Author: Mechanical Dolphin

Fun Palaces Online Comic Maker by State Library of Queensland

Mechanical Dolphin

I’m really pleased to announce the launch of the online Fun Palaces Comic Maker.

A Fun Palaces comic

The Comic Maker lets you drag and drop characters inspired by Emily Medley’s original Fun Palaces illustration into a comic-book story of your own devising.

We’ve been working on this behind the scenes for a long time, ever since I pitched the idea of an online version of Comic Book Dice for Fun Palaces 2015.

Talia Yat and Phil Gullberg of the State Library of Queensland have run with this idea and developed it into an amazing online game, as part of the Queenslanders’ contribution to Fun Palaces 2015.

Comics created at the site will be curated and shared at funpalaces.tumblr.com

It’s been a huge team effort and thanks must go to: Fun Palaces’ Stella Duffy, Sarah-Jane Rawlings, Hannah Lambert, and Kirsty Lothian; Zoey Dixon of Lambeth Libraries; Daniel Flood of State Library of Queensland; our web host Simon Appleby of Bookswarm, plus Sandy Mahal who put us in touch with him; and last but not least our digital Brains Trust of Ed Bishop, Martin Feher, Barney Lockwood, and Steven Moschidis (“I’m tempted to say I will host it just to stop the funky emails!”).

Other Fun Palaces comics events include a workshop at Waterloo Library with Chris Thompson of Orbital Comics, and Amanda Lilywhite’s giant collaborative comic for Carnegie Library.

Go make a Fun Palaces comic online – and then check out the Fun Palace nearest to you!

Fun Palaces Countdown: Serendipity Tours With Stephann Makri

Mechanical Dolphin

As the 2015 Fun Palaces launch on Saturday 3rd October approaches, Lambeth Libraries are gearing up for their borough-wide, simultaneous 11-venue celebration of arts and sciences.

In the countdown to Lambeth Libraries’ Fun Palaces, I’ll be featuring some of the amazing activities and special guests we’ve got lined up for Londoners this weekend.

Today, it’s the turn of Dr. Stephann Makri of City University. Stephann and his student Shermaine Waugh will be running “serendipity tours” of Clapham Library from 2-3pm and 3-4pm this Saturday.

A Wordle of key terms related to Serendipity

Stephann is a Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction at City University London and self-proclaimed ‘Prince of Serendip.’ His research on the nature of serendipity and how we can design to create opportunities for it has been published in leading academic journals and has also featured widely in the media, including on the BBC, in The Sunday Times and in Reader’s Digest.

On Saturday 3rd October, Stephann will invite Fun Palaceers to step out of their comfort zones, break with old habits, and find new ways to stumble on unexpected and rewarding information within the library. After an introduction to techniques of serendipitous browsing and creative exploration of information, Stephann will send you out into Clapham’s beautiful spiral library to forage for wonder amid the shelves.

Stephann Makri
Stephann Makri

There will also be opportunities to learn about, and even participate in, Stephann’s research.

For more information about Stephann’s work, visit www.stephann.com. And you can find Clapham Library’s Fun Palace at the Fun Palaces homepage.

Dulwich Picture Gallery at Bermondsey Street Festival 2015

Mechanical Dolphin

This Saturday saw teens from volunteer scheme NCS The Challenge join me and staff from Dulwich Picture Gallery at the Bermondsey Street Festival.

We spent four hours on the streets of South London, playing Comic Book Dice, getting people to dress up as figures from historic paintings, and sharing strange facts about art from the Dulwich collection – like The Takeaway Rembrandt, the second most stolen painting in the world…

The NCS teen volunteers will be running their own, completely self-directed art event, PROJECT SCREAM, in Ruskin Park on Saturday 26th September.

I’ll be back at Dulwich in December for my event Your Mind Is The Scene of the Crime, an activity which invites you to explore what lies in others’ hearts, delve into the dark side of the gallery, take secrets and lies and make them into art.

Your Mind Is The Scene of the Crime is part of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Escher season. More news soon!

Bermondsey Street Festival with Dulwich Picture Gallery and The Challenge

Mechanical Dolphin

This Saturday you’ll find me at the Bermondsey Street Festival alongside volunteers from NCS The Challenge and the staff of Dulwich Picture Gallery, the world’s first purpose-built public art gallery.

We’ll be running hands-on art events for visitors to the festival, exploring what arts outreach looks like beyond the gallery walls and getting our young volunteers to work as mentors, workshop leaders, and creators in their own right. All very Fun Palaces – can you sense a recurring theme this autumn?

There’ll be more from me at Dulwich later this year, with an M.C. Escher-inspired play session in December. Stay tuned.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us: Lambeth Library Fun Palaces

Mechanical Dolphin

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Just an update on the Fun Palaces project in the London Borough of Lambeth next month.

On Saturday, 3rd October, eleven venues run by Lambeth Libraries and Lambeth Archives will open their doors for people to try their hand at the arts and sciences, storytelling and play, exploration and adventure.

Novelist, therapist, and radio host Lucy Beresford will be joining us at Clapham Library for a Q&A session, as will the entrepreneur Tara Benson, founder and CEO of Here and Now. Staff from City University will be running zine workshops and library tours exploring the science of serendipity.

At Waterloo Library, Chris Thompson of Orbital Comics will be running a comics creating workshop and recording a special episode of his Pop Culture Hound podcast.

In Brixton, Louie Stowell – who worked on Australia’s Parkes Library Fun Palace in 2014 – will be running sessions based on her new book The Astronaut’s Handbook – alongside participatory theatre from Needless Alley Collective and the launch of a new game from the kids’ Code Club led by Lambeth Libraries’ Zoey Dixon.

