Final Page and International Talks

As we continue to get settled in Calgary, I ended up drawing one final page for my book Unflattening (formerly-known-as-my-dissertation) due out from Harvard University Press in March of 2015. While with the exception of the cover, some additional title images, and cleanup, the drawing has been done since i defended in the spring, circumstances required a last minute additional page to solve a pagination issue with how I intended the other pages to be laid out. I share the thumbnails i made for the layout and a vine video of my process here. The finished piece along with all the rest of the work will be out in just three short months (and already available for preorder)! Excited to be able to share it in one whole piece and see it that way for myself! (See more info on Unflattening on HUP's site.)

Days after arriving in Calgary, I had the opportunity to make a quick trip to Umeå, Sweden, and present on my work at the conference on Genres of Scholarly Knowledge Production organized by Patrik Svensson. It was a thought-provoking event all around, and I had the privilege of being one of the first to present on their new 3 screens on the wall and one on the floor presentation space. It was a fun challenge to think through presentation as more than one slide at a time and particularly interesting for me to consider in terms of making comics and how one could use that spatial dimension to engage with the audience in different fashion. I'm sharing two virtual images from how I prepared the talk beforehand and one live image where i got to stand on all the feet that I'd gathered with the put your foot in my dissertation contest. Thanks to Patrik and all who gathered there for such a stimulating adventure and warm reception! 

Finally, back in November I gave a keynote address at the International Visual Literacy Association's conference held at the Toledo Museum of Art. It was a terrific gathering and I got to present in the grand venue that hosts the Toledo Symphony. The museum has just made videos from the conference available - you can see mine and others on YouTube here or embedded below. Note, should you wish to watch it but find yourself intimidated by the video's length - I speak only for about the first 20 minutes or so, and then lead participants in a comics-making exercise, which takes up most of the rest of the video until a final Q&A.

Wishing you well as we approach the shortest day of the year and the approach of the days getting longer again. (My two days in Sweden were nearly sunless - with the sunset that far north happening around 1:30!) Best to all over the holidays and in the new year. - Nick 

Upcoming Talks & Process Sketches (Multimodality)

Last week (10/10/14), I participated in the #remixthediss event on New Dissertation Models at the CUNY Graduate Center here in NYC. It was a terrific gathering, invigorated live audience, and it was live-streamed to audiences around the country and the globe - and in many sites they hosted their own parallel discussions. Primary organizer, Professor Cathy Davidson now of CUNY called it not an event but the start of a movement. And as part of that, a publicly editable document was made available for listeners to ask questions and presenters answered them live and have continued to build on the document since. You can see that document here, and watch the recorded video of it right here. (If you came to here me, I'm around the 50 minute mark). Reflections and resources from it are posted on HASTAC's site here. Cathy Davidson was featured in Inside Higher Ed this week and speaks about the event movement in the interview. (This resonates with previous panels on new forms of scholarship that i've been involved in from Expanding Forms of Scholarship to Beyond the Protomonograph).

This week, I'm off to Michigan State University to present at the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies annual conference. I've been fortunate to participate with this inclusive organization for about six years now, and this time around I've been invited to give a few remarks about my work at the opening, as well as my individual session, which will also include a comics-making workshop! 

And in early November, I've been invited to give a keynote talk/workshop at the International Visual Literacy Association's conference at the Toledo Museum of Art. Looks like a fascinating gathering and I'm honored to be partaking in it. You can get a little sense of some of the things I'll be talking on from this poster I made for the Oxford Illustration Symposium last year. The Chronicle's feature on my work is another good way for those unfamiliar to get up to speed. 

I want to close this post by sharing some process sketches. I've been scanning all the sketches that went into the dissertation (for inclusion in the book version!), and that's led me to reflect further on my process and how ideas emerge between the collaboration of thoughts in our heads and sketches on paper. It's something i find that makes my work in comics smarter than I am on my own. Anyhow, what follows are a slew of sketches that went into making a page on comics and multi modality from the third chapter of the dissertation, which sets out to theorize on how comics do their work. I posted them here in what in pretty close to the order they were made. You can see that my initial idea was going in a totally different direction (though i still like the idea of talking about omelets as a kind of multimodal process). I then came up with a concept that is more or less what i went with, but then you see all the attempts to get the composition to flow correctly. This culminates in transforming the large hand on the "keyboard" into an arrow of sorts that helps move the reading eye back up after going down for the initial content. Anyhow, I think this offers a sense of the thinking that goes into a page. I'm frequently asked how long pages take to make - and while the drawing in many cases can take a long time - for me, it's always the thinking, how to orchestrate the page to embody the ideas. It's a journey of wrong turns and surprising discoveries. Which is what I feel research always ought to be. - Nick 

Simultaneity and process sketches

Sharing just a single new page this week, along with process sketches that led to the recently released page on the sequential nature of comics.

First up, this page on the simultaneity of the comics page is the only page that borrows an existing composition nearly note for note, specifically a page from my journal piece "The Shape of Our Thoughts." I felt that page really hit what I wanted to hit in terms of my thinking on comics and it's been an important one in all my recent talks. Some of the text changed in order to fit within this narrative and to tie in to my more specific thoughts about how comics work. I redrew the whole thing, included different elements in the environment (including a mongoose - for all those remembering Rikki Tikki Tavi out there...), and if you really want to compare this with the original, again, you can find that in the shape of our thoughts piece. The banyan tree that the buddha figure is sitting under is something that is actually tree-like and rhizomatic - that is hierarchical and interconnected all at once, and this links back to this sequence in Ch3, and also the introduction of the term rhizome back in Ch2 here. The dialogue spoken by the buddha here is from the joke, what does the buddha order at the hot dog stand? - but I think fits neatly to talk about how all the panels, elements of a comics page constitute a whole even as they remain distinct.

This stands somewhat in opposition to the notion of comics as a sequential form, which was the subject of the previous page. I share that again here, along with the process sketches that led to its creation.

This was a difficult page to imagine - in part because this entire section is about how comics work and that meta-commentary at times leaves me wondering what to draw. Also, it's my take on Scott McCloud's theorizing, trying to boil it down to essentials that fit a narrative that while often described as being a dissertation in comics about comics, it's only partially about comics - really it's about perception and broadening the forms of meaning-making we consider to be legitimate. Anyhow, as you can maybe gather from the sketches and as I noted in the prior post, this started out something more grid-like, and then at some point i had an idea for a rube goldberg-esque/mousetrap page. But, i rejected that as pointing out the simultaneous aspects of the page when i really needed to keep the focus solely on the sequential. The big breakthrough as noted in my sketchbook came after a quick session on my trampoline and thoughts about the sequence of seasons, calendars as records of time in space, came tumbling out... I think you can get a sense of how it evolved and all came together - some of it right away and a few things I changed right up until the end. 

I'm in the midst of multiple pages at once at the moment representing the finale of Ch3 and exploring the cognitive nature of comics, hoping to have more of them to share next week. Stay tuned. - Nick