(a very brief history)
In 2007 I was asked by artist (and McKnight Photography Fellow) Monica Haller to assist her in designing a book from content that was the culmination of a three-year conversation between Haller and Iraq War Veteran, Riley Sharbonno. The resulting book, Riley and his story., has just been released in a second edition by onestar press — and our collaborative efforts have continued over the years.

More recently, as part of the Veterans Book Project, Monica has been conducting workshops around the country with small groups of people similarly affected by current and past military conflicts. For use in these workshops Monica and I collaborated with new media designer Mark Fox to develop a lightweight software program that enables non-designers to easily assemble their own book in a spirit akin to the Riley book.

Veterans Book Project, software screenshot

(present day)
Today, on Veterans Day, NPR will be airing a segment about the Riley book and the Veterans Book Project during the program State of the Re:Union. The story will replay throughout November and will be available on the SOTRU web site. Also happening today: we are launching the brand new web site for the project, where you can read more about the project, view (or download) all of the current books, keep up to date with upcoming workshops, read blog posts by past workshop participants, and much more.

veteransbookproject.com homepage

(more about the project, taken from veteransbookproject.com)
The Veterans Book Project is a library of books authored collaboratively by artist Monica Haller and dozens of people who have been affected by, and have archives of, the current American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their printed format, the books provide a place or “container” that slows down and materializes the great quantity of ephemeral image files that live on veterans’ hard drives and in their heads.

Each book re-deploys volatile images with the aim of rearticulating and refashioning memories. It stands both independent of and in concert with the larger collection.

books from the first two workshops

(about the process, from veteransbookproject.com)
The Veterans Book Project facilitates bookmaking workshops around the country. In these workshops, combat and non-combat veterans, their families, and others affected by the current American wars are invited to edit and design their archives and stories into softbound, print-on-demand books. Using software specifically designed for this project, three to six participants compile their digital and handwritten archives into book format over the course of a week. These materials can include digital images, emails, journal entries and writings generated at the workshop.

Veterans Book Workshop, reading room @ 01SJ Biennial San Jose, CA

(finally, here are the airtimes—that we know of—for the State of the Re:Union segment)
WNYC – New York City – 11/11 @ 2p and 10p
KALW – San Francisco – 11/16 @10p
WDET – Detroit – 11/11 @ 9p
WAMU – DC – 11/11 @ 9p
WJSP – Atlanta – 11/11 @ 7p
KUOW – Seattle – 11/11 @ 9p
WVXU – Cincinnati – 11/11 @ 7p
WHAD – Milwaukee – 11/13 @ 3p
KUT – Austin 11/11 @ 3p
Vermont Public Radio – 11/11 @ 8p
WSLU – North Country Public Radio (upstate NY) – 11/17 @ 1p and 11/20 @ 3p
WIUM – Macomb, IL – 11/11 @ Noon
South Dakota Public Radio – 11/11 @ Noon
KBBG – Waterloo, IA – 11/11 @ 1a and 8p
KUFM – Montana Public Radio – 11/11 @1p
WFPL – Louisville Public Media – 11/11@ 8p
WSNC – Winston-Salem, NC – 11/11 @ 7p

Newly established Edition MK (a small-scale, independent publishing platform founded in Minneapolis as an extension of Making Known) announces the release of its debut title, DDDDoomed—Or, Collectors & Curators of the Image: A Brief Future History of the Image Aggregator, which forms Vol. I of VIII of a series titled Img Ctrl—texts regarding the contemporary image world.

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About DDDDoomed

DDDDoomed, crafted as a speculative fiction that unfolds from the perspective of a future commentator reflecting back and theorizing about the factors that brought about the dysfunctional state of the contemporary image world, tells the story of how the image (specifically, the online image) devolved in the hands of image aggregators (IAs).

IAs, as DDDDoomed asserts, in having “single-handedly pave[d] the way for a young and Internet-reliant culture’s collective disinterest in even the most essential content of an image,” have turned the image into an aimless one that is made intentionally devoid of its meaning, knowledge, and even of its most basic identifying information. Furthermore, it is argued that “by devaluing [the] image’s potency … IAs were effectively exaggerating the worth of their role by convincing the viewers of their websites that their assembled collection … was, paradoxically, to be the sole object of spectacle.”

DDDDoomed offers a thorough look at the contemporary (online) image world through the lenses of comparatively important image and photography-based artworks, image archives, and artists who are engaged with the collection and use of disparate images.

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Preview of DDDDoomed

The following excerpt has been adapted from the chapter titled “The Image’s Quest to Move Far & Fast”

… Within the world of IA [Image Aggregator] websites, even the seemingly simple act of recognizing an image’s author proved to be a task that was chronically prone to oversight. Unsettling as these oversights were, many of the “content-conscious,” having waved their proverbial white flags, put out the question of how, in an online world so heavily influenced by the IA, any digital, online-bound image could have ever existed as anything but an autonomous “thing.” Defeated, out-numbered, and barely able to imagine a world of online images that were untouched by the IA, they thought: “just how could the image have ever existed as one that was full of all of the information, content, and contextual substance that had ‘weighed it down’ before the IA set it ‘free’?”

