders, walls and doors facilitate a constructive collaboration environment. She is also looking at authorship in design and she is exploring ideas of story writing and making as a form of understanding ourselves and communicating with each other. Her way of writing is very personalized with fantasy elements but she is equally using contrasting bits of theoretically referenced text. This is done to outline the potential of using narrative as a form of academic writing and the promotion of knowledge in a research setting.

In the performance that will now follow we will both show and tell the Phi Books, performing them in an attempt to convey the logic of our practice and its so-called ‘outcomes’. We wrote this paper the way we wrote the books, adding and responding to each others sentences thoughts and dreams with a view to communicating and reflecting upon our individual thoughts. But in framing our practice as adhering to some form of logic, we must as, Bourdieu entreats us, acknowledge that the logic of practice is ‘not that of the logician’ (Bourdieu, 1990:80).

We are weary, therefore, of imposing a misleading degree of coherence upon the books. While we take full responsibility for the project we still define it as a research exploration, acknowledging that there are many more rooms and chambers that we haven’t entered yet. We invite you now to join us in the society of phi-explorers and to enter the known and unknown territories of these two mysterious houses. We challenge you to add your own stories in our books by shaping our collective neighbourhood.

Room One

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1e

E: A book falls from a step-ladder; from the manner of its falling we can deduce that the room is small and sparsely furnished with few soft surfaces or modern comforts.
What kind of person would have a room like this, and what sort of book would they store, so recklessly, on top of a ladder?

A: Room one is a tiny room just 100 words. What could it fit in a tiny space of 10x10 words?

E: If we opened that book, no matter how battered, we would see that the story of room one is where this paper begins:

Although I know little about her it would be accurate to say that Elizabeth Cho is the closest person to me in the world. If, for some reason, we pressed ourselves flat like geckos against the party wall that separates our two homes there would be less than six inches between us. Her life resonates through the cool brick border. Recently I’ve moved my bed into the fifth room so I can hear her heart beating at night. It punctuates my sleep like the touch of an unborn twin.
A: At the same time in Alexandra’s house same room another story starts

‘The little prince was pale with anger, for millions of years flowers have been growing thorns and for millions of years sheep have still been eating flowers, and is it not worth trying to understand why they do go to such lengths to grow thorns which are of no use to them?’(The little prince, Antoine de Saint- Exupéry). We are all sheep flowers, we eat and being eaten.

E: I bet you are already asking yourselves why this story should be told. If you are optimistic you may be wondering what new things the authors will reveal, and if you are a pessimist you may be anticipating 40 minutes of Power-Point tedium followed by a luke-warm cup of tea.

A: The stories are followed by note pages that reflect upon our thinking and link our stories with theoretical referenced texts.

This piece is a metaphor for collaboration. I used the idea of sheep flower as a metaphor for the collaboration process. We all have thorns to protect ourselves but it is inevitable to be inspired by others and give inspiration to them. In our turn we are sheep taking from others even though they have thorns.

E: We value, rather than problematise the difficulties of communication and mutual understanding and the constant flux of our own conception of the project, and indeed, of the book form itself. Alexandra and I have been doing this intensively for the past few months - living cheek by jowl as they say, with only six inches of London Brick between us.

A: We enter each others house only to leave our response to each other’s story. For example, I am responding to Eleanor’s first story .

This is a voice from the flat next door. I am not a human; I am just a utopia machine, a placebo for my neighbours. I am helping them to hear their thoughts; they justify them through my existence. I might be an artificial pulse for the person living on the right of my flat, something completely different for someone else. I only wish there was another machine elsewhere, to hear myself ... the machine.

E: it is about the process of collaboration, the push and pull, the acceptance & the resistance, the learning and misunderstanding. I like it when we accept our differences as well as identifying our similarities

A: Each of us should comply with the rules of the other’s book. We set borders built walls and made compromises. Tight structures and territories were finally abolished to give birth to a wall-free collaboration. The rules were set from the very beginning raising worries about borders.

