Some projects make a big splash right away. With others, it’s something of a slow burn.
Just as the sun sets on this year’s Fun Palaces, I was pleased to see an old programme finally achieving its potential back in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Auckland Libraries have just launched Reading Between the Wines, a monthly book club which tours bars in the central suburbs of New Zealand’s biggest city. Librarians bring a selection of books to the bar for patrons to check out and discuss on the first Thursday of each month.
So yesterday was a huge success for Lambeth Libraries and you can still take part for a few days yet via our online Comic Maker.
Fun Palaces will of course be delivering a full report, evaluation, and celebration in coming weeks but for now here’s my Fun Palaces 2015 on social media.
Tabletop Superheroes was quick to learn and difficult to master, an all-ages Dungeons and Dragons-style game which tied in with the School for Supervillains theme we’d taken from guest author Louie Stowell. You can download it now from Parkes Shire Library.
This year in South London, roleplaying game expert Andy Horton – a librarian at Regent’s University – will be hosting a special Fun Palaces game event at Upper Norwood Library.
Andy and friends will be giving Fun Palaceers the chance to try their hand at a range of role-playing and board games, and there also be a specially-written Dungeons and Dragons scenario for people brave enough to take on a Fun-Palatial quest.
Like Stephann Makri and the #Citylis zinemakers, Andy’s another academic who is partnering with public libraries this October in the name of play, learning, and outreach. Fun Palaces salute you, Dungeon Master!
Upper Norwood Library is a special case among those taking part in Lambeth’s Fun Palaces this year. Jointly funded by Croydon and Lambeth for 100 years, it’s a public library which provides a model for local government co-operation in providing cultural and information services to a local community.
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.
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!”).
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.
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
There will also be opportunities to learn about, and even participate in, Stephann’s research.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After a stint carrying out research for publishers and media productions – projects which I’ll look forward to talking about when I’m allowed to! – I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be working as a creative producer with the London Borough of Lambeth, helping their library staff to devise and deliver ten Fun Palaces with local communities on Saturday 3rd October 2015.
I’m looking forward to taking things further with Lambeth in 2015. Our events will tie in to Black History Month and feature a range of stargazing, cybernetic, all-embracing, all-ages art and adventure. Watch this space for more news.
In the meantime you can read my article “Pushing the Limits: Play, Explore, Experiment” for British librarians’ in-house magazine CILIP Update, which looks at Fun Palaces alongside other arts and community adventures from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand:
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 