★Uniform Books
Uniformagazine N°4
Recently The Guardian critic Jonathan Jones wondered scathingly if the late Terry Pratchett might have wanted his final posthumous novel “…pulped by a steamroller”; pulped…? Surely flattened more like. Here, as if plucked from a laundry list, then hung out to dry—aired in public maybe—this fourth issue has once again been naturally attracted to, whilst avoiding, some theme or other.
Five new Uniformbooks titles have been published so far this year: in the spring a new edition of the modernist se…
Uniformagazine N°3
The following commentary was written about three books by Richard Long from the late 1970s: “Throughout these publications, the photographs are definitive records of moments within a landscape, whether of a single geometric form made with material from the particular terrain, or a composed view of a landscape from within the duration of a journey. Where a sculptural form has been introduced into the landscape, this will occupy a central, foregrounded position within the image. The language is di…
The True Line (Book)
I first saw these printed diagrams and drawings over thirty years ago, and the particular care and certainty they convey has remained with me since. Geoffrey Hutchings published just a handful of books, all addressing the search for geographical and topographical truths, and for the ways of recording and depicting these truths precisely and economically by the handwritten word and line. In addition to his contribution to the development of the teaching of field studies in Britain in the late 194…
The Regional Book (Book)
“Force yourself to see more flatly.” - Georges Perec, Species of Spaces
‘The Broads’ is the name given to a wetland region of eastern England. The broads themselves are shallow lakes, formed from flooded medieval peat excavations, set alongside or within the courses of the rivers Ant, Bure, Thurne, Waveney and Yare. Navigation, holidays and nature conservation have shaped the region, with tensions arising from differing assumptions about what the Broads landscape has been, is and might be.
The R…
Unshelfmarked - Reconceiving The Artists' Book (Book)
In Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists’ book, Michael Hampton vets the medium’s history, postulating a new timeline that challenges the orthodox view of the artists’ book as a form largely peculiar to the twentieth century. Post-Deweyed, these works form an entirely new corpus, showcasing the artists’ book not as a by-product of the book per se, but both its antecedent and post-digital flowering, many salient twentieth-century features proleptically flickering here and there through time, it…
In the Field: The Art of Field Recording
2022 Reprint. This is a collection of interviews with contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work. From its early origins in wildlife sound and in ethnographic research, field recording has expanded over the last few decades into a diverse range of practices which explore and investigate aspects of the lived environment, from the microscopic to the panoramic, through the medium of recorded sound. These conversations explore the fundamental issues that underlie the developmen…
Sound Arts now
In Sound arts now, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle explore contemporary artistic practices and theories, and what contributes to or hinders artistic and career development. This is conducted through a series of interviews with artists and curators, putting the often-unheard voice of the maker at the centre of the discourse. There is a conscious shift of reference away from the “white men from the global north” who have dominated the canon during the decades of the discipline’s emergence and establ…
Sonorama
Located on the train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, Sonorama is an audio work by composer Claudia Molitor that offers sounds and voices for the otherwise silent view from the train. The work is downloadable as an app for listening with headphones.Imagining the journey itself as the ‘score’ Molitor has composed a cycle of works and collected interviews, readings and archival material which respond to both the present, and the history of the route. With each track relating to a dif…
Kew. Rhone.
Released in 1977 the songs on Kew. Rhone. engaged lyrically with three interrelated themes: Omen (the reading/interpretation of signs), Nomen (the power of names, the pros and cons of identity), and Numen (the spirit in matter, the numinous). This illustrated exegetical memoir likewise engages with those themes in an experimental reading and interpretation, an attempt to name and identify some of Kew. Rhone.’s sources, and to invest the material with something like a ‘spirit’.Kew. Rhone. would n…
On Listening
On Listening is a unique collection of forty multi-disciplinary perspectives drawn from anthropology, bioacoustics, geography, literature, community activism, sociology, religion, philosophy, art history, conflict mediation and the sonic arts including music, ethnomusicology and field recording. These specially commissioned contributions explore the many ways in which skilled listening can mediate new relationships with our physical environment and the people and other species that we shar…