E: Have I understood Alexandra’s instructions? Will
she escalate the rules in complexity like the increasingly surreal rules of a tyrant? No blue ink on Wednesdays etc’

A: The collaboration is fundamentally processual in that we are engaged in thinking through doing, generating a dialogue that interrogates and connects both our theoretical and practice bases; As such we would frame ourselves as artist researchers

E: In keeping with the complex and multi-faceted meanings the notion of research by practice evokes, and as evidenced by theorists of research and practice such as Graeme Sullivan, Paul Carter, Barbara Bolt and Henk Slager.

Room Two

Room 2 is testimony to my rocky position. It is a room so blank as to form an anti-room. Matter collapses in room 2. It resembles a waiting-room but it’s rarely witness to anything more substantial than a lingering dread.

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E: Listen to that – how room two would sound if the same book fell from the same ladder. It didn’t actually fall - that would be stretching a point too far. But the model serves a purpose;

A: At the same time, writing about my room 2, incidentally or rather intuitively, I am also speaking for blank spaces deleted memory, blank spaces and falling books, placed in our shared past, a library space.

Room 2 is a room of 200 words. It is the room where I delete my memory. I do that quite often but I have to refill it again.200 words are not enough to fill a deleted mind, so i had to find a way to fit more words in a 200 word room. This is the reason that Room number 2 is a library. Memory deleted, the dash of my mind goes on and off. The only thing remained is diving in the alleys of the books. Sleepwalking guided by the books numbers, I feel like a blind mouse guided by the book voices. I have to put them all in place otherwise I will be punished. Sometimes I put them in wrong place on purpose to separate them from their friends and family. They are suddenly between other books with different interest; they hesitantly talk to them. When they return to their right selves they have new stories to tell. Certain books fall all the time in my head, they want to fill my mind with words, they scream, read me you fool...but i am just blind mouse.

2e

E: Sorry to hark on about George Polya, but the point of the impulse response, (or reverberation) is to ‘express certain relations which are common to the two systems of objects’ we are attempting to compare, that is Room 2 in my flat and Room 2 – in my neighbours flat, which is the uncanny mirror image of my own home, though it contains different objects and different atmospheres. But we are also analogising two subjects: Alexandra and myself or the characters Kay Fairborn and Elizabeth Cho. As Professor Polya put its: ‘The analogy of these systems consists in this community of relations’ (37). Building a community of relations has been the architectural foundation for the Phi Books, to find our path and place, materials and textures, and initially the correct proportions with which to model the project. If you are lost I am performing the books accurately, if you are not lost I have simplified this project to an unhelpful degree.

A: Topics of identity through narrative have already been initiated. Rooms 1 and 2 whisper secrets about our different family environments, and how those shaped our collective identity.

E: ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle. The attitude I have to my own home seems stereotypically English, it’s a neurotic fortress of insulation’

A: In my family we all lived together as a big team.

Being in a very vivid family environment full of relatives, voices, rooms crammed with beds, big table to fit everyone, many plates and cups, it is out of question to have your own space. You have to share, give and be quiet. You gain the information like the library does by being quiet and holding the information concentrated. You are becoming invisible and you take some space without asking, without screaming and demanding. Gaining space as a family tactic. A purple fox has just stolen n apple from a brown squirrel.

Room three

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E: The algorithm is apparent here as a visceral, embodied experience, it enters your ears and agitates the finest hairs, the astute among you will realise that room three is three times larger than room one. Room 3 resembles a shabby bed-sit with a hazardous gas fire and squalid cooking facilities.

A: Room 3 is a room of 300 words. Room 4 is a room of 500 words. Room 5 is a room of 800 words. Room 6 is a room of 1300 words.

3e

E: The algorithm we have deployed defines the ‘volume’ for each section following the Fibonacci sequence yielded from the architecture of the Phi houses, or mise-en-scène, for each story reflects the proportions of the fictitious rooms, and thus the progression of the books encompasses the irrational mathematical constant of the golden (or Phi) ratio, which is approximately 1.6180339887. The so called irrationality of the infinite sequence lies in the fact that it cannot be counted and is therefore beyond the imagining of human subjects. The Fibonacci sequence yielded from the sides of the rooms defined within the golden rectangle schema exemplifies a recursive and perpetual form of regeneration, in which all definitions reduce to a base case[1]. Despite the reassuring clarity and solidity of this schema in room four I wrote:

It’s clear my attempts to dissect room 4 rationally, along established geometric ratios, are not helping. I am more befuddled than ever. My thoughts are an unstable compound of second-order translations and miss-hearings.

