Nothing is Lost: Three artists, three artforms, one city, a shared sensibility. Alison Irvine, Chris Leslie and Mitch Miller set out to document the East End before, during and after the Commonwealth Games. Glasgow’s East End is one of the most impoverished areas in Europe. The Games brought a promised legacy of change and regrowth, of rebuilding, economic and cultural investment – of a new East End, where gap sites were filled and populations returned.

The three artists met market traders, travelling showpeople, playworkers, community activists, cafe owners and local children. They gathered stories and sought out images from the places changed by the Games, those largely untouched, and those left behind. Are things better for the East End? Nothing is Lost offers a way for the reader to work out the truth of the post-Commonwealth city for themselves, through words, photographs and dialectograms.

Chris Leslie’s photographs chronicle Glasgow’s changing fabric. His beautiful, yet unflinchingly stark photographs document the breaking and remaking of the city, its broken bones, lost relics, inconvenient remnants.

Mitch Miller makes dialectograms, illustrations as idiosyncratic as the word suggests, the edges of the city drawn from on high, but as those at ground level see and live it – an intricate, entangled and glorious mess – place as something made up as we go along.

Alison Irvine provides the words. Alison is a novelist who weaves stories from intensive research. She teases out stories, testimonies, moments, follows networks of friends, relatives and acquaintances. In her spare but textured prose the characters speak in select, but eloquent voices that speak from, and of the place itself. Alison explains the trio’s work process below.

In a recent email, prospecting for work, I wrote of our collective:

Our skills lie in unearthing little-known or untold stories about Glasgow the city and its people, and our strengths lie in the fact that we interpret our research in a variety of artistic forms giving a rich, comprehensive and multilayered view of our subjects.

I think that’s a good formal summing up of us: me, the writer; Chris the photographer and filmmaker; and Mitch the illustrator and maker of dialectograms.

An informal summing-up would include the fact that we all benefit from the shared experience, both artistically and socially. We share ideas, hunches, tip-offs, photographs, interview transcripts, anxieties, moans, coffees, shandies. We share family, friends, contacts – anyone who could contribute to our project. And we share the impending deadline which when you’re working with others you could potentially let down if you don’t do your bit, is a massive motivator. Because ultimately, after all the research, it’s just each of us on our own, getting our ideas down and making our work.

In this project we all came with some ideas which we pursued together – we interviewed Gary Barton of the Barras and Schipka Pass fame together, for example – and then we followed the interview up individually, exploring our own narratives and angles.

I liked being at Baltic Street Adventure Playpark, Dalmarnock, and chatting with kids and their families, seeing Mitch with his sketch pad, Chris with his camera, and knowing that we three with our different disciplines were attempting to capture the essence of the play park for the same artistic end. ‘More bloody artists than weans,’ I remember Mitch saying at one point, but the kids didn’t seem to mind.

It’s a sociable way to work and also an expansive one. It stops the ideas from drying up, it makes me think bigger, and respond to the questions that the others ask. We by no means agree on everything and our work definitely has our own experiences stamped on it – personal and political – but I hope that there is also a collective sensibility, some kind of coherence that ultimately ties it all together.

The story they tell takes us from the glamour of the Barrowland Ballroom to the hidden communities caught in the crossfire of major regeneration. It taps into the hopes, fears and dreams of East End youth and the fading memory of demolished districts and East End entrepreneurs. We meet Games volunteers and visit the Adventure Playground built by Assemble Architecture in sight of the new Athlete’s Village in Dalmarnock. We find an East End of many faces, and many possible futures.

Take a look at the limited edition (only 500 printed) box set of 3 books and 2 fold out dialectograms from Nothing is Lost here. Mitch Miller will be exhibiting and selling the books throughout his PhD show SOCIAL MATERIAL: Encountering the Dialectogram at Project Space 2, Art School Union, The Glasgow School of Art from 5-8 September 2015 (preview 6pm, 4 September 2015).

Read more from Chris Leslie and Mitch Miller on Central Station.

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In Process

‘Dialectogram’ is a word I made up to win over a funding committee. It was a joke – a mash-up of ‘diagram’ and ‘dialect’ that seemed to describe the vernacular, idiosyncratic take on architects’ drawings, anthropological diagrams and other types of schematic I had been making. A corny joke, a catchy name – but in the four years since, ‘dialectogram’ has come to take on real meaning.

