We all have a first novel inside of us. A story waiting to be told. But how to go about writing it? The process is daunting, mythologized, out of reach. Until YouTube came along.

Join us for a book launch with a difference, as artist Gretchen Andrew presents the experience of writing her first novel, with YouTube as her only guide.
As part of her residency at arebyte, artist Gretchen Andrew deploys the looping GIF medium to explore what you can and cannot learn, and by way of learning, ‘become’, by following “how to” videos on YouTube.

HOW TO HOW TO HOW TO write a novel applies this self-taught process to writing a first novel.

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Searching “how to write a novel” on YouTube, Andrew has been watching the resulting instructional videos for 7 months. Using her laptop’s webcam to record herself in the process, she endeavors to apply this YouTube advice to her own text, ‘Not Not Joke Vol. I’

The footage is then converted into endlessly looping GIFS, this medium echoing the advice of persistence and steady work required to write a novel.
The result, Not Not Joke Vol. I is a mysterious text of unknown length, theme, format, and merit. On the pages of the animated ebook, as well as printed copies, the “reader” sees only the artist’s earnest face in lieu of the novel’s text.

The content of Not Not Joke Vol. I is ultimately inaccessible to the reader, hidden behind the ambition to create it.

The process becomes the outcome, as the act of creation obscures the result.
Join us for for the public book launch of this first novel, or ‘process’- Not Not Joke, Volume 1.

HOW TO HOW TO HOW TO write a novel is part of a residency and exhibition s investigating what you can and cannot learn, and by way of learning and become, through time + persistence + YouTube “How to” searches including: how to die, how to speak Japanese, how to be sexy, how to do a split, and how to forget.

The project investigates what limits us. Undertones of genetic, social, family, and class privilege exist in the notions of success and failure.

WHO

Gretchen Andrew (b California. 1988) started painting in San Francisco after becoming convinced that the internet can teach you anything. Her practice incorporates traditional oil painting and related investigations of knowing and becoming. She has completed projects or exhibitions with The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, The V&A Museum, The British Film Institute, The Lumen Prize for Digital Art, The British Arts Council, and The White Building, The Ace Hotel, and The London Film School. She works in London with the artist Billy Childish.

Dr. Rob Gallagher, King’s College department of Literature, is currently working on the Ego Media project, an ERC-funded investigation of the impact of new media on practices of self-representation and conceptions of identity. His research considers how digital processes of juxtaposition, aggregation, abstraction and projection allow a different picture of the self to emerge, one in which the conscious choices, opinions and beliefs of autonomous individuals take a back seat to the tendencies, proclivities, susceptibilities and patterns of embodied response that render particular web users demographically a/typical.

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