E: Room Four.

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E: A book falls from a ladder; it lands with a sharp crack like a whip or a firecracker. The book is bursting from its bindings; it contains many different sheets of drawings, notes, collages, found objects, messy pastel pages and loose sheets of transparent papers. Despite its chaotic appearance the briefest examination of the book reveals an inherent structure that will be familiar to many people.

4e

A: The books often tell stories about our individual research interests. Through the chaotic drawings and poetic words we built structures to theorize and think through narrative and making. Room number 5 for example hosts the story of the table to express my thoughts about authorship in design process using food as a metaphor. The literature for my research is based on the ideas of death and return of the author of Barthes, Foucault and Deridda (Burke,1998); they are also based on postproduction ideas about remaking (Bourriaud, 2002).

‘The room where the food is prepared is the most creative room, where the food is being made and eaten. It takes a lot of fantasy to get that right. Furthermore, it takes a lot of talent to enjoy your food and even more to share it…

Preparation and re-making
I always array all my ingredients on the table and prepare my meal, in front of my guests. I do not believe in secret recipes. This is the reason everything happens on the table, so everyone can see what I am doing. I particularly enjoy when someone tries to repeat my recipe. I think that this is the whole point and success, to spread your recipes and see how other people are remaking them. (…) I would be happy if they make the effort to remake the food and I would be grateful if they let me taste it. I would be satisfied if they appreciate that their food is different and let other people see how they made it.(…) Even a clever cat can prepare the same recipe, but the result will always be different.’

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Room 5

E: I enter room five, but things aren’t much clearer in there either:

The room the door opens into is plain and uncluttered, there’s a table, two chairs. An empty white dinner plate glows at the centre of the table, an unlit and unused night-light sits in a glass saucer beside the plate. An old-fashioned tape cassette player is also on the table. It looks in many ways like room 5, but none of my furniture is here. I don’t recognise any of these things

A: The tape recorder was an artificial voice. A voice that made us wonder about our identity. That made us unable to recognise ourselves. We have become something different through the process but still not similar to each other.

There was something familiar in the voices’ tone. Something very personal. It was not me but it was my performing self. I know…now I know, now I remember. This is it. The first voice was me performing. It was like back then when I was a child, I was changing my voice to pretend I was my brother, my teacher, an airplane, a basket, a silent piece or a screaming plate of grapes.(…) I remember that voice changing the names of my relatives, creating fictional characters(…). This voice was the one transforming everything into something else. She was transforming me to something else too, she was making up new dialogues and thoughts. She was using mottos from the TV and comics. Was that voice mine? Were those thoughts my own?’

‘I am the voice of the book you are writing on, your thoughts belong to me, you are part of the white pages, plain material, ink and paper, you belong to everyone that holds me, you do not exist on your own. I am the carnival, I am what others see, I belong to everyone and you belong to me

E: Was there room for such confusion in this project? How might we deal with the fuzziness and chaos of our own practices, should we ignore them, suppress or work with these disturbances? Alexandra was already beginning to show signs of rebellion against her own a priori structures, and I was also weary of making my work an illustration of theory to be swept up in what Barbara Bolt describes as the ‘totalisation of theory’:

Theorists or logicians of practice tend to approach the task of theorising practice as a dressmaker approaches the task of making a garment. Using theoretical schemas or patterns, shapes are “cut out” from the continuous flow of practices. These shapes are inverted and then become metonymic[2] for the practices they purport to describe or explain. The part becomes the whole. In the totalisation of theory, Bourdieu claims, the “fuzziness” of practice is replaced by the demarcation of semi-academic artefact. (Bolt, 2004:4)

And in the delineation of this semi-academic artefact the unruly truth of practice is, Bolt observes, in danger of being all but negated, including our ‘understanding of the art work as a process’ (5).

