Make Your Bed for Rue from You + ME* & Trent Bailey Photo on Vimeo.

There's me thinking that it was the camera that was ruining my stop-motion tests by auto-focusing. Here, in a pretty good video the same thing is happening.

Why do I worry so much?

I did a google search for Papergirl images and the Papergirl Leeds logo/poster seems to be cropping up in a lot of places (some that I didn't even know about!).

We are here in Don't Panic in an article about Papergirl Bristol.

In Creative Times.

By Papergirl Kelowna.

On a blog called Design Practice.

"Communication is a Virus: Papergirl Leeds

Papergirl is a world wide known event where a collective of artists contribute various pieces of artwork, which they then take to the streets to hand out their work for free. This attempt is to put artists work in the hands of the public, who may not have artwork or appreciated it before.

I think this is such a brilliant idea and it's something our group could easily work towards as we all have the ability to put artwork into a charity for example, then give without needing to receive."

Also on the beautiful Reetsweet blog by the lovely Rebecca Drury.

"Closing date is 31st March, so please get in touch with Laura and support this great event asap!x"

So a lot of hype really..........I hope we live up to it!

SNASK from Mike Crozier on Vimeo.

I think I've worked something out.....

It's not necessarily the concept of the animation that I like, it's the making. I seem to be drawn to papercraft in animation or something I want to touch.

I've got some papercraft books out of the library - they're so amazing. I'm going to have a go at making some animation from paper :)

photo meeting
video meeting

More promo...

Phew!

TestSpace have a blog entry about us here.

I also got a phone call from Stylist Magazine this morning!!!! very interesting indeed - sent them off a high res version of the logo, they wanted pictures of us on bikes but I had to explain to them that this is the first PG Leeds and that there weren't any photos of the events yet as they haven't happened. May have to do some publicity photos on the bikes - sounds a bit posey but maybe it's necessary! It's a national publication!

I have an official photographer, Lauren Robson, a good friend and 2nd year Interdisciplinary. As well as help from a few other people to cover all the events. I emailed out about helpers and got responses which was nice.

I've decided I want a Papergirl Leeds "photo booth" - so one person will need to run that on opening night.

Just Another Magazine (JAM) emailed me about a feature too - Ben from JAM even knows some of the Manchester Critical Mass and is going to try and get them over for the ride. They should just be covering the distribution and wanted to know the route. However, there probably wont be a route unless I think it's dangerous to not have one.

I need to have a wander around Leeds city centre on a Friday around 6-7pm and see what the traffic is like and if there are roads we should avoid. Leeds is not cycling friendly.

Need to email Dave Lynch regarding rickshaw sound system too.

I'm so tired :)

BBC testcard fault blooper 70s

Thats all folks!

Don Hertzfeldt - Billy's Balloon

How do I display work in the exhibition?

I'm trying to think up some ideas for displaying the work in the PGL Exhibition. 

Originally, I thought I would do it in a very DIY, low cost way (think bunting style). Either suspending string along the walls, one at the top and one in the middle, in a wave fashion.

Or suspending the string completely across the ceiling.

I think this is a decision best made once I have a better idea of the amount of submissions. I reckon (and have been told by Janice who runs PG Manchester that most submissions come on the last week of the deadline and even afterwards - and I have 8 days between my submission deadline and the opening night - phew!). It may well be that I need to do both ideas if there are a lot of submissions.

The good points of this method are that once the string is up, the work can be moved around during the curation period if something doesn't sit well with another piece of work. Wooden clothes pegs are cheap and can be painted or modified or small bulldog clips can be used. 

Also, if the work is suspended across the ceiling, if there are many people in the room, all the work should still be visible to everyone and with The Marvellous Tea Dance Company being in the space too, it would make a lovely setting for a little sit down with tea and a cake under all the artwork.

I'm trying to make the exhibition as informal as possible, without it looking too shabby. There will definitely be no plinths or frames - mainly because this create a whole load of extra work, begging and borrowing which means travelling and loading/unloading. It also adds extra cost and will take longer to set up and take down.