Dialectograms depict locations as the people who live or work there see them. They show the relationships and stories that turn a space into a place. Subjects I’ve drawn have mostly been in Glasgow, and include the tower-blocks at Red Road, Travelling Showmen’s yards in the east end, community centres, suburban high streets and just lately, a sports stadium. My latest dialectogram, pictured here, was of Piershill Community Flat, an amazing grassroots community resource in a working class district of Edinburgh (it’s nice when your work allows some foreign travel…)

Piershill Dialectogram

There are two parts to my process that (because I really like making words up) we’ll call ‘dialectography’. The first is gathering. Once I’ve gained access to a place, I try to spend as much time there as I can. I want to get a feel for it, who the people are, how they use it, what they feel about it. And, I want the locals to get a feel for me too, get used to me, ask the questions they need to ask, decide if they want to be involved.  By the end of my time at Piershill Community Flat people there said I was ‘in with the bricks’, and I considered that a compliment.

I work in a socially engaged fashion, so I’m generally asking my collaborators what the process can do for them. A lot of documentary work is fairly one-sided. It’s all about the artist’s vision, and how their ‘characters’ can best contribute to that. I try to avoid this.

When I go into a setting I am upfront about my goals – I want to create an interesting image in my ‘signature’ style. But I also try to use this process to initiate discussion over what the image could be, what other outputs we might make together and above all, to examine and think about the place together. A lot of my collaborators say they see themselves and their surroundings differently after the process, and I think that’s an outcome in itself.

At Piershill, we were all involved in researching and developing the dialectogram of the Flat. I was also pulled into its everyday activities. I did a ‘draw to order’ stall at the local fun-day, made comic strip diary entries that dramatized the process, got involved in the craft group, did self-portrait workshops and at their suggestion, created posters and useful materials for the community to use after I’ve gone (which will include a DIY dialectogram kit). And, now I’ve taken a scan of the original drawing, it will be gifted to the flat as a record of our time together, a representation of what the flat was during that period.

I understand that Beth, who runs the place, already has a wall picked out…

Piershill Dialectogram in the Studio

Speaking of the drawing… At some point during all this fun fieldwork, I have to get in my studio and start drawing. Now, even though I draw pretty much every day (usually on things I’m not meant to draw on…) I often get a sudden attack of laziness, or trepidation at this point. I get out a big, white bit of A0 board and just stare at it… and a few hours later, I’m going home for my tea, and the board is still alarmingly, accusingly, white.

But ultimately, the drawing does begin. I pencil out first, spending a lot of time getting the basic geography of the place right, establishing where everything is, working out where I want to put things (this process is nowhere near as straightforward or logical as I make that sound). The shape of the place usually sets the parameters for the stories and images I am going to present within the drawing. It is, literally, ‘the plot’.

Then as you can see from the in-process image here, I start to ink, putting more definition on the drawing. And I write. I try to ‘label’ the difference parts of the pace with stories, impressions and feelings I’ve gotten from my collaborators. I want to show what is significant for them. I check my notes, listen to any recordings and flick through the research photographs I take, to piece the place together.

At various stages I like to invite my collaborators to come in and take a look at what I’ve drawn. This is so they can check how accurate I’ve been, give my useful suggestions and directions and be confident that their material has been used appropriately and ethically. For Piershill, we were able to bring the group through to my studio to check on the drawing in its early stages. When it was 99% complete, we organised a Christmas event back at the flat, where everyone who was involved could take a look, make some final checks, then sign the drawing.

Concierge Station Dialectogram

People often ask how I know a drawing is ‘finished’. That’s a hard one to answer…many are never really finished to my satisfaction, I just run out of room on the sheet, or just as likely, out of time. People also ask how long they take, and again, that depends. When I drew Duke Street in the East End of Glasgow, I had 7 weeks to research and draw a 10 metre-long drawing (that definitely wasn’t finished to my satisfaction!). At 1/18^th the size Piershill took 7 months of careful research and consultation.