Room 6
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E:

5e

Elizabeth (or is it Alexandra?) is Hoovering. While my own unit makes its babyish gurgling sounds the droning machine next door is knocking against the adjoining wall in room six, over and over, pushing at the skirting board, as if Elizabeth/Alexandra is trying to expand the territory of her own room, attempting through force to push the walls back towards me.

The force that I could feel through the walls of my own deterministic structures was uncertainty, Gaver et al (2004) describe this ‘pervasive sense of uncertainty’ (2004) in positive terms, acknowledging the value of ‘play, exploration and subjective interpretation’ (1), particularly in response to the limits of our knowledge. In the context of such an intensive collaboration as that which we engaged upon in producing the Phi Books, it seems right to acknowledge and perhaps even to capitalize upon the limits of our mutual understanding, exploration, is after all, about entering unknown territories. In my relationship to the Phi Books project the unknown territory was both the practice and the inter-subjective, creative, engagement with Alexandra. In a strong sense our subjectivities, like the book form itself are also medium specific elements within this project.

A: By the time we reached room six, I had already instigated a full scale rebellion against the phi ratios, bursting out of their numerical constraints and inviting readers to do the same by writing their own stories. I felt that the story should be at the same space with the theory, as narrative writing is next to referenced text. I went back to previous stories and draw, filling the void space; I was a rebel, I wanted to celebrate that. Eleanor joined in the rebellion by reverting to code, which is, of course, a type of language,. At the same she wrote in my territory, tunnelling into one of my rooms, and leaving words as provocations. She used stardust in her illustrations and these specks of shiny little dots where transferred into the whole book. That was the collaborative contamination. The walls were built to be broken down, when we felt that our rules were well established and not needed anymore. We loved both books equally.

Conclusion
In light of our recognition of the inadequacy or absence of models for theorising our creative research, we should consider now in conclusion the following orthodox academic questions:

How to evaluate this project?
How to ‘generalise’ it?
What are the most important consequences of the project?
What advances in knowledge did we make?

In answer to these questions we draw upon our experiences of both Human Computer Interaction and arts practice, in which networks of validity as James McAllister calls them are analogous to scientifically validating networks or laboratories. James McAllister boldly states that artworks do ‘contain knowledge about the world’ (McAllister in Slager, 2004:10) But, as he points out the networks of validation artists experience include other artists, ‘galleries, curators, critics and so on’ (11). McAllister suggests that ‘communication of an artwork would also count as an empirical success’ (12) but that research does not consist of ‘think-pieces to accompany works of art or exhibitions. Rather the research exists in the works of art themselves’ (12).

One of the consequences of this project has been the questions we have generated, such as:

What is a book?
Is the book form performable?
Can books be written by humans via methods and procedures more familiar to computation?
How can artists communicate openly with each other during collaborative processes?
How do we generate and disseminate expansive ideas while maintaining some degree of narrative coherence?
How can narrative writing be used as a methodology for research projects?
How making in conjunction with narrative may lead to design innovation?

Stephen Wilson states in (1996) that we contribute to research by defining new questions, but also, at times, by ‘using systematic investigative processes to develop new technological possibilities or to discover useful new knowledge or perspectives’ (Stephen Wilson, 1996: 7). The Phi Books may be framed as a technology[3] or craft and saying, to revert, with Alexandra’s permission to the Greek origins of the word, but also, in the case of the Phi Books a system and a method of organization, albeit a method that was embedded with the productive possibility of its own destruction. Indeed the possibility of destroying our own methods might be framed as an aspect of the Phi Book methodology, or ecological intersubjectivity, which, to quote Graeme Sullivan ‘acknowledges that the self and others are reflective and reflexive beings. This suggests that meaning is not contained within a form itself, say a person, painting or a poem, but exists within a network of social relations and discourse’ (Sullivan, 2005:43), to paraphrase Paul Carter, we embrace a system that participates in the world’s complexity rather than eliminating it (Carter, 2004: XII).

Though the methods we used in producing the books are in part reproducible, this has not been my own goal, ‘generalization, repeatability, and quantification’ (Slager, 2004:2) as Slager states are not the characteristic qualities of arts research, rather ‘artistic research is directed towards unique, particular, local knowledge’ (2), but its singularity and situatedness should not negate its value or status as knowledge.