I personally am not a lover of "the frame" in the context of an exhibition. Why should art be kept under a glass sheet? We are not trying to preserve the art, the art is for now. It's impulsive and unique. Art under glass connotes being protected - but protected from what? The word curate means to guard, to look after - but to guard from what? What are we so afraid of?

I hope that this vision is shared by the critics. I would hate to get sloppy reviews, saying that the submissions were awesome, the concept of the project was awesome but the curatorship was sloppy and not thought about. I think that we need a shake up in the way we view art. If I get people talking, that's good. I would like some critical debate.

The Marvellous Tea Dance Company

I worked today (technically yesterday) with the lovely ladies at The Marvellous Tea Dance Company. It was so much fun! I got to wear an apron (don't laugh, it was very much an adorable apron), run the tombola and sell bingo tickets - everyone there, even the customers were really, really lovely.

I absolutely loved the way the Hifi Club was kitted out for the event. There was bunting hanging from the rafters, lacy pink and blue table cloths with crocheted doilies and tea cosies galore! It took me back to my days of waitressing at Brodricks Cafe in the Corn Exchange when I was 17 (until they sacked me for dying my hair magenta - it was the Corn Exchange!! All the customers had pink hair - what a right-wing twat!).

I think everyone there had a great time. All the tables were full at one point!

I do hope they ask me to help out again if they're short staffed. I learn a lot about how an event business is run. I liked how everything had it's own little box ready to be packed away again for the next event. It made me think about preparation and "an event kit"

I'm going to have a think about making my own "event kits" for the PGL exhibition and other events. Also about what I need to get ready for TMTDCo at the PGL opening night.

Lots of lists.

Article Magazine

Papergirl Leeds have had a mention in Article Magazine here. It's only a mention, but I'm going to get in contact to see if they want to do a feature on us.

4 tweets! 7 facebook like! oooo!

I have submitted an interview about PGL to The Low Culture blog too, which is part of the Vice Magazine network of blogs. Can't wait to see it - written by Lauren Potts.

They're already done a feature on the exhibition space - TestSpace.

I've already been in contact with Emma from The Culture Vulture regarding a blog entry - unfortunately with the workload of college it's been difficult to get people to have time to do an insight. I've offered the task to the PGL facebook group so hopefully there are some willing bloggers out there.

I now need to contact The Guardian (apparently they like to know about local project around the country) and The Leeds Guide. See if I can get some more coverage.

I think it would be a good idea to invite people from each organisation to come down to the opening night of the exhibition and review - which terrifies me! argh!

Here's my interview for Low Culture:

Name: Laura Jordan

Age: 25

From: Leeds

How I got involved with Papergirl: I took part in Papergirl Manchester in October 2010. Cycling around Manchester giving out bundles of art – It was really fun! I though that it was a brilliant project and that it was just what Leeds needed.

1) Tell us a little about Paper Girl- what it is, where it's come from and where it's going.

Aisha Ronniger started the Papergirl project in Berlin in 2006. It was a response to the changing laws regarding graffiti. A law was passed that classed wheat-pasted artwork in public space as the same illegal penalty as spray-painting. Many artists in Berlin faced fines if they displayed their work as so Aisha, being the creative genius that she is, began to conjure up ideas of how to get artists’ work “out there”. Inspired by the idea of American papergirls and paperboys, she began the steps to start up a new project: the result being Papergirl.

Now five years on, Papergirl has spread around the globe. The idea of giving the art away seems to be something that has struck many people as something wonderful. I can only imagine that Papergirl projects will continue to crop up in new places.

2) What inspired you to get involved and what's your role as ambassador for Leeds Paper Girl?

After taking part in Papergirl Manchester, I felt inspired. In a way it seemed like everything just clicked into place. As a student and visual artist myself, the time seemed right for me to take on a big project. I can’t speak for anyone else that started a Papergirl project in their own city, but I felt like I related to the project and I believed in the ethics. I felt like I would do it justice and of course, as a Leodian (someone from Leeds), I wanted a platform for this city to show everyone just what we can do.

3) Why should people be excited about the project?