But these are just different gradations of sloooow. And that’s kind of the point; a dialectogram is the result of a long, hard look at our surroundings. If it causes the audience to do the same, then it’s all been worthwhile.

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Stations of the Green was an exhibition at the New Glasgow Society Gallery on display from 26 April – 17 May 2013. The following review is by M.Res Glasgow School of Art student, Peter Drew.

There’s a great bit of footage from 1965 in which Bob Dylan meets a devout fan who asks Dylan the ‘meaning and philosophy’ behind the T-shirt he wore on a recent album cover. With enough wide eyed sincerity to make anyone wince, the fan unfolds his intricate theories only for Dylan to reply “I don’t really remember too much about it” with a mixture of amusement and fear at a fan clearly intoxicated with idolatry. I like to imagine that Douglas Gordon might react similarly to Stations of the Green if it were ever brought to his attention.

In 1990, the same year that Glasgow was wishfully dubbed the European city of culture, Douglas Gordon paid some other artists to paint 6 dates on an abandoned railway station along with the word ‘Mute’. At the time no one really knew what it meant and cared so little that by 1996 the site of the mural had become overgrown with vegetation. However, that same year Gordon won a prize that was fast becoming the main P.R. engine of British Contemporary art. Interest in the mural began to grow until now, 17 years later, Stations of the Green presents an exhibition dedicated to its memory. Such is the gilded light cast upon the Turner Prize recipient that it illuminates not only their future but also their past.

Last year the ruins of the Glasgow Green Station, upon which the mural was painted, were demolished, prompting curators Johnny Rodger and Mitch Miller to sift through the wreckage. Around the time of the demolition the BBC were in town making The Grit and the Glamour, in which Alan Yentob (jolly culture guy) fawns over the city’s contemporary art starts in a struggle to inflate the myth of the ‘Glasgow miracle’ without fainting. ‘Miracle’ because Glasgow’s identity was meant to be drenched in blue-collar authenticity, which isn’t very arty, right? But in the 90s it fit perfectly with the ‘brash rebel’ cliche of the Cool Britannia brand. So when Gordon’s mural was about to come down you’d think Alan Yentob and his BBC crew would be all over it, but no. Apparently Glasgow’s shrug of indifference at the mural’s destruction might have conflicted with the documentary’s premise that the ‘Glasgow Miracle’ had something to do with Glasgow.

So what is this mural all about? A general consensus holds that the dates refer to significant events in the city’s history of the labour movement that took place on or around Glasgow Green. The problem is that Gordon has never really confirmed this theory which leaves the door wide open for a long game of forensic inquiry. So, like an episode of Taggart, Stations of the Green is on the case.

Curator Johnny Rodger traces the last three dates to an essay by John Taylor Caldwell titled ‘The Battle for The Green’ published in a Workers City publication in 1987. According to the essay a bye-law was passed in 1916 that banned almost any form of public gathering that could be employed to political ends. The law was actually enforced in 1922 and finally revoked in 1932. A perfect match! This clue even suggests an explanation for Gordon’s use of the word ‘Mute’ in the fact that the law suppressed discourse. Rodgers goes on to postulate that ’1820′ refers to The Scottish insurrection.

The last two dates are harder to nail down. In fact you start to wonder “why am I nailing down dates at all”. Rodgers suggests that the whole thing might be a parody of the reductive practice of memorialising entire dates via public inscription. With typography so stark and authoritarian you might even hope that the mural is a parody. But it seems more likely to just be as critic Craig Richardson states that the dates suggest an alternative to the ‘centrally validated view of Glasgow’s history.’ I didn’t realise there was a ‘centrally validated’ view of Glasgow’s history but I guess it could be fun to imagine you were rebelling against one.

Aside from the wealth of investigative documentation, the exhibition includes responses to the mural in the form of new artworks. Photographer Michael Mersinis has captured some beautiful black and white textures of the earth where the wall fell that convey the violence of erasure and the sterility that remains.

Illustrator Mitch Miller dérived his way around Glasgow Green and produced a series of songlines that imagine the spiritual connection to the places where protestors marched and fought and sang.