In the complexity of interacting with another writer, we resorted to visual, non-verbal models as a heuristics for gaining insight into our own anxieties about collaboration, in particular the extensive non-determinism of working inter-subjectively. These models have represented a significant break-through in the context of my own research, in which spatialising the book form has opened up new areas of investigation. The models may be seen as an epistemic shift but not an opposition to other modes of generating knowledge; they have also engendered deeper thinking about the relationships of geography to language and of the possibilities for performing the book form.[4]

The Phi Books project has illuminated naturalised, and we should add, internalised notions of what Bill Gaver and Phoebe Sengers describe in relation to HCI as ‘single, specific, clear‘ (Gaver and Sengers, 2006 1) interpretations of what systems are for and ‘how they should be used and experienced’ (1), this recognition has enabled us to step away from the ‘presumption that a specific, authoritative interpretation of the systems we build is necessary, possible or desirable’ (1), and that the expectation for this in others – including academia can be countered with credible epistemic tools and techniques.
To conclude we quote from Stephen Wilson’s paper Art as Research, though it was written over 13 years ago it seems as prescient as ever, serving as both a warning and as an encouragement to unorthodox forms of research practice in the arts:

Valuable lines of inquiry die from lack of support because they are not within favor of particular scientific disciplines. New technologies with fascinating potential are abandoned because they are judged not marketable. Our culture must develop methods to avoid the premature snuffing of valuable lines of inquiry and development. I believe the arts can fill a critical role as an independent zone of research. (Wilson, 1996:1)

[Finishing sound]

Technical notes:
Impulse response modelling was achieved via the Voxengo Impulse Modeller; Eleanor also recorded a book falling then imported it into Cubase where the SIR VST native audio plug-in used the impulse response files to generate an authentic reverberation for each room in the Phi house. The Processing code in story 6 is based on a section of a language generating program from Eleanor’s PhD project South: A psychometric text adventure. We both used parts of our individual PhD research within the books. The books were a chance to discuss our research fields and filter them through narrative. We cannot separate this project from our greater research. ‘Creative knowledge cannot be abstracted by the loom that produced it. Inseparable from its process, it resembles the art of sending the woof-thread through the warp.’ (Carter, 2004, p.1). The installation is a physical map of the Phi books’s neighbourhood. It is very important that we placed the books in space representing houses. Around the books there are piles of papers, representing other houses that invite the audience to write their own stories, as Alexandra does in the room 6. The piles of paper shape a constantly changing scenery as people add or take papers from the pile.

Bibliography

Antonopoulou, Alexandra and Dare, Eleanor (2009) Phi Books, Book A, artists’ book.

Antonopoulou, Alexandra and Dare, Eleanor (2009) Phi Books, Book E, artists’ book.

Bolt, Barbara (2004) Art beyond Representation, I.B Tauris.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1990) The Logic of Practice, Polity Press.

Bourriaud,.N. (2002), Postproduction: culture as screenplay : how art reprograms the world, Lukas &Sternberg, New York

Burke,.S. (1998), The Death and return of the author : criticism and subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, Endiburgh University Press, Edinburgh

Bury. S (1995) Artists' Books: The Book as a Work of Art, 1963-1995, Scolar Press.

Carter, Paul (2004) Material Thinking, Melbourne University Press.

Francé, Raoul, Heinrich (1920) The Plant as an Inventor, Kosmos, Stuttgart.

Polya, George (1957) How To Solve It, Doubleday Anchor.

Sullivan, Graeme (2005) Art Practice as Research, Sage.

