Cover design for the original version of Tiercel. (Click on the images to embiggen). It uses a bit of patterning from a Saxon artefact alongside textures and patterns built up in drawings and on the computer. The image was printed out large, so that I could use it as a doubled-over wrap, to create a softback cover.

I'm also including the colophon below, which gives my source for the book.

Ever since I worked on this book, I've been aware of the power of character to help us to inhabit a topic differently. While I haven't always explicitly used narrative characters in my artists' books, even those that simply posit a different point of view end up inhabiting 'another self' -  even if at its most basic that self is the 'drawing self' as opposed to the 'printmaking self'. Though I have always found that books gave me a chance to assemble events and outlooks more 'in the round' that expressing myself through single images. I think it is the sense of cntext books can provide; sometimes this ends up, as here, being worked out into a narrative situation, but elsewhere it seems that there is an opportunity simply to present, as ironic or as pastiche or as investigation, or as satire or as reliquary. All these notions encapsulate a  point of view, and books make this process, for me at any rate, a very easy and attractive proposition.

If you are impatient to see the rest of Tiercel, you can view it straightaway, here.

In this, the final page, I reach out towards the air and grasp it.

Am I reaching for the voice, for the implied contact of the communication? Am I touching, holding the messenger and connecting with its message? Or am I crushing it? Is the annihilation of the message/lacewing the completion of its journey?

This plays out some of the same tensions we saw in the transmission of the message 'swallowed by birds', or the notion of the message/lacewing annihilated by (head)light (which might itself be the form the message takes).

But its the end of the book, and you'll henceforth have to find your own bugs to crush.

I will return shortly with a serialised version of Tiercel, my book about a hunting falcon who watches a battle between danes and Anglo Saxons. I wrote a poetic text that is based on a fragment from a well know Anglo-Saxon piece 'The Battle of Maldon', but I retell it from the bird's point of view.

Thanks for reading along, and don't forget that if you are interested in having a nice, high-resolution copy of Radio for yourself, you can get one (among several others) at my Blurb pages.

I really did hear a show about lacewings which crystallised a lot of other material for me and helped me begin this book. I have no idea whether any of the 'journeying' significance I've ascribed to them has any basis in fact, but it was convenient to look at them that way. I think that their winged stage is basically a breeding vector though, so there's that.

They make a comeback here, identified with the wandering line of data that comes in and touches my radio, inspiring this book and, perhaps, completing their journey.

Approaching the lit window.

I based this on my window when I was living at Upton Road in Bristol, and a radio that I subsequently gave away to someone who needed one. (it's represented by that dim shape to the bottom right of the window frame). I never could get the bugger reliably tuned in, so I hope they had better luck than I.

Back in the initial scale/scenario, moving towards the lighted window at night where the listener is waiting for the message that proves he is not alone.

I'm not sure about the text at this point. It seems to me that the collapse back into a more mundane scale has brough with it an over reliance on the available 'Radio' references. I'm not sure now how I would connote a real listening experience. Certainly the sense of company-desite-loneliness can be a real experience of radio, but I'm not sure that, given the foregoing metaphysical shenanigans, that I would choose to frame it quite as 'loneliness' where I doing this book today.

We're switching back to our intitial scale at the beginning of the book, with the stream of information being seemingly drawn out of the night towards the listener.

I now cringe at the pun here 'the light programme' - but you know what I meant.

At this level, there's enough quiet for the information to once again be perceptible...

Continuing on from the zoom into the 'iris' sequence, the spaces between elements starts to open up, and the space is not so densely packed with information. We're now at the level of the space between things, or as my chums in Ozric Tentacles like to put it 'The bits between the bits'.

The extreme 'close up' effect over the preceding pages has brought us up to the level where the indentity of the image breaks down, and there are only materials to see reather than shapes. 'Weaving through the waves of the electromagnetic stream' seemed like an apt description of the listener's search for meaning over the airwaves, or anyone's struggle to make sense of the visible world.

Part of a sequence of images beginning with Radio 38. There is a small, barely-noticable bit of filigree decoration off centre at left that connotes a kind of embroidered 'weaving' of the needle. Im not sure it really adds anything and I think I'd just remove it were I producing the book now.

Part of a sequence (see Radio 38) exploring inner space.

A slighly uncomfortable visual/textual juxtaposition here of the 'needle' and 'eye' imagery. There's certainly some sort of poetic resonance in that, and I was aware of it at the time, but I wasn't sure what to do with it. Perhaps the difficulty of vision is such that to pierce into things with any 'acuity' (since we're talking needles), we must needs risk some discomfort? I didn't follow this through at the time.

The narrator revisits the first line of the book, asking us ponce again to search through the cosmos for a meaning- but this context is different. We'll use differnt equipment, and we'll travel inward instead of outward.