Papergirl Leeds is a great opportunity to get your work seen – every submission is included in the exhibition! There’s no element of choosing work and there’s no element of choosing the recipient when we hand it out. Being on a bicycle when distributing, speeds up the process and there’s little time to select a person – it’s just being in the right place, at the right time. I think that’s what is special about Papergirl.

4) Who are you hoping to get interested and how can people get involved?

Anyone! Papergirl Leeds is for anyone that wants to get involved – the more the merrier! Like I say, every submission will be included in the exhibition, so I think that it will especially interest students that perhaps haven’t had much work on display as yet. Submitting your work into a project or a competition is quite a scary prospect in the beginning, so Papergirl Leeds makes sure that there’s no doubt that your work will be seen.

As well as exhibiting the artwork, we will be making as much use of the space as possible by having activities during the exhibition. There will be various drop-in workshops and a few “bookable” sessions. I love how there have been so many ideas generated on the facebook group and twitter page regarding skill sharing workshops. It’s exciting to see such sparks of creativity generated by the project. We’re always open to suggestions and the best ideas come from when something excites you.

5) What's your favourite part of the project?

The reactions of people! The response to Papergirl Leeds has been astonishing. Since I began working on Papergirl Leeds, there have been so many people, artists and organisations wanting to get involved – it seems that the ethics of Papergirl are something that a lot of people relate to. I like the idea of “creating a creative community” and I think that with project like Papergirl Leeds, we can do just that.

The exhibition opens on the 8^th April and runs until the 17^th April – Everyone is welcome.

The Bowery Internship

I'm thinking of applying for an internship at The Bowery in Headingley. I think I'd like the position of Gallery and Marketing Assistant - it sounds like a great opportunity to gather some great marketing skills and genreally be around creative individuals 2 days a week.

Problem is - I don't have an up to date CV. something I need to get done asap.

I'm confident, reliable and hard-working, plus my Papergirl Leeds project should be an excellent talking point and proof of this. Fingers crossed!

Well I wont get anything if I don't complete my CV!

LVAF

I joined Leeds Visual Arts Forum today. Not sure why I hadn't sooner.

Brilliant way to talk about Papergirl Leeds and to get "in the know".

I made a post about Papergirl Leeds, so hopefully that should generate some more submissions or just get the name thrown around a bit. There will be more Papergirl Leeds events, this is only the start!

I think next time it should be a lot less stressful, seeing as the social networking sites are established and there is a mass of people that already know about it. Plus, anything that goes wrong this time, we can rectify for next time. I say "we", I mean "me". I say "we" when talking about Papergirl Leeds, I think it sounds better (good advice from my Dad too!). It gives the idea of a community of people, which I think that Papergirl Leeds will eventually be. I am finding it difficult to do everything - although I am a good multi-tasker, when there's so much to do, I can't help worrying that I've missed out something incredibly important. Plus it means I can't use my other skills of delegation and managing. Effectively I'm managing myself at the moment (which makes me the best and worst employee!). It wasn't planned this way but life gets in the way sometimes and it's a good opportunity to prove myself. It also means I have no one else to blame but myself if everything goes tits up.

I want to make this! It's amazing!!

Early in the morning of December 13, 2006, police officers from the small town of Hull, MA, near Boston, arrived at the home of Michael and Carolyn Riley in response to an emergency call. Their four-year-old daughter, Rebecca, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years earlier. When the officers reached the house, they found Rebecca sprawled out on the floor next to her teddy bear. She had died from an overdose of the medication cocktail prescribed to her by her psychiatrist, Dr. Kayoko Kifuji. At the time of her death, Rebecca was taking Seroquel®, a powerful antipsychotic drug, Depakote®, a no less powerful anticonvulsant and mood-stabilizing drug, and clonidine, a hypotensive drug used as a sedative.

Rebecca’s parents were charged with first-degree murder, but her doctor’s role must also be questioned. How could she have prescribed psychotropic medications normally intended for adults suffering from psychotic mania to a two-year-old? Yet the medical center where Rebecca had been treated issued a statement describing Dr. Kifuji’s treatment as “appropriate and within responsible professional standards.” In an interview with the Boston Globe, Dr. Janet Wozniak, director of the Pediatric Bipolar Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, went even further: “We support early diagnosis and treatment because the symptoms of [bipolar] disorder are extremely debilitating and impairing. […] It’s incumbent on us as a field to understand more which preschoolers need to be identified and treated in an aggressive way.” On July 1, 2009, a Plymouth County Grand Jury dropped all criminal charges against Dr. Kifuji.

