More art in the post from talented and generous friends. First Ele Carpenter sent me a recent production from the
Open Source Embroidery project. For 'Yarn' she asked various embroiderers (including me) to send her patches sewn with text from the
Raqs Media Collective's '
A Concise Lexicon of\for the Digital Commons'. The embroideries have been shown at HUMlab, and have now been made into a small book which makes an anthology of all the patches, and thus the whole text. The binding is appropriately hand-stitched.
Jenny West and Sean Kaye also sent a
book: 'A Random Dispersal of Dust (Mutely Understood)'. It is an artwork that tackles Jorge Luis Borges' 1941 short story 'La Biblioteca de Babel' (The Library of Babel'). Their text is a reflection on the English translation. They have taken each word of the text and considered its antonym, using this opposite meaning to construct a new coherent text, which inverts and complements the original translation. For words that do not have an obvious opposite, a conceptual contrast is used - the 'library' becomes a 'random dispersal of dust'. There is a preface written by artist Juan Cruz, which I'm really looking forward to reading. It is also a very beautiful object: handset and printed in Paris, and wrapped in a jacket that coincidentally echoes the colours of the dust-storms currently sweeping parts of Australia...
It will be launched at the
London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel this weekend.
