#neon books

[glamboyl]

Read More Books! For Lex. Enjoy my Friend!

[aesthesiamag]

Luminous Neon Books by  Airan Kang

[thogdin]

Various press and praise for Gary J. Shipley’s Warewolff

“JG Ballard on crack” — Stewart Home

“Beyond horror or the fictional… these convulsions and reassignments can be thought of as twenty-first century probabilities — those current realities of public dreaming that we accept as our present conditions” — David Toop

ABSENCES AND INHUMANITY: 5 WORKS OF ABSTRACT HORROR at LitHub

Favourite of 2017 — Dennis Cooper

Books I recently Loved — Dennis Cooper

“Warewolff! is a blistering read” — Neon Books

“Shipley has bored a hole into the inner life of a multitude of subconscious minds... The sheer intimacy of strangeness Shipley’s novel conveys is appalling. But it is also uncomfortably familiar... No one likes the sound of themselves on tape" — 3AM

“Shipley is one of the most daring contemporary horror writers, with an enviable command of prose, and has the audacity to go exactly where one doesn’t go... The Warewolff carves itself out with stolen tongues” — Heavy Feather Review

“Horrific and confounding violence. So horrific. So  confounding. So violent. So unique and amazing. All of it” — 11 Amazing Books From 2017, Neon Grisly

“Extraordinary, incantatory fiction in which the contemporary world is both observed and distorted by the feral Lovecraftian consciousness of the book’s own shape-shifting narrator. The more unsettling and uncategorisable the better seems to be the Hexus ethos” — artist Wayne Burrows, Backlit Gallery and Nottingham Writers’ Studio

"Instead of what books can do for me, I’m interested in what books can do to me. And folks, I’m telling you, this shit can be like a drug. I’m talking full-on altered states of consciousness" — Broken River Books

“Its dispersal is the horror of biomorphism: a condition somewhat akin to life that, like Shipley’s alien, ‘discloses its arrangements’ through our language centers. And this is the condition of unbinding: we are spoken by something; we pass into something without the assurance that our hunger is our own” — Enemy Industry

“Shipley's words were cast over us, with the synths growling, initially quietly, underneath... The language and imagery was everything I expected it to be -- vicious, grotesque, transgressive, obscene, and darkly comic” — The Electric Philosopher (review of launch reading)

Readings at Burley Fisher; The Peckham Pelican; The Klinker Club.

Accompanying playlist courtesy of Reckless Records Blog

“This is a book to make a mockery of the Goodreads star rating system, as it's a collection of prose poetry that overturns petty value judgements of 'story' and 'character' and rolls around in the mess on the floor. Warewolff! is experimental horror that's a disquieting read with flashes of sick humour shining through the darkness.” And of course... Goodreads

[thursdayleila]

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[workinglight]

Start up the Treadmill, There's Art to be Made...

 I'm working on a commission piece for a series of exhibitions sponsored by the online print on demand publisher Blurb.com. The exhibition series or project is entitled "Unbinding the Book." It is going to be a series of three exhibitions one in London and one in New York and one in San Francisco. They kicked off the project by having a launch event in each of the three cities. I was present at the San Francisco launch event for this particular project and  I was mightily impressed by the amount of effort that Blurb put into the event. It was a lot of fun and a first cabin deal. Free food and free drinks with presentations about books in general and artist books in particular made for an entertaining evening. They also had examples of the product that the company puts out and it appeared to be a quality item. I've seen some print on demand books produced by other companies that did not seem to have the same production values as the examples that Blurb brought to this event. Given all that, I decided to go to the website and enter the competition for one of the commissions even though the stuff I do is pretty far out into left field from the kind of thing that Blurb does. Blurb is producing fairly standard books on paper in standard book formats that have high production value but still do not exactly push the envelope of book design. My stuff is related to that only in the sense that there is some resemblance to the book form in what I produce. I do primarily illuminated books. The text or images are either laser etched or carved into sheets of acrylic. In the early books neon tubes in the stuff that I'm doing today strips of LEDs are placed along the edges of the pages. The light from the LEDs or tubes travels through the page and glows wherever the surface of the acrylic has been scratched, carved, engraved creating texts or images that appear to float in the midst of these clear acrylic pages. Not that close to ink on paper. On the other hand they were going to pay for production, come up with an artist fee and show the work in three cities so I what did I have to lose. I sent in my proposal and, about a month after the date that they had stated for finalizing the choices, I received an email saying I had gotten the gig.

  The piece involves taking a 4 drawer small dresser and turning it into an artist book around the text of T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

  I need to find an appropriate dresser-like object; hinge the 4 drawers together so they come out as a unit and can be tipped on their side to unfold into an accordion-fold book; laser etch the poem onto 4 panels that fit one to a drawer; illuminate the panels with LEDs; find some vintage men's clothing to put in the drawers; assemble the whole deal and ship it to London to arrive the first week of September. And, sadly, still work the day job.

Vroom-vroom we are off and running.