The visual sequence over the following pages including this one recapitulates the 'solar system' imagery from the previous page, but conflates the disc form with the iris of an eye and then switches between that and the gaseous forms of nebulae. Eventually a stream of information (in the form of oscilloscope-green' dots) will once again appear.

Part of a sequence of three along with Radio 35 and 36. They read "The transitory entities break down, and the room is filled with radiolight'.

The message arrives, in some sense. The message is perhaps simply that the room is always bathed in 'radiolight', in cosmic information. But perhaps the point of the messenger is not so much that we have to hear its message, as much as that we have to feel that the message is around us, always. It isn't necessarily about the passing through or the passing on of entities, even ourselves, as much as it is to do with the continuity of being.

I didn't realise up until I rewatched it a couple of months ago that this book owes a debt to the Robert Zemeckis film version of Carl Sagan's book Contact. There are sequences there that explore the passage outward of elecromagnetic information into the cosmos, and of course the film explores conlations of metaphysical and scientific truths. In sequences following on here, I'll take my viewer into the human cosmos instead, but it's the same place, really.

Part of a sequence of three -finished in Radio 37

The intention here is to create a sense of a space that is filled with some sort of mysterious presence. Not quite a ghost, but a sort of 'ghost of potential'; the 'ghost of a promise', perhaps. Something about the sequence shifts us out from the death of the messenger towards the promise of the message they carry. There is, I suppose, a kind of resurrection imagery here that I might have been a little more explicit about.

Cobbledick contends that

“Artists make up a considerable proportion of this nation’s [i.e. the United States’] educated professional class, but their information needs have been neglected by information professionals.”

(Cobbledick 1996, p.343)

My interest in Cobbledick’s research is threefold: to prepare a point of reference on whether the situation has improved; to gather notions of what makes for good support for artists’ information needs; and to pose a critical query about whether serving people’s imaginative engagement with research materials is always best achieved by making things easier.

This last perhaps brooks a little more explanation, seeing as it departs from the wisdom of serving the user. I am interested in the ways in which encounters with information can either lead us deeper into a confirmation of our initial position, or, contrariwise, those times when information surprises us or helps us create new insights. This dichotomy is germane to the experience of serendipity. Serendipity is not an organised event; it cannot be rationally planned-out in the sense of creating better indices or categories. It can be nurtured by creating the right circumstances, but it is not easy to predict. Serendipity is not in the business of confirming anything; we do not seek out serendipity, it is not research in that sense. Picasso puts it more simply when he says “I do not seek; I find”.

With those interests in mind, what do we find in Cobbledick’s 1996 research on the information-seeking behaviour of artists?

Cobbledick notes that artists’  information needs may be obscured by

The persistent appeal of certain preconceptions concerning artists – that they are intuitive, self-contained individuals who create via inspiration.

(Cobbledick 1996, p.344)

The persistence of this romantic and expressionist figure leads to a conception of the artist who “needs a library about as much as does a whirling dervish”.  Cobbledick concludes that “the rarity of artist-use studies is itself a silent endorsement” of the view that “libraries are peripheral to the lives of artists.”

(Cobbledick 1996, p.345)

Cobbledick now lays out the purpose of her study: if we neglect artists’ information needs, what, then, are those needs? Her research will try to outline this, drawing on the very varied possibilities of artists’ actual practice. A literature review follows, with Cobbledick building on Toynr and Stam’s studies. Notable quotations here include:

“Although her research was centred on the art library, Stam also speaks of the great need artists have for a ‘wider culture than the world of art’ [9, p.22]” (ibid. p.346)

“William J. Dane […] identifies  […] needs for culturally diverse materials and legal information about insurance and copyright laws. He also insists that the public library is ideally suited to meet the needs of artists because they often use the language of other disciplines [13].”

(Cobbledick 1996, p.346)

“In a series of three short articles in Art Libraries Journal, three artists discuss the place of the library in their creative lives [14—16]. All three express a great love of libraries and books, books of all kinds from many different disciplines, valuable for both their textual and their visual content. They also speak of the joys of browsing and serendipitous discovery, the accidental stumbling on just the right image in an old, forgotten volume. ” (Cobbledick 1996, p.346)

So far, Cobbledick’s findings seem to emphasise the importance of general access to stock. Artists are apt to require access to a wide variety of information, not simply materials on art; and, however we weigh this, the experience of serendipity does seem to be a part of the attraction. Cobbledick is struck by the fact that artists do not list art books as among their most important or influential resources; instead, as Cobbledick notes, in a feature in Arts Magazine  where artists were asked to list books important to them,“books about art dominate only two out of […] thirty-eight lists”(Cobbledick 1996, p.347)

Drawing from these results, Cobbledick notes that it is art librarians who are for the most part looking at the needs of artists, which risks “confin[ing] concern for artists to a specialized arena where their needs may not be met.” (ibid. p.347) If artists need material outside of the art library, why aren’t they a bigger part of the discourse of more general provision? Why are artists’ needs limited to the ‘jurisdiction’ of the art library when the existing information points to their needs being met elsewhere? (It’s worth noting that this doesn’t negate the value of the art library; it’s just that artists themselves cast a wider net than just their ‘home’ subject.

