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Manual is an artist’s book by Eline McGeorge that co-exists with an animation and a sound piece. 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. It could be said that the protagonist is a subject in process and or crisis - trying to adapt to conditions that we may recognise from our day to day.
As with both other elements (the animation and the sound), 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 the animation, sound piece and book all 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, which revolve around distorted places, spaces and characters and travel or navigation across them. Through abstraction and fragmented portrayal of these locations and characters, the artist engages with the politics and psychology that governs them. Individual titles of McGeorge’s works such as ‘Travelling Doubles’, ‘Ontological Candidate, Navigator’, ‘Departure of a Stranger’, ‘Amongst Familiar Strangers and Surveilled Spaces’, ‘Resumed Arrival’, ‘Possibility of Another Place’ and others often underline these concerns. For McGeroge, a turn to the non-figurative is a way to come to terms with other forms of abstraction - a way to describe and enter political, philosophical and psychological concepts.
The book was designed by Åbäke, with the idea of camouflage and cheating censorship in mind. Could an "innocent and boring" looking electrical device manual be left alone in a search for subversive writings? The text of the manual part in this book, edited by Åbäke is built up by translation of certain associative references to the McGeorge’s text.
Eline McGeorge lives and works in London and Berlin. This book was produced Momentum 2009, Nordic Biennale for Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway. Manual, 2009 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.
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