Obs

168 pages // 97 x 138 mm // Soft-bound sewn binding with dustjacket // Set in Grotesque and BB-Book // 3 colour risograph printed by Footprint Workers Co-op on Munken Lynx // Edition 200 // Designed by Mark Simmonds

In a world awash with instruments and data, a local reading group devise to build an observatory as an act of resistance against their own observation. What follows is a story that collides measurement and experimentation, with language and the senses, both human and non, conjuring a playful satire of our contemporary technologically mediated condition.

Through a lively interplay of oddball fictional narrative and risograph printed imagery, Obs asks: How did the strange and peculiar functions of the observatory and observational science, once specialised institutions and practices, become such a part of everyday life? Has the whole world become an observatory, or rather have we become observatories of ourselves? And what might an alternative observatory be, one run by amateurs, artists, and the observed?

Sam Skinner is an artist and curator focusing on intersections between community, technology, and alternative modes of organising. His work employs a range of processes from historical research to printmaking, publishing to workshops, report writing to mural painting. Recent work includes the reestablishment of a community radio station and arts festival in Thamesmead, London; co-directing the publishing project Torque (www.torquetorque.net), including co-editing anthologies The Act of Reading and Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain; co-chair of working group 1 of COST Action on New Materialism and co-editing the project Almanac (www.newmaterialism.eu); and a forthcoming essay entitled ‘Community’ (with mirko nikolić) in Philosophy Today. Sam has a BA and MA in Art History, and was recently awarded a PhD from Manchester School of Art.