Warren Ellis's Blog, page 174

SVK

Finally, one of my sekrit projects has poked its head into the light of day.  That which was Project Blacklight has been announced by BERG: it's called SVK.

This is the announcement post on the BERGblog.

SVK is a short graphic novella I'm writing, to be illustrated by my old mate Matt Brooker, the artist generally known as D'Israeli.  This'll be the first substantial work we've done together in… christ, nigh on 20 years, since LAZARUS CHURCHYARD.

And it's to be published by BERG, the London design consultancy group.

Regular readers of this site will know BERG well.  For the rest of you, check out their work — you might well find you realise you already knew them.

SVK is about… well, SVK stands for a few things, including "Surveillance, Very Kafka."  In one meeting I also described the book as "Franz Kafka's Bourne Identity," which seems to have stuck.

The story, concerning a recovery agent and a thing lost that should probably never have been made, is set in London.  So it has to be about surveillance at some level, as London is probably the most surveilled city in the world, one estimate pegging the level at one CCTV camera to every eight people.  At any one time, in fact, a fifth of the world's  CCTV cameras are live in the UK.

There is an interesting and possibly unique physical aspect to the book that we're not discussing right now.  But BERG are very good at making things that are about perception, like the (pre-INCEPTION!) Here And There map.  When Jack Schulze at BERG came to me with the core idea that SVK's built on, I knew I had to at least try this, just to see if it'd work…!  It's going to be a surprise, I think, and this sort of envelope-tampering is only going to happen somewhere like BERG.  Strange Vector of a Komik.

Also, there are going to be strange and lovely opportunities for a few advertisers therein.  Not quite product placement.  Details at the BERG link.

SVK will be with you next spring.

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FREAKANGELS 0118

Back on the air.

The End Of Del.icio.us

Well, apparently Yahoo! is closing down del.icio.us.  I just exported my bookmarks out of there (probably with all the fucking tags missing) and am deciding where to move my bookmarking to.  Probably Google Bookmarks, if there's a decent extension.  Reeder doesn't support Google Bookmarks tagging, so I'll have to email my bookmarks to myself and then load them in later.   I still find Evernote a bit jerky and slow, and the Evernote extension for Chrome has a mind of its fucking own.  Del.icio.us was smooth and fast and simple, and I will miss it terribly.

Hey, Yahoo?  Running del.icio.us cost you pennies, and bought you so much goodwill.  Now you're just another of those scumfucks who acquires great services just to bury them.  But then, firing all those people before Xmas really showed what kind of people you are anyway, didn't it?  "Oh, we didn't want people to spend too much money at Xmas and then fire them in January with that extra debt on their shoulders."  Right.

Everyone I know is currently working out how to back all their photos off Flickr, in case that's next.  The thinking being, if Yahoo didn't know what they had with del.icio.us, they're not going to know what they have with Flickr.  Which is a fair point.

To Joshua Schachter, and everyone else who worked on del.icio.us — thank you so much.  It made my working life so much easier, you can't imagine.

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Black And White

My friends are always so quick to throw me under the bus. Katie West's new book of photography is available for sale, and apparently it's all my fault:

A long time ago Warren Ellis suggested I make a black and white photobook; something that didn't cost an arm and a leg to get printed, something that anyone could pick up by way of print-on-demand, something that people from the internet could afford to buy five of – if they felt so inclined. It was, of course, a great idea, and I wanted to do it, but I got distracted by a few things. Or maybe just one thing: life.

But that's the entire point of this: here is my life of the past year and a bit laid out in a collection of 76 black and white photographs. Some of them are terrifically sad, as I suffered many losses and a bout of self-inflicted heartbreak during this time; some are ridiculously happy, as I learned to be better at recognizing happiness; many are concerned with my body and sexuality, as those are issues I've always been interested in and during the past couple years I've been confronted with a lot of criticism and revelations about the representation of my body in my photography. You don't see anyone else from my life, or actual things I might do day-to-day, but you do see how I feel about the moments and events that end up changing me.