Behind a dark curtain at the back of the exhibition rests a stone autopsy in the form of three large fragments from the wall itself. Recovered from a council depot in Shettleston, these six letters from the Glasgow Gr-EE-n Sta-TI-ON sign convey just how big the wall actually was. The letters set the structure of a haunting musical composition by Stephen Davismoon that plays in the room. A projected 3D model of the mural by Michael Mersinis (pictured above), spins on the wall.

Like a great cover on a bad album, I enjoyed this exhibition but not the memory of Gordon’s mural. Despite the riches of documentation provided, the mural still seems stark and craft-less to the point that the two men who were hired to actually paint the thing could barely remember doing so. Such a minimal approach might have worked if the concept was stronger or if the subject matter of the labour movement didn’t have its own visual traditions that Gordon chose to ignore. Gordon’s former lecturer David Harding might have been right in his belief that, when it comes to public art, “context is half the work” but there’s still the other half. The dates allow the mural a piggy-back ride on the significance of past events to which it contributes little besides the necessary amount of ambiguity to satisfy an insider audience’s habit of fondling their own interpretations. All this is brilliantly captured by Stations of the Green, an exhibition I enjoyed very much for many reasons, not least of which was the assistance it gave me in realising my distaste for the mural itself.

Written by Peter Drew

Read more by Peter Drew on Central Station here.

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Where does Mariusz Tarkawian sit on the ‘tree’ of art history? Somewhere, sometime (not necessarily now…), someone (I refer you to the earlier parenthesis…) will attempt a ‘final’ judgment, but the Polish artist has offered his own suggestion most easily summed up as ‘down at the bottom, in the ‘trunk, near Bosch’.  He occupies his place, bearded, young, busy drawing, in his ‘Tribute to the History of Art’, a huge, expansive, diagrammatic clutter of homages to western art through the ages.

Mariusz Tarkawian, ‘Anticipating the Future’, 2013, installation view Mackintosh Museum, The Glasgow School of Art

A whole whose meaning is found in its parts, the piece is summative of the sensibility that runs throughout this exhibition. Tarkawian draws all his works, usually in pencil, usually on small pieces of paper and generally very simply, in the spare, democratic ligne-clair style. I am envious of how well he does this; his line is definite, assured yet strangely vulnerable, clean but not overly polished. He uses this “simple” method to map an art world that is yet-to-come, appraise the career trajectory of his fellow students from art school in Lublin, and examine always, everywhere, himself and his place in the world.  They describe shape and form, but are primarily, timelines.

These aggregations of small works are overwhelming when they are arrayed in rows four or five deep and many metres long. ‘The Anticipation of Art’ is the most attention-hungry, channelling Donald Barthelme’s reviews of non-existent exhibitions to imagine what contemporary artists will be making in the future. Some of these artists are well known, others do not exist, and others are misappropriated from their actual calling (such as his own brother, actually a mechanic). Engaged as it currently is in examining its own ‘miracle’ ascendancy as an artistic centre, Glasgow seems a very apt venue for this piece. Indeed, the Tarkawian style seems very at home among the vibrant ‘drawing culture’ within the Glasgow art scene and naturally invites comparisons to local linesmen Stuart Murray and David Shrigley (who, you will be glad to hear, is destined to draw smug, suspiciously self-satisfied worms…).

Mariusz Tarkawian, ‘Probably David Shrigley’s artwork in 2018, 2012, Pencil on paper.

But beneath the surface humour, we can trace a sharper, critical edge. Histories of the future, whether straight science fiction or the modelling of futurists, utopian or dystopian, tend to be veiled critiques of the present, a diagnosis of what could be done better, or a warning that our handbasket is veering into Hell’s orbit. Tarkawian’s foray into this weird subgenre is too subtle to pay lip service to either tradition. Instead, he cannily exploits both the inherent subjectivity of drawing as a means of encountering the world, and the ostensible neutrality of his style, to leave such judgements entirely to us.

In Search of Lost Time’s Proustian title matches its scope and size (covering 75% of the wall-space). Selected from more than 700 works that reproduce drawings the artist has made throughout his life, from childhood to art school, it is easily the most charming, yet emotionally complex segment of the exhibition. The non-chronological ordering of these pieces guides us away from questions of linear ‘development’ to a freer, easier state of reverie. The juxtapositions can be delightful, such as the accidental morphological similarities between his fish and his spaceships but there is again, hidden critique, especially when we compare the free-spirited whimsy of the childhood drawings next to the comparatively stiff, academic life studies from his years at art school which are interestingly enough, hung in a much stricter chronological format.

