Laurence Scott

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2015 WINNER OF THE JERWOOD PRIZE âe~Mercurially brilliantâe(tm) Will Self 'A richly complex portayal of the ways we live today' TLS âe~A delightfully tender and humane guide to transformations that might amaze Ovid and new forms of nostalgia to rival Proustâe(tm) Alexandra Harris âe~Entertaining and insightfulâe(tm) Sunday Times âe~Elegant and artfulâe(tm) Financial Times A constellation of everyday digital phenomena is rewiring our inner lives. We are increasingly coaxed from the three-dimensional containment of our pre-digital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information and global connection. Our portals to this new world have been wedged open, and the silhouette of a figure is slowly taking shape. But what does it feel like to be four-dimensional? How do digital technologies influence the rhythms of our thoughts, the style and tilt of our consciousness? What new sensitivities and sensibilities are emerging with our exposure to the delights, sorrows and anxieties of a networked world? And how do we live in public, with these recoded private lives? Tackling ideas of time, space, friendship, commerce, pursuit and escape, and moving from Hamlet to the ghosts of social media, from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, from Facebook politics to Oedipus, The Four-Dimensional Human is a highly original and pioneering portrait of life in a digital landscape.

Ways of Being in the Digital World

The Four-dimensional Human

The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century

Picnic Comma Lightning

Simon English: my big self decoy justin beiber brings together a significant new body of painted drawings by the artist that format themselves around the double page spread, with both image and text on the page to invite and resist quiet contemplation. These exquisitely delicate and brutal drawings tussle with one another for space, pulling the viewer into the energetic and colourful vortexof the artist's psyche. Diaries jostle with devotions, desires and disputes--a confabulation of friction and fiction in a place where fetish and fact collide. Simon English draws across the blank page with the instincts of one entering cyberspace. His surfing history is left only too clear on the surface of the page, or buried beneath heavy black deletions and overpainting. His are the 'old' gremlins, the monsters within that say one is too much and more is never enough. In 2004, Bill Arning wrote that "for picture addicts like myself, English is the equivalent of a crack dealer". ,br> The work within the book is brought together with written contributions from Laurence Scott, who will contribute a text emanating from English's imaginary drawing database, and Sally O'Reilly, who will construct a voice for the work somewhere between art, theory, fiction and fantasy.

My Big Self Decoy Justin Beiber

Simon English

**A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK** 'Clever, funny and deeply moving... an engaging and thought-provoking journey through the fakery of modern life.' Mail on Sunday 'A stylish, playful exploration of what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world.' Guardian, 'Book of the Week' ________________________ In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the narrator offers a memorably brief account of his mother’s death: 'picnic, lightning'. Picnic Comma Lightning similarly opens with the death of Laurence Scott's parents, and the definitive ending of their deaths raises for him one fundamental question: how much of what we live through is truly real? With humour and insight, Scott transforms this personal meditation on loss into an exploration of what it means to exist in the world now. It used to be that our vision of the world was rooted to reasonably solid things: to people, places and memories. But today, in an age of constant internet debates, online personas and alternative truths, reality feels more vulnerable than ever before. Picnic Comma Lightning looks at how digital life is distorting, echoing and magnifying our age-old preoccupation with what is real and what isn't. Where do we draw the line? How is technology shifting these boundaries? And how do we maintain a sense of reality in an increasingly unreal world? ________________________ 'A report from the front line of the digital generation by someone superbly well-equipped to read and decode the signals.' Sunday Times

Laurence Scott

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