According to the IA, all of this “weight” attached to the image was, for the most part, seen as textual in nature. Therefore, in taking into account certain basic principles of physics, it wasn’t entirely surprising to know that the image, in its quest to move far and fast between many IA websites, had to shed its extraneous “weight” in order to flourish in the sense that IAs defined flourishing.*

But despite the image’s aforementioned transformation into a streamline being, its surface and appearance changed, relatively speaking, very little. As such, an image always retained some form of subtextual meaning—albeit in vastly differing capacities and in ways that were not likely intended by the image’s creator—that could be implicitly understood by its viewer. Yet, especially for the IA who typically only had an eye for aesthetic matters, interpreting and properly representing online images in a manner that strengthened the meaning and history of those images was, from the outset of IA culture, to put it lightly, ill-fated.

And as if each viewer’s history and state of mind were not already enough to drastically scramble any possibility of an image being interpreted in a manner that was intended by its creator; the always-altering and heterogeneous environments of the Internet had made it even more exponentially possible for an image’s meaning to be (mis)translated in ways that were never imagined by the image’s creator. …

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*
The IA’s notion of “flourishing” was more often than not based upon their own gauging of web analytics such as the number of page views or visitors their website received or, more commonly, was based upon, for example, the number of “likes” their image tallied on Tumblr or times their image was “saved” on FFFFound!. This pervasive data and analytics-driven online culture had undoubtedly placed unforeseen expectations of performance upon the IAs. The aftermath of this widespread occurrence was interpreted in an incredibly honest way by Daniel van der Velden, who, in a 2009 essay, described the culture and habits of a growing generation of Internet-reliant creatives who came to life in the early twenty-first century century by succinctly stating that: “[in a] network … so interdependent and self-congratulatory that it ultimately suppresses deviation from its unwritten rules … every formal gesture is kept in check by an imaginary audience of thousands of your best friends (van der Velden, “Shadow Practice,” in Churchward International Typefaces, ed. David Bennewith [Auckland, NZ: Clouds Publishing; Maastricht, NL: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2009], 104).

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Purchase DDDDoomed

Published by Edition MK in November 2010, DDDDoomed is currently available for purchase at makingknown.org/editionmk.

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It’s that time of year! The NY Art Book Fair will be in full swing, November 5–7, 2010 and IFS, Ltd. will be there on the 3rd floor at booth CC01. The site specific collaboration and publication The Book Trust Prospectus is, in non-equal parts: a local currency, a stock prospectus for The Book Trust, an exploration into the nature of small-scale publishing and its presence at the NY Art Book Fair (Rob Giampietro), a survey of precedented alternative currencies (Benjamin Critton), a platform for hyperbolic re-representations of anonymous fiat money (Rafaël Rozendaal), a foray into corporate branding and rebranding (Metahaven et al.), a proposal for a time-based repurposing of existing banknotes (Nikolaus Hirsch & Zak Kyes), an analysis of the current state of [art] book-publishing and -design (Linda van Deursen et al.), a venue for research into non-essential commodity futures like tulips and Beanie Babies™ (Harry Gassel), a profile of independent art book vendors (Golden Age), and a podium for experimentation with anti-counterfeiting guilloché renderings (Brendan Griffiths & Zak Klauck). It is the story of its own making and financing as well as an evaluation of the context in which it was made and financed.

(left to right: Harry Gassel, Benjamin Critton, Brendan Griffiths, Mylinh Nguyen, Zak Klauck. Portrait by George Prinos.)

The Book Trust was born out of a shared interest in publishing and distribution, and from a desire to investigate the micro-economy of the art book market. As the overall demand for printed matter allegedly shrinks, specific books manage to retain their worth or even appreciate in actual and intangible value. Though the Prospectus seeks to act as a signal of literal trust and investment, it simultaneously attempts to enter a specific economy as a proposed alternative currency. Our observation of previous iterations of the NY Art Book Fair prompted IFS, Ltd. to imagine a publication that serves as both commodity and currency—an object meant to engage in transactions that bypass the traditional cash economy of the Fair. In that sense, the Prospectus hopes to stand as a book unto itself, and as a physical manifestation of the hyper-local economy to which this currency speaks. Both temporal and site-specific in this way, you are invited to invest through one of two means:

1) Your physical presence at the Fair from 5–7 November, 2010 at PS1 MoMA or

2) Your monetary or intellectual contribution to the creation of the publication

Via the Prospectus, we intend to build a Trust, of which your contribution will be a part. Our agenda is the physical construction of a value-appreciating, curated collection of publications; a literal book bank in which you can hold one share. Our holdings, however, are more than publications; they are tangible representations of the abstract value of intellectual and creative capital.

At the close of the trading day, 5PM on 7 November, IFS, Ltd. will assess and catalogue the contents of the Trust with the intention of circulating its holdings in appropriate domestic and international venues, at which point new editions of the Prospectus may be issued in context- specific reenactments of the initial trading period.

In framing the project in a format similar to that of a stock exchange, the performance emphasizes the tenuous and abstract value of the book as a designed object, as a medium for content, as a traded commodity, and as a symbol of participation in the project itself.

The Book Trust, a project by IFS, Ltd. is brought to you by Benjamin Critton, Harry Gassel, Brendan Griffiths, Zak Klauck, and Mylinh Nguyen. Our booth features a custom designed bookcase and various seating by Minneapolis-based design studio ROLU/rosenlof-lucas/ro-lu.

Previews, November 4th; opening bell, November 5th. Online at www.ifs-l.biz.