Papers:

Gaver, Bill, Sengers, Phoebe (2006) StayingOopen to Interpretation: Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design and Evaluation, Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems (2006), pp. 99-108.
Available here: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142422
Accessed 20/08/09

William W. Gaver ,Andrew Boucher, Sarah Pennington, Brendan Walker (2004) Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty,
Available here:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1015555
Accessed 20/08/09

Slager, Henk, (2004) Methododicy, Lier en Boog, Vol. 18, No. 1. (20 February 2004), pp. 12-31, available here: http://www.citeulike.org/article/26172
Accessed 17/08/09

Wilson, Stephen (1996) Art as Research
Available here: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson/ Accessed 20/08/09
[1] Ignoring the seed values, each remaining number is the sum of the previous two or F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2), for integer n > 1. Both the golden section and the Fibonacci sequence have been used in numerous design processes, the myth exists that it was used to establish the proportions of the Parthenon in Athens (though this is often disputed) and also to design Stradivarius violins. The composers Bartók and Debussy also reputedly used the ratios as compositional determinants. Agents A and E were drawn to the historical continuity of this schema, arguably to bolster their sense of having an aesthetic provenance despite their otherwise arriviste or outsider status as artist-theorisers.
[2] ‘Metonymy is a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government or of the sword for military power.’ Available at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Metonymic Accessed 19/08/09
[3] Technology or "technologia", "τεχνολογία" — "techne", "τέχνη" ("craft") and "logia, "λογία" ("saying").[
[4] For example the walks I have choreographed for the South Bank area which enact historical, geometric modes of book design.

2010-01-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

images from the Phi books

2010-01-02T07:35:00.001-08:00

Collaboration and individuality

2010-01-02T06:40:00.000-08:00

This is a Cartoon of a skyscraper, published in Life's magazine’s “Real Estate Number” of March, 1909.The full-page cartoon by A.B. Walker shows conventional houses stacked on an open skyscraper frame. Its caption reads, “‘Buy a cozy cottage in our steel constructed choice lots, less than a mile above Broadway. Only ten minutes by elevator. All the comforts of the country with none of its disadvantages.’ – Celestial Real Estate Company”

R. Koolhaas extensively analyzed this cartoon in his seminal book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978, pp.69-70)'Each of the 84 stories is treated as “virgin site” - each site reflects a range of different social aspirations as if all the other did not exist The lack of program holding the whole structure together therefore allows multiple
activities / futures = reduction in predictability = inability to ‘plot’ culture

This cartoon reminded me of our project. It is like Phi books -Slide 1we worked together with Eleanor, we produced a common project, like the scyscraper, and then we wrote papers expressing our different interpretations on the project as a paradigm of joining their individual practices and ending up with a common result that celebrates collaboration and individuality.

Ourselves, as personalities, but also our professional training (me as a designer and Eleanor as computer artist) often brought us in front of different perceptions and ways of doing things. I think that I am looking at the project as a design product, thinking of how it can be packaged, promoted, structured to be functional and easily understood by the audience while Eleanor considers it more of an artistic practice.

2009-12-13T12:07:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-12-07T09:58:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-11-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

My study is full of books. I try to keep them on shelves but there isn't enough space so some are on the floor under the shelves, some on the furniture, and when I write gradually they circle me, on the desk round the lap-top and round my chair on the floor. Then I have to return them all - there is a system or rather systems. The theory books are fairly chronological, Marx to Bourdieu mainly, though anything using psychoanalysis is alphabetical, as are also the feminist critical books .
[141 words]
There are also shelves for library books and books borrowed from other people, a shelf, quite haphazard, for modernism, (that fits), a Pound section, a H.D section, an anthropological theory section - though lots of books there are not really anthropological at all, but fit to me - all alphabetically - though Native American and.... [narrative ends]

Berlin, 17/11/09: reader-contributor Berlin_d

2009-11-22T06:13:00.000-08:00

Gemütlichkeit/Cosiness

Atmosphäre/Atmsophere

Metapher/Metaphor

Traum/Dream

Einbildung/Imagination

Begriff/Concept

Bücher/Books

Berlin, 17/11/09: reader-contributor Berlin_c

2009-11-20T12:08:00.000-08:00

Berlin, 17/11/09:

It is a moment with room 3 and was it only 400 words that form the impression of 'housing the self'' in a place of no wallpaper and no colour. What is an impression of sorting out an area, of no comfort; where do you sit? Where do you lie? Describe how a moment might enter the play of enclosure, doorlessness. Where is the light? How is it that one can move from a to b; there is nothing to bump into, nothing to slip on - babel and babble, door knobs and frames, windows, no curtains, the tunnelling into a space at the corner of a room, finding an exit, getting suffocated in a room of only 400 words.

