HELP

confronting the reality of a hard faced contemporary Economy, one without a moral underpinning on paper or in person; watching a fascist pantomime break the fourth wall to poison a passive, mocking people confident that they can laugh it off; a growing sense of bewilderment and detachment from any personal purpose within the working framework I am at the center of; daily realisations as to the extent to which our ideological infrastructure is crumbling; an awareness that History is asserting itself at a critical epoch beyond my control whilst simultaneously experiencing the distinct lack of a personal guiding narrative; creative deflation and the surrounding onset of post-apocalyptic obsession; a growing sense of mutual disparity in every instance of human contact; a lack of sanctity or cohesion in culture, music and art; the onset of fear... (!) these are the anxieties that dog me this evening. HELP.

ON PAMPHLETTERING

A new spatial context for reading written text, why not produce a short-run pamphlet or essay, printed on the surface of an inflatable beach ball? A project that tends to my curiosity / concern for the spatial aspect of text in space.

With a tag line "Just puff and peruse" underpinning the thought process, I was enthused by the idea of creating what would essentially begin as a 2-dimensional, flat-packed reading material which a reader would then self inflate and turn into a 3-dimensional object for textual consumption.

When first thinking about it, the beach ball pamphlet's written contents came secondary to the beach ball format itself. However, one possible factor I considered in order for the textual aspect to inter-act with the spatial dimensions of the object were for the text - whatever this great text might be - to be purposefully and artfully never ending.

Imagining the text to be printed in a traditional page format across each of the individual plastic segments that make up the material of the beach-ball, the opening line would begin without an upper case demarcation, and the final line - reached after having read round the ball by rotating it 360 degrees - would finish without punctuation, thereby feeding into the original first-line so as to create an endless literary continuity.

Otherwise, if I were not limited by layout in order to indulge such a small grammatical gimmick, the surface of the ball could be used to host images and articles, inter-linked and inter-mingled at any angle or rotation so that the act of reading would be delineated. Having to play with the beach ball by spinning it around would aid your reading experience.

[Sketch by Luke 'Curtis' Collins]

Finally, as an image of absurdity in our ever increasingly absurd world, the idea of selling such a product as an alternative to a commuter newspaper (say for ¥400 on a station platform) conjured up the great situation in my mind where a carriage load of neck-tied business men would be given creative license to undermine their self-enforced seriousness and indulge their inner infant by being able to read something interesting on a beach ball before being done with it and having a quick game of keepy-uppy or catch with the person sitting across from them. Admittedly, the task of the train serviceman having to clear up all the discarded beach ball pamphlets dumped in the static carriage at the station terminus might get tiresome fast, but the extra money spent on cleaning staff would surely be recouped by the money saved on anxiety pills that otherwise straight-jacketed city slickers would have turned to by middle age had they not let out their pent up frustrations with what I have now decided would act as beach ball therapy!

MOVEMENTS

The Thing Consensus will return posthaste

Admiring economic flotsam's rightful non-alignment in space.

[Image: Yeji Yun @ *see outer space*]

Current concerns: The Spatial Dissemination of Text; The Experiential Organisation and Cultural Production of 1st World Cities; Misogyny in British Pop; London's Abandoned Rail Station Networks; The Next Crescendo of despair on the Korean peninsula; The Impotence of Modern Musical Instrumentation; Reaching UK Urban Exploration; The Ideographic Beauty of the Chinese Brush-stroke; The Continued Dream of a New Avant-garde.