What's All This Then?
This site is edited by Coudal Partners, a design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago, as an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce. [Next]
What's All This Then?
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Sunday Edition
Slowtron's Western State: a documentary series about
familiar artists doing non-traditional things.
Coudal Partners
Summer Reading
LEAFING THROUGH
A Certain Book In a Certain Place
Summer is, above all else, about travel. Finally thawed after months of cold and an uneven Spring, we throw open our doors and head out into the world. Hopping across the globe or just to the coffee shop around the corner, summer is about getting away from here to somewhere else.
Very often, books accompany our flight from these hyper-familiar confines. Some people take their time selecting reads that will uniquely match their destinations. Others quickly run through a list of recommended titles and stop at the most compelling title or blurb. Whatever the case, in short time, location and book will begin to influence one another.
Despite the inherent silence of author-to-reader interaction, literature is a creature of its surroundings. Books allow a reader to explore locations unfamiliar, while with a circular momentum, the reader's own environment shapes and intensifies the appearance of those distant places and the people and events that inhabit them.
The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person's experience with both. The writing you'll find here is grounded in that idea. You won't find any book reviews here. You'll find reviews of experience.
Thanks very much to all the writers for so generously sharing their thoughts with us and also for the nice reviews in Time Out Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor. May this summer hold many more such stories for us all.
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Field-Tested Books
The final big batch of this year's Field-Tested Books is now up. Dive right in and start with one of our favorites by Jonathan Eig. After that you're on your own.
The Field-Tested Books Reviews
The Goods
If we had a place by the seashore (which we don't) this poster would sure look nice on the wall next to the side table with the stack of weathered paperbacks from summers past on top. You know, that spot next to the muslin drapes that move silently with the breeze off the water. We're also trying something new this year and publishing a compendium of all the Field-Tested reviews to date.
A Short Film
Our first Field-Tested poster was created by Jay Ryan of The Bird Machine and we made a film about their work. For this year's edition we figured why mess with a good thing? So after we asked Dan and Mike of Aesthetic Apparatus to make something great for us, Steve hopped on I-94 going north and six hours later was in the Twin Cities for a visit with the guys. Please take a few minutes to check it out. Thanks a million to Helicopters for letting use pieces from their great new record How To Fake Falling Asleep on the soundtrack.