Reader-contributor Berlin_a

2009-11-19T13:40:00.000-08:00

17/11/09, Berlin:

My immediate response is to draw in the spiral. Then I notice that the left-hand spiral is a rather elaborate bass clef. Then you tell us where the road is, and the garden, so I decide to draw them in. But what abides is a wandering abput what it would be like to live in a Fibonacci house. I saw from one of the books that you had constructed 3-D models of the houses. My urge then is to treat them as dolls houses, to furnish and people them, to make them materiallly inhabited. As they are, their materiality is in the books: they are materialised as texts, not as houses. That was 112 words. So does it spill out of room 1, or leave part of room 2 empty? (and actually in the 'real' Fibonacci sequence there are two 100 word rooms, so rooms 1 and 2 both have 100 words...) Two ensuite bathrooms maybe?

Reader-contributor Berlin_b

2009-11-19T03:12:00.000-08:00

[Reverb sound: rev2.wav]

E: Listen to that – how room two would sound if the same book fell from the same ladder. It didn’t actually fall - that would be stretching a point too far. But the model serves a purpose;

A: At the same time, writing about my room 2, incidentally or rather intuitively, I am also speaking for blank spaces deleted memory, blank spaces and falling books, placed in our shared past, a library space.

It feels like our first formal presentation, or performance, of the Phi Books at the inter-art symposium in Berlin went well, it seems to have been accepted as a hybrid form of research schloarship and fiction. At lesast we both had a positive sense of it working as a perfomance and

received lots of encouraging feedback. The next step might be to perfom the books within a theatre setting, involving some of our new reader-contrbutors in voicing their own pieces about the house - or the extended Phi neighbourhood. Another possibility is to bind the contrbutions from each performance into a new generation of Phi Book, so that we might create a phi city from these burgeoning structures. Carrie and Janis asked how we would organise the new materials - at first we suggested categorising them in terms of length, but perhaps a temporal classification or organisation might make more sense...hence generations of new books.

2009-11-13T01:15:00.000-08:00

Describe your favourite room (or part of a room) where you live:

My room is massive in size. It has white walls with big posters. The posters are randomly generated computer images with strong colours. The room has solid sound insulation, and I can play my music really loud. Classical, rock, pop and all sorts. In one corner there is a sofa bed on wheels and a massive 64" TV screen, it feels like a cinema without the popcorn machine. [I think this is a fantasy room ?- ED]

Have you ever looked in into someone elses's house? Find a vanatge point where you can see someone else in their house (or a memory of this). Describe what you see and feel:

I feel embarassed as I am looking into the bedroom of one of my close friends, but not initmately close. I don't know their love habits but can imagine it now, I see dirty socks and an unmade bed with cups of tea leisurely disguarded all over the room. I feel like an intruder, but at the same time I know I am judging.
JM - reader/contributor 2009

Describe your favourite room (or part of a room) where you live:

I would say my favourite room is my bedroom, because I can forget all of my worries from the day. It's quite a small room with wonky wooden floors and a big Victorian sash window that doesn't fit very well, so there's always a draft in the room. I'm so used to that draft if I sleep in another room it feels claustrophobic and airless, but at first the draft drove me mad. If I get up in the night I like the feel of the wonky floorboards under my feet and the squeaky sounds they make, like they are talking to me or guiding me in the night.....

AP reader-contributor 2009

2009-11-12T08:39:00.001-08:00

Have you ever looked into someone else’s house? Find a vantage point where you can see someone else in their house, describe what you see and feel:
The man in the apartment is in such a hurry, he opens one of those trouser press machines and puts the trousers in a small suitcase. To see this makes me feel lonely and almost desolate. His flat is so empty of soft things; there are few photographs or pictures or cushions or nice curtains, instead he has metal blinds and a metal framed mirror. I am reminded of my worst times. I want to look away, at the sun or at trees or anything that is alive and hopeful.
MS reader-contributor 2009

