Manual is an artist’s book by Eline McGeorge that co-exists with other works as part of installations.

Manual includes a story that bounces between abstract passages and clear cut narrative. We might be set in the future, and the story deals with the implication of digital technology, social structures and conventions as well as the manipulation of information and politics.

As with other elements in the installations, the story weaves reality and abstraction; emerging from an engagement with the subject of being placed within a culture, a political system, a language, that may not feel like home.

In McGeorge’s work, the interplay between forms produces a hybrid experimentation where works make an appearance across one another.

The characters in the story share names with titles of McGeorge’s work. They reflect on the background ideas of these works. Through abstraction and fragmented portrayal of locations and characters, the artist engages with the politics and psychology that governs them.

The book is designed with the idea of camouflage and cheating censorship in mind. Could an electrical device manual be left alone in a search for subversive writings? A ‘run away story’ expanding on the subject of commodification is camouflaged as a product manual. The text in the manual part of this book is built up by translation of certain associative references to McGeorge’s text, which is ‘coded’ through google-tanslation. Diagrams of  ‘undefined’ devices relate to the product manual aspect of the publication and mix in with reproductions of McGeorge’s work.

 

Manual, 2009 by Eline McGeorge is published by Dent-De-Leone Press (www.dentdeleone.co.nz) ISBN number:  978-0-9561885-4-0
Designed by åbäke, Softcover, 80 pages, 24 cm x 17 cm, Produced by Momentum, Moss, Norway.