This season holiday have been quite productive and we have finally launched Electronest visual portfolio – projects’ details are available upon request. This is where all the announcements/linkage of new projects will be made.

None collects more personnal (Jerome) post, links, images and found things including tweets.

Dogeared Books is our collection of pages: a scanned archive of our best quote from books we’ve read or those we are currently reading. It is a little bit the same kind of editorial/curatorial selection as in R-Echos but this one is dedicated to tangible books.

Tlktlk serves as a local event aggregator; it acts mainly as a calendar to gather friends to nice events. One of the tlktlk emerging project is to organise talks and discussions around topics close or at intersections of our various practices; first discussion should gather people around the topic of republishing. More information will be made available soon.

Capacity and R-Echos remained what and where they are already – check those out too if you don’t know them. Capacity is where we share and talk about the technical issues and solutions we face. R-Echos is our all time best pick daily articles coming straight from our news reader.

url: http://on-purpose.info

As the curators Nav Haq from Arnolfini and Åbäke put it: “On Purpose: Design Concepts looks at conceptual design practices, the emergence of ‘meta design’, and the question of who or what can define something as design.”

The exhibition will present interventions and work by a selection of the most interesting and ‘speculative’ designers today. In recent years, the field of design has evolved significantly having embraced conceptualism and technology, and is now offering advanced parallel theoretical practices to contemporary art. Yet the renowned principle that has been given to design in order to differentiate it from contemporary art is still a point of contention – that it should have specific purpose. On Purpose looks to investigate this tension around the definition of design, questioning whether ‘purpose’ is actually its ultimate constraint.

Focussing predominantly on interventions within Arnolfini, some of which may become semi-permanent, On Purpose will also be used as an opportunity for designers to offer proposals to reshape the existing infrastructure of Arnolfini. It will look at every public facet of the institution – physical and virtual – and will aim to rethink it afresh.

On Purpose is the second in the Concept Store series of projects at Arnolfini, exploring the realms of marketing, design and experience economy.

The exhibition will be open from Sat 13 Sep – Sun 9 Nov
and hosts the works of Åbäke, Droog Design, Daniel Eatock, Electronest, Ann-Sofie Back, Will Holder, Peter Jensen, Onkar Kular & Noam Toran, Metahaven, Alex Rich, Savage, Yuri Suzuki

* The line up is quite impressive for us and we are very glad to be part of it. It was also the occasion to discuss a bit more with Will Holder, while we helped him to setup the website http://commonknowledge.at which lists and help tracking the books he lend for the exhibition from his personal collection.

** The website we designed for the exhibition On-Purpose is driven by the idea of giving to the spectator on the internet a better idea of the size of things; by using the (almost) universal ISO proportion of the A4 and a slider which change the size of the images, someone can sync the size of the images on the website with a A4 paper and get a decent idea of the proportion.

*** Recently we (re) discovered the work of Gemma Holt who did a project related to size and format; she has a different take.

**** More details about the exhibitions at Arnolfini, on their website

The Publish and Be Damned Fair 2008 will be on 3rd August at Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, and will run from 12pm – 6pm.

Instead we thought we could sell shares of the final project.

Like on the market, investors are buying shares of a company and gain power and control over some of its fundamentals. Here, in this project, people would be able to invest in this publication. It might be because they are friend of us, because they like what we do, because they would like to give the publication to a few friends, because they think our work might get more value as time is passing by (like on the art market). Once we reach the critical mass of donations that allow for the production, we will then start the production and ask people what they want to do with their share, which should be a fair amount of publication per share owner, round 50 copies.
Collectively or individually, they will be able to decide whether or not they want to sell them, give them away, keep them, organise something for/with them… etc. They can also ask their share to be send to them by post, or collect them on location – and do whatever they want: burn, distribute, sell.

* & 001 – R-Echos issue 1

Would you be interested in investing in the tangible production of this work?

1. You can download the digital archive
and decide wether or not you’re interested in particpating in this project.
2. Each participant donate a minimum of £8
3. The publication is produced
4. We share the publications
which means each participant own a fair amount of publications and participants decide (collectively or individually) what to do with it.

minimum £8

For this poster we wanted to reflect the process that helped produce the poster: everyone presenting an event on the poster was participating to the cost of the production. The poster ended up with 21 events, each of which were presented in a rectangle of the same exact dimensions; an egalitarian layout wherein the size of each event description is determined in inverse relation to its length: the more you speak at length the smaller the text will be – this, in order to preserve the visual rights of the neighbouring events.

* Quite obviously the text has been set in a rather daft way, using software’s automated composition, like people do for an office note on a coffee machine.

** Anna and Mia commissioned us also to realise their electronic presence extension: Pipeline; a clone of the R-Echos project aiming at republishing material generated by their exhibition and artist in residence programs.

*** In some ways, one could also put that the size of each hierarchical element was designed depending on the amount of characters inside it. This process is quite close from experimentations like the Sun Tzu series. The beta version of the next publication arrived and we are working on a future release of a few specimens.

buy your own here, as Patrick said last Friday it’s really all about typography Fetishism – and it’s so good to yield to temptation… it’s £3 and it surely will help!

700 of those were sold online in 48 hours – it’s a huge thing to see that happening thans to the hard work of James West. Thanks!

Quite often, I feel stuck with the idea of presenting my work; most of the time the ideal portfolio ends up being a text, sometimes quite a long one, which is not an good form to showcase your work to a large and possibly mainstream audience. Sometimes, also, it ends up being a collection of images, which our web work is not either. Both have practical advantage – disadvantages also.
Thanks to the repeated inputs from Pierre on the subject, this weekend I finally gave a go at something Pierre referred to as ‘See-Through Website’ – which simply means there’s a kind of a hole in the web page where the original website and content is displayed (for more technical insights see the post on Capacity: Electronest Projects and see through pages). The main advantage of this kind of solution being the concise way of displaying list of links, not relying on an external outfit but presenting the Truth – the website we worked on for what it is: not a beautiful photoshoped image but a web page. A communication machine on which you click, which reacts to your input, which is resized with your browser window, etc. A real web page.
Direct citation instead of a partial representation is quite interesting way of exploring the notion of a portfolio, especially for a web portfolio.

Beyond the usefulness of having a portfolio, working on the presentation of one self’s work is quite hard; some creative may decided to ask others to manage this quite particular task of self promotion (which is not self in this case) like recently when we worked for wearebuild.com (with The Digital Club) or when we designed a custom blog for Martino Gamper work. It is quite hard but at the same time it helps a lot to figure out what kind of projects brings you where you’re (the From) and where you would like to go, also it gave me a sort of an overview on what are the working process, the methods we used and which worked or not, where to bring some more efforts and also what we are good at and where did we fail. It helps a lot to define new paths, new direction to take.

Working on how to describe and explain our activities definitely helps me a lot to define and redefine our activities and stay fresh with it.