Tickets please! Fuselit: Contraption is out at last!

After a long, long time under tarpaulin, attended by sinister figures in black, we unleash upon you, the public, not only a gorgeous new website, courtesy of Jon's tireless graftery, but also Fuselit's 17th issue, Contraption!



Available to read online, or as a free (or pay-what-you-want-if-you-like) download for your Kindle or e-book reader, as well as in its traditional paper/card/ribbon/unicorn toenail hand-made format, it's a modern marvel!

Head to www.fuselit.co.uk for a closer inspection.

The Boar reviews 'Confronting the Danger of Art'

Award-winning university newspaper The Boar has reviewed Ian McLachlan and Phil Cooper's 'Confronting the Danger of Art' thus:

"Imagine a world in which artistic expression is suppressed and condemned by the government. Not too difficult, is it, considering the cuts we have suffered in recent years. Both wonderfully relevant therefore and also intriguing in its portrayal of the thing is Ian McLachlan's 'Confronting The Danger Of Art', a short poetry pamphlet that talks about how to survive an influx of creative types and their work in the style of a 70s nuclear safety information booklet. It is a marriage of ideas that does not sound quite as effective as it actually is; the poetry within providing a hilarious and searing look at the way people do sometimes treat the arts, and how it is a slippery slope potentially towards more totalitarian views ... perfectly crafted and delightfully witty."

Buy 'Confronting the Danger of Art' here, and make an old alchemist marginally wealthier.

About a Minute

I've contributed to this new and excellent exhibition, which opens today:

15 artists, architects, designers, poets and writers interpret the potential of a minute

About a Minute is the inaugural exhibition at The Gopher Hole, a new project space in Hoxton founded by aberrant architecture and Beatrice Galilee. For their first show, The Gopher Hole invited carefully chosen conceptual artists, architects, designers, poets and writers to respond to a premise – the idea that today, a minute is all we seem to have.

Increasingly hyperactive consumption of data, information and images has trained the brains of a generation to multi-task, skim, tweet, comment and status-update, but has eliminated the notion of patience or pause. The sheer volume of things available at the touch of a button or swipe of a finger has lead to a saturation point, where boredom and irritation arrives sooner than we may like to admit. Galleries are easy victims of the phenomenon. Visitors may spend a few moments to asorb an artwork, half-read a caption and move on. This leaves both curators and artists in a conundrum. How does one respond to the knowledge that no more than a minute may be spent with a painstakingly crafted exhibit? After all, it can take less than a minute for everything in the world to change.

Participants: Rachel Armstrong, Shumon Basar, Diane Cochrane, Economy, Glowacka Rennie & Robin Dutson, The Go West Project, Elaine W. Ho, Sam Jacob, Christian Kerrigan, Pedro Gadhano, Ralf Pflugfelder, Postworks, Jon Stone, Sunday Collective, Luke Wright

My contribution is 'Staring Into Space', a collection of six poems written to reflect the content and composition of about a month's worth of daydreams I noted down (or recorded on a dictaphone). Daydreaming can do strange things with time, including compressing it so that you conduct an entire fantasy narrative in the space of a minute or so. Visitors are invited to stand and daydream themselves, then record their daydreams in a book provided.

My favourites among the other pieces include a collection of 'translated' chairs (the originals were described using a minute's worth of words and the descriptions then used by architects as the basis for a new design) and a layered picture which visitors are invited to tear a piece from, causing a gradual decay over the course of the exhibition.

It's running from now until early February on Saturdays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, at The Gopher Hole, which is downstairs at El Paso restaurant near the corner of Old Street and Curtain Road. Nearest tubes are Old Street and Liverpool Street. Please go and have a look round!