How did we come to this? As the psychiatrist and historian David Healy points out in his latest book, Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), very few people had heard of bipolar disorder before 1980, when it was introduced in the DSM-III – the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association – and it was only in 1996 that a group of doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Joseph Biederman and Janet Wozniak, first proposed that some children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) might in fact suffer from bipolar disorder. But whoever googles “bipolar disorder” today is likely to learn that the illness has always been with us. It’s just a new name, we are told, for what used to be called manic depression, a severe mood disorder characterized by oscillations between states of manic hyperactivity and deep depression.

Healy has no trouble demonstrating that this is a retrospective illusion. “Manic-depressive insanity” (a term coined in 1899 by Emil Kraepelin) was a relatively rare illness – ten cases per one million people each year, Healy claims, or 0.001 percent of the general population. By contrast, the prevalence of bipolar disorder is supposed to be much higher. In 1994, the US National Comorbidity survey estimated that 1.3 percent of the American population suffered from bipolar disorder. Four years later, the psychiatrist Jules Angst upped the figure to 5 percent: 5,000 times higher than the figure suggested by Healy. Are we really talking about the same thing? Or did the name create a new thing?

Healy favors the second hypothesis. The term bipolar disorder, he explains, was simultaneously introduced in 1966 by Jules Angst and Carlo Perris, who proposed cleanly separating unipolar depressions from bipolar disorders (they were contradicting Kraepelin, who believed that both sets of disorders were presentations of one and the same manic-depressive illness). While their conceptual move has been hailed as a breakthrough, it is hard to understand what the point is – it muddles the diagnosis instead of clarifying it. In practice, how are we to distinguish a unipolar depression from a bipolar disorder in a patient who has yet to experience a manic episode? Nonetheless, instead of seeing this incoherence as a reason for rejecting the new paradigm, psychiatrists have since done their utmost to patch it up with all sorts of ad hoc innovations.

First a distinction was made between “bipolar disorder I,” which applied to patients hospitalized for both depressive and manic episodes, and a brand new “bipolar disorder II,” which referred to patients hospitalized solely for a depressive episode. In other words, any person hospitalized for depression could now be diagnosed as bipolar. Then the reference to hospitalization was dropped for bipolar disorder II, which meant it could now include less severe forms of depression and hyperactivity, as well as all sorts of neurotic disorders that Kraepelin would never have dreamed of calling manic-depressive insanity. One now speaks of a “bipolar spectrum,” which includes, along with bipolar disorders I and II, cyclothymia (a mild form of bipolar II) and bipolar disorder “not otherwise specified” (an all-purpose category in which practically any affective instability can be placed) – to which some add bipolar disorders II ½, III, III ½, IV, V, VI, and even a very accommodating “subthreshold bipolar disorder.”

The category has expanded so much that it would be difficult to find anyone who couldn’t be described as “bipolar,” especially now that the diagnosis is liberally applied to all ages. Conventional wisdom once had it that manic depression burns out with age, but geriatric bipolar disorder is now the talk of psychiatric congresses. Elderly people who are depressed or agitated find themselves being diagnosed with bipolar disorder for the first time in their lives and are prescribed antipsychotics or anticonvulsants that have the potential to drastically shorten their life expectancy: according to David Graham, an expert from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), these psychotropic medications are responsible for the deaths of some 15,000 elderly people each year in the United States. Likewise, it has been assumed since the work of Biederman and Wozniak that bipolar disorder can strike in early childhood and not just with the onset of adolescence. As a result, the prevalence of pediatric bipolar disorder multiplied by a factor of 40 between 1994 and 2002.