[image error]

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GUEST INFORMANT: Rita J King

Rita J King and I got talking on Twitter a while ago. She's one of those scary people who can seemingly do anything: writer and journalist, futurist, Senior Fellow at two think-tanks, an Innovator In Residence at IBM, artist, public speaker and I give up. She's currently exploring what she calls "hybrid realities," which very broadly speaking could encompass storytelling, the digital world and the public event. I asked her to write to you about whatever thing interested her today, and this is what she wrote:

Artists, writers and cartographers who can imagine the magnificence of the Seven Seas should check out the guidelines for participating in the story of the Levitating Mermaid.

The story is that the Levitating Mermaid is in possession of a massive trove of secret letters, with the Imaginary Sailor, Balthazar, in hot pursuit across the Seven Seas, described here by the 9th century AD author Ya'qubi:

"Whoever wants to go to China must cross seven seas, each one with its own color and wind and fish and breeze, completely unlike the sea that lies beside it."

* Sea of Fars ends at a strait where pearls are fished.

* Larwi is massive, filled with islands that have kings. It can only be sailed by starlight and contains many wonders that are beyond description.

* Harkand has an island filled with precious stones and rubies.

* Kalah is shallow and filled with huge serpents that ride the wind and smash ships.

* Salahit is large and filled with wonders.

* Kardanj is very rainy.

* The Sea of Sanji, the final crossing, is the sea of China.

The site contains handwritten letters written to and from the Levitating Mermaid and the Imaginary Sailor, as well as glimpses of the trove of secret letters in her possession. Balthazar's passion is letter writing (the results are sometimes, but not always, NSFW, like his site), which is how I met him when I requested a letter.

The story has just begun, so now is the time to become a character in this electrifying global art caper.

Follow artist, adventurer and entrepreneur Rita J. King on Twitter (@ritajking).

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SPECIAL SOUND, Page 29

SPECIAL SOUND: The Creation And Legacy Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Louis Niebur. Page 29. Excuse shitty iPhone photo of the page in question, no time to run the scanner tonight:

Further down the page, there's also this:

…he disavowed its comparison to music by noting that the BBC has chosen the term 'radiophonic' over the more controversial musique concrete and that the work they are to hear is a completely new genre, the radiophonic poem… 'a poetic experience that only exists in terms of a sound complex.'

These were the days, you see, when you could hear Samuel Beckett plays on the (national) radio, and producers realised that the only way his bad dreams could be presented in audio was to accompany them with dream-sounds that could not occur in reality.

I don't know that there's anything in British radio that continues this today, beyond the work done at Resonance FM. You could, if you felt so inclined, probably draw a line between the 1956 BBC radio production of Beckett's ALL THAT FALL and, say, the latter work of Moon Wiring Club.  The connection between the radiophonic and the supernatural, of course, remains strong in the work of many purveyors of the Confusing English Electronic Music — Belbury Poly and the Broadcast And The Focus Group project to name but two.

(Go here for Moon Wiring Club's six favourite pieces of Confusing English Electronic Music in 2010.)

I was talking with Adam Drucker — cLOUDDEAD, Doseone, Anticon and the co-composer of the music for Alan Moore's most recent spoken word piece, UNEARTHING — the other day, when it occurred to me that Bandcamp would be the most perfect home for the radiophonic production.

Anyway, completely random, just wanted to get the bookmark and the thoughts down before they vanished into the ether…

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Links for 2010-12-15

The Spoken History of Rural Britain Goes Online
George Ewart Evans, the pioneer of British oral history, collected 250 recordings of around 170 individuals born largely in the 1880's and '90s.
(tags:history )

Modern Times

"Made with no money, just a little time and a lot of passion," the filmmakers say.

MODERN TIMES from BC2010 on Vimeo.

D.O.P: Richard Mountney

Lighting and Camera assistants:

Simon Mountney, Tom Mountney and Robin Mair

Film Excerpts and Music used under a strictly non-profit basis.

Urushi Musical Interface

Urushi Musical Interface from Yuri Suzuki on Vimeo.

"A project for Collacqueration: Designed in the UK – Lacquered in Japan – exhibition at Embassy of Japan in the UK."

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TWO-STEP Out From Today

Out today in North America, from tomorrow in the UK and elsewhere, collecting the miniseries from the early 2000s that I wrote for Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti to draw.

He's a Zen gangster boy. She's a bored girl with a camera. They don't fight crime.

We hope you like it.

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