Mariusz Tarkawian, from the series ‘Potential Artists’, ‘Anticipating the Future’, 2013, installation view Mackintosh Museum, The Glasgow School of Art

So is art school good for you? What of that essential quantum of prospecti and institutional assessments, the ‘student experience’? ‘History of Art Put to the Test’ transcribes Hans Belting’s 2011 essay, and certainly challenges the viewer to switch from looking to reading in a physical context they might not be accustomed to, but then discomfort, and awareness of place and head-space is perhaps the intent here. The social context comes to the fore in ‘Potential Artists’, which depicts his fellow Lublin alumni and records their self-assessment of whether (via a simple +, – or +/- marked in the top right corner, the latter being the algebraic equivalent of ‘mebbes aye, mebbes no’) they have indeed, become ‘artists’ since graduating. Tarkawian offers us a carefully rendered pose of each individual but is again rather gnomic; these are in a sense, anti-portraits that offer quantities but leave the real existential qualities open to conjecture. Yet we can’t help but speculate. Are the +, -, +/-’s successes, ‘failures’, epiphanies, circumstantial, deliberate or temporary? Should we worry if not all art students become artists? Shouldn’t we be more worried if everyone simply became what the degree certificate indicated?

Tarkawian’s cool, world-levelling line constantly experiments with the very idea of evaluation, its existential consequences and why we feel so compelled to do it. But he is not dismissive. In his hands ‘evaluation’ is both subject and tool; it becomes an impressive engine of creativity, of generation, a means of talking about his/my/your generation, in every sense in which that word is understood.

By Mitch Miller

Artist talk: Wednesday 20 February, 6 – 7pm Mack lecture theatre

Find out more: Website

All images photography: Janet Wilson
Courtesy The Glasgow School of Art and the artist

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Boswell in Space was the final project to be funded by Central Station’s Member Fund. It’s an experiment in documentary-making using a variety of old and new forms of communication, including illustration, photography, video and blogging. It is also an exploration of narrative, character and performance in the virtual world. Mitch Miller and Emma Lennox, the pair behind the project, sit down with the man himself (albeit in a spiritual incarnation) to reveal the thinking behind their interactive documentary adventure.

Boswell’s Ghost: I note that in your advertisements as to your undertaking, that you refer to my past incarnation, Mr Boswell, as the ‘first documentarian’. I must ask you to tell me more about this as I am unfamiliar with the term.

Emma: Well, your methods of documentation are very similar to today. You write very thoroughly about the human experience and you are particularly good at describing people’s character. I’d like to think that if you were still alive today, you’d have a film crew tagging along after you while you tweeted from your iphone.

Boswell’s Ghost: Madam, I am not a bird!

Emma: …not that kind of tweeting. Anyway, trust me I think you would find all these new ways of communication fascinating.

Mitch: Pretty much what Emma says. You obviously precede the invention of film, but all of the techniques we see documentary filmmakers using – recording the detail of what they see, interviewing, subtly changing their behaviour or approach as necessary, eavesdropping on conversation, fashioning characters out of real people – even creating situations and set pieces to see what happens – are all techniques you actually pioneered, just in print, not celluloid. I read this book about Direct Cinema once that outlined ‘crisis’ theory – that it is when you put real people in difficult situations that they reveal their character, and forget they’re being observed. I’ve noted that you did this all the time – you took Dr. Johnson into the Highlands where he was in every way out of his comfort zone, or introduced him to people he was politically or morally opposed to – just to watch what happened. And, like Nick Broomfield, you are always in the story yourself, often posing as an idiot (which if you don’t mind me saying was, in many ways, not a huge stretch for you…

Boswell’s Ghost: Not a huge stretch!?

Mitch: …BUT, to be sure, you are a clever, clever guy. You use your talents in acting to make people underestimate you, make them drop their guard. Above all, as Emma points out, you were indeed scrupulous in collecting details and tracking down facts and quotations – if only more journalists were like you!
Boswell’s Ghost: Sir, I find many of them fail in absolutely every regard!