2009-11-11T06:56:00.001-08:00

I do not understand, nor can I begin to outline my origins, destinations, purposes and meanings. ‘Who am I?’ the machine voices murmur, spitefully replicating my own apprehensions as I wonder from room to room trying to retrace events that mutate before I can rationally grasp them. ‘Who am I’ and which objects, spaces and memories will answer this question? I am convinced that my identity is entangled with this building, that answers are hidden in its materials and geometric relations; though we are so unalike I am certain that my belief in the secret relations of surfaces and structures links me significantly to Elizabeth Cho. Does she know this? What I hear and feel through the stolid walls of this restless building tells me that she does. She is as lost as I am but where she is lost in numbers and numeric systems I am lost in my own origins. extract from room 3.2

New pdf of our Berlin presentation, we need to change aspects of this, like the introduction and conclusion, also Ive changed some parts of the text to make more sense in light of some changes we made earlier:
http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma501ed/berlin.pdf

2009-11-07T10:56:00.000-08:00

In Britain, the standard modern brick is about 8.5 × 4 × 2.5 inches; there are elegant variations on this form, bricks with complex interior cavities that facilitate both insulation and fortitude, the ideal characteristics for any British home.

2009-11-07T07:35:00.000-08:00

Our abstract for the Internationales Graduiertenkolleg "InterArt"International Research Training Group "Interart Studies"Freie Universität Berlin 16-18 November 2009:

I would describe the Phi books project as generating knowledge for reflexive action, with all the problems that the word reflexive entails, it still feels like its been a constructive, dynamic and expansive practice. Phi Books Research Journal, November 2009, available at :
http://phibooksland.blogspot.com/

Phi books is a collaborative project between Alexandra Antonopoulou, a designer and children’s book writer-illustrator, and Eleanor Dare, a computer artist. The Phi books use the house as a metaphor for interdisciplinary collaboration. The two researcher-artists use narrative, making and performance to explore how borders, walls and doors facilitate collaboration. The paper interrogates the difficulties and pleasures of collaboration between different disciplines working within the same research field. The project uses, stories, theory, drawings, maps, charts, found objects, photographs, dreams, spies, keys, overheard conversations and meta-critical observations.The artists have written papers based on their interpretations of the project, chracterising their joint work as a paradigm for joining individual practices, leading to a result that celebrates both collaboration and individuality.The project is a response to the inadequacy of historical models for both theorizing and practicing creative research collaboration, and to an apparent lack of theoretical mobility across diverse disciplines. Both papers emphasize the co-constitution of theory and practice.

2009-11-07T07:19:00.000-08:00

link to our paper for the Berlin Inter Art Symposium:
http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma501ed/aE.pdf

2009-11-07T00:37:00.000-08:00

Though I can describe the room in some detail it is hard to conceive of a dependable specification for it. The words I composed previously are quite inconsistent with my current perception of both events and structures, I’m not even sure if it was I who really formulated them. Such doubts are a steady feature of room 3, that and the fact that one enters it via a prolapsed waiting room, a system of intricate, humid tunnels that correspond to some sort of digestive process ..

I've made two, full colour, mini phi books, they are quite crudely constructed, but look good from a distance! Hopefully I'll make better versions after doing a bookbinding course in the new year.. back to back inside the case they are like terraced houses, they feel solid yet inter-dependent, a structural collaboration (Eleanor)

2009-11-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

Who built this library and all the other sections encompassed by room 4? The architect of these structures represents an intelligence beyond anything my parents could assemble. The architecture feels ancient; perhaps it was erected by insects or grew organically from the Earth? I do not suggest this facetiously, I can only guess the origins of these pedagogic structures. As to the key, there are many books in the great library with padlocked covers and impregnable casings.

So we've got about two weeks until we present our Phi Books project in Berlin. Al,eaxandra and I are meeting on Thursday to make components for our installation - pages copied from the books arranged in map-like configurations with spaces for participants to add their own contributions, we'll add these to this journal/blog (unless they say our work is idiotic or something? Maybe that would be amusing). Alexandra is designing a great program, but she says she doesnt like it, I particuarly like the arrangement of quotes from our books - it reminded me of a book cover and play program - but she's going to change it so no point in harking on...