Cobbledick’s studies draw on a variety of artists whose consultations of libraries in an age before more or less ubiquitous internet connections may differ from those we’d expect now. One of the most striking aspects of her findings was that all the artists tended to use the library as a whole, rather than the art library, to support their practice. The art library has an audience – but it is not located in the practice of these practicing artists. Books on technique, for example, tend either to be part of artists’ own collections, or not to be in-depth enough to be satisfactory. Cobbledick turns up a range of artists whose usage of libraries ranges from those who are willing and capable of using opac to serve themselves, to a user who is capable enough but who does not want to learn to do this. His comment is revealing,

“[For him] The reference librarians [from the institutional library] are not as helpful as those in public libraries: ”They insist on teaching me how to use the card catalog and how to use the computer, etc. I’m in a hurry, and I need to find where the books are so I can look at them on the shelf; and I don’t want to be taught.””

He wants to be served, instead, and finds that the reduced collection sizes and helpful public library staff suit him more. His comments reveal two things: that he feels there are particular subjects he wants to research (and feels that there will be materials which satisfy this wish), and that he is not coming to the library to browse or peruse or seek inspiration.

In fact, Cobbledick’s research contains an interesting construction for dividing information seeking behaviour into Sources of Inspirational Information and other, more goal-directed types of information seeking, such as that described here. For the same individual, sources of inspirational information includes site-specific research involving library materials, to help the artist (a sculptor) develop a relationship to the site he has been commissioned to produce an artwork for.

Cobbledick finds overall that artists tend to use the library in a more directed way than we might presuppose given the myth of the ‘inspired artist’ :

“All of the artists interviewed visit the library with a specific need in mind. They often locate material to answer this need by browsing, but they do so by browsing within limited subject areas […] None of the artists describes happy accidents of serendipitous discovery in the library.”

(Cobbledick 1996, p.362)

One is tempted to search for the flaw here. I am an artist, and I have often found sources of material by accident; but it must be said that I recognise strongly the position outlined here, too. Certainly one will search through a subject area hoping for that item that snags in the mind, that fact or circumstance or story through which the creative artist can create an aporia to discuss, as it were, one thing through another. Isn’t it this that the sculptor does when he researches the history of a place? Though it would be interesting to pursue the point, the article cannot share in detail with us what the nature of this specificity is. The artist is not after all trying to establish the facts; he is looking for the facts that are inspirational. And though he can get help in narrowing the field over which to search, their significance are still the products of a convergence of circumstances which only he can bring together. No cataloguing system, however personalised, can adequately reproduce this. (Indeed I am concerned that the more personalised information offerings try to be, the less likely they are to offer just such ‘snags’ or points of interest.)

Had Cobbledick led an inquiry that asked the artist if he knew which facts he wanted to outline, I think he’d likely have answered no.

It would be an easy mistake to go from the observation that artists do not appear to pursue ‘happy accidents’ to say that the nature of their research in libraries is not of this kind. While it is true that their research will have a certain specificity, I would offer that the artist still does not set out to confirm facts or to disprove them, but to see what is there that will prove relevant. To be purposive is not necessarily to operate with a particular outcome or task in mind. This differs from a scientistic view of research, though it seems valid to offer that historical research and other humanities research will as often make discoveries in the library as (dis)confirmations. The dichotomy of discovery/confirmation, whilst probably creating a point of friction if we try to apply it to any individual’s research, probably offers a more revealing argument – in my view – than the notion that artists either seek specific information or are in the business of seeking the happy accident. I would also seek to illuminate through the interview, whether or not there were times when more specific information was being sought, and times when media was simply consumed in a more random fashion. Perhaps this is a more obvious question in the age of the internet, when we can all easily understand the difference between surfing and searching, even if at times the line is very blurred. But it is also a part of the strategic push and pull of artistic practice as I would recognise it. Several of the artists interviewed note the importance of continuity in their work. The buildup of a material language and of the webs of significance and sensitivity that an ongoing practice evolves can sensitize one fact over another – it is this form of ‘being situated’ vis-à-vis the information landscape that describes what the artists’ sensibilities are; it is not explicitly acknowledged here that this buildup continues in times of specificity as well as in times of browsing. Picasso said of his practice ‘I do not seek: I find’, but there are times to seek as well as times to find, and what we find comes to depend on what the background of seeking has primed us for.