James Langdon
This issue loops around NUMBERS and was produced in the ambient glow of a reprogrammed electronic scoreboard clock which first appeared in Venice one year ago. Bulletins this time arrive from Angie Keefer, John Dewey and James Mclellan, James Langdon, Rosie Cooper, Mathew Kneebone, Philip Ording, David Foster Wallace, David Reinfurt, Cory Arcangel, Justin Warsh, Perrine Bailleux, Byron Cook and Tauba Auerbach, Dan Fox, Katherine Pickard, and Vincenzo Latronico.
Issue #9 tackles all manner of SPORTS. It kicks off with a commentary on New England Patriots controversial Quarterback Tom Brady in view of Ancient Greek ideas of heroism, and ends with seminal Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly’s 1975 interview with Prime Minister Harold Wilson on the radio. In between, the issue slaloms around bodybuilding, bridge, ice hockey, tennis, darts, golf, reporting, running, drugs, rock climbing, basketball, and Pong.
This issue is both *in* and *about* COLOR. Starting with ISSUE #10, we have reduced our format and we are printing in all of the available inks. The issue was published in time to inaugurate (finally!) our first physical space for The Serving Library in a storefront on the north side of the majestic India Buildings block in the heart of Liverpool’s once-colorful mercantile district.
Bulletins around the edges of color come courtesy Lucas Benjamin on a green screen, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey on ephemera, Umberto Eco on conditioning, Emily Gephart on a poetry hoax, James Langdon on kitchen cabinetry, Tamara Shopsin on swimming ...
This issue comprises various outlooks on “perspective.” This might be taken to mean something as specific as a particular opinion or as general as an axonometric projection; in short, different ways and means of looking at the world. And so we find Vincenzo Latronico attempting to get in touch with E.T., a collection of Lucy McKenzie’s illusory quodlibets, a conversation between Jumana Manna and Robert Wyatt on art and ethics, a timely analysis of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” by Sarah Demeuse, along with other points of view from Mark de Silva, Jocelyn Penny Small, Abigail Reynolds, James Langdon ...
dos focuses on conversations in, about, and with exhibitions.
dos commissions and edits conversations between two visitors to an exhibition to emphasize subjective experience and meaning-making at large. dos conversations can be streamed, followed as an RSS feed, or accessed as a podcast.
dos conjures their listeners as eavesdroppers and vicarious visitors who experience exhibitions on their own time, partaking in a continuum of physical experience and shared interpersonal thinking.
James Langdon is a designer, writer, and curator. He is one of six directors of Eastside Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Birmingham, England, runs an independent design practice, and has written for publications like The Serving Library and Bricks from the Kiln. He’s a professor in the communication design department at HfG Karlsruhe and in 2013, he founded the itinerant School for Design Fiction, working with students to investigate the storytelling inherent in the design process. He’s also written and researched extensively on the work of Norman Potter. In this episode, we talk about how Dot Dot Dot sparked ...
The 2019/20 issue of The Serving Library Annual is entirely devoted to the late Italian designer, artist, inventor and polymath Bruno Munari. The core of the annual is the first English translation of Obvious Code, the 1971 collection of Munari‘s own writings, sketches and poems about his own work, published by arrangement with Corraini, who issued the book’s anastatic edition in 2017. It includes iconic design objects such as the Abitacolo, ground-breaking artworks such as his 1952 series of hand-made projection slides, and little known rhymes about the art market, as well as an original piece from his “unreadable books” ...
This year’s Annual is published in tandem with a long-term installation of The Serving Library’s collection of (mostly) framed objects at 019, an artist-run exhibition, performance and work space in a former welding factory in Ghent, Belgium.
Apparently, the sole common denominator of the objects in the collection — which range from paintings, photographs, and record sleeves, to a can of green paint, a German car license plate, and an ouija board — is to have appeared as illustrations in an issue of The Serving Library Annual or one of its immediate antecedents, Bulletins of The Serving Library or Dot Dot ...
