Thursday 28 October 2010
British Library Intranet article, Interview with Aleks Krotoski
Thursday 21 Oct 2010
Aleks Krotoski is the British Library’s Researcher in Residence for the newly opened exhibition, Growing Knowledge.
A respected digital media commentator and presenter of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution, Aleks has brought her experience and knowledge of technology to the Library, helping the exhibition pose the right questions to the research community.
Internal Communications assistant, Evie Jeffreys, met up with Aleks to discuss the novel role of Researcher in Residence and her thoughts on Growing Knowledge.
How did you get involved with the exhibition?
I have stalked the British Library for a long time – I always found it a place of solace during my PhD. So when I was approached for my thoughts on the future of digital research I jumped at the chance to be involved.
I was already looking at how the web interacts with social sciences but was keenly aware of issues we hadn’t thought about when it came to technology and research.
What does the role of Researcher in Residence entail?
I worked closely with Matthew Shaw, the lead curator of the exhibition, and Clive Izard, Project Director, to identify which tools we can showcase in the exhibition and with UCL and JISC to evaluate the tools. I also worked to establish the event schedule – compiling panel discussions and workshops.
I did a lot of thinking and writing with Times Higher - we are constantly asking the question ‘is this relevant to researchers?’ It’s really important to get an understanding of what is useful to the people potentially using the tools.
How do you think the exhibition will contribute to the research community in general?
Just having access to the tools in the exhibition is exciting. They will provoke new research questions and hands-on collaborative work. We want to inspire discussion and debate.
However, the exhibition is not just informing the research community, but wants to know the researchers’ opinions and needs.
It will keep evolving and internal reports in January and March will give us feedback on how the research community feels about new research tools and methods.
On a more personal level, when and how did you become interested in technology?
As a child I had an IBM PC and my mother was adamant that I start using it to prepare me for whatever technology and tools were to come.
I found the whole concept of self-publishing fascinating.
I developed an ability to use technology and as I evolved professionally I took for granted that I was not scared of it and wanted to work with it and learn more.
Last week’s launch of Growing Knowledge, kicked off by speeches from Aleks, Lynne Brindley and Andrew Miller MP, was a great success.
You can watch a YouTube video of Aleks, among others, speaking about Growing Knowledge here.
The Media Society, Protecting the Media?
Evie Jeffreys
http://www.themediasociety.com/news/PROTECTING+THE+MEDIA%3F/144/
Nothing Bad Magazine, Ditto Press
The company, which also publishes work printed in and out of house, was founded by Lynsey Atkin and Ben Freeman. Both were previously freelancers working in print design and discovered that there was no Risograph printing service available in Britain, so decided to be the first with Ditto Press.
Risograph printing is a rarely used commercially, not because it is disliked, but because it is, in Lynsey’s words, a “faff”.
“It's not an accurate science. You have to really persevere with it. It's a huge lot of trial and error. Anybody that wanted to make quick money out of printing, this is not the way to do it. You've got to want to do it and you've got to get satisfaction out of doing it.”
While many may believe printing to be an easy, automated process, Ben and Lynsey certainly prove otherwise. Risograph printing, though using digital images sent to the machine, is a finely tuned skill.
“It's a technique”, says Ben, “like screen-printing and lithography and etching, engraving, foil blocking. Our favourite clients are people who think about it as a technique that they like, rather than something just economical or something cool.”
The pair joke that the venture is the ‘artisan dream’, but it certainly appears to be a skilled trade rather than a factory production line.
“Some people's attitude to print is that you just send a printer an e-mail and they bang it out and give it to you, which is unfortunate because that's not how it used to be” explains Ben. “50 or 100 years ago nobody thought of printing in that way, but because we now have ink jet printers and laser printers people think you just press a button and it prints. That's never true at all, with any print process.”
One of the main benefits of Riso-printing is that it is possible to produce short runs of books. While with most other types of printing, such as offset lithography which is responsible for the printing of most books, it is easy and only financially feasible to take on a job that will produce hundreds of thousands of copies, Risography lends itself to jobs producing, say, 50 copies and is economically accessible. The cost is similar to that of digital printing, but the end product looks as nice as screen-printing.
On the whole, the only reason Ditto Press would turn away a print client would be if their job were too big. “If someone was to come to us and say we want 500 page books, full of colour photos, we could do it theoretically but it would take maybe a year and it would cost them about the same as a flat in Kensington, so we tend to be honest with people and say this isn't the right process. You get that with any printers. It's just about what's suitable,” says Ben.