Mitch: Exactly. You were interested in absolutely everything, and wrote it all down, which gives your books enormous documentary value, but also value as imaginative works of art. In fact, I think anyone interested in working in a documentary form should read your introduction to The Life of Johnson  (a great book by the way) which lays out how you worked – those methods still hold good today, and we wanted to explore that in Boswell in Space.

Boswell’s Ghost: It satisfied me that so much more of my work is known now – and increasingly valued, I hear. But pray, how did you come up with ‘Boswell in Space’?

Emma: Mitch came up with the idea. I just thought it would be great to tag along in a 21st Century style.
Boswell’s Ghost: Indeed. So much more is revealed by watching carefully from the back of the room.

Mitch: What she said…I’d noticed how ‘psycho-geographically’ you write about some places – like Child’s Coffee House, the description of Mrs Rudd’s dining room, or your home at Auchinleck – and wanted to explore that through trying to draw them. Spaces aren’t just a backdrop – they help create the ‘characters’ and are, in a sense, characters themselves. Emma then observed how you would be to a bloggers world, we started to spark off each other…

Emma: And then it all went out of control…

Mitch: That’s one way of looking at it.

Boswell’s Ghost: So your endeavours began in mid November, which I note is the anniversary of my past self’s great adventure to London in 1762. Many of us have, to be sure, been fascinated by the first of your episodes, but what stage are you at now?

Emma: We had a delayed start to the project, so we’re still playing catch up; filming actors’ readings, editing, writing and drawing. Everything has taken longer than expected so I have a load of material to edit, and Mitch is looking very ink stained. Fortunately our web designer, Ewan Sinclair, has been very patient with us!

Mitch: It’s been a struggle at times, no question – we’re trying a lot of stuff we’ve never tried before, and inevitably, that means there are occasional difficulties, and a need to reverse and rethink. Just gaining access to some places has been a major headache! Some of the other things we wanted to try – like making more use of email to create a narrative, for example – just wasn’t possible because of the limitations of available software (I’m looking at YOU Google mail) but I’m pleased at what we have achieved, with a mix of old, new, the specially designed and the freely available on the web.

Emma: what has worked though, has worked very well, such as animating the drawings and linking them up with my blogs and photographs, and we’ve also interacted with some great people along the way, who help to flesh out the themes of the journey and encourage people to look at them in a new way.

Boswell’s Ghost: What though, would you say has had cause to surprise you on this journey? Travel can be precarious…

Emma: A pleasant surprise has been exploring areas and finding that although the people and buildings may have changed in the last 250 years, the nature of the place is still the same. For instance the site of Child’s Coffee house near St Paul’s in London is now an area covered in coffee shops and cafes. We may think of coffee shops as a modern convenience, but people having been going o St Paul’s Churchyard for a cup of ground beans for centuries.

Boswell’s Ghost: I am glad to hear that the citizens of London still sit in the shadow of that great, edifying building to conduct their business. It ensures the spiritual is retained even as we are engaged in our material wellbeing.

Boswell’s Ghost: The impression sir (and madam) of this project is of a happy union of disciplines that results in a most felicitous variety of experience in the eye of the beholder. Are there other such associations of artists and poets who have come together in a cross-disciplinary undertaking that have had cause to inspire you?

Emma: I think we’re inspired by all the traditional methods of documentation, but have put them together in an unusual way. I’ve been looking at online documentaries such as Maisie Crow the photographer, and the story4 journalists. Creating the navigation of the website was one of the hardest parts, and along with Ewan we looked at the Dummy Jim website, and even the Donnie Darko website from a few years ago. We’re probably closer to a web comic than anything else.

Mitch: I’ve liked Chris Dooks’ work on ‘Ayrtime’ - a mixture of live events, art, music and podcasting to help generate activity and interest in his local area. I also came across the Book of the Erinyes, which combines bookbinding, printmaking and surreal fiction, and documents it online.

Boswell’s Ghost: But what next for your partnership? Surely this will not be the last collaboration between you?

