London Launch: Novel

Novel ~ publication, event and screenings
6-9 pm January 29th 2009

Contributions from Ei Arakawa, Edwin Burdis, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Steven Claydon, Henry Flynt, Megan Fraser, Anna-Catharina Gebbers / Luis Jacob, Barry MacGregor Johnston, Michael Krebber, Sam Lewitt, Scott Lyall, Alastair MacKinven, RH Quaytman, Hannah Sawtell, Mark von Schlegell, Michael Stevenson / Jan Verwoert, Josef Strau

Novel draws together artists writing, texts and poetry that oscillate between modes of fiction and criticism. A cacophony of voices, that is the primary condition of writing, seek to break the habitual methods of representation and productions of subjectivity. Disconnected from any unitary theme these texts place writing as a core material of a number of artists exploring language as a force. This fiction as force is no longer defined by what is said, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow and to erupt.

Here, writing is an apparatus for knowledge capture, informed by theory, film, politics and storytelling; writing as parallel practice, different, tangential; writing as political fiction; writing as another adventure on the ‘skin drive’, renegotiating unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – that might offer points of departure. Amidst the insinuated narratives and materialised visions there is a concern for writing and the impossibility of fiction which is at stake. Novel asks us to think of writing as something distinct from information, as at least one realm of cultural production that is exempt from the encompassing obligation to communicate.

Edited ~ Alun Rowlands and Matt Williams
Designed ~ James Langdon
24cm x 33cm, 42 pp.
Berlin-London 2008
ISBN 978-1-906424-07-7
www.novelpublication.org

Screening of Bernadette Corporation ~ Hell Frozen Over

Sacha Hahn ~ Obviously

and a reading of the RH Quaytman’s The Call of the Wind by Edwin Burdis