Zoey Dixon of Lambeth Libraries
Zoey Dixon of Lambeth Libraries

At Upper Norwood Library, there will be special board game and tabletop roleplay sessions from Andy Horton, librarian at Regent’s University – and across the borough, you’ll also find jewellery making, firefighters, art, science, dance, play, and all kinds of creative mayhem.

Stella Duffy, co-director of the national Fun Palaces event, will be leading a walking and writing tour of Lambeth, visiting each one of our library venues.

The Fun Palace vision – of participants not audiences, of locally made art and science and play – exemplifies the best work that I’ve seen in libraries, galleries, and museums over the past few years.

Fun Palaces remind us that libraries are about so much more than shelves (PDF) and they make space for wild play as well as more structured activities.

In Lambeth, our partnership with Orbital Comics builds on experience devising collaborations between retailers and libraries in New Zealand and Australia.

In a time of budget cuts and austerity, Library Fun Palaces emphasise community collaboration and the power of volunteering, while still recognising the unique skills which professional librarians have to offer.

Most importantly, Fun Palaces focus on arts provision for all, not just for a privileged centre.

Lambeth Libraries’ Fun Palaces run across the borough on Saturday 3rd October 2015.

Find out more at the Fun Palaces website.

Escher and other adventures at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Mechanical Dolphin

On Monday, I start a new project with Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London. As part of the youth scheme NCS The Challenge, I’ll be helping a group of teen volunteers to create arts outreach activities for the Bermondsey Street Festival on 19th September.

M.C. Escher, Day and Night - 1938

We’ll be drawing on art exhibited at Dulwich, but a gallery is as much about the relationships between culture and community as the items in a given collection – so we’ll also be looking at forms of original artmaking and play which Challenge volunteers will devise and deliver for the Bermondsey fair.

Dulwich Picture Gallery has a proud tradition as the world’s first purpose-built public art gallery; I’m excited to be helping the gallery take public outreach onto the streets of London, in the same community spirit as Fun Palaces.

Later this year, I’ll be running another event at Dulwich to tie in with their exhibition of works by M.C. Escher.

Darran Anderson’s recent talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum reminded me of the importance of Escher as an influence on pop culture, especially computer games, and I’m excited to see the playful, pop-cultural approach Dulwich is taking with this exhibition.

Find out more at the Dulwich Picture Gallery website.

Holes in maps look through to nowhere: Games as criticism

Mechanical Dolphin

Australian arts journal The Lifted Brow has just published my review of Nick Sousanis’ doctoral-thesis-as-comic-book, Unflattening.

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

The review is a little different – it’s an online choose your own adventure, which sees the reader trapped in a mysterious library, trying to locate Nick’s book and escape in one piece.

I built the adventure using Twine, the same piece of free software which we used at Auckland Libraries to create our online zombie game City of Souls.

The game marks the culmination of a long period I’ve spent exploring what it means to write criticism of other people’s work.

In recent months, I’ve reviewed comics for academic journal The Comics Grid and New York art paper Brooklyn Rail; I’ve written about Hasbro’s Transformers for The Cultural Gutter, a Canadian site devoted to “disreputable art in all its forms”, and I’ve explored the world of fan criticism together with James David Patrick from The James Bond Social Media Project. 

The Lifted Brow piece is something special to me, though. It comes from being persuaded of Nick Sousanis’ case, in Unflattening, that the traditional priority of words over illustrations is wrong: words and images cannot be explored separately from one another.

Reading the book, it becomes difficult to feel satisfied with comics criticism that deals in words alone. Alternatives like Terry Elliot’s experiments with digital annotation of Unflattening look increasingly appealing; therefore I decided to create my response to Unflattening in the form of a game: a set of sequential incidents which the reader can navigate at will – rather like the panels of a comic book.

See my review of Unflattening over at the Lifted Brow website.

“Sorry, sweetheart, you have to help Daddy pay for his mistakes” – Una McCormack vs. Ant-Man

Mechanical Dolphin

Busy times here at Finch Towers, both at home and work. My head was full of stuff and I needed a quick summer read. I was supposed to be reading John Tomb’s Head, a New Zealand novel about postcolonial heritage, but it was too intense. Then I stumbled on The Baba Yaga, by Una McCormack and Eric Brown.

The Baba Yaga Una McCormack cover

I know Una vaguely from Twitter and I heard her speak once, brilliantly, on Doctor Who so I gave the book a whirl. Read more →

Fun Palaces workshop at Brixton Library

Mechanical Dolphin

Today, Fun Palaces kicked off in earnest at Lambeth Libraries, with a workshop for staff and allies from libraries, universities, businesses, and the wider community.

You can see more of the event via Storify:

Creative practice, research, and syzygies with Kim Tairi at EBLIP8

Mechanical Dolphin
Portrait of Matt Finch by Kim Tairi
Portrait by Kim Tairi

I’m featured in Swinburne University librarian Kim Tairi’s keynote for EBLIP8, the Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference today, talking about research practice and cultural programming. People so often think of research in terms of the sciences and quantitative data, it was good to think about it from the perspective of a creative practitioner with a humanities background.

Also, Kim sketched me from our Skype conversation above – I don’t think I’ve ever been drawn before…

The word Kim and I latched onto in our Skype discussion is “syzygy” – and before too long, I’ll be telling you why in a blog post on this site. In the meantime, you can find out more about Kim’s keynote online and also it’s worth following her on Twitter – @kimtairi.