Emma: I think, sir, you are a unique character, and it’s hard to imagine doing this with any other figure. The detailed descriptions of your life that you left us have made it easy to track places down and inspire new work. But I’ve really enjoyed telling a story this way, through Mitch’s drawings my photographs and writing, so we’ll definitely do something like this again. In the meantime, I’ll be continuing with freelancing and script work.

Mitch: My thoughts are turning to the Red Road Flats and a small cinema installed inside a caravan. But I think we shall definitely work together again – though I’m going to let her come up with the idea for the next one…

Boswell in Space is unfolding at www.boswellinspace.org
 Find out about the latest developments on the Boswell in Space Facebook page.

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Boswell in Space was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.

The winner of £1,500 on round five was Bobby Niven who will be making a film about the Hair Museum in Cappedocia, Turkey. He will be documenting the cave, the owner, the pottery workshops and the landscape in the region. He’ll also make a series of ceramic and stone sculptures to accompany the film.

We had 80 submissions in July, with requests totaling over £100,000. The team really enjoyed looking through the ideas and were impressed by the breadth and variety of the projects. Unfortunately we couldn’t fund everyone.

Our last £1,500 went to Mitch Miller and Emma Lennox who will be presenting “Boswell In Space – A Strictly Ill-adviced Documentary Journey“. It caught our eye because of the project is trying to do something genuinely multimedia, in a territory that’s still struggling to establish itself with frameworks and guidelines.

Congratulations to the winners.

Here, Boswell describes the scene when two Highland soldiers entered a London theatre, and received the sharp end of anti-Scottish resentment;

…two Highland officers came in. The mob in the upper gallery roared out ‘No Scots! No Scots! Out with them!’, hissed and pelted them with apples. My heart warmed to my countrymen, my Scotch blood boiled with indignation. I jumped up on the benches, roared out, ‘Damn you, you rascals!’, hissed and was in the greatest rage. I am very sure at that this time I should have been one of the most distinguished of heroes. I hated the English; I wished from my soul that the Union was broke and that we might give them another battle of Bannockburn. …[I] asked them of what regiment they were. They told me Lord John Murray’s and that they had just come from Havana. ‘And this’ said they, ‘is the thanks that we get – to be hissed when we come home…’But,’ said one, ‘If I had a grip o yin or twa o the tamd rascals I sud let them ken what they’re about.’

So, what kind of friend of Boswell are you? Destined for immortality, or a consoling spirit such as Johnston? We would like you to follow Emma and Mitch as they follow Boswell. As a ‘FoB’ (That’s ‘Friend of Boswell’) you will receive a special username and password right before the launch of Boswell in Space online. And, in the preamble to the event, will also receive exclusive material that fleshes out the story of Boswell, and the backstory to Emma and Mitch’s jaunt.

It’s dead easy, and can be done by:

-Clicking the RSS feed and following this blog – we will take note of you as a follower, and keep in touch!

-Liking our Facebook Page

-Writing to us at boswellinspace@gmail.com, where we will add you to our mailing list.

Boswell himself has graciously agreed to haunt the proceedings, and has learned the art of tweeting. Follow BoswellsGhost to receive his thoughts on the project. Incurable gossip that he is, Mr Boswell will also be using twitter to spread rumour, hearsay and news on a fairly regular basis.

Hope to see you there!

But first, we should describe who ‘we’ are; Mitch Miller is an illustrator and Emma Lennox is a podcaster – both are also writers. We have devised an online immersive journey experience that will encourage our audience (assuming we can find one – please let us know if you have any spare), other artists and people they meet to consider the mechanics of the imaginative process. 

Our subject is one James Boswell, who you may well have heard of – he is best known as the slightly bumbling companion to the famous Dr Johnson, who wrote the first major English language dictionary, and famously toured Scotland in the late eighteenth century. Boswell is often remembered as a sycophant, a fool and a stenographer who leeched off of more impressive figures. This is not totally inaccurate (he also wrote an unforgivably idiotic poem on slavery) but he was also rigorously self-aware, an imaginative observer of his surroundings and an excellent writer of non-fiction. We reckon he was the first real documentarian – someone who took information, fact and his observation of where he was and who he was with, and made it into art. The writer worked as today’s documentarians do, drawing from his own experience, entering dialogue with his subjects and then – often at his own instigation, observing them in moments of crisis or culture shock, in order to draw out their inner character.