How, then, did we come to apply such a serious diagnosis to vaguely depressed or irritable adults, to unruly children and to nursing home residents? Is it simply that psychiatric science has progressed and now allows us to better detect an illness that had previously been ignored or misunderstood? Healy has another, more cynical explanation: The never-ending expansion of the category of bipolar disorder benefits large pharmaceutical companies eager to sell medications marketed with the disorder in mind. Psychiatric research doesn’t evolve in a vacuum. Behind the psychiatrists’ constant redrawing of the map of mental illnesses in a sincere effort at better understanding, there are enormous financial and industrial interests that steer research in one direction rather than another. For researchers, mental illnesses are realities whose contours they attempt to define; for pharmaceutical companies, they are markets that can, thanks to marketing and branding techniques, be redefined, segmented and extended in order to make them ever more lucrative. The uncertainties of the psychiatric field present in this respect a magnificent commercial opportunity, since illnesses can always be tailored to better sell a particular molecule under a particular patent.

In the case of bipolar disorder, this conceptual gerrymandering has involved stretching and diluting the definition of what used to be called manic-depressive illness so that it might include depression and other mood disorders, thus creating a market for “atypical” antipsychotic medications such as Lilly’s Zyprexa®, AstraZeneca’s Seroquel® or Janssen’s Risperdal®. Even though these medications were initially approved only for the treatment of schizophrenia and acute manic states, they were marketed for the treatment of bipolar disorder and by extension mood disorders in general. The same was done to anticonvulsant medications, which are strong sedatives prescribed for epileptic attacks. In 1995 Abbott Laboratories succeeded in obtaining a license to offer its anticonvulsant drug Depakote® for the treatment of mania. Depakote®, however, was marketed not as an anticonvulsant but as a “mood stabilizer” – a term without any clinical meaning that is misleading insofar as it suggests a preventive action against bipolar disorder that has never been established in any study.

In the wake of this brilliant terminological innovation, other anticonvulsants such as Warner Lambert/Parke Davis’s Neurontin® were aggressively marketed for mood disorders when they hadn’t been approved even for manic states. But what did it matter, since the meteoric success of the concept of “mood stabilization” made this step useless? The suggestion to doctors was that they prescribe anticonvulsants or atypical antipsychotics to “stabilize” the moods of depressive patients who had never before displayed any manic hyperactivity, the idea being that these people had been misdiagnosed as suffering from unipolar depression while in fact being bipolar. Anyone who knows how lucrative the market was for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants such as Prozac® or Paxil® in the 1990s will immediately see the point of the exercise. While most SSRIs are now off patent, the market for atypical antipsychotics is currently worth $18 billion – twice as much as that of antidepressants in 2001.

It is easy to see that the redefinition of manic depression into the much wider concept of mood disorders neatly mirrors the marketing of anticonvulsants and atypical antipsychotics as mood stabilizers. The question, of course, is whether the pharmaceutical industry’s marketers actually created bipolar disorder or merely exploited tentative psychiatric research. Strictly speaking, we must grant it was opportunism: The research of Angst and Perris on bipolar disorder dates from 1966, well before the development of atypical antipsychotics and “mood stabilizers.” But the reality of the contemporary medical-industrial complex is that their hypothesis would not have survived, let alone prospered, had it not been “recruited” at a particular moment by the pharmaceutical industry and thrust forcefully on the public with the help of the most sophisticated marketing and advertising techniques.

This is what Healy calls the “manufacture of consensus”: By subsidizing one research program instead of another, one conference or symposium, one journal, one publication, one learned society and so on, the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t just make precious allies among the “key opinion leaders” of the medical establishment, it also gains a very efficient means of steering the academic discussion toward the illnesses that interest it at any given moment. Healy provides a detailed description of how bipolar disorder was launched at the end of the 1990s, from the avalanche of publications ghostwritten by specialized PR agencies to the sponsoring of bipolar patient advocacy groups and the creation of websites where people could fill out “mood assessment questionnaires” that inevitably dispatched them to the nearest doctor. Following this marketing blitz, no one could ignore bipolar disorder any longer. As a Practical Guide to Medical Education intended for industry marketers explains, “It is essentially like setting a snowball rolling down a hill. It starts with a small core of support: maybe a few abstracts presented at meetings, articles in key journals, focuses for discussion amongst ‘leading experts’ […] and by the time it reaches the bottom of the hill the noise should be coming from all sides and sources.” Pharmaceutical companies today launch diseases in the way fashion companies launch a new brand of jeans: creating needs that align with industrial strategies and the duration of patents.