A number of features of Risography reel in predominantly arty clients: the ability to produce a small number of copies at a low cost, the care that goes into the work, but also the way it looks.
“That's when we get the best results”, explains Ben, “when clients specifically want the look that we give. I think the reason why we get the customers we do is because we've got a background in design. So we know how things are supposed to look and what people want things to look like and we really care about what things are supposed to look like. The best thing for us is when we have that dialogue with people. We get that a lot, it's good.”
The relationship with a client is important to both Ben and Lynsey. The way the two parties work together resembles the way in which a tattoo artist and their customer work to achieve the perfect image.
“Not everyone is going to want the look we produce,” accepts Lynsey. “But it's great because we don't want to print for everybody, we care about our work and it's great to have clients that care about it as well, without trying to sound too much like a cliché.”
Aside from the print side of the business and the relationship with their clients, the element that really inspires the pair is publishing. A mutual desire to run a publishing company was one of the main driving forces behind the venture.
“We are so swamped with print that we don't really get as much time as we would like to put into the publishing business, but that's what we get really excited about and what we want to do.”
There are roughly five publishing projects coming up over the next few months, for which the two seem in anticipation.
To some, printing may be no more than the flip of a switch or a click of a mouse, but at Ditto Press that is certainly not the case. The process sounds excruciatingly tricky to pin down, but here it has been met with a genuine passion, infectious to those that come across it.
Photos and words - Evie Jeffreys
http://nothingbadmag.com/ (Issue 2)
Sunday 25 July 2010
Friday 11 June 2010
Nothing Bad Magazine, The Theory
SHORT FILM PREVIEW: “THE THEORY”
June 1st, 2010
The Theory is the latest short film from award winning and Dalston-based writer and director Eva-Marie Elg. Swedish-born Elg, often referred to as Emie, has become known for her unconventional use of narrative and imagery, but The Theory has been received as her ‘straightest’ film so far.
The film follows a day in the life of an aging man who has lost his family and is in a state of frustration and denial. Starting in the style of a documentary the man is interviewed about the death of his family while carrying on with his daily routine. As the day unfolds so does his mourning. The interviewer’s voice over describes the sad details of his life: he still buys enough food for four people and his job as a night watchmen is down to his inability to interact with other people.
By the end of the film we have seen the man descend into madness. Watching family home movies provokes him into a rage and he begins destroying his living room, only to wake up for his night shift, put the room to rights and tenderly kiss a family photograph, which had previously lay strewn on the floor. This seems to be part of the routine, and in a Groundhog Day fashion he is trapped in it.
The film is extremely uncomfortable and claustrophobic. Sound effects like the ticking of a clock and whirring of a projector subtly highlight the character’s loneliness and quietly anxious existence. The actor playing him may seem slightly too overwrought at times and while this could sometimes be classed as overacting, it works well here in portraying him as socially inept due to grief.
Denial and loss seem to be themes that Emie is fond of using, as one of her previous films Recognize Myself follows roughly the same story. Both films also surround male protagonists, which make the portraits of their upset and anger all the more awkward. The film, however, also produces an air of mystery as certain details, such as how the man’s family died and whether he had an involvement in their deaths, go unexplained, allowing the audience to develop their own theories.
“Relationships really interest me, especially love relationships, because they have so much depth to them, in terms of the stages you go through, and what happens when it goes a bit more destructive. I like destructiveness in people,” says Emie.
The film is dedicated to Emie’s mother, who died of cancer early this year during the making of The Theory. The death had a profound effect on the direction of the film and put even more emphasis on the nostalgia and loss felt by the main character.
“It made me stronger, because I felt like this actually means something. I knew exactly what I wanted. It had a really good impact on me for some reason.”
Nostalgia is a theme in other films from Emie. Her preferred format to shoot in is film, which often creates a nostalgic atmosphere in itself, and she usually uses 16mm. However, due to financial reasons The Theory is shot predominantly in digital. It has been effective in this case though, as the stark reality of the digital picture of the man in his daily routine contrasts well against the soft, blurry home movies, shot on super 8mm film.
Emie’s next project with her production company, Happy Endings Productions, is a sequel to the comic book short, Sleeping and Dreaming of Food, showing that she can work with different genres and media. But for now, The Theory is a personal and professional achievement and raw portrayal of an old man’s regret and grief.
www.happyendingsproductions.co.uk
Words and photography – Evie Jeffreys
http://nothingbadmag.com/index.php/art/short-film-preview-the-theory/