Miller read Boswell’s scandalous London Journal when he was 23 – the same age as Boswell when he wrote the bulk of it. He was immediately impressed by the quality of its writing and the powerful imagery of its scenes and sequences of dingy alleyways, smoky pubs and ornate drawing rooms. Ten years on, he will now attempt to draw in the ‘dialectogram’ style, a number of the locations and places mentioned so vividly in Boswell’s work – starting out in Glasgow, and going to Edinburgh, Ayrshire, Mull, St Andrews and London. These drawings will show how Boswell’s feel for space was used to create characters in his nonfiction, and draw out elements of their personality and back-story.

But that’s not all – Lennox will be dogging Miller’s steps, a Boswell Mark II whose task shall be to document the process of visiting major Boswellian locations and meeting a range of people along the way – people who know about Boswell, people who don’t, but know a lot about the places he frequented, and various waifs and strays picked up on the way. Whereas Miller will be using very traditional methods – as old fashioned as a pen and ink – Lennox will use film, sound editing, photography, podcasting and blogging to observe Miller in pursuit of his obsession, almost as a character in his own work.

And then what? Well, we will be asking anyone who is interested to sign up as a ‘Friend of James Boswell’ via Facebook and Central Station sometime in late October. As part of the group you will receive a special password that will invite you to follow our ‘journey’ as an internet event, each stage of the trip being released in episodes through a flash website. You will be able to piece together the story, and what happened, through drawing, animation, video, podcast, blog and anything else we can dream up. We will post up details about the group on this blog over the next week, so please do join us! We will be releasing ‘trailer’ material from around mid October, so hopefully you won’t get too bored waiting for the internet event to happen.

Speaking of which, the actual event will begin on Monday the 15^{th of} November.

Why then? Well, that is the same date Boswell began his London Journal. While we will be delving into various of Boswell’s other writings, the Journal will remain the focal point of much of our misadventures, so we leave you with its opening lines – with which we couldn’t agree more  (except to say that all Boswell says applies regardless of sexual orientation, race, ethnicity or gender…);

The ancient philosopher certainly gave a wise counsel when he said, ‘Know thyself.’ For surely this Knowledge is of all the most important… A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge ‘what manner or person he is’. I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal of which I shall set down my various sentiments and my various conduct, which will be not only useful but very agreeable.

James Boswell, 15 November 1762 

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Boswell in Space was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.

Originally released in episodes between November 2010 and April 2011, the entire series will be viewable through a specially redesigned website. As the documentary was originally intended to be episodic, the filmmakers recommend that audiences take the journey step by step and watch one or two episodes at a time.

Inspired by the writing of James Boswell (1740-1795), Boswell in Space is an experiment in documentary-making using a variety of old and new forms of communication; illustration, photography, video and blogging. Describing a circuit of Scotland and England, from Glasgow through London to Auchinleck, the audience can explore Boswell’s pioneering documentary method through animated maps, short films and audio. They can also explore more general concepts of narrative, character and performance in the virtual world.

The project combines the talents of Journalist/Filmmaker Emma Lennox and illustrator/writer Mitch Miller, drawing on, film, illustration, photography and new media to tell the story of their pursuit of the world’s ‘first documentarian’.  

The narrative begins in Glasgow, then unfolds in a serious of episodes at each of the locations on the Documentary journey – Edinburgh, London (in four locations in the city), Mull (the isle of Inchkenneth, just off the coast) and Auchinleck.  You can visit each of these in sequence, or at any time through clicking on the interactive map on the home page.

Boswell in Space is a unique interactive experience. To follow the whole story takes over 2 hours, so we would recommend taking it an episode at  a time at your own leisure. Each episode (with the exception of the prelude in Glasgow) consists of a specially drawn, animated ‘dialectogram’ illustration of Boswell’s experiences and those of Lennox and Miller as they follow in his footsteps. The website uses sound and vision, so make sure you are in a place where you can listen!

 Website: www.boswellinspace.org

Email us at: info@boswellinspace.org

Find us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/Boswell-in-Space/159277644087880

Or Twitter at @BoswellsGhost

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Boswell in Space was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.