The techniques Healy describes are the same as those used by the pharmaceutical industry to sell, or oversell, conditions as diverse as depression, osteoporosis, hypertension, social phobia, metabolic syndrome, high cholesterol, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, fibromyalgia, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, panic attacks, restless leg syndrome and so forth. In each case the existence and risks of one condition or another are amplified in order to better persuade us to swallow chemical products that may be either useless or, often, potentially toxic.

In the case of bipolar disorder, the medications on offer come with significant risks. Anticonvulsants are liable to cause kidney failure, obesity, diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome, and they are among the most teratogenic drugs. Atypical antipsychotics, once reputed to be less toxic than first-generation “typical” antipsychotics, are now known to have very serious side effects: significant weight gain, diabetes, pancreatitis, stroke, heart disease and tardive dyskinesia (a condition involving incapacitating involuntary movements of the mouth, lips and tongue). They can, in some circumstances, cause neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a life-threatening neurological disorder, and akathisia, whose sufferers experience extreme internal restlessness and suicidal thoughts. Prescribing such toxic medications to patients suffering acute mania may be unavoidable, but as a prophylactic to be given to depressed pensioners and hyperactive kids?

A series of prominent lawsuits has been brought over the past few years in the United States against the manufacturers of anticonvulsants and atypical antipsychotics for having hidden their side effects and for having marketed them “off label” to patient populations not approved by the FDA. The sums paid out in fines or settlements by the companies involved are staggering (a total of $2.6 billion for the illegal marketing of Zyprexa® by Lilly, for example), and they give an idea of how disastrous the effects of the medications actually have been. In a related development, Dr. Joseph Biederman, director of the Johnson & Johnson Center for Pediatric Psychopathology Research at Massachusetts General Hospital and the main academic advocate of pediatric bipolar disorder, has been subpoenaed in a federal investigation to account for the $1.6 million he received between 2000 and 2007 from Johnson & Johnson and other pharmaceutical companies likely to benefit directly from his research.

But the marketing of bipolar disorder itself has not been put on trial, and probably never will be. This is the perfect crime. Bipolar disorder I, II, III, etc., remain on the books and doctors continue to exercise their freedom of judgment in prescribing Zyprexa® and Seroquel® off label to their “bipolar” patients. An extended release version of Seroquel®, Seroquel XR®, was approved in December 2009 by the FDA for the treatment of depression. As for sales of Zyprexa®, they are up 2 percent compared to 2007, when the medication generated $4.8 billion in sales.

Who remembers Rebecca Riley now?

Crooked Rot

God Only Knows

Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour - "Deceptacon" (clip)

Long time no see!

I've been neglecting my blog :(

It's just not like me!

Anyways, I will be making a conscious effort to blog a ridiculous amount in order to make up for it!

I have actually been very busy with Papergirl Leeds.

Reetsweet craft fairs have a blog post on us :) which is a result of a very unplanned meeting with Rebecca Drury who runs the craft fairs, during a meeting with Angie from The Marvellous Tea Dance Company.

Inky Goodness

Inkygoodness are calling for submissions for – Colour Me Totem – our first online creative project!

Colour Me Totem

Here’s your chance to be part of our exciting Character Totem project..

Discover your inner character – doodle, ink, paint or digitally design your own Character Totem. Give him a name & send us the results!

All you need to do is:

• download
• print off
• customise
• scan
• submit

All you need to do is download our Colour Me Totem pdf below and get drawing. Give your characters a name, along with your web address & contact details and keep a close look at our gallery for your Totem to appear. We can’t wait to see what you get up to!

Send your submissions to: inkygoodness@easy.com – no later than Friday 25th March. All entries will be uploaded to our evolving Character Totem online gallery. The best entries will be displayed in the Neurotitan Gallery as part of our offical Character Totem exhibition at Pictoplasma this year – so what are you waiting for? Get involved!

colour me totem download

Hop to it.

Inky Goodness Blog

Complex Presents: The Charlie Sheen Soundboard

I love number 4.